Seekers after God Part 7

It would indeed be cheap and easy, to attribute the general inferiority and the many shortcomings of Seneca's life and character to the fact that he was a Pagan, and to suppose that if he had known Christianity he would necessarily have attained to a loftier ideal. But such a style of reasoning and inference, commonly as it is adopted for rhetorical purposes, might surely be refused by any intelligent child. A more intellectual a.s.sent to the lessons of Christianity would have probably been but of little avail to inspire in Seneca a n.o.bler life. The fact is, that neither the gift of genius nor the knowledge of Christianity are adequate to the enn.o.blement of the human heart, nor does the grace of G.o.d flow through the channels of surpa.s.sing intellect or of orthodox belief. Men there have been in all ages, Pagan no less than Christian, who with scanty mental enlightenment and spiritual knowledge have yet lived holy and n.o.ble lives: men there have been in all ages, Christian no less than Pagan, who with consummate gifts and profound erudition have disgraced some of the n.o.blest words which ever were uttered by some of the meanest lives which were ever lived. In the twelfth century was there any mind that shone more brightly, was there any eloquence which flowed more mightily, than that of Peter Abelard? Yet Abelard sank beneath the meanest of his scholastic cotemporaries in the degradation of his career as much as he towered above the highest of them in the grandeur of his genius. In the seventeenth century was there any philosopher more profound, any moralist more elevated, than Francis Bacon? Yet Bacon could flatter a tyrant, and betray a friend, and receive a bribe, and be one of the latest of English judges to adopt the brutal expedient of enforcing confession by the exercise of torture. If Seneca defended the murder of Agrippina, Bacon blackened the character of Ess.e.x. "What I would I do not; but the thing that I would not, that I do," might be the motto for many a confession of the sins of genius; and Seneca need not blush if we compare him with men who were his equals in intellectual power, but whose "means of grace," whose privileges, whose knowledge of the truth, were infinitely higher than his own. Let the n.o.ble constancy of his death shed a light over his memory which may dissipate something of those dark shades which rest on portions of his history. We think of Abelard, humble, silent, patient, G.o.d-fearing, tended by the kindly-hearted Peter in the peaceful gardens of Clugny; we think of Bacon, neglected, broken, and despised, dying of the chill caught in a philosophical experiment and leaving his memory to the judgment of posterity; let us think of Seneca, quietly yielding to his destiny without a murmur, cheering the constancy of the mourners round him during the long agonies of his enforced suicide and dictating some of the purest utterances of Pagan wisdom almost with his latest breath.

The language of his great contemporary, the Apostle St. Paul, will best help us to understand his position. He was one of those who was _seeking the Lord, if haply he might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being_.

CHAPTER XIV.

SENECA AND ST. PAUL.

In the spring of the year 61, not long after the time when the murder of Agrippina, and Seneca's justifications of it, had been absorbing the attention of the Roman world, there disembarked at Puteoli a troop of prisoners, whom the Procurator of Judaea had sent to Rome under the charge of a centurion. Walking among them, chained and weary, but affectionately tended by two younger companions,[38] and treated with profound respect by little deputations of friends who met him at Appii Forum and the Three Taverns, was a man of mean presence and weather-beaten aspect, who was handed over like the rest to the charge of Burrus, the Praefect of the Praetorian Guards. Learning from the letters of the Jewish Procurator that the prisoner had been guilty of no serious offence,[39] but had used his privilege of Roman citizens.h.i.+p to appeal to Caesar for protection against the infuriated malice of his co-religionists--possibly also having heard from the centurion Julius some remarkable facts about his behaviour and history--Burrus allowed him, pending the hearing of his appeal, to live in his own hired apartments.[40] This lodging was in all probability in that quarter of the city opposite the island in the Tiber, which corresponds to the modern Trastevere. It was the resort of the very lowest and meanest of the populace--that promiscuous jumble of all nations which makes Tacitus call Rome at this time "the sewer of the universe." It was here especially that the Jews exercised some of the meanest trades in Rome, selling matches, and old clothes, and broken gla.s.s, or begging and fortune-telling on the Cestian or Fabrican bridges.[41] In one of these narrow, dark, and dirty streets, thronged by the dregs of the Roman populace, St. Mark and St. Peter had in all probability lived when they founded the little Christian Church at Rome. It was undoubtedly in the same despised locality that St. Paul,--the prisoner who had been consigned to the care of Burrus,--hired a room, sent for the principle Jews, and for two years taught to Jews and Christians, to any Pagans who would listen to him, the doctrines which were destined to regenerate the world.

[Footnote 38: Luke and Aristarchus.]

[Footnote 39: Acts xxiv. 23, xxvii. 3.]

[Footnote 40: Acts xxviii. 30, [Greek: en idio misthomati].]

