Seekers after God - Frederic William Farrar
SEEKERS AFTER GOD
BY THE REV. F. W. FARRAR, D.D., F.R.S.,
CANON OF WESTMINSTER.
SENECA.
"Ce nuage frange de rayons qui toucbe presqu' a l'immortelle aurore
des verites chretiennes."--PONTMAOTIN.
INTRODUCTORY.
On the banks of the Baetis--the modern Guadalquiver,--and under the
woods that crown the southern slopes of the Sierra Morena, lies the
beautiful and famous city of Cordova. It had been selected by Marcellus
as the site of a Roman colony; and so many Romans and Spaniards of high
rank chose it for their residence, that it obtained from Augustus the
honourable surname of the "Patrician Colony." Spain, during this period
of the Empire, exercised no small influence upon the literature and
politics of Rome. No less than three great Emperors--Trajan, Hadrian,
and Theodosius,--were natives of Spain. Columella, the writer on
agriculture, was born at Cadiz; Quintilian, the great writer on the
education of an orator, was born at Calahorra; the poet Martial was a
native of Bilbilis; but Cordova could boast the yet higher honour of
having given birth to the Senecas, an honour which won for it the
epithet of "The Eloquent." A ruin is shown to modern travellers which
is popularly called the House of Seneca, and the fact is at least a
proof that the city still retains some memory of its illustrious sons.
Marcus Annaeus Seneca, the father of the philosopher, was by rank a
Roman knight. What causes had led him or his family to settle in Spain
we do not know, and the names Annaeus and Seneca are alike obscure. It
has been vaguely conjectured that both names may involve an allusion to
the longevity of some of the founders of the family, for Annaeus seems
to be connected with _annus_, a year, and Seneca with _senex_, an old
man. The common English composite plant ragwort is called _senecio_ from
the white and feathery pappus or appendage of its seeds; and similarly,
Isidore says that the first Seneca was so named because "he was born
with white hair."
Although the father of Seneca was of knightly rank, his family had never
risen to any eminence; it belonged to the class of _nouveaux riches_,
and we do not know whether it was of Roman or of Spanish descent. But
his mother Helvia--an uncommon name, which, by a curious coincidence,
belonged also to the mother of Cicero--was a Spanish lady; and it was
from her that Seneca, as well as his famous nephew, the poet Lucan,
doubtless derived many of the traits which mark their intellect and
their character. There was in the Spaniard a richness and splendour of
imagination, an intensity and warmth, a touch of "phantasy and flame,"
which we find in these two men of genius, and which was wholly wanting
to the Roman temperament.
Of Cordova itself, except in a single epigram, Seneca makes no mention;
but this epigram suffices to show that he must have been familiar with
its stirring and memorable traditions. The elder Seneca must have been
living at Cordova during all the troublous years of civil war, when his
native city caused equal offence to Pompey and to Caesar. Doubtless,
too, he would have had stories to tell of the noble Sertorius, and of
the tame fawn which gained for him the credit of divine assistance; and
contemporary reminiscences of that day of desperate disaster when
Caesar, indignant that Cordova should have embraced the cause of the
sons of Pompey, avenged himself by a massacre of 22,000 of the citizens.
From his mother Helvia, Seneca must often have heard about the fierce
and gallant struggle in which her country had resisted the iron yoke of
Rome. Many a time as a boy must he have been told how long and how
heroically Saguntum had withstood the assaults and baffled the triumph
of Hannibal; how bravely Viriathus had fought, and how shamefully he
fell; and how at length the unequal contest, which reduced Spain to the
condition of a province, was closed, when the heroic defenders of
Numantia, rather than yield to Scipio, reduced their city to a heap of
bloodstained ruins.
But, whatever may have been the extent to which Seneca was influenced by
the Spanish blood which flowed in his veins, and the Spanish legends on
which his youth was fed, it was not in Spain that his lot was cast. When
he was yet an infant in arms his father, with all his family, emigrated
from Cordova to Rome. What may have been the special reason for this
important step we do not know; possibly, like the father of Horace, the
elder Seneca may have sought a better education for his sons than could
be provided by even so celebrated a provincial town as Cordova;
possibly--for he belonged to a somewhat pushing family--he may have
desired to gain fresh wealth and honour in the imperial city.
