SOURCE: Aggeler, Geoffrey. “‘Sparkes of Holy Things’: Neostoicism and the English Protestant Conscience.” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 26, no. 3 (summer 1990): 223-40.

In this essay, Aggeler connects Calvinist thought with the revived interest in stoicism, as modeled in works such as Hall's Heaven Upon Earth. The critic concludes that stoicism and Calvinism shared similar concerns about the corruption of man and the importance of self-knowledge and suggests that stoic civic ideals—freedom from tyranny, the duties of man, and the duties of rulers—may have informed the political beliefs of seventeenth-century Calvinists.

Various commentators have noticed a linkage of the Stoic revival in England with the rise of Protestantism. In the words of Philip A. Smith, “The great web of English Protestantism had been woven partly of Stoic threads. Hooker and Taylor, Milton, the Cambridge Platonists, Barrow, Tillotson, and many other Christian humanists adopted and exploited fully...