Jeremy Taylor Week: 'none but a wise and good man can truly rejoice'

It is not only in Taylor's books of divinity that classical Roman wisdom had a significant presence and role. This was also the case with his sermons. In other words, Taylor's vision of a Christian humanism integrating the wisdom of Cicero and Seneca was also heard in his pulpit ministry. This in itself is revealing, pointing to how Taylor's use of Cicero and Seneca was no mere literary device in his written works (which would be - as we have seen - a rather unconvincing interpretation), but integral to his theological vision. 

If we consider the 25 sermons of the Golden Grove Winter volume (preached from Advent Sunday unto Whitsun, published in 1653), we find Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian appearing regularly. In many cases, they are invoked as Taylor expounds the nature of the moral life.  Sermons XXII, XXIII, and XXIV are jointly entitled 'The Good and Evil Tongue'. In Sermon XXII, Seneca is quoted on how the foolish tongue is contrary to reason:

Every beam of reason and ray of knowledge checks the dissolutions of the Tongue. But, ut quisque contemptissimus & maxime ludibrio est, ita solutissimae linguae est, said Seneca, Every man as he is a fool and contemptible, so his tongue is hanged loose, being like a bell, in which there is nothing but tongue and noise.

Sermon XXIII has Quintilian address the nature of those who engage in contentious speech:

The next appendage of vain and trifling speech is contention, wrangling and perpetuall talke proceeding from the spirit of contradiction: Profert enim mores plerumque oratio, & animi secreta detegit: Nec sine causa Graeci prodiderunt, ut vivat quemque etiam dicere, said Quintilian: For the most part, a mans words betray his manners, and unlocks the secrets of the mind ...

You shall meet with some men (such were the Sceptics, and such were the Academics of old) who will not endure any man shall be of their opinion, and will not suffer men to speak truth, or to consent to their own propositions, but will put every man to fight for his owne possessions, disturbing the rest of truth, and all the dwellings of unity and consent; clamosum altercatorem, Quintilian calls such a one.

In Sermon XXIV, it is Cicero on the evil of slander:

The fourth instance of the calumniating filthy communication, is that which we properly call slander, or the inventing evill things, falsely imputing crimes to our neighbor: Falsum crimen quasi venenatum telum, (said Cicero) A false tongue or a foul lye against a mans reputation, is like a poysoned arrow, it makes the wound deadly, and every scratch to be incurable.

To regard this as Taylor using Seneca, Quintilian, and Cicero to teach 'mere morality' would, of course, be nonsense. Such a view entirely disregards the teaching of Proverbs on the use of the tongue and the apostolic teaching given by James and Paul, never mind our Lord's teaching on the subject. Contrary to the casual dismissal of such preaching - and aspects of Scripture - by commentators old and new, Taylor, in the dedication of this volume of sermons, declares "no Sermon is received as it ought, unlesse it makes us quit a vice, or bee in love with vertue". Such was the moral vision of Taylor's Christian humanism, drawing deeply from Seneca, Quintilian, and Cicero.

That this was not 'mere moralism' is also seen in words from Seneca in Sermon XI:

Gaudium enim nisi sapienti non contingere, said Seneca, none but a wise and a good man can truly rejoyce; The evill laugh loud, and sigh deeply, they drink drunk, and forget their sorrowes, and all the joyes of an evill man is only arts of forgetfulnesse, devices to cover their sorrow, and make them not see their death, and its affrighting circumstances; but the heart never can rejoyce, and be secure, be pleased and be at rest, but when it dwels with holinesse.

Here a rich humanism understands holiness as virtue, fundamental to our flourishing and well-being. Something of this is also evident in Taylor's two sermons entitled 'The Marriage Ring'. He quotes from both Quintilian and the Stoic-inclined Varro as he identifies marriage with the joy of children:

but of all these the noblest end is the multiplying children, Mundus cum patet, Deorum tristium atque inferum quasi patet janua; propterea uxorem liberorum quaerendorum causâ ducere religiosum est, said Varro, It is religion to marry for children; and Quintilian puts it into the definition of a wife, est enim uxor quam jungit, quam diducit utilitas; cujus haec reverentia est, quod videtur inventa in causa liberorum.

As Diarmaid MacCulloch notes, this reflects Taylor's "enjoyable experience of marriage" and family life. Sermon XII further demonstrates how Taylor saw the understanding of marriage in Quintilian and Varro as a cause of joy and flourishing:

No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many delicious accents make a mans heart dance in the pretty conversation of those dear pledges, their childishnesse, their stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their imperfections, their necessities are so many little emanations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society.