Thither we must follow him; and, as it is our object not only to depict
a character but also to sketch the characteristics of a very memorable
age in the world's history, we must try to get a glimpse of the family
in the midst of which our young philosopher grew up, of the kind of
education which he received, and of the influences which were likely to
tell upon him during his childish and youthful years. Only by such means
shall we be able to judge of him aright. And it is worth while to try
and gain a right conception of the man, not only because he was very
eminent as a poet, an author, and a politician, not only because he
fills a very prominent place in the pages of the great historian, who
has drawn so immortal a picture of Rome under the Emperors; not only
because in him we can best study the inevitable signs which mark, even
in the works of men of genius, a degraded people and a decaying
literature; but because he was, as the title of this volume designates
him, a "SEEKER AFTER GOD." Whatever may have been the dark and
questionable actions of his life--and in this narrative we shall
endeavor to furnish a plain and unvarnished picture of the manner in
which he lived,--it is certain that, as a philosopher and as a moralist,
he furnishes us with the grandest and most eloquent series of truths to
which, unilluminated by Christianity, the thoughts of man have ever
attained. The purest and most exalted philosophic sect of antiquity was
"the sect of the Stoics;" and Stoicism never found a literary exponent
more ardent, more eloquent, or more enlightened than Lucius Annaeus
Seneca. So nearly, in fact, does he seem to have arrived at the truths
of Christianity, that to many it seemed a matter for marvel that he
could have known them without having heard them from inspired lips. He
is constantly cited with approbation by some of the most eminent
Christian fathers. Tertullian, Lactantius, even St. Augustine himself,
quote his words with marked admiration, and St. Jerome appeals to him as
"_our_ Seneca." The Council of Trent go further still, and quote him as
though he were an acknowledged father of the Church. For many centuries
there were some who accepted as genuine the spurious letters supposed to
have been interchanged between Seneca and St. Paul, in which Seneca is
made to express a wish to hold among the Pagans the same beneficial
position which St. Paul held in the Christian world. The possibility of
such an intercourse, the nature and extent of such supposed obligations,
will come under our consideration hereafter. All that I here desire to
say is, that in considering the life of Seneca we are not only dealing
with a life which was rich in memorable incidents, and which was cast
into an age upon which Christianity dawned as a new light in the
darkness, but also the life of one who climbed the loftiest peaks of the
moral philosophy of Paganism, and who in many respects may be regarded
as the Coryphaeus of what has been sometimes called a Natural Religion.
It is not my purpose to turn aside from the narrative in order to
indulge in moral reflections, because such reflections will come with
tenfold force if they are naturally suggested to the reader's mind by
the circumstances of the biography. But from first to last it will be
abundantly obvious to every thoughtful mind that alike the morality and
the philosophy of Paganism, as contrasted with the splendour of revealed
truth and the holiness of Christian life, are but as moonlight is to
sunlight. The Stoical philosophy may be compared to a torch which flings
a faint gleam here and there in the dusky recesses of a mighty cavern;
Christianity to the sun pouring into the inmost depths of the same
cavern its sevenfold illumination. The torch had a value and brightness
of its own, but compared with the dawning of that new glory it appears
to be dim and ineffectual, even though its brightness was a real
brightness, and had been drawn from the same etherial source.
CHAPTER I.
THE FAMILY AND EARLY YEARS OF SENECA.
The exact date of Seneca's birth is uncertain, but it took place in all
probability about seven years before the commencement of the Christian
era. It will give to his life a touch of deep and solemn interest if we
remember that, during all those guilty and stormy scenes amid which his
earlier destiny was cast, there lived and taught in Palestine the Son of
God, the Saviour of the world.
The problems which for many years tormented his mind were beginning to
find their solution, amid far other scenes, by men whose creed and
condition he despised. While Seneca was being guarded by his attendant
slave through the crowded and dangerous streets of Rome on his way to
school, St. Peter and St. John were fisher-lads by the shores of
Gennesareth; while Seneca was ardently assimilating the doctrine of the
stoic Attalus, St. Paul, with no less fervancy of soul, sat learning at
the feet of Gamaliel; and long before Seneca had made his way, through
paths dizzy and dubious, to the zenith of his fame, unknown to him that
Saviour had been crucified through whose only merits he and we can ever
attain to our final rest.
