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Bishop Hall, “Our English Seneca”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Philip A. Smith
Philip A. Smith*
Affiliation:
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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Extract

Joseph Hall, whom Fuller designated “our English Seneca”, is chiefly remembered as a satirist, character-writer, and indefatigable champion of the Anglican faith against the onslaughts of “Smectymnuus” and Milton. But Fuller's phrase suggests a further claim on our attention. Bishop Hall was the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century, a notable practitioner of the so-called “Baroque” or “curt” style (stile coupé) of the Attic writers. It was to the Neo-Stoic brand of theology which Hall so enthusiastically preached that Sir Thomas Browne had reference when he observed in his Religio Medici that “truely there are singular pieces in the Philosophy of Zeno, and doctrine of the Stoicks, which I perceive, delivered in a pulpit, pass for current Divinity.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , December 1948 , pp. 1191 - 1204
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948

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References

1 Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1931), i, 54.

2 Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, tr. Sir John Stradling, ed. Rudolf Kirk (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1939), i, 4; ii, 3.

3 Tr. Edward Southwell (New York: Facsimile Text Soc, 1930), sig. B3v. See Seneca, Epistle lxvi, 39, and Diogenes Laertius, Lives, vii, 88. For an explanation of how Christian humanists of the seventeenth century interpreted Stoic “reason” see Herbert of Cherbury, De Veritate (Paris, 1624), sig. S4v ff.; Douglas Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time (Cornell Univ. Press, 1945), pp. 36–40; and Edwyn Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics (Oxford, 1913), pp. 47–50.

4 See J. R. Mattingly, “Early Stoicism and the Problem of Its Systematic Form”, Philosophical Rev., xlviii (1939), 273–295.

5 The earliest Stoics represented much the same “climate of opinion” as the first Christians. Five of the first seven leaders of the Early Stoa were Jews, who emphasized strongly a note of moral earnestness in their teachings. For example, Zeno, the first Stoic, taught monotheism and a certain dogmatic austerity in ethics remarkably like the spirit of Protestantism. Edwyn Bevan remarks (Hellenism and Christianity [London, 1921], p. 72): “If one were to consider those elements in the environment of early Christianity which belonged to the classical tradition of Greek civilization … Stoicism would unquestionably be the element of prime importance for the Christian Church.”

7 See Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1940), pp. 165–166; J. B. Lightfoot, St.Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (London, 1881), pp. 276–293; and Léontine Zanta, La Renaissance du Stoïcisme au XVIe Siècle (Paris, 1914), pp. 99–100.

8 Sir Thomas Browne expressed this need, which Renaissance Neo-Stoics like Lipsius and Bishop Guillaume du Vair tried to make good, by urging that one should “rest not in the high-strain'd Paradoxes of old Philosophy supported by naked Reason, and the reward of mortal Felicity, but labour in the Ethics of Faith, built upon heavenly assistance, and the happiness of both beings. Understand the rules, but swear not unto the doctrines of Zeno or Epicurus. Look beyond Antoninus, and terminate not thy morals in Seneca or Epictetus .... Be a moralist of the Mount, an Epictetus in the faith, and Christianize thy Notions” (Works, i, 148–149).

9 Lipsius, Opera Omnia (Versailles, 1675), iv, 827–1007.

10 Religio Stoici (Edinburgh, 1665), p. 36. Ralph Cudworth even designated Calvinistic as opposed to Stoic fatalism “divine fate immoral and divine fate moral” (The True Intellectual History of the Universe, tr. John Harrison [London, 1845], i, xiii–xxiv). More's statement is cited by Douglas Bush in a passage pointing out how Stoicism and the doctrine of “right reason” fortified some of the main positions of Christian humanism (“Two Roads to Truth: Science and Religion in the Early Seventeenth Century”, ELH, viii [1941], 98).

