Seneca’s writings reveal a committed Stoic, a pious soul, and an inspirational moral philosopher. Nevertheless, some of his actions and financial dealings have generated doubt about his genuineness. Seneca is a mixed bag if the historical record can be trusted. However, it is crucial to keep in mind that Seneca engaged in politics at the highest levels of the Roman Empire, which was the dominant world power of his time. Thus, he had powerful enemies, not the least of which was the infamous Emperor Nero. When I imagine a man like Seneca in our modern political game of character assassination, I can easily find room to believe much of his negative press was politically motivated. I’m not going to dive into the morass of conflicting scholarship about Seneca; However, I offer the following quote as a balanced opinion,
Naturally, we can have no more certainty that Seneca actually followed his own moral teaching than we can have about any person from antiquity. At best, the sources allow us to extract certain implications for a prominent individual like Seneca. But common opinion about his person seems very much affected, first, by the bare fact that he was a wealthy man, as if that alone would have made him selfish and hypocritical by definition, and, second, by a peculiar fusion of the tutor and counselor Seneca with the student and Emperor Nero, who is best remembered for his bad morality. Here it seems to matter little that our sources suggest that the emperors ‘good period’ was in fact precisely when he was under Seneca's influence.
The stereotyped image of Seneca as a pretentious hypocrite is amazingly widespread, often simply found ‘as a stock assertion dragged from one second-hand work to another’.[1]
As Stoics, I think we should take Seneca's writings at face value. They inspired multitudes in the past, and they do the same today. Many of the early Christian Church Fathers thought highly of Seneca and considered him a moral exemplar. Tertullian, a second-century Christian apologist, even referred to him as “our Seneca.” Regardless of the ambiguous historical record, Seneca’s writings reveal his deep philosophical thought and reverence for divine Nature.
Letters to Lucilius
Throughout his writings, Seneca refers to the relationship between the gods and us. In Letters 1.5, he calls this relationship a “kinship” and claims it is “sealed by virtue.” Later, in Letters 31, titled Our mind’s godlike potential,[2] he suggests a committed devotion to philosophy, as a way of life, raises us above our human nature toward our godlike potential. How? Through virtue, which he defines as:
[T]he evenness and steadiness of a life that is in harmony with itself through all events, which cannot come about unless one has knowledge and the skill of discerning things human and divine. (Letters 31.8)
Again, in Letters 53, Seneca argues that a mind committed to philosophy will be near to the gods and can experience the “tranquility of God.” He points out the tremendous power of philosophy to “beat back all the assaults of chance” and claims,
No weapon lodges in its flesh; its defenses cannot be penetrated. When fortune’s darts come in, it either ducks and lets them pass by, or stands its ground and lets them bounce back against the assailant. (Letters53.11-12)
In Letters 41, titled God dwells within us, Seneca covers the topics of Stoic physics and theology in some detail. First, he makes a clear distinction between the practices of personal religion and those of conventional religions. As I discussed in previous episodes, Stoicism was never a religion in the traditional sense, with altars, temples, and priests. Nevertheless, the Stoics were deeply spiritual and reverential toward God, which they conceived as an immanent and creative force that permeates and providentially guides the cosmos and humankind. Seneca begins Letters 41 by asserting,
You need not raise your hands to heaven; you need not beg the temple keeper for privileged access, as if a near approach to the cult image would give us a better hearing. The god is near you—with you—inside you. I mean it, Lucilius. A sacred spirit dwells within us, and is the observer and guardian of all our goods and ills. However we treat that spirit, so does the spirit treat us. In truth, no one is a good man without God. Or is there anyone who can rise superior to fortune without God’s aid? It is God who supplies us with noble thoughts, with upright counsels. In each and every good man resides a god: which god, remains unknown. (Letters 41.1-2)
Scholars suggest this reference to God as unknown comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, where King Evander leads Aeneas to a grove and says,
…this hill with its crown of leaves is a god’s home, whatever god he is. (Aeneid 8.352)
As an educated Roman, Lucilius would have been familiar with Virgil’s epic poem about the foundations of Roman civilization. However, this reference begs the question. Why would Seneca quote a passage referring to an unknown god in a letter about the God that dwells within us? I think this is illustrative of the Stoic conception of God. Cleanthes, the second Scholarch of the Stoa, referred to the divinity as the God of many names in his deeply spiritual Hymn to Zeus. For the Stoic, God is immanent in all of creation. Therefore, whether God, Nature, Zeus, universal Reason, etc., the name we choose does not matter. They all point to the same concept—divine rationality that permeates the cosmos and is the source of its ongoing existence.
Next, Seneca discusses the religious awe many people experience while in the majestic presence of Nature.
If you happen to be in a wood dense with ancient trees of unusual height, where interlocking branches exclude the light of day, the loftiness and seclusion of that forest spot, the wonder of finding above ground such a deep, unbroken shade, will convince you that divinity is there. If you behold some deeply eroded cavern, some vast chamber not made with hands but hollowed out by natural causes at the very roots of the mountain, it will impress upon your mind an intimation of religious awe. We venerate the sources of great rivers; we situate an altar wherever a rushing stream bursts suddenly from hiding; thermal springs are the site of ritual observance; and more than one lake has been held sacred for its darkness or its measureless depth. (Letters 41.3)
Next, Seneca makes an interesting comparison. He compares this experience of the divine in Nature to the experience of encountering a sage-like person—a person who lives up to their godlike potential. He wrote:
So if you see a person undismayed by peril and untouched by desire, one cheerful in adversity and calm in the face of storms, someone who rises above all humankind and meets the gods at their own level, will you not be overcome with reverence before him? That eminent and disciplined mind, passing through everything as lesser than itself, laughing at all our fears and all our longings, is driven by some celestial force. Such magnitude cannot stand upright without divinity to hold it up. In large part, then, its existence is in that place from which it has come down. (Letters 41.4-5)
So, what is the source of this divinity which holds up the “eminent and disciplined mind” of this person? Seneca writes:
Even as the sun’s rays touch the earth and yet have their existence at their point of origin, so that great and sacred mind, that mind sent down to bring us nearer knowledge of the divine, dwells indeed with us and yet inheres within its source. Its reliance is there, and there are its aim and its objective: though it mingles in our affairs, it does so as our better. (Letters 41.4-5)
In other words, the god-like mind we see in this sage-like person has its source in “that great and sacred mind” that permeates the cosmos. As Pierre Hadot notes in his marvelous book The Inner Citadel, the Stoics thought:
It is impossible that the universe could produce human rationality, unless the latter were already in some way present within the former.[3]
Many moderns gloss over passages like this because they consider them religious nonsense. However, Seneca and the other Stoics thought this conception of the cosmos the most reasonable inference from their observations of nature. Seneca is arguing for the existence of an inherent intelligence in the cosmos, and many modern scientists agree. In response to an inquiry from a young girl, Einstein wrote:
…everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.[4]
Einstein did not believe in a personal God, and he was not an advocate of organized religion; nevertheless, he asserted that “individuals of exceptional endowments” could rise to a “third stage of religious experience” he called “cosmic religion” where,
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.[5]
Einstein’s definition of cosmic religion is consistent with the theology and religious sentiment of the Stoics, who called this intelligence within the cosmos logos and considered it divine. For the Stoics, a fragment of the same logos (rationality) which permeates and rationally orders the cosmos also serves as our guiding principle or hegemonikon—our rational mind. Thus, when we live according to Nature, as the Stoics prescribed, our rational faculty is in coherence with the divine, rational mind (logos) permeating the cosmos.
