SOURCE: Chew, Audrey. “Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism.” PMLA 65, no. 6 (December 1950): 1130-45.

[In this essay, Chew discusses Hall's brand of neo-stoicism in relation to the evolving Christian stoic philosophy from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Further, the critic analyzes the major philosophical points on which Hall agreed with and diverged from Seneca, particularly noting that Hall embraced Seneca's puritanical concept of placing virtue before pleasure.]

During his own lifetime Bishop Joseph Hall was nicknamed “our spiritual Seneca” by Henry Wotton and later called “our English Seneca” by Thomas Fuller; as a result it has recently become fashionable to associate him with seventeenth-century English Neo-Stoicism. A seventeenth-century Neo-Stoic is of interest presumably because he points in the direction of eighteenth-century Neo-Stoicism, away from a revealed religion toward a natural religion, away from faith toward reason. In a recent article Philip A. Smith calls Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” and says that he enthusiastically preached the “Neo-Stoic brand of theology” to which Sir Thomas Browne objected.¹ This theology maintained that “to follow ‘right reason’ was to follow nature, which was the same thing as following God.” Smith goes on to say that “what most attracted seventeenth-century Christian humanists like Bishop Hall was the fact that Stoicism attempted to frame a theory of the universe and of the individual man which would approximate a rule of life in conformity with an ‘immanent cosmic reason’”—though in the same paragraph he also mentions the point “that Neo-Stoic divines of the seventeenth century were interested in Stoicism almost exclusively from the ethical point of view.” He cites Lipsius to show how a Christian might reach an approximation between the Stoic Fate and Christian Providence, leaving the reader to assume that Hall might also have made this approximation. He says that “the natural light of reason, as expounded by the Stoic philosophers, became, for seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics, the accepted guide to conduct” and that “religious and moral writers endeavored to trace a relationship between moral and natural law which in effect resulted in the practical code of ethical behavior commonly associated with Neo-Stoicism.”

If Hall is to be called, as Smith says he is, “the most thoroughgoing of seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics,” it is to be presumed that Hall's theology reveals a more than average stress on the light of nature in preference to mere revelation. Yet Smith carefully avoids making any such claim; rather he says that Hall “continually reaffirmed the ultimate superiority of the Christian over the Stoic creed, even when simultaneously paying the highest tribute in his power to the latter.” His claim rests on the fact that “next possibly to Jeremy Taylor, Hall referred to and quoted the Stoics more often than any other writer of his time, and made far more integral use of their teachings.” By “integral use of their teachings” Smith says he means that “while the bishop stoutly proclaimed the innate superiority of the Christian faith over pagan doctrines, the very terms of his protestations implied the greatest possible admiration for the Stoics.” Though “Hall insisted upon the primacy of Christianity … his works themselves are saturated with Senecanism.” Smith then goes on to list examples of influences of Seneca on Hall, and one gathers that Hall admired Seneca because Seneca often agreed with standard Christian doctrine and borrowed words and ideas from Seneca to reinforce his own Christian teaching. His borrowings come under the head of rules for conduct. We do not find him trying to twist his theology to make it agree with Stoic philosophy. If Hall, therefore, is to be called “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” it must be concluded that in England seventeenth-century Neo-Stoicism differed from mediæval Neo-Stoicism only in quantity, not in quality.

In Rudolf Kirk's recent edition of Hall's Heaven upon Earth and Characters of Virtues and Vices (New Brunswick, N. J., 1948) the conclusion is similar. Kirk has published his edition as part of a trilogy of Neo-Stoic treatises which, when completed, will include English translations of Two Bookes of Constancie by Justus Lipsius and The Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks by Guillaume Du Vair. Hall, says Kirk, did what “Lipsius had accomplished so learnedly for the European world and Du Vair so gracefully for his beloved French.” He “explained Stoic philosophy in order to show what in it a Christian might admire and what he must repudiate.” It was the Christianity, however, not the Stoicism, which in Kirk's opinion had the upper hand. Hall “had taken Seneca as his master, but in the very act of following the Stoic philosopher, the Christian repudiated the pagan” (p. 21). Where Hall borrowed from Seneca he adapted him to fit Christian needs. He did not try to make Christianity fit itself to Stoicism. He always insisted that Grace was even more important than the light of nature. In Heaven upon Earth and the Characters Kirk says that Hall stated and exemplified his philosophy of life in this world. “The tranquillity which he set out to consider in his treatise, as his goal, he took from the Stoic Seneca; the peace at which he arrived, and which he counsels us to seek, is the Christian Peace of God, which passeth all understanding” (p. 51).

In addition to his ideas, Kirk and Smith point out that Hall owed his title of the “English Seneca” in part to his prose style. Kirk says that Hall's sentences were always recognized as the finest Senecan English of his age, but thinks his philosophy was his important contribution (p. 64). Smith says that Hall “was a leading Attic stylist under the tutelage of the master himself and Lipsius” (p. 1203).

Smith and Kirk have demonstrated that Hall adapted Senecan ideas to Christian use. The question now to be considered is whether they are justified in calling him a Neo-Stoic, especially when one considers some of the connotations of that term both in its present-day and in its seventeenth-century uses.