11 Works, ed. Alexander Napier (Cambridge, 1859), vi, 499.

12 See Cochrane, op. cit., p. 168; Epistolicae Senecae ad Paulum et Pauli ad Senecam (quae vocantur), ed. Claude W. Barrow (Horn, Austria, 1938); and Lightfoot, op. cit., pp. 278–285. That classical Stoicism first entered the Christian religion through St. Paul is now considered a doubtful proposition. Cochrane thinks patent Stoic similarities to have been merely a species of “sky writing” looking toward a better world. The evidence, such as it is, is interesting however, and is taken mainly from St. Paul's speech on the Areopagus (Acts, xvii, 18–31: “”). Cf. especially Acts, xvii, 25, 27, 29; and Seneca, Epistles, xcv, 47; xli, 1; xxxi, 1. Bishop Hall, incidentally, believed firmly that Paul and Seneca had corresponded (Balm of Gilead, viii, 1 [Works, vii, 56]).

13 R. M. Wenley, Stoicism and Its Influence (Boston, 1924), p. 76.

14 Morris W. Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose”, Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1929), pp. 435–436. See Charles Burnier, La Morale de Sénèque et la Néo-Stoïcisme (Lausanne, 1907), pp. 46–84; and Frank Ivan Merchant, “Seneca the Philosopher and His Theory of Style”, Am. Jour. Phil., xxvi (1905), 44–59. Basically, Seneca believed that language, like reason, ought to be employed according to nature.

15 In his preface, “To the Courteous Reader”, Lodge succinctly expressed the attraction Seneca held for readers in the seventeenth century: “Learne in these good lessons, and commit them to memory, to subdue passion is to be truely a man, to contemne fortune is to conquer her, to foresee and unmaske miseries in their greatest terrors is to lessen them, to live well is to be vertuous, and to die well is the way to eternitie” (Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, both Morall and Naturall [London, 1614]).

16 Translated into English and circulated by Samuel Lennard under the title Of Wisdome. Charron had been a pupil of the French scholar Muretus, who in turn had originally influenced Lipsius in the direction of Stoicism. See Croll, “Muret and the History of 'Attic Prose”, PMLA, xxix (1924), 254–309.

17 See Hoskins, Directions, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton Univ. Press, 1935), pp. xxx–xxxviii; Louise Brown Osborn, The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskins (Yale Univ. Press, 1937), pp. 103–113; and George Williamson, “Senecan Style in the Seventeenth Century”, PQ, xv (1936), 341 ff.

18 See Wilhelm Dilthey, Dos Natürliche System der Geisteswissenschaften am 17. Jahrhundert, especially “Einfluss der Römischen Stoa auf die Ausbildung des Natürlichen Systems in den Geisteswissenschaften” (Gesammelte Schriften [Leipzig, 1923], ii, 153–162).

19 Works, ii, 510–511.

20 Archbishop John Tillotson, no man to burden a reader with a parade of ancient pagan authorities (“It would be a very superfluous and impertinent work, to trouble you with particular citations of heathen authors”), nevertheless once exclaimed, “How much better teachers of religion were the old heathen philosophers !… I speak it with grief and shame, because the credit of our common Christianity is somewhat concerned in it, that Panaetius and Antipater and Diogenes the Stoick, Tully and Plutarch and Seneca were much honester and more Christian casuists than the Jesuits are” (Works [London, 1757], i, 446). John Wilkins, however, in an influential work on the subject, after stating that, “Seneca in traducendis vitiis salsus est et elegans, ac vehemens etiam”, strongly advocated the quotation of “such heathen authors whose works serve to confirm doctrine” (Ecclesiastes, or A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching [London, 1646], p. 120).

21 Taylor's fondness for jumbling together the disjecta membra of patristic and classical thought, sometimes for purely ornamental purposes, occasioned the kind of criticism expressed in Cotton Mather's indignant “To stuff a sermon with citations of authors, and witty sayings of others, is to make a feast of vinegar and pepper; which are healthful and delightful used as sauces, but must needs be very improper and offensive to be fed upon as a diet” (Magnalia Christi Americana [London, 1702], iii, 144).

