SENECA AND ST. PAUL.
In the spring of the year 61, not long after the time when the murder of
Agrippina, and Seneca's justifications of it, had been absorbing the
attention of the Roman world, there disembarked at Puteoli a troop of
prisoners, whom the Procurator of Judaea had sent to Rome under the
charge of a centurion. Walking among them, chained and weary, but
affectionately tended by two younger companions,[38] and treated with
profound respect by little deputations of friends who met him at Appii
Forum and the Three Taverns, was a man of mean presence and
weather-beaten aspect, who was handed over like the rest to the charge
of Burrus, the Praefect of the Praetorian Guards. Learning from the
letters of the Jewish Procurator that the prisoner had been guilty of no
serious offence,[39] but had used his privilege of Roman citizenship to
appeal to Caesar for protection against the infuriated malice of his
co-religionists--possibly also having heard from the centurion Julius
some remarkable facts about his behaviour and history--Burrus allowed
him, pending the hearing of his appeal, to live in his own hired
apartments.[40] This lodging was in all probability in that quarter of
the city opposite the island in the Tiber, which corresponds to the
modern Trastevere. It was the resort of the very lowest and meanest of
the populace--that promiscuous jumble of all nations which makes Tacitus
call Rome at this time "the sewer of the universe." It was here
especially that the Jews exercised some of the meanest trades in Rome,
selling matches, and old clothes, and broken glass, or begging and
fortune-telling on the Cestian or Fabrican bridges.[41] In one of these
narrow, dark, and dirty streets, thronged by the dregs of the Roman
populace, St. Mark and St. Peter had in all probability lived when they
founded the little Christian Church at Rome. It was undoubtedly in the
same despised locality that St. Paul,--the prisoner who had been
consigned to the care of Burrus,--hired a room, sent for the principle
Jews, and for two years taught to Jews and Christians, to any Pagans who
would listen to him, the doctrines which were destined to regenerate
the world.
[Footnote 38: Luke and Aristarchus.]
[Footnote 39: Acts xxiv. 23, xxvii. 3.]
[Footnote 40: Acts xxviii. 30, [Greek: en idio misthomati].]
[Footnote 41: MART. _Ep_. i. 42: JUV. xiv. 186. In these few paragraphs
I follow M. Aubertin, who (as well as many other authors) has collected
many of the principal passages in which Roman writers allude to the Jews
and Christians.]
Any one entering that mean and dingy room would have seen a Jew with
bent body and furrowed countenance, and with every appearance of age,
weakness, and disease chained by the arm to a Roman soldier. But it is
impossible that, had they deigned to look closer, they should not also
have seen the gleam of genius and enthusiasm, the fire of inspiration,
the serene light of exalted hope and dauntless courage upon those
withered features. And though _he_ was chained, "the Word of God was not
chained." [42] Had they listened to the words which he occasionally
dictated, or overlooked the large handwriting which alone his weak
eyesight and bodily infirmities, as well as the inconvenience of his
chains, permitted, they would have heard or read the immortal utterances
which strengthened the faith of the nascent and struggling Churches in
Ephesus, Philippi, and Colossae, and which have since been treasured
among the most inestimable possessions of a Christian world.
[Footnote 42: 2 Tim. ii. 9.]
His efforts were not unsuccessful; his misfortunes were for the
furtherance of the Gospel; his chains were manifest "in all the palace,
and in all other places;" [43] and many waxing confident by his bonds
were much more bold to speak the word without fear. Let us not be misled
by assuming a wrong explanation of these words, or by adopting the
Middle Age traditions which made St. Paul convert some of the immediate
favourites of the Emperor, and electrify with his eloquence an admiring
Senate. The word here rendered "palace" [44] may indeed have that
meaning, for we know that among the early converts were "they of
Caesar's household;" [45] but these were in all probability--if not
certainly--Jews of the lowest rank, who were, as we know, to be found
among the _hundreds_ of unfortunates of every age and country who
composed a Roman _familia_. And it is at least equally probable that the
word "praetorium" simply means the barrack of that detachment of Roman
soldiers from which Paul's gaolers were taken in turn. In such labours
St. Paul in all probability spent two years (61-63), during which
occurred the divorce of Octavia, the marriage with Poppaea, the death of
Burrus, the disgrace of Seneca, and the many subsequent infamies
of Nero.
[Footnote 43: Phil. i. 12.]
[Footnote 44: [Greek: en olo to praitorio].]
[Footnote 45: Phil. iv. 22.]
