Seneca was living through his own tragedy now and as all personal tragedies feel on the inside, this experience was ‘unprecedented’. None of the general and theoretic ‘works written by the most famous authors to control and moderate grief’ offer any assistance to him in this moment. Seneca requires ‘some novel vocabulary’ rather than generic words of hope or condolence. ‘Everyday’ language proves inadequate when faced with the messy, painful reality of actual life. Neat Stoic maxims cannot work here for they would appear too straightforwardly reductive. Instead, Seneca needs a way of communicating with his mother which acknowledges the duality of their current relationship and which will allow him to comfort her both despite and because of the fact that he is also the cause of her suffering.
As in Hercules, where the counsellors Theseus and Amphitryon fall silent in the face of tragedy, ‘overpowering grief’ silences Seneca. Tragedy renders us mute, removing ‘the capacity to choose words’. However, despite Seneca’s initial sense of inarticulacy and hesitancy he is able to fashion a letter of consolation to his mother. Seneca’s approach – like that adopted from him by CBT – is not to try to change his situation, but instead to change the way that he and his mother think about his situation. He describes his letter as his mother’s ‘treatment’31 and as such it is an early model of therapy. The consolation contains a description of the long chain of losses that Seneca’s mother has suffered throughout her life, beginning with the loss of Helvia’s own mother who died while giving birth to her. Like Hercules’s step-father Amphitryon for whom ‘the end of one trouble is the stepping stone to the next’,32 Helvia’s life appears to have been an interminable cycle of sorrow.
Instead of becoming a victim of the tragic momentum, Helvia must have a way of thinking about her past suffering that will help her now to face her present suffering. Not by getting rid of it but by being it, changing its shape and using it as best she can. As his mother’s counsellor, it is Seneca’s job to provide her with the new helpful thought that she herself – stuck within her own predicament – might not have been able to create for herself. The paradox of this letter is that Seneca has not only caused the suffering that he must now counsel his mother through, but that he must counsel her through a predicament that he too is trapped within. The letter is an explicit attempt to reprogramme Helvia’s thoughts, but in the writing of it, Seneca was also rewiring his own thoughts:
So this is how you must think of me – happy and cheerful as if in the best of circumstances. For they are best, since my mind, without any preoccupation, is free for its own tasks.33
In the first sentence Seneca instructs his mother to think of him ‘as if in the best of circumstances’, but in the second sentence the wishful thinking of ‘as if’ becomes a reality: ‘for they are best’. This shift demonstrates on the page the way in which an opinion can determine reality and thus define the subsequent emotional response. If Seneca or his mother permit themselves to face his exile with the wrong opening thought – that Seneca is unhappy and miserable and in the worst of circumstances – then further negative emotions will duly follow.
Seneca finds counsel for himself in the primary chemistry and physics of the Stoic cosmology rather than the compact, second-order maxims of more conventional, ‘everyday’ Stoic philosophy. What he needs is a different perspective:
How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change.34
Seneca is always at his most powerful when he is speaking of ‘the same elements’ and seeking ways to recombine them. By finding a way to reconcile his particular position in the word – alone, uncertain and involuntarily detached from his community – with the wider universe beyond his single, particular self, Seneca was able to comfort himself and then go on to at least try to comfort his mother:
So, eager and upright, let us hasten with bold steps wherever circumstances take us, and let us journey through any countries whatever: there can be no place of exile within the world since nothing within the world is alien to men. From whatever point on the earth’s surface you look up to heaven the same distance lies between the realms of gods and men. Accordingly, provided my eyes are not withdrawn from that spectacle, of which they never tire; provided I may look upon the sun and the moon and gaze at the other planets; provided I may trace their risings and settings, their periods and the causes of their travelling faster or slower; provided I may behold all the stars that shine at night […] provided I can keep my mind always directed upwards, striving for a vision of kindred things – what does it matter what ground I stand on?35
The mother and son are reunified as Seneca begins to write in the first-person plural, ‘let us hasten’. Here is the healthy version of the cosmology, rather than the fractured and infected cosmos of the tragedies where the system has failed. Individuals are able to reconnect the circuitry between one another and plug into the wide expanse beyond them, to think further than the limits of their own internal psychologies and to escape the limitations of the everyday, small world. The tensions of the cosmos are still visible here in the repeated formulation, ‘provided I may’ or ‘provided I can’, for the success of this system is dependent on a series of conditions or provisions which must be met. There is a fragility built into this worldview, and health and sickness, consolation and sorrow are all finely balanced. By mentally positioning himself within the cosmos, Seneca rejects the constraints and difficulties of this one particular spot of earth that he has been exiled to and enters into a vision of a much larger common space.
Notes
1Jules Evans, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations (London: Rider Books, 2012), pp. 3–4; hereafter cited as ‘Evans’.
2Ibid., p. 60.
3Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gunmere, The Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), ii, Letter LXXVIII, p. 189; hereafter cited as Epistles.
4Carl Baker, ‘Mental Health Statistics for England: Prevalence, Services and Funding’, House of Commons Briefing Paper, 25 April 2018.
5Evans, p. 8.
6Mind, ‘We Need to Talk: Getting the Right Therapy at the Right Time’ (2010), https://www.mind.org.uk/media/280583/We-Need-to-Talk-getting-the-right-therapy-at-the-right-time.pdf, accessed 12 February 2015.
7Joanna Cates, ‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Is Not Always the Answer for Anxiety and Depression’, Huffington Post, 10 March 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/joanna-cates/cognitive-behavioural-not-always-the-answer_b_6814562.html,