Latest / The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism / Ep. 11: A Holy Spirit Indwells Within Us

Transcript

Ep. 11: A Holy Spirit Indwells Within Us · The Morning Stoic: The Untold Lives Behind Stoicism

• 0:00
  I imagine a country estate outside Rome, early in the morning,
• 0:04
  with the light still thin.
• 0:06
  An older man sits at a writing desk with a letter from a friend beside him.
• 0:11
  He has spent most of his life in the most dangerous room in the empire,
• 0:15
  and now he is trying to be somewhere else.
• 0:18
  The man is Seneca.
• 0:20
  For years he had been tutor and then chief adviser to the emperor Nero.
• 0:25
  In AD 62 his ally Burrus died, and Seneca's position grew a great deal more exposed.
• 0:32
  He asked to retire.
• 0:33
  He even offered to hand back his wealth.
• 0:36
  Nero refused the offer.
• 0:38
  Seneca drew back from public life anyway, living largely on his country estates,
• 0:43
  and began writing long, searching letters to a younger friend named Lucilius.
• 0:48
  Lucilius was serving as a procurator in Sicily, an official far from Rome,
• 0:55
  with his own pressures and his own temptations.
• 0:58
  The letters are generally dated to about AD 62 to 65, the last years of Seneca's
• 1:04
  life.
• 1:06
  So when we read them, we're reading a man who knows how quickly an emperor's favor
• 1:11
  can turn, and who has decided to spend his remaining time on the one thing that
• 1:16
  favor can't touch.
• 1:18
  Letter 41 begins with praise.
• 1:21
  Lucilius has written that he's working to attain sound understanding,
• 1:25
  and Seneca says that's an excellent thing, and good for him.
• 1:29
  Then he says something that might have surprised a Roman reader,
• 1:33
  because it quietly dismisses a good deal of ordinary religious life.
• 1:37
  I'm reading from Richard Mott Gummere's translation, which is in the public domain.
• 1:42
  Seneca writes: "We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven,
• 1:47
  or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear,
• 1:52
  as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard."
• 1:55
  Picture what he's describing.
• 1:57
  A temple keeper who, for a price or a favor, will let you stand near the statue's
• 2:03
  ear so the god might hear you better.
• 2:06
  Seneca finds the whole arrangement a little absurd.
• 2:10
  And then comes the line that the rest of the letter hangs from.
• 2:14
  "God is near you, he is with you, he is within you."
• 2:19
  A few sentences later he says it again, more fully.
• 2:22
  "This is what I mean, Lucilius: a holy spirit indwells within us,
• 2:29
  one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian."
• 2:34
  And he adds that as we treat this spirit, so are we treated by it.
• 2:39
  Let me be careful here, because this is a place where it's easy to hear the wrong
• 2:43
  thing.
• 2:44
  Later Christian readers sometimes took that phrase, a holy spirit,
• 2:48
  as a sign that Seneca was close to their faith.
• 2:51
  But as I understand it, Seneca is speaking as a Stoic.
• 2:56
  In that tradition, god is not a figure on a throne, listening for prayers.
• 3:01
  God is the rational principle that runs through the whole universe,
• 3:05
  and every human being carries a portion of it.
• 3:09
  That's my reading of the background, not Seneca's own words,
• 3:12
  but it's the key to everything else in the letter.
• 3:15
  Seneca backs the idea with a line of Virgil.
• 3:17
  "In each good man A god doth dwell, but what god know we not."
• 3:24
  He doesn't claim to know what the god is.
• 3:26
  He only says that it's there.
• 3:28
  Then he does something I find lovely.
• 3:31
  He doesn't argue.
• 3:33
  He asks Lucilius to remember a feeling.
• 3:36
  If you've ever come upon a grove of ancient trees grown so tall and so tangled
• 3:42
  overhead that the sky is shut out, he says, then the loftiness of the forest,
• 3:48
  the seclusion of the place, and your marvel at the unbroken shade will prove to you
• 3:53
  the presence of deity.
• 3:56
  Or a cave hollowed out of the rock by natural causes, holding up a mountain on its
• 4:01
  arch.
• 4:03
  Your soul, he says, will be deeply moved by a certain intimation of the existence of
• 4:08
  God.
• 4:09
  He
• 4:19
  points out that people have always worshipped the sources of great rivers,
• 4:22
  and consecrated pools because of their dark water or their immeasurable depth.
• 4:27
  I imagine Lucilius in Sicily, reading this with that island behind him,
• 4:33
  its mountains and springs, and knowing exactly what Seneca means.
• 4:39
  Everyone has stood somewhere that made them go quiet.
• 4:43
  And then Seneca turns the whole thing around.
• 4:45
  He asks: "If you see a man who is unterrified in the midst of dangers,
• 4:51
  untouched by desires, happy in adversity, peaceful amid the storm,