The man of the seventeenth century, according to Henry W. Sams,² associated Stoicism chiefly with three things: first, and most important, suppression of the passions; second, paganism; third, an overweening trust in the efficacy of human reason. Whether Hall could be considered a Stoic by any of these definitions is a question I shall consider later. First I want to look not so much at his ideas as at his prose style.

What today is called Senecan style, that plain, terse prose which stresses meaning rather than ornament, has come to be associated with the radical group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers who were breaking away from mediæval and early Renaissance Aristotelian and Ciceronian tradition. The classic example is Bacon.³ Now Thomas Fuller said that Hall was called “our English Seneca, for the pureness, plainness, and fulness of his style,” and the plainness of his prose has always been one of its distinguishing characteristics.⁴ Though the style varied with the type of work, the pithy, aphoristic prose of the Characters and the Meditations is the one which is best known. It is a style which has a certain resemblance to the style of Bacon's Essays. Because of that resemblance there has been a tendency to group Hall with those thinkers whose revolt against Ciceronianism was for intellectual reasons, whereas Hall's actual motives were moral rather than intellectual. It was not so much that he wanted an instrument which could be adapted to the expression of new and complicated ideas, but that he felt that plainness partook less of pride. In many respects, and especially in the matter of personal conduct, he sympathized with the Puritans. He talked about prose style in the same terms he used for fine clothes: he felt that excess ornament and elaboration were wicked. Just as Seneca did, he objected to a style which was either, at one extreme, unnecessarily rough or, at the other, elaborately and artificially smooth; but he preferred roughness to “elegancy without soundness,” insisting that the proper standard of judgment for prose style as for anything else was its usefulness.⁵

In general it might be said that Seneca appealed to Hall because Seneca agreed with Hall's puritan tastes. Hall was not a Puritan in the technical sense of the word. He never became a member of the Puritan Party. He did not leave the Church of England. Nor did he agree intellectually with those Puritans who put supreme emphasis on the ability of the individual to arrive at truth by himself. But it was in the moderate asceticism of his notions of personal conduct that his puritan side came out. It was here that Seneca attracted him.

Hall was not a philosopher. He went to Seneca not for new ideas but because in Seneca he could find a reinforcement of old ones—ideas that had been current at least all through the sixteenth century. The same ideas can be found in Spenser or Ascham or Elyot. Sometimes they are supposed to derive from Aristotle, as Aristotle was interpreted by the sixteenth century. Sometimes they are supposed to come from the Stoic philosophers. After all, the Stoic cardinal virtues⁶ of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance had long ago been appropriated by the Christians. If Hall boasted loudly that he was adapting Seneca for Christian use the cause was possibly not so much that he had seen in Seneca a new light which was to change his own philosophy profoundly as that he saw Seneca as one of those Classical writers who could safely be Englished for the edification of seventeenth-century Christians.

As a typical man of his time, Hall had a great respect for the classics. He liked to use Classical molds for his contemporary teachings. Boasting in the beginning of his Virgidemiarum that he was the first English satirist, he used the Juvenalian form for his attack on current social ills.⁷ The publication of his Characters made him the first to produce in English a group of Characters on the Theophrastian model. In his Epistles he was very likely imitating Seneca. He claimed to be the first in English to write epistles which were in reality essays. In his dedication to Heaven upon Earth he said that he was following the philosophy of Seneca in his advice for the attainment of tranquillity. Seneca made a particularly safe model because of the legend, which Hall believed,⁸ of his correspondence with St. Paul. Like Cicero, he had for a long time been in good odor with the Christians. And to Puritan-minded Protestants like Hall his appeal might be greater than Cicero's because of his greater insistence on plain talking—and possibly merely because Cicero had been in favor with Catholic humanists.

As a Christian, Hall was always careful to pity Seneca. Fine moralist though Seneca was, and although—using the light of nature alone—he had perhaps seen as much truth as it was possible for any pagan to see, yet his lack of Grace could only mean that his end would be destruction. Hall, like any other orthodox Christian of his time, would never forget that Seneca must be kept in his place. When Kirk says that Hall, as compared with Lipsius and Du Vair, “was able to lead the Christian through the best of Stoicism to the best of Christianity without the necessity of the subtle philosophical argument required by Lipsius or the transposition of Epictetus piece by piece, which was the method of Du Vair,” that Hall saw immediately “that the Heathen lacked Grace,”⁹ he is merely saying that Hall's approach to Seneca is the mediæval approach rather than that of the scientific minded thinkers of the Renaissance whom the word Neo-Stoic tends to call to mind.