Seneca was about two years old when he was carried to Rome in his
nurse's arms. Like many other men who have succeeded in attaining
eminence, he suffered much from ill-health in his early years. He tells
us of one serious illness from which he slowly recovered under the
affectionate and tender nursing of his mother's sister. All his life
long he was subject to attacks of asthma, which, after suffering every
form of disease, he says that he considers to be the worst. At one time
his personal sufferings weighed so heavily on his spirits that nothing
save a regard for his father's wishes prevented him from suicide: and
later in life he was only withheld from seeking the deliverance of death
by the tender affection of his wife Paulina. He might have used with
little alteration the words of Pope, that his various studies but served
to help him
"Through _this long disease, my life_."
The recovery from this tedious illness is the only allusion which Seneca
has made to the circumstances of his childhood. The ancient writers,
even the ancient poets, but rarely refer, even in the most cursory
manner, to their early years. The cause of this reticence offers a
curious problem for our inquiry, but the fact is indisputable. Whereas
there is scarcely a single modern poet who has not lingered with
undisguised feelings of happiness over the gentle memories of his
childhood, not one of the ancient poets has systematically touched upon
the theme at all. From Lydgate down to Tennyson, it would be easy to
quote from our English poets a continuous line of lyric songs on the
subject of boyish years. How to the young child the fir-trees seemed to
touch the sky, how his heart leaped up at the sight of the rainbow, how
he sat at his mother's feet and pricked into paper the tissued flowers
of her dress, how he chased the bright butterfly, or in his tenderness
feared to brush even the dust from off its wings, how he learnt sweet
lessons and said innocent prayers at his father's knee; trifles like
these, yet trifles which may have been rendered noble and beautiful by a
loving imagination, have been narrated over and over again in the songs
of our poets. The lovely lines of Henry Vaughan might be taken as a type
of thousands more:--
"Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought;
* * * * *
"Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense;
But felt through all this fleshy dress,
Bright shoots of everlastingness."
The memory of every student of English poetry will furnish countless
parallels to thoughts like these. How is it that no similar poem could
be quoted from the whole range of ancient literature? How is it that to
the Greek and Roman poets that morning of life, which should have been
so filled with "natural blessedness," seems to have been a blank? How is
it that writers so voluminous, so domestic, so affectionate as Cicero,
Virgil, and Horace do not make so much as a single allusion to the
existence of their own mothers?
To answer this question fully would be to write an entire essay on the
difference between ancient and modern life, and would carry me far away
from my immediate subject.[1] But I may say generally, that the
explanation rests in the fact that in all probability childhood among
the ancients was a disregarded, and in most cases a far less happy,
period than it is with us. The birth of a child in the house of a Greek
or a Roman was not necessarily a subject for rejoicing. If the father,
when the child was first shown to him, stooped down and took it in his
arms, it was received as a member of the family; if he left it unnoticed
then it was doomed to death, and was exposed in some lonely or barren
place to the mercy of the wild beasts, or of the first passer by. And
even if a child escaped this fate, yet for the first seven or eight
years of life he was kept in the gynaeceum, or women's apartments, and
rarely or never saw his father's face. No halo of romance or poetry was
shed over those early years. Until the child was full grown the absolute
power of life or death rested in his father's hands; he had no freedom,
and met with little notice. For individual life the ancients had a very
slight regard; there was nothing autobiographic or introspective in
their temperament. With them public life, the life of the State, was
everything; domestic life, the life of the individual, occupied but a
small share of their consideration. All the innocent pleasures of
infancy, the joys of the hearth, the charm of the domestic circle, the
flow and sparkle of childish gaity, were by them but little appreciated.
The years before manhood were years of prospect, and in most cases they
offered but little to make them worth the retrospect. It is a mark of
the more modern character which stamps the writings of Seneca, as
compared with earlier authors, that he addresses his mother in terms of
the deepest affection, and cannot speak of his darling little son except
in a voice that seems to break with tears.
[Footnote 1: See, however, the same question treated from a somewhat
different point of view by M. Nisard, in his charming _Etudes sur les
Poetes de la Decadence_, ii. 17, _sqq_.]