It is out of such materials that some early Christian forger thought it
edifying to compose the work which is supposed to contain the
correspondence of Seneca and St. Paul. The undoubted spuriousness of
that work is now universally admitted, and indeed the forgery is too
clumsy to be even worth reading. But it is worth while inquiring whether
in the circumstances of the time there is even a bare possibility that
Seneca should ever have been among the readers or the auditors of Paul.
And the answer is, There is absolutely no such probability. A vivid
imagination is naturally attracted by the points of contrast and
resemblance offered by two such characters, and we shall see that there
is a singular likeness between many of their sentiments and expressions.
But this was a period in which, as M. Villemain observes, "from one
extremity of the social world to the other truths met each other without
recognition." Stoicism, noble as were many of its precepts, lofty as was
the morality it professed, deeply as it was imbued in many respects with
a semi-Christian piety, looked upon Christianity with profound contempt.
The Christians disliked the Stoics, the Stoics despised and persecuted
the Christians. "The world knows nothing of its greatest men." Seneca
would have stood aghast at the very notion of his receiving the lessons,
still more of his adopting the religion, of a poor, accused, and
wandering Jew. The haughty, wealthy, eloquent, prosperous, powerful
philosopher would have smiled at the notion that any future ages would
suspect him of having borrowed any of his polished and epigrammatic
lessons of philosophic morals or religion from one whom, if he heard of
him, he would have regarded as a poor wretch, half fanatic and half
barbarian.
We learn from St. Paul himself that the early converts of Christianity
were men in the very depths of poverty,[46] and that its preachers were
regarded as fools, and weak, and were despised, and naked, and
buffeted--persecuted and homeless labourers--a spectacle to the world,
and to angels, and to men, "made as the filth of the earth and the
off-scouring of all things." We know that their preaching was to the
Greeks "foolishness," and that, when they spoke of Jesus and the
resurrection, their hearers mocked[47] and jeered. And these indications
are more than confirmed by many contemporary passages of ancient
writers. We have already seen the violent expressions of hatred which
the ardent and high-toned soul of Tacitus thought applicable to the
Christians; and such language is echoed by Roman writers of every
character and class. The fact is that at this time and for centuries
afterwards the Romans regarded the Christians with such lordly
indifference that--like Festus, and Felix and Seneca's brother
Gallio--they never took the trouble to distinguish them from the Jews.
The distinction was not fully realized by the Pagan world till the cruel
and wholesale massacre of the Christians by the pseudo-Messiah
Barchochebas in the reign of Adrian opened their eyes to the fact of the
irreconcilable differences which existed between the two religions. And
pages might be filled with the ignorant and scornful allusions which the
heathen applied to the Jews. They confused them with the whole degraded
mass of Egyptian and Oriental impostors and brute-worshippers; they
disdained them as seditious, turbulent, obstinate, and avaricious; they
regarded them as mainly composed of the very meanest slaves out of the
gross and abject multitude; their proselytism they considered as the
clandestine initiation into some strange and revolting mystery, which
involved as its direct teachings contempt of the gods, and the negation
of all patriotism and all family affection; they firmly believed that
they worshipped the head of an ass; they thought it natural that none
but the vilest slaves and the silliest woman should adopt so
misanthropic and degraded a superstition; they characterized their
customs as "absurd, sordid, foul, and depraved," and their nation as
"prone to superstition, opposed to religion." [48] And as far as they
made _any_ distinction between Jews and Christians, it was for the
latter that they reserved their choicest and most concentrated epithets
of hatred and abuse. A "new," "pernicious," "detestable," "execrable,"
superstition is the only language with which Suetonius and Tacitus
vouchsafe to notice it. Seneca,--though he must have heard the name of
Christian during the reign of Claudius (when both they and the Jews were
expelled from Rome, "because of their perpetual turbulence, at the
instigation of Chrestus," as Suetonius ignorantly observed), and during
the Neronian persecution--never once alludes to them, and only mentions
the Jews to apply a few contemptuous remarks to the idleness of their
sabbaths, and to call them "a most abandoned race."
[Footnote 46: 2 Cor. viii. 2.]
[Footnote 47: [Greek: _Echleuazon_], Acts xvii. 32. The word expresses
the most profound and unconcealed contempt.]
[Footnote 48: Tac. _Hist_. i. 13: ib. v. 5: JUV. xiv. 85: Pers. v. 190,
&c.]
The reader will now judge whether there is the slightest probability
that Seneca had any intercourse with St. Paul, or was likely to have
stooped from his superfluity of wealth, and pride of power, to take
lessons from obscure and despised slaves in the purlieus inhabited by
the crowded households of Caesar or Narcissus.