If there is anything central to Hall's philosophy it is conservatism. When one reads through his many volumes of sermons, Biblical commentaries, epistles, meditations, contemplations, polemical pamphlets—in addition to his better-known satires and Characters—one finds little that is remarkable in the way of ideas. Hall was a middle-of-the-road man. He wanted peace. He wanted to preserve the way of life which was fast disappearing—but he could be made to change his mind. He was always willing to compromise. Though his patriotism as an Englishman made him strongly anti-Catholic, he was not moving in the direction of greater freedom for the individual. Instead of stressing the importance of free inquiry or the superiority of reason over custom he believed in tradition and authority, opposing change, enthusiasm, and (especially) sectarianism. Moderation, restraint, common-sense, obedience, patience were his constant catchwords. The continual threat of political upheaval filled him with horror. The ideal system which he envisaged—and which he perhaps even imagined had once existed before the world had fallen into its current decay—was a benevolent monarchy, one in which the king owed obedience only to God but ruled himself strictly according to conscience while the other members of society performed the duties suitable to their positions. The lower classes would seek only to do their work well, not to rise out of their proper spheres. Questions of theology would be left to those who were qualified to study them. In this philosophy there is nothing either specifically Senecan or anti-Senecan. When Seneca agreed, Hall was glad to make use of him. When he did not, Hall went his own way.

In pitying Seneca for his heathenish lack of Grace, Hall was taking what Sams has shown to be the average seventeenth-century point of view. (See note 2.) Did Hall also associate Stoicism with what Sams has shown to be the other two average attitudes: an overweening trust in the efficacy of human reason and suppression of the passions?

Pride in reason (Stoic pride as it was sometimes called) had a number of facets. The best known was probably the tendency to consider man's reason the measure of all things. The notion that a man might control his own destiny by accepting the laws of the universe and living according to reason could only in part appeal to a Christian. A Christian might try to understand the will of God (as manifested in nature) in order to rule himself accordingly. He might patiently accept misfortune as coming from God. But a disdain of the misfortune, a refusal to notice something which God had taken the trouble to send either as punishment or as trial could not be Christian. To insist, as Seneca did, that if things got too bad one had always the remedy of suicide was positively sinful. Hall said the Christian should accept misfortune not only with fortitude but with joy. The patient man “sees a divine hand invisibly striking with these sensible scourges, against which he dares not rebel or murmur. … He is … so much more happy than others, by how much he could abide to be more miserable.”¹⁰ No sin was worse from Hall's point of view than spiritual pride, the secure assurance of occupying a safe place in God's heart. From his point of view the Christian should never rest in a state of happy self-confidence. “Fear intenerates the heart, making it fit for all gracious impressions; security hardens it, and renders it uncapable of good. Fear ends in happiness; security, in an inevitable mischief.” To believe oneself sinless, possessed of grace, just, wise, liberal, religious when one was actually none of these things was to be “carried hoodwinked into hell.”¹¹

Another popular notion of Stoic pride was that the Stoic had too great a faith in the human intellectual instrument. If the Stoic faith in reason made the Stoic think he had the answers to final questions, Hall would disagree. Though he was no more an extremist in his intellectual attitudes than in any of his other attitudes, he did not think it possible or proper for man to know everything. He did not object to a study of nature which might prove useful to man or which might add to the glory of God, but he really did not have much faith in man's ability to know. No matter how much man might learn about the motions of the heavens, for instance, he could never hope to know the real answers. After men have looked through Tycho Brahe's “prospective trunk” and seen a few more planets and moons and unknown stars “they are but who they were; no whit better, no whit wiser, and perhaps far less happy than those who never smelt any but their own smoke, never knew any star but Charles' wain, the morning star, and the seven.”

Do we see but a worm crawling under our feet, we know not what that is which in itself gives it a being: do we hear but a bee humming about our ears, the greatest naturalist cannot know whether that noise come from within the body, or from the mouth, or from the wings of that fly: how can we then hope or pretend to know those things which are abstruse and remote?

For though “man's best faculty is reason” and “he places his happiness … in the delights of the mind, in the perfection of knowledge, and height of speculation,” yet “the Christian's best faculty is faith.” Faith begins where reason ends. “And if reason will be encroaching upon the bounds of faith, she is straight taken captive by infidelity.” Revelation not ratiocination must give us light into divine mysteries. It is criminal pride to try to examine too closely into the workings of God's will. “How many shall wish they had been born dullards, yea idiots, when they shall find their wit to have barred them out of heaven!”

As our senses are deceived by distances or interpositions to think the stars beamy and sparkling, the moon horned, the planets equally remote, the sun sometimes red, pale others some; so doth also our understanding err in misopinion of divine things: it thinks it knows God when it is but an idol of fancy.¹²

Nor would Hall agree with the more radical Puritans that every man was qualified to seek out truth for himself by the light of the reason which he carried within him. Nothing frightened him more than the increasing number of sects and schisms which were troubling the peace of the Church. He begged people to leave abstruse questions of scriptural interpretation to their betters, not to upset the Church and the state.¹³ Though it must be admitted that his underlying reasons were closer to a desire to preserve the state of things as they were than to a skeptical doubt whether any absolute answer could be reached, he was still lining himself up with the conservatives.

These points about Hall's intellectual attitudes are brought in merely to illustrate once more the importance of knowing which aspects of Stoicism, as it was understood by the seventeenth century, appealed to Hall, which not. According to L. I. Bredvold the traditional enemies of the Stoics were the Skeptics, who insisted they could know nothing with certainty. “In the modern world, as among the Greeks,” he says, “the Skeptic has often been a traditionalist, conservative in temper, a defender of the established order in politics and society, and a conformist in religion and practical conduct,”¹⁴ all of which sounds exactly like a description of Bishop Hall, though it is not necessarily to say that he was a conscious Skeptic attacking the intellectual pride of the Stoics, any more than he was a conscious Neo-Stoic, but rather to point out that he did not trouble himself about being a systematic thinker, that he could pick from Seneca's teachings what suited his purpose without feeling embarrassed about diverging at crucial points from what might have been thought of as essential Stoic doctrine.