Let us add another curious consideration. The growth of the personal
character, the reminiscences of a life advancing into perfect
consciousness, are largely moulded by the gradual recognition of moral
laws, by the sense of mystery evolved in the inevitable struggle between
duty and pleasure,--between the desire to do right and the temptation to
do wrong. But among the ancients the conception of morality was so
wholly different from ours, their notions of moral obligation were, in
the immense majority of cases, so much less stringent and so much less
important, they had so faint a disapproval for sins which we condemn,
and so weak an indignation against vices which we abhor, that in their
early years we can hardly suppose them to have often fathomed those
"abysmal deeps of personality," the recognition of which is a necessary
element of marked individual growth.
We have, therefore, no materials for forming any vivid picture of
Seneca's childhood; but, from what we gather about the circumstances and
the character of his family, we should suppose that he was exceptionally
fortunate. The Senecas were wealthy; they held a good position in
society; they were a family of cultivated taste, of literary pursuits,
of high character, and of amiable dispositions. Their wealth raised them
above the necessity of those mean cares and degrading shifts to eke out
a scanty livelihood which mark the career of other literary men who were
their contemporaries. Their rank and culture secured them the intimacy
of all who were best worth knowing in Roman circles; and the general
dignity and morality which marked their lives would free them from all
likelihood of being thrown into close intercourse with the numerous
class of luxurious epicureans, whose unblushing and unbounded vice gave
an infamous notority to the capital of the world.
Of Marcus Annaeus Seneca, the father of our philosopher, we know few
personal particulars, except that he was a professional rhetorician, who
drew up for the use of his sons and pupils a number of oratorical
exercises, which have come down to us under the names of _Suasoriae_ and
_Controversiae_. They are a series of declamatory arguments on both
sides, respecting a number of historical or purely imaginary subjects;
and it would be impossible to conceive any reading more utterly
unprofitable. But the elder Seneca was steeped to the lips in an
artificial rhetoric; and these highly elaborated arguments, invented in
order to sharpen the faculties for purposes of declamation and debate,
were probably due partly to his note-book and partly to his memory. His
memory was so prodigious that after hearing two thousand words he could
repeat them again in the same order. Few of those who have possessed
such extraordinary powers of memory have been men of first-rate talent,
and the elder Seneca was no exception. But if his memory did not improve
his original genius, it must at any rate have made him a very agreeable
member of society, and have furnished him with an abundant store of
personal and political anecdotes. In short, Marcus Seneca was a
well-to-do, intelligent man of the world, with plenty of common sense,
with a turn for public speaking, with a profound dislike and contempt
for anything which he considered philosophical or fantastic, and with a
keen eye to the main advantage.
His wife Helvia, if we may trust the panegyric of her son, was on the
other hand a far less commonplace character. But for her husband's
dislike to learning and philosophy she would have become a proficient in
both, and in a short period of study she had made a considerable
advance. Yet her intellect was less remarkable than the nobility and
sweetness of her mind; other mothers loved their sons because their own
ambition was gratified by their honours, and their feminine wants
supplied by their riches; but Helvia loved her sons for their own sakes,
treated them with liberal generosity, but refused to reap any personal
benefit from their wealth, managed their patrimonies with disinterested
zeal, and spent her own money to bear the expenses of their political
career. She rose superior to the foibles and vices of her time.
Immodesty, the plague-spot of her age, had never infected her pure life.
