Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism

D URING 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.l 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." If Hall is to be called, as Smith says he is, "the most thoroughgoing of seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics," it is to be presumed that Hall's theology reveals a more than average stress on the light of nature in preference to mere revelation. Yet Smith carefully avoids making any such claim; rather he says that Hall "continually reaffirmed the ultimate superiority of the Christian over the Stoic creed, even when simultaneously paying the highest tribute in his power to the latter." His claim rests on the fact that "next possibly to Jeremy Taylor, Hall referred to and quoted the Stoics more often than any other writer of his time, and made far more integral use of their teachings." By "integral use of their teachings" Smith says he means that "while the bishop stoutly proclaimed the in-