With the last of the three notions which Sams says the seventeenth century commonly associated with Stoicism, the one which he says was uppermost in the average mind, the suppression of the passions, Hall probably had most sympathy. Even there, however, he felt it necessary to distinguish between his own position, which very likely had some resemblance to Aristotelian continence or temperance as it was understood by such another puritan as Spenser,¹⁵ and the total suppression of the passions which he associated with the Stoics. In one of his Meditations he explained his position:

Every man hath a kingdom within himself. Reason, as the princess, dwells in the highest and inwardest room. The senses are the guard and attendants on the court, without whose aid nothing is admitted into the presence. The supreme faculties, as will, memory, & c., are the peers. The outward parts and inward affections are the commons. Violent passions are as rebels, to disturb the common peace. I will not be a Stoic, to have no passions; for that were to overthrow this inward government God hath erected in me; but a Christian, to order those I have. And for that I see, that as in commotions one mutinous person draws on more, so in passions, that one makes way for the extremity of another, (as excess of love causeth excess of grief, upon the loss of those we loved,) I will do as wise princes use to those they misdoubt for faction, so hold them down and keep them bare, that their very impotency and remissness shall afford me security.

[vii, 457]

As a Christian, moreover, Hall had to insist that one passion, anger, might, on occasion, be not only no sin but a required virtue.

The great doctor of the Gentiles, when he says, Be angry, and sin not (Eph, iv.26) shows that there may be a sinless anger. He, that knew no sin, was not free from this passion, when he whipped the money-changers twice out of the temple. Surely, if we be not thus angry we shall sin. If a man can be so cool, as, without any inward commotion, to suffer God's honour to be trod in the dust, he shall find God justly angry with him for his want of anger.

[vi, 437-438]¹⁶

These points at which Hall differed from the popular seventeenth-century conceptions of Stoicism do not, of course, prove that he had no business being called “our English Seneca.” They prove that if he is to be called a Neo-Stoic it must be with an awareness of the sense in which the word is being used. Whether Hall would have liked to be called a Neo-Stoic, when he seems to have shared at least some of the current attitudes toward the Stoic is, of course, a question. And whether he would have considered that his pointing out the adaptability of certain of the teachings of Seneca to Christian use made him a Stoic is still another. There is no doubt, however, that Hall admired Seneca and that he agreed with many of his teachings—possibly, as I have already suggested, because Seneca's teachings fitted in well with protestant-puritan attitudes.

Both puritan and Stoic insisted on a virtue-centered (or God-centered) world, which required that everything be able to show its immediate usefulness, either in a practical everyday sense or as leading straight to virtue. Hall's plain prose style with its distrust of useless ornament, though only one example, is typical. In general Hall tended to distrust any pleasure which seemed to exist for its own sake. If a thing looked too good he feared it could not be sound. “Too glittering pretences” immediately made him suspicious. Not only elaborate prose but elaborate dress shocked him, believing as he did that the object of clothing should be utility not beauty.¹⁷ True to his moderate stand, however, Hall always insisted that there was no need to go to the opposite extreme and neglect appearance entirely. The middle way was always the best way. One example was his lenient attitude towards women's hair—a subject on which he even preached a sermon, “The Women's Veil.” He agreed that too much exposure of the hair was bad. “Where such bushes are hanged out, it is an argument that something is exposed to sale.” But, on the other hand, there was no point in placing sin where God never intended it. Since God intended the hair for an ornament, “no law of God, or good reason disallows such a moderate laying out of some part of the hair as may give a safe comeliness to the face” (v, 540-542).

Not only beauty but also knowledge was judged by its immediate usefulness and its leading in the direction of Godliness and virtue. Knowledge which seemed to exist only for its own sake, curious knowledge as Hall called it, or abstract speculation, or quibbles over fine points of meaning neither he nor Seneca could approve.¹⁸ Similarly with travel, the purpose should not be idle curiosity—which can never be satisfied—but virtue. “That you have seen cities, and courts, and Alps, and rivers, can never yield you so sound comfort, as that you have looked seriously into yourself,” said Hall. Seneca said much the same thing.¹⁹

Associating virtue, as they seemed to do, with simplicity it was perhaps natural that both Hall and Seneca should look back nostalgically to a dim imaginary past when men lived without the false trimmings of civilization.²⁰ Hall complained continually “that we are fallen upon the old age of the world; the last times, and therefore nearest to the dissolution.” He made “that universal decay of arts and men, wherewith the world is commonly checked,” the keynote of his Virgidemiarum,²¹ looking back with regret to those hardier times when men lived on simple food and either went naked or were

                                                                      clad in ruder hide
Or homespun russet, void of foreign pride

[iii, i]

—when women knew what it meant to be chaste and obedient and did not paint their faces or deck themselves out in lascivious clothes.²²

