Seneca, Moral Letters 41.1

Letter 41: On the God within us 

 
You are doing an excellent thing, one which will be wholesome for you, if, as you write me, you are persisting in your effort to attain sound understanding; it is foolish to pray for this when you can acquire it from yourself. 
 
We do not need to uplift our hands towards heaven, or to beg the keeper of a temple to let us approach his idol's ear, as if in this way our prayers were more likely to be heard. 
 
God is near you, he is with you, he is within you.
 
This is what I mean, Lucilius: a holy spirit indwells within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. 
 
As we treat this spirit, so are we treated by it. Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God. Can one rise superior to fortune unless God helps him to rise? He it is that gives noble and upright counsel. In each good man 
 
“A god doth dwell, but what god know we not." 

—fron Seneca, Moral Letters 41 
 
A colleague of mine, on fire with his own particular brand of religion, was once so desperate to save my soul that he pleaded with me to stop reading anything by the Stoics. He hurled this letter at me as proof that Seneca, and all of his kind, were enemies of God’s grace, and that I would join them in Hell if I didn’t quickly change my ways. 
 
“See?” he said, pointing to the opening sentence. “He’s saying we can become good by ourselves, and we don’t need to pray!” 
 
It’s funny how two people can look at the same thing and yet see it so differently. No, I don’t read this as a denial of the Divine, but rather as a reminder that the transcendent is also immanent, that we best follow the Absolute by attending to its presence within our own souls.
 
But isn’t God somewhere “up there”? As the fullness of all Being, God is everywhere, and so it is not necessary to wave my hands at the sky, or to pay a priest for special favors, or to search outside of myself for a gift I have already been granted. I am not rejecting the power of the Divine when I nurture my own intelligence as a reflection of the Ultimate Intelligence. 

My job is a part of a grander design.

 
Furthermore, as the higher works through the lower, what we may call the supernatural is for the sake of elevating the natural, not at its exclusion, and faith, however we may define it, must be in harmony with reason, not acting in opposition. There is great danger in committing my total trust with the absence of any understanding. 
 
I hope my friend and I are still struggling toward the same goal, though we might be approaching it from different angles. I only wish he wouldn’t start with the conclusion, and instead proceed from the premises. I suppose I prefer a zealotry about Providence, even if it is so narrow, to the relativism of the Hipster Stoic, who abandons Providence entirely. 
 
As I read on in this letter, it becomes clearer to me how Stoicism, classically understood, can never be separated from an unqualified reverence for the Divine. To focus on my self-reliance, I must also place that self within the context of the whole. To improve my own nature, I must act in union with the totality of Nature. To find meaning and purpose in my soul, I must turn to the very origin and measure of truth. 
 
A "holy spirit" inside me? I actually find it far more difficult to accept myself in the image and likeness of God than to wallow in cynicism, because loving myself demands the effort of knowing myself, and knowing myself requires a grueling return to the source. If reason tells me that everything is from the One, then nothing is ever possible without the One. 
 
The entire world is charged with grace, not remotely but immediately, and prayer is in seeking to cooperate with that grace, not in the winning of worldly profits. 
 
I will not, as some are prone to do, claim to know the mind of God. Yet I do grasp how everything I am, and everything I can ever be, are at His mercy. He has made me as I am for good cause, and by serving Him I liberate myself. 

—Reflection written in 1/2013 

IMAGE: Pompeo Batoni, God the Father and the Holy Spirit (c. 1740)