The focus on individual, autonomous, or “autarkic” selfhood was one of the most appealing features of Seneca’s work for a period often associated with the formation of modern notions of selfhood and modern forms of “self-fashioning.”14 Seneca was a key figure for the development of new understandings of psychology and ethics. Self-assertion, self-correction, and autonomy were crucial to the development of an idea of secular individuality in the early modern period; Seneca helped form these concepts.15 Moreover, Seneca was particularly useful for thinking through the (problematic and permeable) boundaries of political communities, as well as of individual human bodies and selves. The question of how the two kinds of imperium might relate had a particular resonance at the period of the formation of modern nation-states and during the rise of absolutist models of monarchy. Seneca’s De Clementia, in particular, shaped the whole “mirror for princes” tradition, a genre represented by such works as Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528), which focused on the correct behavior of kings and other elite groups. Machiavelli’s Prince (1513) was both a participant in the tradition and an attack on its (Senecan) basis: Machiavelli tries to show that Seneca’s appeal to the ideal that a ruler should be merciful is entirely misguided. Princes should not spare those they conquer; rather, they should kill them. Machiavelli disputes not only Seneca’s ethics but also his metaphysics in insisting that the strong man should not submit to the will of providence nor be constant against the alterations of fortune, but should be himself willful, impetuoso, and violent.16 But Stoicism, including Senecanism, could seem liable to provoke sedition when employed not by the ruler but against him. The future James I of England objected in Basilikon Doron to those who imitate “that ancient sect.”17
It is often difficult to disentangle specifically Senecan elements in the Neo-Stoicism of this period, although Seneca (along with Cicero) was certainly one of the dominant influences. Montaigne, who has often been seen as more of a Skeptic than a Stoic, was deeply influenced both by the style and format of Seneca’s work, especially by the meandering, personal mode of the Letters to Lucilius. The modern genre of the “essay” (leading from Montaigne to Robert Burton, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Browne to the great eighteenth-century essayists like Addison, Steele, and Johnson) could not have developed without the model of Seneca’s epistles. Montaigne rejected the Stoic ideal of the perfect sage, but he defends the man against the usual accusations of hypocrisy (“Defense of Seneca and Plutarch”) and engages deeply both with Seneca’s notion of constancy (which he reinterprets as primarily a military virtue, not one to be adopted by a private citizen)18 and most importantly with his ideal of clemency, from Seneca’s Letters and especially from De Clementia—which Montaigne transformed into a modern ethics of flexible, humane kindness, to contrast with the heroic, rigid code of his contemporaries.19
A very different response to Seneca as an ethical model for the war-torn Europe of the late sixteenth century was Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia (On Constancy) from 1584, which has been seen as an attempt to reclaim a Senecan, organic model of government against the assaults on it from Machiavelli.20 Lipsius, a Belgian Catholic scholar, produced an edition of the complete works of Seneca while working at the University of Leiden. His attempt to produce a version of Stoicism (“Neo-Stoicism”) that would be compatible with a generalized form of Christianity was recognizably a response to the French Wars of Religion; Stoicism, unlike the Bible, was not tainted by the various theological disagreements between Protestants and Catholics, and it offered a path back to a pristine, ancient model of steadfastness in a time of crisis. Neo-Stoicism allowed for a kind of cosmopolitanism that would transcend the boundaries of nationalities and of specific religious sects.
Reconciling Senecan Stoicism with Christianity remained a problem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Simon Goulart, a pastor from Geneva who sympathized with Lipsius’ Neo-Stoicism, warned that “If you read Seneca as a pagan, he seems to have written as a Christian, but if you read him as a Christian, you feel that it is a pagan speaking.”21 Goulart suggests that Seneca’s correspondence with Paul must have been a forgery, since Seneca clearly knew nothing of God, and his supposedly perfect sage is an arrogant, morbid fantasist: “he is defiant in his virtue, and looks for all his sources of happiness within himself; in other words, he paints castles in the air and looks for life in death.”22 A common objection was that Seneca and the other Stoics showed too little humility and detracted from God’s power in claiming that human beings alone could achieve happiness through virtue alone, without divine grace. Joseph Marston wrote in 1598, “Peace, Seneca, thou belchest blasphemy / To live from God, but to live happily / (I heare thee boast,) from thy Philosophy.”23 In Paradise Regained (1671) Milton’s Jesus speaks out against the Stoic’s “philosophic pride”:
Much of the Soul they talk, but all awry;
And in themselves seek virtue; and to themselves
all glory arrogate, to God give none.
(4.313–315)
Descartes has often been seen as the father of modern philosophy and modern scientific thinking. But in his ethical thought, at least, he looked back closely to the ancients and especially to Seneca’s On the Happy Life, on which he gave an extensive commentary in his letters to Princess Elizabeth in 1645. Descartes insisted—like Seneca and other Stoics—that the proper use of reason was essential for happiness. But he parted company with Seneca in his claim that the ultimate goal is not virtue or a life in accordance with nature, but happiness—which results from virtue but is not identical with it. For Descartes, the passions are not dangerous or misleading; they are “all by nature good.”24
In the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Stoicism, drawn largely from Seneca, was appealing in its promise of salvation in this world, not the next, and in its focus on the human capacity to achieve happiness without a need for external, supernatural aid. Rousseau took the epigraph to Emile from Seneca: “We are sick with evils that can be cured; and nature, having brought us forth sound, itself helps us if we wish to be improved.”25 In Pantheisticon, John Toland equipped his pantheists with chants drawn directly from Seneca: “To lead a happy Life Virtue alone is sufficient,” they declare.26 Stoicism had a new kind of political importance at the time of the Enlightenment because it promised “to restore man to his ethical dignity.” It has been claimed that Thomas Jefferson was, perhaps unknowingly, using “the language of Stoic philosophy” when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, with its claim that “all men were created equal”;27 the masculine language (“men”) is very much in tune with the Stoic emphasis on manly virtue (virtus) and on a model of social equality that has few implications for material or institutional change.