Even as the puritan side of Hall disapproved of any ornament which seemed to exist for its own sake, so it disapproved of pleasure which was interested only in the satisfaction of the immediate moment. Still, as a Protestant (revolting against what he thought of as Catholic extremism) Hall was always careful to stipulate that he did not mean a total repulse of pleasure. God had placed pleasure in the world in order that it might be enjoyed. To deny it completely would be ungrateful.²³ “They know not God that think to please him with making themselves miserable.” As long as one always remembered to look through the pleasure to God (and to be moderate in one's indulgence) everything was all right.²⁴ Such a bow to the ideal of the well-rounded man, however, did not disguise the fact that Hall, like Seneca, felt uncomfortable about pleasure. The danger of excess, as he saw it, was much greater than the danger of total abstinence. Pleasure, over-indulged, might so enchant the mind with secret delight that it would turn “men into swine with such sweet charms, that they would not change their brutish nature for their former reason.” It is only an illusion, he said, that transitory pleasure brings content, foolishness to call this want of tranquillity happiness.²⁵

This mention of the word tranquillity is important in the Hall-Seneca connection. It was especially for his excellent “precepts of Tranquillity” that Hall praised Seneca in the beginning of Heaven upon Earth. Like most other men both Hall and Seneca were interested in finding a recipe for the good life. To a certain extent they were agreed in their conclusion. With Dr. Johnson they would have said that “human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” Both would have emphasized the necessity of increasing the capacity to endure rather than enlarging the ability to enjoy. For all this, it must never be forgotten that the ends of their philosophies were different. Though Seneca did make some mention of an after-life and the necessity of pleasing the gods, this supernatural aspect was not central to his thinking as it was to Hall's. Even though Hall's Christianity was well mixed with teachings from the Classics, from contemporary political and economic theory, and from many other sources popular with the men of his time, his Christianity still insisted on certain principles, some of which ran counter to Senecan principles. Seneca's eye was mainly on this world, which he saw as bad. His problem was to face the unpleasant facts instead of struggling against them. Among these unpleasant facts there was the one that said if one got in the habit of needing physical pleasures: good food, wine, pleasant surroundings, etc., one would suffer much more when they were taken away than if one had never had them. Only a single-minded devotion to truth and virtue would place one above the power of fortune. As a Christian who had still some of the mediæval other-worldly look Hall also saw the world as bad. This life was only a proving-ground for the next. One was not supposed to enjoy it particularly. To set one's heart on earthly pleasures so that one forgot about God and the need of preparing for the after-life was wicked. In Seneca's teachings, however, Hall saw a way of having one's cake and eating it too. By following those of Seneca's precepts which did not conflict with Christian teaching it would be possible to have a minimum of unhappiness on earth while at the same time preparing one's way to heaven. In other words, it would be “Heaven upon Earth.”

On such subjects, therefore, as the proper attitude toward eating and drinking the two men are much alike. Hall said of the model eater, “His plate is the least part of his care; so as his fare may be wholesome, he stands not upon delicacy. … Lastly, he so feeds, as if he sought for health in those viands, and not pleasure; as if he did eat to live; and rises, not more replenished with food than with thankfulness.” As for overeating, it was not only a bore, it was a danger both to the body and to the soul.²⁶ Over-fastidiousness about the taste of one's food was “more fit for Sybarites than for Christians.” Excessive drinking was fast turning Hall's contemporaries into beasts. And smoking! “Think not,” he said, “that ye can climb up to heaven with full paunches; reeking ever of Indian smoke, and the surfeits of your gluttonous crammings and quaffings.”²⁷ Seneca would have agreed to all this. He disliked elaborate dishes, favored total abstinence from foods whose only purpose was to please the palate, and explained logically and in detail why the wise man would not get drunk.²⁸ Seneca even went so far as to say that his own stomach was unacquainted with wine.²⁹ But Hall emphasized that “not drinking of wine, but drunkenness with wine is forbidden,” and pointed out that Christ himself at the wedding feast had not thought it necessary for the guests to drink water when the wine ran out.³⁰