While the shape of the moral life in the Golden Grove sermons owes much to the Roman philosophers, it is also the case that their influence is felt in matters that might be understood more clearly as doctrinal. So much is this the case, that the words of Seneca are applied in Sermon VIII by Taylor to Christian teaching on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit:

Now by grieving the holy Spirit, is meant, those things which displease him, doing unkindnesse to him, and then the grief which cannot in proper sense seise upon him will in certain effects return upon us: Ita enim dica (said Seneca) sacer intra nos Spiritus sedet, bonorum, malorumque nostrorum observator & custos, hic prout à nobis tractatus est, ita nos ipse tractat. There is a holy spirit dwels in every good man, who is the observer and guardian of all our actions, and as we treat him, so will he treat us. Now we ought to treat him sweetly and tenderly, thankfully and with observation.

Seneca, then, is set forth by Taylor as offering wise teaching on how Christians are to live as those indwelt by the Spirit of Christ. It is, to say the very least, not insignificant that Taylor sees Seneca's Stoic reference as applying to the Holy Spirit. 

Even more controversially, Taylor - in Sermon VII - invokes Cicero concerning the heated debates on predestination:

aepius illud cogitant quid possit is cujus in ditione sunt, quam quid debeat facere (Cicero pro Quinctio), they remember oftner what God can do then what he will; being more afrighted at his Judgements, then delighted with his mercy.

Taylor goes on to make it abundantly clear that he stands with Cicero against the predestinarians:

this caution I have now inserted for their sakes whose Schooles and Pulpits raise doctrinall fears concerning God, which if they were true, the greatest part of mankinde would be tempted to think they have reason not to love God, and all the other part that have not apprehended a reason to hate him, would have very much reason to suspect his severitie, and their own condition. Such are they which say that God hath decreed the greatest part of mankinde to eternall damnation, and that only to declare his severity and to manifest his glory by a triumph in our torments, and rejoycings in the gnashing of our teeth. 

That Taylor sided with Ciceronian humanism against predestinarianism would, of course, have confirmed his opponents in their criticisms of him. For Taylor, however, it was the wisdom of reason and goodness over and against a narrow scholasticism which, at best, obscured the mercy and goodness of God. Even though Cicero over-stated rejecting a fear of God - Taylor, in Sermon IX, asserts that we must have a right fear of God - the Ciceronian view of a disordered, superstitious fear of God is rightly applied to those "fearing ... God as if he were a tyrant":

But this fear some of the old Philosophers thought unreasonable in all cases, even towards God himself; and it was a branch of the Epicurean Doctrine, that God medled not any thing below, and was to be loved and admired, but not feared at all; and therefore they taught men neither to fear death, nor to fear punishment after death, nor any displeasure of God: His terroribus ab Epicuro soluti non metuimus Deos, said Cicero; and thence came this acceptation of the word, that superstition should signifie an unreasonable fear of God: It is true, he and all his scholars extended the case beyond the measure, and made all fear unreasonable; but then, if we upon grounds of reason and divine revelation shall better discern the measure, of the fear of God; whatsoever fear we find to be unreasonable, we may by the same reason call it superstition ... that it may be call'd superstition, their authority is sufficient warrant for the grammar of the appellative.

Using the language of Cicero, then, Taylor viewed the devotees of predestinarianism as promoting superstition, encouraging what he termed "evill or mean opinions of God ... as bad as Atheisme":

To be God, and to be essentially and infinitely good, is the same thing, and therefore to deny either is to be reckoned among the greatest crimes in the world.

This brings us to see the two related principles at the heart Taylor's vision of Christian humanism, influenced and shaped by Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian: that God is "essentially and infinitely good", and that "none but a wise and good man can truly rejoice". The wise and good God desires humanity to be wise and good: the wise and good person will rejoice in the God who is wise and good. It is this, I think, which explains which these bearers of classical Roman wisdom appear throughout the Golden Grove sermons: their words draw the hearer and reader of the sermons to behold that what is wise and good is rooted in reason, cohering with revelation.

These sermons were preached and then published during what the preface to the 1662 revision of the Book of Common Prayer famously called "the late unhappy confusions". In that time, when - again quoting the preface - "factious, peevish, and perverse spirits" had their way, Taylor's invocation of Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian in his sermons pointed to a more deeply rooted, reasonable, attractive moral order, in which the wise and good man could yet rejoice. As he had stated in the dedication of this volume of the Golden Grove sermons, "Sermons are not like curious inquiries after New-nothings, but pursuances of Old truths". And those old truths were found in Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian.