SOURCE: Chew, Audrey. “Joseph Hall and Neo-Stoicism.” PMLA 65, no. 6 (December 1950): 1130-45.

In this essay, Chew discusses Hall's brand of neo-stoicism in relation to the evolving Christian stoic philosophy from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Further, the critic analyzes the major philosophical points on which Hall agreed with and diverged from Seneca, particularly noting that Hall embraced Seneca's puritanical concept of placing virtue before pleasure.

During his own lifetime Bishop Joseph Hall was nicknamed “our spiritual Seneca” by Henry Wotton and later called “our English Seneca” by Thomas Fuller; as a result it has recently become fashionable to associate him with seventeenth-century English Neo-Stoicism. A seventeenth-century Neo-Stoic is of interest presumably because he points in the direction of eighteenth-century Neo-Stoicism, away from a revealed religion toward a natural religion, away from faith toward reason. In a recent article Philip A. Smith calls Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of...