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Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Audrey Chew
Audrey Chew*
Affiliation:
Mills College Oakland 13, Calif. 45
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Extract

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. 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.”

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Type
Research Article
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PMLA , Volume 65 , Issue 6 , December 1950, pp. 1130 - 1145
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1950

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References

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; vu, 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 Mediaeval 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, 4S1; v, 132,150-151,154-156, 296,305, 429; x, 143,145,449-450; Virgidemi-arum, iii, i, vii; iv, iv.

18 Works, v, 160, 317; vi, 108-109, 455, 629; vii, 576, 591; x, 460-461, 470, 492; Vir-gidemiarum, vii, ii; Seneca, Epistles, lxxxviii, 2-12, 20, 31-32; cviii, 35-38; cix, 17. Cf. A. O. Love joy 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. 476-4:78.

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.

12 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.

28 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, in, 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; ex, 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, xm; 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; vii, 46; cf. Ruth Kelso, The Institution of the Gentleman in English Literature of the Sixteenth Century (TJrbana, 1926), pp. 25-26; L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London, 1937), p. 155.

45 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.