Seneca

There is something arresting about the first-century Roman philosopher and teacher Seneca. The Spanish-born Stoic (c. 4 BC-AD 65) was educated in philosophy and rhetoric in the Imperial capital of Rome. His essays and letters attracted attention for centuries, across the Middle Ages and down through Petrarch, Erasmus, and John Calvin. Perhaps his failure with his most famous student, Nero, accounts for some of his enduring fascination. Here was a great teacher who tried to inculcate wisdom and virtue in his young charge, but failed, proving his contention that virtue could not be taught but only prepared for and encouraged.

Seneca was an exact contemporary of Jesus and the Apostles. That, too, is intriguing. Little did he know the impact Christianity would shortly have on the Greek and Roman world and beyond. This misunderstood sect of Judaism, so the Romans thought, would turn the world upside down. Seneca’s earnest striving for wisdom and virtue takes on added poignancy when we set it in the context of the Gospel’s answer that Jesus is the power and wisdom of God, that Jesus is the Word made flesh, full of grace and truth. The Apostle Paul confronted the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers with this Gospel in Athens (see Acts 17). Paul quoted from ancient Greek poets and philosophers, including a Stoic. When Paul proclaimed to these teachers of wisdom the truth about their city’s Unknown God, perhaps the Stoics nodded along as he described the God “in whom we live and move and have our being.” But both Stoics and Epicureans scoffed when the Apostle proclaimed to them the coming judgment and the Resurrected Christ.

Perhaps I share Petrarch’s lament about Cicero—that he was so wise and eloquent but died before the coming of Christ—when I read Seneca’s profound reflections on man and his place in the universe written when Christianity would come to Nero’s own household, though Nero himself would execute them to entertain his guests.

Seneca addressed education in “On Anger,” the fragment known as “On Leisure” (or “On the Private Life”), and in “On Liberal and Vocational Studies.” I commend all of these to your careful study. You will discover that the “Seven Liberal Arts” were not yet codified in that way, and that he reserved the exalted title of “liberal” only for wisdom and virtue and did not accord it to grammar, mathematics, and astronomy. These studies were important but had to taught in a way and to a degree that did not distract from wisdom and virtue—two “spacious” things that needed a lot of elbow room.

Seneca’s way of combining of the active and contemplative life deserves special note. Seneca distinguishes an education for action, for contemplation, and for pleasure (thinking here of the Epicureans). And he gives credit to the true Epicureans for warning that pleasure must be kept in the bounds of reason and not degenerate into hedonism, as Epicurus himself was careful to warn against in light of what he saw as the slander against his school. True was pleasure was not idle pleasure. Seneca, like many sturdy Romans, including Cicero, condemned Epicurean isolation from the world as an irresponsible denial of duty. But he reserved his greatest condemnation for the merely “busy” life. Busy-ness is not the life of action. It is a life of getting and spending, the ceaseless pursuit of personal gain with no reflection of man’s higher ends. It is a life of constant distraction that prevents true knowledge of self and knowledge of the divine. We can even pursue our studies, occupations that can look so contemplative, in a way that preoccupies us at the expense of this same knowledge and prevents us from living the life of service to others and to future generations.

The life of the true contemplative will abound in good to himself, his family, his community, and to humanity at large, according to Seneca. Zeno and Chrysippus, the founders of Stoicism, though they led lives of retired contemplation and teaching, “accomplished more than if they had commanded armies, held public office and passed laws.” They helped “govern the centuries to come.” Indeed, “they found a way to make their very repose more profitable to men that the bustle and sweat of others.”

Classical teachers and administrators sometime defend liberal education as an end in itself, sounding as if liberal education glories in its uselessness. That is a mistake. In a very busy world in which popular education markets itself as making young people good climbers on the ladder of career advancement, it is tempting to go to the other extreme and defend liberal education as serenely detached from the world’s frenetic activity. But at its best, the Great Tradition has combined the active and contemplative, knowing that contemplation properly oriented will bear fruit. Action will be oriented by right contemplation and contemplation by right action.

As I mentioned, even scholars who look so otherworldly can busy themselves with their studies in a way that distracts them and their students from what matters most in education. In the wittiest part of “On Liberal and Vocational Studies,” Seneca satirizes experts on Homer in a way that sounds all too familiar in modern academia (and dare we say even in Classical education?):

It may be, perhaps, that [these teachers] make you believe Homer was a philosopher, although they disprove this by the very arguments through which they seek to prove it. For sometimes they make of him a Stoic, who approves nothing but virtue, avoids pleasure, and refuses to relinquish honor even at the price of immortality; sometimes they make him an Epicurean, praising the condition of a state of repose, which passes its days in feasting and song; sometimes a Peripatetic, classifying goodness in three ways; sometimes an Academic, holding that all things are uncertain. It is clear, however, that no one of these doctrines is to be found in Home, just because they are all there; for they are irreconcilable with one another. We may admit to these men, indeed, that Homer was a philosopher; yet surely he became a wise man before he had any knowledge of poetry. So let us learn the particular things that made Homer wise.

We would all do well to let Homer be Homer. Attempts to “philosophize” his epics (if I may use philosophize as a transitive verb) will come at the expense of Homer the poet. We need to ask, with Seneca, what made Homer wise? Our abstract analysis might kill him.

Whatever our specialization, Seneca urges, teachers must strive to cultivate loyalty, temperance, kindness, simplicity, moderation, self-control, and thrift, among other indispensable character qualities. Every teacher teachers character by word and deed, knowingly or unknowingly, well or badly. The question today, as in ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, and first-century Palestine, was what is the right foundation for that character? What is the foundation of wisdom and virtue? This foundation unifies the disciplines, and we must give it the closest attention.