22 Works, ed. Reginald Heber, rev. Charles Page Eden (London, 1861), iii, 265, 283–284. See Seneca, Moral Essays, ii, clxvi ff.; Epistle ci, “On the Futility of Planning Ahead”; and De Vita Beata, i, xx.

28 See Richard Foster Jones, “The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration: An Episode in the Development of the Neo-Classical Standard for Prose”, JEGP, xxx (1931), 188–217.

24 Works, i, 309, 314–315; iii, 67. See Seneca, Epistles lxxxi, lxxix, and De Beneficiis, v, xx.

25 W. Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson (London, 1932), p. 232.

26 Works, ed. Philip Wynter (Oxford, 1863), vi, 3. Hall proceeds, in the section next following, to epitomize Seneca's rules for tranquillity.

27 Works, vii, 475.

28 Works, vii, 473–474; cf. Seneca, Epistle lxiii.

29 Ibid., vi, 156–158; cf. Seneca, Epistles lxxxii, 16, xxiv, 13, iv, 6.

30 The frequent condemnation of Stoic “apathy”, especially on the part of the clergy, has been noted by Henry W. Sams, “Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England”, SP, xli (1944), 65–78.

31 Works, vi, 131, 190.

32 See also Epistles v and vi, Decade i; vii and x, Decade ii; i, ix, and x, Decade vi—all of which are completely Stoic in theme and treatment.

33 Works, vi, 89–90. The subjects Hall chose for his Characters of Virtues and Vices are distinctly reminiscent of the section-headings of Seneca's various Moralia.

34 Works, vii, 11.

35 Ibid., vii, 51, 53, 69, 88, 96–97, 99.

36 Works, vii, 96–97; cf. Seneca, Epistle xci, 16, and xxxvi, 11, 12.

37 Ibid., vii, 69–72, 84–94; cf. Seneca, Epistle lvi. In addition to the purely ethical tracts of Seneca, Hall reproduced the substance of Seneca's Paradoxes (published in an appendix to Lodge's translation of Seneca). Hall not only incorporated Stoic teachings in his religious and philosophical prose, he also practised them in his own daily life. Clement Barksdale noted with admiration that “He was a rare Mirrour of Patience under all his Crosses, which toward his latter end were multiplied upon him” (Memorials of Worthy Persons [London, 1661], p. 4).

38 Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (Oxford, 1907), ii, 370.

39 The highly staccato style of the Atticists aimed at short sentences and the careful avoidance of anything like the “periodic” structure. The purpose of the genus humile, in contradistinction to that of the oratorical style, was “to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking” (Croll, “The Baroque Style in Prose”, p. 428). Richard Whitlock, himself a disciple of “that incomparable Master of Sentences, Seneca”, approvingly quoted Hall's words, at the same time designating Hall “our English Divine Seneca” (Zoolomia [1654], sig. Alv). See George Williamson, “Richard Whitlock, Learning's Apologist”, PQ, xv (1936), 254–272.

40 History of the Worthies of England, ed. P. Austin Nuttall (London, 1840), ii, 231.

41 Works, vii, 446.

42 Works, vii, 467–468.

43 Works, vii, 451. The fullest description of Hall's style is that of Zděnek Vančura, “Usěcný styl v anglické próze sedemnáctého stoleti” [“The Curt Style of English Prose of the Seventeenth Century”], Ćasopis pro Moderni Filologii, xviii (1932), 164–173. See especially pp. 168–169: “In Hall extensive periods are encountered in which the thought flows through various designated stages from single facts to generalizations illustrated by examples and metaphors. All these stages are bound in to an extensive unit by common members of the sentence.”

44 Five Sermons in Five Several Styles, pp. 23–38. See also George Berkeley, Historical Applications and Occasional Meditations (1670), for an excellent imitation of Hall.

45 Works (London, 1804), v, 429.