Gems and pearls had little charms for her. She was never ashamed of her
children, as though their presence betrayed her own advancing age. "You
never stained your face," says her son, when writing to console her in
his exile, "with walnut-juice or rouge; you never delighted in dresses
indelicately low; your single ornament was a loveliness which no age
could destroy; your special glory was a conspicuous chastity." We may
well say with Mr. Tennyson--
"Happy he
With such a mother! faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and, though he trip and fall,
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
Nor was his mother Helvia the only high-minded lady in whose society
the boyhood of Seneca was spent. Her sister, whose name is unknown, that
aunt who had so tenderly protected the delicate boy, and nursed him
through the sickness of his infancy, seems to have inspired him with an
affection of unusual warmth. He tells us how, when her husband was
Prefect of Egypt, so far was she from acting as was usual with the wives
of provincial governors, that she was as much respected and beloved as
they were for the most part execrated and shunned. So serious was the
evil caused by these ladies, so intolerable was their cruel rapacity,
that it had been seriously debated in the Senate whether they should
ever be allowed to accompany their husbands. Not so with Helvia's
sister. She was never seen in public; she allowed no provincial to visit
her house; she begged no favour for herself, and suffered none to be
begged from her. The province not only praised her, but, what was still
more to her credit, barely knew anything about her, and longed in vain
for another lady who should imitate her virtue and self-control. Egypt
was the headquarters for biting and loquacious calumny, yet even Egypt
never breathed a word against the sanctity of her life. And when during
their homeward voyage her husband died, in spite of danger and tempest
and the deeply-rooted superstition which considered it perilous to sail
with a corpse on board, not even the imminent peril of shipwreck could
drive her to separate herself from her husband's body until she had
provided for its safe and honorable sepulchre. These are the traits of a
good and heroic woman; and that she reciprocated the regard which makes
her nephew so emphatic in her praise may be conjectured from the fact
that, when he made his _debut_ as a candidate for the honours of the
State, she emerged from her habitual seclusion, laid aside for a time
her matronly reserve, and, in order to assist him in his canvass, faced
for his sake the rustic impertinence and ambitious turbulence of the
crowds who thronged the Forum and the streets of Rome.
Two brothers, very different from each other in their habits and
character, completed the family circle, Marcus Annaeus Novatus and
Lucius Annaeus Mela, of whom the former was older the latter younger,
than their more famous brother.
Marcus Annaeus Novatus is known to history under the name of Junius
Gallio, which he took when adopted by the orator of that name, who was a
friend of his father. He is none other than the Gallio of the Acts, the
Proconsul of Achaia, whose name has passed current among Christians as a
proverb of complacent indifference.[2]
[Footnote 2: Acts xxv. 19.]
The scene, however, in which Scripture gives us a glimpse of him has
been much misunderstood, and to talk of him as "careless Gallio," or to
apply the expression that "he cared for none of these things," to
indifference in religious matters, is entirely to misapply the spirit of
the narrative. What really happened was this. The Jews, indignant at the
success of Paul's preaching, dragged him before the tribunal of Gallio,
and accused him of introducing illegal modes of worship. When the
Apostle was about to defend himself, Gallio contemptuously cut him short
by saying to the Jews, "If in truth there were in question any act of
injustice or wicked misconduct, I should naturally have tolerated your
complaint. But if this is some verbal inquiry about mere technical
matters of your law, look after it yourselves. I do not choose to be a
judge of such matters." With these words he drove them from his
judgment-seat with exactly the same fine Roman contempt for the Jews and
their religious affairs as was subsequently expressed by Festus to the
sceptical Agrippa, and as had been expressed previously by Pontius
Pilate[3] to the tumultous Pharisees. Exulting at this discomfiture of
the hated Jews and apparently siding with Paul, the Greeks then went in
a body, seized Sosthenes, the leader of the Jewish synagogue, and beat
him in full view of the Proconsul seated on his tribunal. This was the
event at which Gallio looked on with such imperturbable disdain. What
could it possibly matter to him, the great Proconsul, whether the Greeks
beat a poor wretch of a Jew or not? So long as they did not make a riot,
or give him any further trouble about the matter, they might beat
Sosthenes or any number of Jews black and blue if it pleased them, for
all he was likely to care.
[Footnote 3: Matt. xxvii. 24, "See ye to it." Cf. Acts xiv. 15, "Look ye
to it." Toleration existed in the Roman Empire, and the magistrates
often interfered to protect the Jews from massacre; but they absolutely
and persistently refused to trouble themselves with any attempt to
understand their doctrines or enter into their disputes. The tradition
that Gallio sent some of St. Paul's writings to his brother Seneca is
utterly absurd; and indeed at this time (A.D. 54), St. Paul had written
nothing except the two Epistles to the Thessalonians. (See Conybeare and
Howson, _St. Paul_, vol. i. Ch. xii.; Aubertin, _Seneque et St. Paul_.)]