Moderating one's desires, controlling one's passions, staring possible evils full in the face, these were the rules which Hall and Seneca gave for the achievement of tranquillity. Their ideal: “an even disposition of the heart, wherein the scales of the mind neither rise up towards the beam through their own lightness or the overweening opinion of prosperity, nor are too much depressed with any load of sorrow” (vi, 4). Hall, with the exceptions already noted, agreed with Seneca that passion should be kept strictly under the control of reason. Since passion differed from madness only in the matter of degree, it was better to have too little than too much.³¹ Similarly he agreed that it was a good idea to decrease one's desires, especially was it a good idea for other people. Seneca said that instead of trying to enjoy to the full the pleasures the world might be able to offer, one should learn to live within oneself.³² Since happiness came only from the love of virtue, one should not place one's heart on such worldly goods as wealth, honor, or even friends. Though a man need not go out of his way to endure want, his heart should not be set on his material possessions to such an extent that their removal would disturb his tranquillity. Even Seneca agreed that the chance of attaining such an equanimity of spirit was necessarily small and felt that the average man would do well, therefore, to have nothing to lose. All of this advice Hall would have echoed. At one point he said, “I marvel then, that any wise men could be other but stoics; and could have any conceit of life, but contemptuous: not more for the misery of it, while it lasteth, than for the not lasting” (vi, 190). He advised the poor, therefore, to count their blessings, pointing out that the man who is content with what he has “is in truth richer than the greatest monarch”; that poverty has “quiet security, sound sleeps, sharp appetite, free merriment; no fears, no cares, no suspicion, no distempers of excess, no discontentment”; that no matter how badly off one might be there were always others whose condition was worse.³³ The best solution for all men, therefore, was to be content with what they had and with what they were. From Hall's point of view the cure of one ill would only lead to dissatisfaction on some other score. The ideal was not to remove the cause of annoyance but to learn to live with it.³⁴ In order to reinforce his argument that the poor man was better off poor he discussed in detail the miseries that went with wealth and position, describing lengthily the torments of ambition, the weakening moral effects of luxury, the dangers of provoking the envy of others, and so on.³⁵ Since, he pointed out, there was no good without its accompanying ill, men would do well before complaining, to look around at the disadvantages inherent in other conditions and to remember that what may be appropriate for one is highly unsuitable for another. Many who seem outwardly happy “are secretly wrung with the inward sense of their own concealed sorrows,” while others “whom we pity as miserable … laugh in their sleeve, and applaud themselves in their secret felicity.” Too many of us make ourselves miserable with imagined evils, forgetting that the very nature of life makes it impossible that we should know perfection. It is even foolish to envy other men for their greater abilities. They may also be hiding greater vices.³⁶

Being contented with one's allotted station in life was only one step, however. In addition both Seneca and Hall emphasized the necessity of standing firm against whatever misfortune might arise. Since there was no point in telling men to avoid evil, it was better to teach them to bear it, and to soften the blows as much as they could by such devices as always hoping for the best but expecting the worst, accepting smaller afflictions as preparations for larger ones, not making afflictions out of things which really were not, not dwelling too heavily on the past or the future, and noticing how much better off they were than their neighbors. But mainly the remedy for crosses was to bear them. “There is no want for which a man may not find a remedy in himself.”³⁷ Moreover, since the important end was not so much happiness as virtue, one could only consider the loss of such earthly things as wealth, health, or friends as of secondary importance. In fact, afflictions might actually be beneficial, since bearing them might strengthen one's moral character. Even when the affliction was actually an injustice inflicted by some other human being it was better to learn over backwards in the effort not to take offense.³⁸

In spite of all these similarities, there were also differences in the fundamental attitudes of the two men. The difference in their attitude toward the cause of misfortune has already been noted. The Stoic felt it beneath his dignity to be at the mercy of chance. If he could not actually avoid misfortune or affliction he could at least try to put himself in the position of not minding such things, reasoning to himself that since they were inevitable the wise solution was to bear them, remembering that as long as they had not touched his equanimity they had not really harmed him and that there always remained the final remedy of suicide. If one chose, one could always be one's own master. But Hall, though he would certainly teach men to bear the evils they could not avoid, would also tell them to do so because the evils had been sent by God. Learning to accept the will of God was an important Christian duty. To put oneself in place of God, above fortune, was sinful pride.

This otherworldly Christian aspect was, however, only one side of Hall. Few men could be otherworldly all the time. There were other differences between his fundamental attitude and Seneca's which arose from secular causes. Though one motive for telling people to be content with their lot might be the Christian one of telling them to accept the will of God, another motive might be the political one of telling them not to upset the state of things as they were.³⁹ Though Hall was, of course, very much interested in saving his soul he was also very much interested in resisting the political and economic changes which he saw approaching in the everyday world. His advice to men to subdue their passions, moderate their desires, meditate long before acting, stay where they were, be satisfied with what they had, endure misfortune instead of rebelling against it, was all the sort of advice a man himself comfortably placed might easily give to his less fortunate fellows. Hall himself had been a poor boy who had risen to be a bishop, and not without making a few of the right moves himself. When he found his own salary too low, for instance, his remedy had not been to lower his desires but to find himself another job.

Very likely Seneca was in reality more of a pessimist than Hall. His life, most of it, had been less pleasant. The impression he leaves is that society is bad and that it is only the exceptional individual who can be expected to live the good life. For the philosopher he advised the life of retirement. Hall—possibly because that was his business—directed his advice hopefully toward society in general. He approved of the social system under which he lived and wanted to see it preserved. If he told the poor man to be content with his poverty he told the rich man to take good care of his wealth. Just as it was the duty of the poor man to accept his lot so it was the duty of the rich man to practice the virtues of liberality and charity. It was not the duty of anyone to withdraw from the world, as the Stoic would do, merely for the purpose of contemplating virtue. Hall's slothful man was one who “wears the time in his cloister; and, as the cloak of his doing nothing pleads contemplation.” The active life was the virtuous life.⁴⁰ Hall accepted the usual Renaissance solution to the ancient conflict between wealth and virtue,⁴¹ insisting that riches in themselves were neither good nor bad. If riches did not make one lose sight of God, they could be an instrument of good. The rich man could do good works; but Hall, a careful householder himself, followed usual Renaissance practice in warning the rich man not to be so liberal in his gifts as to ruin his estate.⁴² It was very important, from his point of view, for a man of property to take care of his property. Hall was much disturbed by the sight of young men wasting their patrimonies in useless extravagance. Where Seneca would merely have said, “How foolish they are,” Hall felt it necessary to try to make them stop. He was above all a practical man. Much of his writing offers practical solutions to practical problems.

