Praying for a Revival of Paul’s Cosmopolitan Christianity

“Dying Seneca” by Peter Paul Rubens in 1612 or 1613.

In the same year that Nero the tyrant beheaded Paul the apostle of Christ and ordered Seneca the Stoic philosopher to end his own life, we have this in a letter by Seneca:

We are the parts of one great body. Nature produced us related to one another, since she created us from the same source and to the same end. She engendered in us mutual affection, and made us prone to friendships. . . . According to her ruling, it is more wretched to commit than to suffer injury. Through her orders, let our hands be ready for all that needs to be helped. Let this verse be in your heart and on your lips:

I am a man; and nothing in man’s lot
Do I deem foreign to me.

Let us possess things in common; for birth is ours in common. Our relations with one another are like a stone arch, which would collapse if the stones did not mutually support each other, and which is upheld in this very way.¹

Considering the shared cosmopolitain vision of Paul and Seneca offers hope to the future of Christian civilization when so many increasingly wonder if any civilization will survive long in our brutally fractured world.

Seneca has held a substantial place in the Christian imagination from the beginning. Tertullian presumes his conversion to the Christian faith when referring to him as “our Seneca.” Jerome mentions having read the purported exchange of letters between Seneca and the Apostle Paul of which Emily Wilson writes that “they were probably composed in the third century CE, or perhaps early in the fourth.”² We know from the book of Acts that Paul met Seneca’s elder brother the Proconsul Junius Gallio when Paul was brought before Gallio by Jewish leaders in Corinth who dismissed the charges against Paul, saying that the matter was a religious dispute and not a crime. Coming from the direction of Paul’s relationship to Stoicism, we have another concrete connection between Paul and the world of Stoic thought in the book of Acts when Paul quotes Epimenides on Mars Hill. However, probably most evocative of all in relation to Seneca specifically, is the fact that both the Apostle Paul and the Roman Stoic philosopher were executed by the Emperor Nero. Paul was likely beheaded under Nero around 64 to 67, and Seneca was ordered by Nero to commit suicide in 65. Their deaths under the same madman in the same city within perhaps the same year have lead to endless speculations about their meeting in person near the ends of their lives.

While the legends and the inspiring poetic parallels between Paul and Seneca are very nearly as old as Christianity itself, more recent scholarship has started to give serious attention to the relationships between their conceptual worlds. We see this, for example, in “Seneca and Christian Tradition” by Chiara Torre (chapter 21 of The Cambridge Companion to Seneca from 2015) as well as in Roman Christianity and Roman Stoicism: A Comparative Study of Ancient Morality by Runar Thorsteinsson (Oxford 2010). While the blessings bequeathed to Christianity by Neoplatonic thought in the early years of Christianity will never be rivaled, there is a strong case to be made for an even earlier influence from at least a popular variety of Stoic philosophy.

My interest here, however, is not in the full scope of this history or all of its various implications. The only concern in this brief note is a vision for the future of a Stoic and Pauline “cosmopolitan Christianity” that David Bentley Hart has been mentioning for a few years now in several places (most fully here although not yet named as such at this early date). This has also been identified by Hart as a future book project. In a December 4, 2024 comment, Hart reiterated that his book on Paul’s Stoic and cosmopolitan Christianity “has been planned for some time” although his health challenges of the past months have put most future projects on hold. In my inability to wait for the book or for more news of its progress, I am collecting together references to the idea and engaging in frenzied speculation about the broader reasons why this book would be a tremendous help for Christians today. For anyone who wants that, please try out a subscription.