Fiona McCall's identification of the place of Stoic influences in conformist episcopalian piety, in her excellent Baal's Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2013), introduces us to a significant theme in Taylor's thought. Indeed, McCall particularly highlights Taylor's view of episcopalian suffering during the Interregnum not as a celebration of martyrdom but in Stoic terms of edification:
Jeremy Taylor took the stoic view that suffering, rather than being the means to martyrdom, should be seen as a force for earthly improvement, 'affliction shall try the children of God', wrote Taylor, making them grow wiser and more holy, be taught 'patience by their suffering, and charity by their persecution'. Rather than emphasising the special calling of the sufferer, Anglicans often stressed the role of suffering in improving relationships with others and thereby society as a whole ... we become less selfish and develop fellow feeling for others.
That Stoic virtues were especially evident in how Taylor sought to shape the episcopalian response to the crisis of defeat in the civil wars and the experience of the Interregnum indicates the significance of Stoic thought in his work. As Herschel C. Baker notes in The Wars of Truth: Studies in the Decay of Christian Humanism in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (1952), this is particularly so in what are Taylor's most famous works:
his incomparably beautiful moral treatises are similarly informed with Stoicism ... In both Holy Living and Holy Dying ... his latent Neo-Stoicism is most apparent ... he is quite content to repeat the ancient Stoic precepts of fortitude, temperance, and constancy. The third chapter of Holy Dying is a tissue of Senecan commonplaces.
It is in Holy Living that Taylor explicitly declares that Stoic virtues cohere with Christianity:
The old Stoicks when you told them of a sad story would still answer; What is that to me? Yes; for the Tyrant hath sentenced you also to prison. Well! what is that? He will put a chain upon my leg, but he cannot binde my soul. No: but he will kill you. Then I'll dye. If presently, let me go that I may presently be freer then himself: but if not till anon or to morrow, I will dine first, or sleep, or do what reason and nature calls for, as at other times. This in Gentile Philosophy is the same with the discourse of S. Paul, I have learnd in whatsover state I am therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound, every where and in all things I am instructed, both how to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and suffer need.
Indeed, the very first work quoted in Holy Living is a foundational Stoic text, Arrian's Discourses of Epictetus. The work is quoted six times in Holy Living. Seneca the Stoic is quoted eight times. To put these figures into some perspective, Holy Living quotes Augustine nine times. It is quite clear, in other words, that Stoic thought is a significant influence in this work.
Holy Living also indicates how this Stoicism could shape the form of episcopalian piety highlighted by McCall, offering a stoical alternative to enthusiastic accounts of martyrdom:
There is no one duty which our blessed Saviour did recommend to his Disciples with so repeated an injunction as this of Charity and Almes. To which adde the words spoken by our Lord, It is better to give then to receive; and when we consider how great a blessing it is that we beg not from door to door, it is a ready instance of our thankfulnes to God, for his sake to relieve them that do. This duty is that alone wherby the future day of judgment shall be transacted. For nothing but charity & almes is that whereby Christ shall declare the justice and mercy of the eternal sentence. Martyrdom it self is not there expressed, and no otherwise involved, but as it is the greatest charity.
In an age when Enthusiasts of varying confessions loudly exalted martyrdom, Taylor pointed to the greater spiritual significance of the prosaic - charity and alms. Seeking the confrontation and division in which martyrdom occurs will not stand alongside charity and alms on the day of judgement. It is not blind pursuit of martyrdom which will receive vindication on that day, but the ordinary virtues and duties of charity and alms-giving.
Turning to Holy Dying, we see how Herschel Baker's description captures a key characteristic of this work: "a tissue of Senecan commonplaces". An excellent example of this is a passage in which Taylor links together two statements from Seneca, and then - as in Holy Living - explicitly articulates the relationship between Seneca's wisdom and Christianity:
Though we must not look so far off, and pry abroad, yet we must be busy near at hand; we must, with all arts of the spirit, seize upon the present [Footnote: Ille enim ex futuro suspenditur, cui irritum est praens - Seneca], because it passes from us while we speak, and because in it all our certainty does consist. We must take our waters as out of a torrent and sudden shower, which will quickly cease dropping from above, and quickly cease running in our channels here below: this instant will never return again, and yet it may be, this instant will declare or secure the fortune of a whole eternity. The old Greeks and Romans taught us the prudence of this rule; but Christianity teaches us the religion of it. They so seized upon the present, that they would lose nothing of the day's pleasure [Footnote: Etate fruere; mobili cursu fugit - Seneca].
Seneca's Stoic virtues, therefore, become a means of aiding the Christian to live rightly and wisely in the light of our mortality:
Seneca said well, “There is no science or art in the world so hard as to live and die well: the professors of other arts are vulgar and many;” but he that knows how to do this business is certainly instructed to eternity. But then let me remember this, that a wise person will also put most upon the greatest interest. Common prudence will teach us this.
The cardinal Stoic virtue of temperance is also significant for the Christian, calling us from the dangers of immoderate desires and appetites:
it is worse when the soul, the principle of life, is employed wholly in the offices of death, and that man was worse than dead of whom Seneca tells, that being a rich fool, when he was lifted up from the baths and set into a soft couch, asked his slaves, As ego jam sedeo? Do I now sit? The beast was so drowned in sensuality and the death of his soul, that, whether he did sit or no, he was to believe another. Idleness and every vice are as much of death as a long disease is, or the expense of ten years ... For as every sensual pleasure and every day of idleness and useless living lops off a little branch from our short life, so every deadly sin, and every habitual vice does quite destroy us.
Again Taylor states "that Christianity taught us to turn this into religion". The wisdom of the Stoics, therefore, passes from the rarefied atmosphere of the philosophers to the common teaching and living out of Christianity's duty towards God and neighbour.
Crucially, this embrace of the Stoic virtues as a wise means of living out the Christian vocation, also guards against that disordered zeal which exalts doctrinal and confessional disputes over the moral life:
for some over-forward zeals are so earnest to profess their little and uncertain articles, and glory so to die in a particular and divided communion, that in the profession of their faith they lose or discompose their charity. Let it be enough that we secure our interest of heaven, though we do not go about to appropriate the mansions to our sect; for every good man hopes to be saved, as he is a Christian, and not as he is a Lutheran, or of another division.
The Stoics help us to see that the "little and uncertain articles" of confessional strife are not the way to the kingdom of heaven, but the holiness to which Christ calls us, lived out with wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.
By understanding Stoicism to cohere with Christianity, expounding the Christian life and vocation by means of Stoic wisdom and virtues, Taylor, in Holy Living and Holy Dying, offered an eirenic alternative to sectarian visions of the moral life, whether determined by Biblicist or Tridentine convictions. Both alternatives are cautioned against by Taylor. Against the Stoic shape of the Christian life set forth by Holy Dying, in which, quoting Seneca, "He that would die well must, all the days of his life, lay up against the day of death", Taylor points to how Biblicist and Tridentine accounts of the moral life contradict this calling:
the actions of holy persons in Scripture are not always good precedents to us Christians, who are to walk by a rule and a greater strictness, with more simplicity and heartiness of pursuit;
In the church of Rome they reckon otherwise concerning sick and dying Christians than I have done. For they make profession, that from death to life, from sin to grace, a man may very certainly be changed, though the operation begin not before his last hour; and half this they do upon his death-bed, and the other half when he is in his grave.
Mindful of how rival Biblicist and Tridentine visions had brought conflict, bloodshed, and chaos to the polities of Europe and of the Three Kingdoms, there was also a political context to Taylor's invocation of the Stoic virtues. Against the militancy of the Biblicist or the Tridentine allegiances, the Stoic virtues urged a different way, heard in a prayer from Holy Living:
Make me humble and obedient, peaceable and pious; let me never envy any mans good, nor deserve to be despised my self; and if I be, teach me to bear it with meeknesse and charity.
While the Biblicist and the Tridentine allegiances encouraged political disorder and confessional conflict, the Stoicism of Holy Dying, in setting forth the Christian duty of self-examination, pointed to the "quiet and disentangled life":
to examine our lives will be no trouble, if we do not intricate it with the businesses of the world and the labyrinths of care and impertinent affairs. A man needs a quiet and disentangled life who comes to search into all his actions, and to make judgment concerning his errors and his needs, his remedies and his hopes.
A footnote fittingly referenced Seneca:
Securae et quietae mentis est in omnes vitue partes discurrere; occupatorum animi velut sub jugo sunt, respicere non possunt.
[It is the mark of a calm and untroubled mind to range over every aspect of life; the minds of the busy are like those under a yoke, they cannot look back.]
In the dedication of Holy Dying, Taylor begins by stating to Lord Carbery:
Taylor comparing himself to "a Roman gentleman" is a revealing introduction to a work deeply imbued with the Stoic virtues. That Carbery and Taylor, both royalists and episcopalians, were living amidst the ruins of the cause which they had defended, the cause of Church and King, gives further meaning to the image of "a Roman gentleman". And it gave reason to recognise that "Seneca said well": that the Stoic virtues were rightly 'turned into religion', aiding the Christian - not least the episcopalian Christian during the Interregnum - to have "a calm and untroubled mind".
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