[Footnote 41: MART. _Ep_. i. 42: JUV. xiv. 186. In these few paragraphs I follow M. Aubertin, who (as well as many other authors) has collected many of the princ.i.p.al pa.s.sages in which Roman writers allude to the Jews and Christians.]

Any one entering that mean and dingy room would have seen a Jew with bent body and furrowed countenance, and with every appearance of age, weakness, and disease chained by the arm to a Roman soldier. But it is impossible that, had they deigned to look closer, they should not also have seen the gleam of genius and enthusiasm, the fire of inspiration, the serene light of exalted hope and dauntless courage upon those withered features. And though _he_ was chained, "the Word of G.o.d was not chained." [42] Had they listened to the words which he occasionally dictated, or overlooked the large handwriting which alone his weak eyesight and bodily infirmities, as well as the inconvenience of his chains, permitted, they would have heard or read the immortal utterances which strengthened the faith of the nascent and struggling Churches in Ephesus, Philippi, and Colossae, and which have since been treasured among the most inestimable possessions of a Christian world.

[Footnote 42: 2 Tim. ii. 9.]

His efforts were not unsuccessful; his misfortunes were for the furtherance of the Gospel; his chains were manifest "in all the palace, and in all other places;" [43] and many waxing confident by his bonds were much more bold to speak the word without fear. Let us not be misled by a.s.suming a wrong explanation of these words, or by adopting the Middle Age traditions which made St. Paul convert some of the immediate favourites of the Emperor, and electrify with his eloquence an admiring Senate. The word here rendered "palace" [44] may indeed have that meaning, for we know that among the early converts were "they of Caesar's household;" [45] but these were in all probability--if not certainly--Jews of the lowest rank, who were, as we know, to be found among the _hundreds_ of unfortunates of every age and country who composed a Roman _familia_. And it is at least equally probable that the word "praetorium" simply means the barrack of that detachment of Roman soldiers from which Paul's gaolers were taken in turn. In such labours St. Paul in all probability spent two years (61-63), during which occurred the divorce of Octavia, the marriage with Poppaea, the death of Burrus, the disgrace of Seneca, and the many subsequent infamies of Nero.

[Footnote 43: Phil. i. 12.]

[Footnote 44: [Greek: en olo to praitorio].]

[Footnote 45: Phil. iv. 22.]

It is out of such materials that some early Christian forger thought it edifying to compose the work which is supposed to contain the correspondence of Seneca and St. Paul. The undoubted spuriousness of that work is now universally admitted, and indeed the forgery is too clumsy to be even worth reading. But it is worth while inquiring whether in the circ.u.mstances of the time there is even a bare possibility that Seneca should ever have been among the readers or the auditors of Paul.

And the answer is, There is absolutely no such probability. A vivid imagination is naturally attracted by the points of contrast and resemblance offered by two such characters, and we shall see that there is a singular likeness between many of their sentiments and expressions.

But this was a period in which, as M. Villemain observes, "from one extremity of the social world to the other truths met each other without recognition." Stoicism, n.o.ble as were many of its precepts, lofty as was the morality it professed, deeply as it was imbued in many respects with a semi-Christian piety, looked upon Christianity with profound contempt.

The Christians disliked the Stoics, the Stoics despised and persecuted the Christians. "The world knows nothing of its greatest men." Seneca would have stood aghast at the very notion of his receiving the lessons, still more of his adopting the religion, of a poor, accused, and wandering Jew. The haughty, wealthy, eloquent, prosperous, powerful philosopher would have smiled at the notion that any future ages would suspect him of having borrowed any of his polished and epigrammatic lessons of philosophic morals or religion from one whom, if he heard of him, he would have regarded as a poor wretch, half fanatic and half barbarian.

We learn from St. Paul himself that the early converts of Christianity were men in the very depths of poverty,[46] and that its preachers were regarded as fools, and weak, and were despised, and naked, and buffeted--persecuted and homeless labourers--a spectacle to the world, and to angels, and to men, "made as the filth of the earth and the off-scouring of all things." We know that their preaching was to the Greeks "foolishness," and that, when they spoke of Jesus and the resurrection, their hearers mocked[47] and jeered. And these indications are more than confirmed by many contemporary pa.s.sages of ancient writers. We have already seen the violent expressions of hatred which the ardent and high-toned soul of Tacitus thought applicable to the Christians; and such language is echoed by Roman writers of every character and cla.s.s. The fact is that at this time and for centuries afterwards the Romans regarded the Christians with such lordly indifference that--like Festus, and Felix and Seneca's brother Gallio--they never took the trouble to distinguish them from the Jews.

The distinction was not fully realized by the Pagan world till the cruel and wholesale ma.s.sacre of the Christians by the pseudo-Messiah Barchochebas in the reign of Adrian opened their eyes to the fact of the irreconcilable differences which existed between the two religions. And pages might be filled with the ignorant and scornful allusions which the heathen applied to the Jews. They confused them with the whole degraded ma.s.s of Egyptian and Oriental impostors and brute-wors.h.i.+ppers; they disdained them as seditious, turbulent, obstinate, and avaricious; they regarded them as mainly composed of the very meanest slaves out of the gross and abject mult.i.tude; their proselytism they considered as the clandestine initiation into some strange and revolting mystery, which involved as its direct teachings contempt of the G.o.ds, and the negation of all patriotism and all family affection; they firmly believed that they wors.h.i.+pped the head of an a.s.s; they thought it natural that none but the vilest slaves and the silliest woman should adopt so misanthropic and degraded a superst.i.tion; they characterized their customs as "absurd, sordid, foul, and depraved," and their nation as "p.r.o.ne to superst.i.tion, opposed to religion." [48] And as far as they made _any_ distinction between Jews and Christians, it was for the latter that they reserved their choicest and most concentrated epithets of hatred and abuse. A "new," "pernicious," "detestable," "execrable,"

superst.i.tion is the only language with which Suetonius and Tacitus vouchsafe to notice it. Seneca,--though he must have heard the name of Christian during the reign of Claudius (when both they and the Jews were expelled from Rome, "because of their perpetual turbulence, at the instigation of Chrestus," as Suetonius ignorantly observed), and during the Neronian persecution--never once alludes to them, and only mentions the Jews to apply a few contemptuous remarks to the idleness of their sabbaths, and to call them "a most abandoned race."

[Footnote 46: 2 Cor. viii. 2.]

[Footnote 47: [Greek: _Echleuazon_], Acts xvii. 32. The word expresses the most profound and unconcealed contempt.]

[Footnote 48: Tac. _Hist_. i. 13: ib. v. 5: JUV. xiv. 85: Pers. v. 190, &c.]

The reader will now judge whether there is the slightest probability that Seneca had any intercourse with St. Paul, or was likely to have stooped from his superfluity of wealth, and pride of power, to take lessons from obscure and despised slaves in the purlieus inhabited by the crowded households of Caesar or Narcissus.

CHAPTER XV.

SENECA'S RESEMBLANCES TO SCRIPTURE.

And yet in a very high sense of the word Seneca may be called, as he is called in the t.i.tle of this book, a Seeker after G.o.d; and the resemblances to the sacred writings which may be found in the pages of his works are numerous and striking. A few of these will probably interest our readers, and will put them in a better position for understanding how large a measure of truth and enlightenment had rewarded the honest search of the ancient philosophers. We will place a few such pa.s.sages side by side with the texts of Scripture which they resemble or recall.

1. _G.o.d's Indwelling Presence_.

"Know ye not that ye are the temple of G.o.d, and that the Spirit of G.o.d dwelleth in you?" asks St. Paul (1 Cor. iii. 16).

"_G.o.d is near you, is with you, is within you_," writes Seneca to his friend Lucilius, in the 41st of those _Letters_ which abound in his most valuable moral reflections; "_a sacred Spirit dwells within us, the observer and guardian of all our evil and our good ... there is no good man without G.o.d_."

And again (_Ep._ 73): "_Do you wonder that man goes to the G.o.ds? G.o.d comes to men: nay, what is yet nearer; He comes into men. No good mind is holy without G.o.d_."

2. _The Eye of G.o.d_.

"All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of Him with whom we have to do." (Heb. iv. 13.)

"Pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (Matt. vi. 6.)

Seneca (_On Providence_, 1): "_It is no advantage that conscience is shut within us; we lie open to G.o.d_."

_Letter_ 83: "_What advantage is it that anything is hidden from man?

Nothing is closed to G.o.d: He is present to our minds, and enters into our central thoughts_."

_Letter_ 83: "_We must live as if we were living in sight of all men; we must think as though some one could and can gaze into our inmost breast_."

3. _G.o.d is a Spirit_.

St. Paul, "We ought not to think that the G.o.d-head is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device." (Acts xvii. 29.)

Seneca (_Letter_ 31): "_Even from a corner it is possible to spring up into heaven: rise, therefore, and form thyself into a fas.h.i.+on worthy of G.o.d; thou canst not do this, however, with gold and silver: an image like to G.o.d cannot be formed out of such materials as these_."

4. _Imitating G.o.d_.

"Be ye therefore followers ([Greek: _mimaetai_], imitators) of G.o.d, as dear children." (Eph. v. 1.)

"He that in these things [righteousness, peace, joy in the Holy Ghost]

serveth Christ is acceptable to G.o.d." (Rom. xiv. 18.)

Seneca _(Letter_ 95): "_Do you wish to render the G.o.ds propitious? Be virtuous. To honour them it is enough to imitate them_."

_Letter_ 124: "_Let man aim at the good which belongs to him. What is this good? A mind reformed and pure, the imitator of G.o.d, raising itself above things human, confining all its desires within itself_."

5. _Hypocrites like whited Sepulchres_.

"Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness." (Matt, xxiii. 27.)