• 4:56
  who looks down upon men from a higher plane, and views the gods on a footing of
• 5:01
  equality, will not a feeling of reverence for him steal over you?"
• 5:06
  The grove and the cave were only the warm up.
• 5:09
  The greater wonder, he says, is a human being like that.
• 5:13
  He gives an image for how it works.
• 5:15
  "Just as the rays of the sun do indeed touch the earth, but still abide at the
• 5:20
  source from which they are sent; even so the great and hallowed soul,
• 5:26
  which has come down in order that we may have a nearer knowledge of divinity,
• 5:30
  does indeed associate with us, but still cleaves to its origin."
• 5:35
  A sunbeam on a stone floor is still part of the sun.
• 5:39
  That's the picture he wants Lucilius to hold.
• 5:42
  Now comes the part of the letter that gets sharper, and where the author becomes
• 5:46
  harder to read comfortably.
• 5:48
  Seneca asks what makes such a soul admirable, and he answers by listing what
• 5:53
  doesn't.
• 5:54
  "A golden bit does not make a better horse."
• 5:58
  He turns to the arena, which every Roman reader knew.
• 6:02
  A lion made to wear decoration, worn down and trained into putting up with it,
• 6:08
  is sent into the arena very differently from a wild lion whose spirit is unbroken.
• 6:14
  And the crowd, he says, favors the wild one.
• 6:18
  He turns to a vine.
• 6:20
  We praise a vine for bending its poles with heavy fruit, and no one would prefer a
• 6:25
  vine hung with golden grapes and golden leaves.
• 6:29
  Then he names what he means.
• 6:31
  A retinue of handsome slaves, a beautiful house, a large farm,
• 6:37
  a large income.
• 6:38
  "None of these things is in the man himself; they are all on the outside."
• 6:44
  And here I have to stop and say the obvious thing.
• 6:47
  The man writing this was one of the wealthiest men in the empire.
• 6:51
  He owned grand estates, and he owned enslaved people, the very retinue he lists as
• 6:56
  external ornament.
• 6:58
  In the last episode on Letter 47, we saw him urge Lucilius to see those who serve
• 7:03
  him as fellow human beings, and we noted then that Seneca himself lived inside that
• 7:08
  system.
• 7:10
  Nothing in Letter 41 erases that.
• 7:13
  I don't think we should excuse it, and I don't think we should wave the letter away
• 7:16
  either.
• 7:17
  What I see is a man near the end of his life, under Nero's shadow,
• 7:22
  looking at everything he has gathered and admitting that none of it is really him.
• 7:26
  It may be that the sentence on gold was easier to write because he'd tried to give
• 7:30
  the gold back and had been refused.
• 7:33
  That's my interpretation, and only that.
• 7:36
  But the words stand as he wrote them.
• 7:39
  What does he say is truly yours?
• 7:41
  "No man ought to glory except in that which is his own."
• 7:46
  And then: "Praise the quality in him which cannot be given or snatched away,
• 7:52
  that which is the peculiar property of the man.
• 7:56
  Do you ask what this is?
• 7:58
  It is soul, and reason brought to perfection in the soul."
• 8:03
  Think of what that meant in Rome.
• 8:05
  Property could be confiscated.
• 8:07
  Offices could be taken away in an afternoon.
• 8:10
  A friendship with an emperor could end with a knock at the door.
• 8:14
  Seneca is pointing at the single possession that nobody, not even Nero,
• 8:19
  could reach.
• 8:21
  He finishes with an odd, honest note.
• 8:24
  Reason asks only one thing of a person, and that thing is to live in accordance with
• 8:30
  his own nature.
• 8:31
  It ought to be the easiest task there is.
• 8:34
  But Seneca says the general madness of mankind has made it hard.
• 8:39
  "We push one another into vice."
• 8:42
  And he ends with a question, a little bleak, a little tender: how can a man be
• 8:48
  recalled to salvation when he has none to restrain him, and all mankind to urge him
• 8:53
  on?
• 8:55
  Then just one word.
• 8:57
  Farewell.
• 8:58
  There's a thread running forward from this letter.
• 9:01
  A century later, an emperor on a military frontier would write notes to himself
• 9:06
  about a spirit that Zeus gave each person as a guardian and guide,
• 9:11
  a portion of himself.
• 9:13
  We'll get to that soon, when we reach Marcus Aurelius.
• 9:17
  For now, it's enough to notice that the idea didn't begin with him.
• 9:21
  What stays with me is the scene.
• 9:24
  A man with a great deal to lose, in a dangerous age, writing to a friend on a
• 9:29
  distant island, and telling him that what he's looking for isn't in the temple or
• 9:34
  the treasury.
• 9:35
  It's near.
• 9:36
  It's with him.
• 9:37
  It's within him.
• 9:39
  Whether Seneca fully lived by that, I can't say.
• 9:42
  But he wrote it down, and it has come to us across two thousand years,
• 9:47
  ready for any morning.