Enough has been said, however, to indicate that as individuals Hall and Seneca were not the same. Except in his last years (and his specifically Senecan writings do not come from his last years) Hall was not an exile from the political world of his own time. If he believed with the Stoics that living according to reason meant finding out what was the law of nature (or the will of God) and living accordingly, then he must have thought that the law of nature meant the law of things as they were during the reigns of James I and Charles I.

In conclusion, what is the answer to the question of Joseph Hall's Neo-Stoicism? If calling him a Neo-Stoic implies that he belonged to the group of thinkers who were slowly edging Revelation out of the door in favor of the light of natural reason, Hall was not one. If calling him a Neo-Stoic implies that he took an overweening pride in man and man's ability to control fate by the use of reason, Hall was not one. If calling him one meant that he believed in the greatest possible control of the appetites and the passions, one might come nearer to saying yes. But even then it would have to be noted that his attitude could also be equated with the average sixteenth-century notion of the Aristotelian golden mean and that his teachings are little different from those of Spenser. If calling him one means that his puritanical tastes were often similar to those of Seneca, that he belonged—as Seneca did—to the group of those who put virtue ahead of pleasure, the answer would be yes. If it means that he borrowed from Seneca certain literary forms, such as the epistle, and that he borrowed, or adapted, from Seneca certain precepts for the achievement of tranquillity—a means of having “heaven upon earth”—then the answer is yes.

If, then, we are to follow Smith in calling Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” we must assume that in seventeenth-century England Neo-Stoicism was no different from the Christian Stoicism which had existed during the Middle Ages. It was merely an adapting of certain Stoic teachings to Christian use. If we are not to accept this assumption, then we must look for someone else as a candidate for the position of “leading Neo-Stoic.”

Though an absolutely final answer to the suspicion that Seneca's attraction for Hall came from Hall's backward look toward the Middle Ages rather than from his forward look toward the eighteenth century will have to wait until a thorough study of the history of stoicism from classical times down to the seventeenth century has been made, it can be said that the present suspicion, based largely on a knowledge of Hall's opinions in general, is strong enough to be advanced in the hope that it will receive serious consideration.⁴³

Notes

1. “Bishop Hall, ‘Our English Seneca’,” PMLA, lxiii (1948), 1191-1204.

2. “Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England,” SP, xli (1944), 65-78.

3. See, e.g., M. W. Croll, “Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon,” Schelling Anniversary Papers (New York, 1923), and George Williamson, “Senecan Style in the Seventeenth Century,” PQ, xv (1936), 321-351.

4. See Williamson, op. cit.; W. F. Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory (New York, 1932), p. 225; F. P. Wilson, Elizabethan and Jacobean (Oxford, 1945), pp. 27-37.

5. Works of Hall, ed. Philip Wynter (Oxford, 1863), vi, 3; vii, 457. Don Cameron Allen—“Style and Certitude,” ELH, xv (1948), 167-175—makes the point that actually Hall's prose style was probably influenced more by Tertullian than by Seneca.

6. See Kirk, Heaven upon Earth, pp. 25-26.

7. Arnold Stein—“Joseph Hall's Imitation of Juvenal,” MLR, xliii (1948), 315-322—thinks that Hall's apparent imitation of ideas as well as form comes from the fact that in some of his basic attitudes he resembled Juvenal.

8. Works, vii, 53, 61-63, 86.

9. Heaven upon Earth, p. 65.

10. Works, vi, 20, 96-98, 573-574, 586; vii, 7-8, 321, 473-474, 575-576.

11. Ibid., vi, 366; vii, 460; viii, 86-87.

12. Ibid., i, 15-16; ii, 298-299, 311-312, 382; v, 160, 462; vi, 49-50, 58, 509-510, 540-541, 619-620; vii, 187, 255, 473; viii, 24, 155, 338; x, 137.

13. Ibid., ii, 333; vi, 318, 491; vi, 615; vii, 471-472, 534-535, 589-590; viii, 161, 634.

14. The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor, 1934), p. 20.

15. See Viola B. Hulbert, “A Possible Christian Source for Spenser's Temperance,” SP, xxviii (1931), 184-210; H. S. V. Jones, “The Faerie Queene and the Mediæval Aristotelian Tradition,” JEGP, xxv (1926), 283-298; F. M. Padelford, “The Virtue of Temperance in the Faerie Queene,” SP, xviii (1921), 334-346.

16. Sams points out a similar statement in Bacon's essay, “Of Anger.”

17. Works, i, 451; v, 132, 150-151, 154-156, 296, 305, 429; x, 143, 145, 449-450; Virgidemiarum, iii, i, vii; iv, iv.

18. Works, v, 160, 317; vi, 108-109, 455, 629; vii, 576, 591; x, 460-461, 470, 492; Virgidemiarum, vii, ii; Seneca, Epistles, lxxxviii, 2-12, 20, 31-32; cviii, 35-38; cix, 17. Cf. A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935), pp. 274-275. According to Knappen this attitude toward knowledge was pretty much the standard Puritan one: see Tudor Puritanism, pp. 476-478.

19. Works, vi, 154, 530, 536; ix, 536-541; x, 408; Seneca, Epistles, civ, 13-15.

20. See Works, V, 263-264; Seneca, Epistles, lxxxvi, xc, xcv. According to Lovejoy and Boas, Seneca's “Epistulae morales and tragedies were probably the most important classical sources of hard primitivism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”—op. cit., p. 260.

21. See Works, v, 13, 63-64, 73-74, 76, 115, 377-378, 405, 418, 492; vi, 241-242, 363, 454, 539-540; vii, 535, 605-606; ix, 172, 454, 535.

22. Ibid., ii, 156; v, 18, 131-132, 324, 458; ix, 556-557; Virgidemiarum, iii, i; v, iii; vi, i; Seneca, “To Helvia on Consolation,” Moral Essays, xvi, 2-6.

23. Works, i, 14; v, 135; vi, 216-218, 389-400.

24. Ibid., vi, 401-411; vii, 168, 458, 596; x, 145.

25. Ibid., i, 134-135, 259; v, 11, 36, 154, 206, 312, 385-387, 626, 681; vi, 30-32, 178-179, 412-413; vii, 9; x, 149. Seneca, Epistles, civ, 34; cviii, 16; cxxiv, 2 ff.

26. Works, ii, 459, 507-508, 534; v, 386-387, 546; vi, 282, 389, 567; vii, 169-170; x, 159-160, 424, 428.

27. Ibid., i, 259; ii, 255, 358-359, 459; v, 11, 203, 344-346, 377, 386-387; vi, 389, 405, 588; vii, 511; ix, 556-557; x, 33, 419, 423-424, 477; Virgidemiarum, iii, vi.

28. Epistles, lxxxiii, 16-27; xcv, 26; cviii, 13-16.

29. Ibid., civ, 16.

30. Works, i, 259; ii, 358-359; vi, 398.

31. Ibid., vi, 4-5, 91-92, 458; vii, 457, 473, 512, 541-542; Seneca, Epistles, cxvi; “On Anger,” Moral Essays.

32. Epistles, iv; vi; xxi, 7-11.

33. Works, ii, 71-72, 321; v, 124-125; vi, 41, 183-184, 315, 568-571; vii, 61, 470, 473-474, 480-481, 489, 506-507, 598; viii, 56; Seneca, Epistles, ii, 6; iv, 6, 10-11; v, 7; xciv, 7; cx, 14; “On the Happy Life,” Moral Essays, xxii, 2; xxiii, i; xxiv, 5; xxvi, 1.

34. Works, vi, 40-41, 111-113, 556; vii, 460; Virgidemiarum, iv; Seneca, Moral Essays, “On Firmness,” iii, 4.

35. Works, vi, 30, 413, 565-566, 587; vii, 445, 449, 460, 466; viii, 76; x, 182-425; Virgidemiarum, “Defiance to Envy”; Seneca, Epistles, xciv, 73-74.

36. Works, i, 213; vi, 41-44, 554-555, 564; vii, 65-67, 443, 507, 510, 586; Seneca, Epistles, cxv, 17.

37. Works, i, 97, 207; v, 627, 636; vi, 17-18, 57, 207, 313, 590-591; vii, 56, 460, 464, 466, 504, 508, 519-520, 563-564, 627; Seneca, Epistles, xiii; xviii, 6; lxxxviii, 17; cxiii, 27-31; xcviii, 7; “On Firmness,” “On Providence,” Moral Essays.

38. Works, i, 108, 113; iii, 304; v, 642-643; vi, 20; 96-98, 573-574, 586; vii, 7-8, 216, 460, 472, 519, 575-576; Seneca, Epistles, lxxxi, 4-6; “On Providence,” Moral Essays.

39. William Haller says of Hall: “Steeped in Seneca's smooth and engaging moralizings, he shows how easily a prosperous man could compound Calvinism and stoicism into the theory that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds”—Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938), pp. 327-328.

40. Works, i, 14-15, 51, 304, 468; ii, 310, 353; v, 652; vi, 115-116, 270-271; viii, 51.

41. See Hans Baron, “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth as Factors in the Rise of Humanistic Thought,” Speculum, xiii (1938), 1-37.

42. Works, ii, 86-92, 108, 428, 430-439, 513; iv, 169; v, 123, 127, 129, 133, 135, 144-145, 441-442; vi, 29, 99-100, 313, 418-419; vii, 159, 409, 623; viii, 46; cf. Ruth Kelso, The Institution of the Gentleman in English Literature of the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, 1926), pp. 25-26; L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London, 1937), p. 155.

43. Since this paper was accepted for publication its findings in Hall's Neo-Stoic ideas have been supplemented by an excellent article on Hall's prose style—H. Fisch, “The Limits of Hall's Senecanism,” Proc. of the Leeds Philosophical Soc., vi (1950), 453-463.