Chapter VI: Introduction

Percolating through the Jewish Communities, the Christian religion reached Egypt as early as the 1st cent. A.D. On its arrival, it found, already established there, two distinct forms of spiritual life.

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The first was the spiritual life of Ancient Egypt, which had clung to the soil of the Nile valley for over 4,000 years. It had existed so long that though Christianity could close its temples she never quite uprooted it from the heart of the people. The resurrection of Osiris as Sun God; the partaking of him as Corn God by the blessed in the world below; the beneficent group of the mother Isis with Horus her child; the same Horus as a young warrior slaying the snaky Set; the key-shaped “ankh” that the gods and goddesses carried as a sign of their immortality:—these symbols had sunk too deeply into the minds of the native Egyptians to be removed by episcopal decrees. Consequently there were cases of reversion—e.g. at Menouthis (near Aboukir) in 480, when some villagers were discovered worshipping the ancient deities in a private house. And there were also cases of confusion, where the old religion passed imperceptibly into the new. Did Christianity borrow from the Osiris cult her doctrines of the Resurrection and Personal Immortality, and her sacrament of the Eucharist? The suggestion has been made. It is more certain that she borrowed much of her symbolism and popular art. Isis and Horus become the Virgin and Child, Horus and Set St. George and the Dragon, while the “ankh” appears unaltered on some of the Christian tomb stones as a looped cross, and slightly altered on others as a cross with a handle.

The second form of spiritual life was the life of Alexandria. Its quality (mainly Hellenic and philosophic) has already been indicated. Christianity, to begin with, was not philosophic, being addressed to poor and unfashionable people in Palestine. But as soon as it reached Alexandria its character altered, the turning point in its worldly career arrived. The Alexandrians were highly cultivated, they had libraries where all the wisdom of the Mediterranean was accessible, and their faith inevitably took a philosophic form. Occupied by their favourite problem of the relation between God and Man, they at once asked the same question of the new religion as they asked the Jews and the Greeks—namely, What is the link? Philo said the Logos, Plotinus the Emanations. The new religion replied “Christ.” There was nothing startling to the Alexandrians in such a reply. Christ too was the Word, he too proceeded from the Father. His incarnation, his redemption of mankind through suffering—even these were not strange ideas to people who were accustomed to “divine” kings, and familiar with the myths of Prometheus and Adonis. Alexandrian orthodoxy, Alexandrian heresies, both centred round the problem that was familiar to Alexandrian paganism—the relation between God and Man.

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Thus Christianity did not burst upon Egypt or upon Alexandria like a clap of thunder, but stole into ears already prepared. Neither on her popular nor on her philosophic side was she a creed apart. Only politically did she stand out as an innovator, through her denial of divinity to the Imperial Government at Rome.

ANKH: Museum, Room 8.
EARLY CHRISTIAN CROSSES: Museum, Room 1.
ISIS AND HORUS: Museum, Room 10.
MENOUTHIS: p. 183.

(I). GNOSTICISM (Esoteric knowledge).

CERINTHUS—About 100 A.D.
BASILIDES—120.
VALENTINUS—140.

Gnosticism taught that the world and mankind are the result of an unfortunate blunder. God neither created us nor wished us to be created. We are the work of an inferior deity, the Demiurge, who wrongly believes himself God, and we are doomed to decay. But God, though not responsible for our existence, took pity on it, and has sent his Christ to counteract the ignorance of the Demiurge and to give us Gnosis (knowledge). Christ is the link between the divine and that unfortunate mistake the human.

The individual Gnostics played round this idea. Cerinthus (educated here) taught that Jesus was a man, and Christ a spirit who left him at death. Basilides (a Syrian visitor) that there were three dispensations, pre-Jewish, Jewish, and Christian, each of whose rulers had a son, which son comprehended more of God than did his father. The Ophites worshipped snakes because the serpent in Eden was really a messenger from God, who induced Eve to disobey the Demiurge Jehovah. Consequently if we wish to be good we must be bad—a conclusion that was also reached, though by a different route, by Carpocrates, who organised an Abode of Love on one of the Greek islands. These are unsavoury charlatans. But one of the Gnostics—Valentinus—was a man of another stamp, and his system has a tragic quality most rare in Alexandria.

Valentinus (probably an Egyptian; educated here; taught mainly at Rome) held the usual Gnostic doctrine that creation is a mistake. But he tried to explain how the mistake came about. He imagines a primal God, the centre of a divine harmony, who sent out manifestations of himself in pairs of male and female. Each pair was inferior to its predecessor, and Sophia (“wisdom”) the female of the thirtieth pair, least perfect of all. She showed her imperfection not, like Lucifer, by rebelling from God, but by desiring too ardently to be united to him. She fell through love. Hurled from the divine harmony, she fell into matter, and the universe is formed out of her agony and remorse. She herself was rescued by the first Christ but not before she had born a son, the Demiurge, who rules this world of sadness and confusion, and is incapable of realising anything beyond it. In this world there are three classes of men, all outwardly the same, men of the Body, the Spirit, and the Soul. The first two belong to the Demiurge and ought to obey him. The third are really the elect of his mother Sophia. He rules them but cannot make them obey. It was for their salvation that the Christ whom we call Jesus descended straight from the primal God and left with his twelve disciples the secret tradition of the Gnosis.

With Valentinus the Gnosticism of Alexandria reaches its height. Further east it took other forms. It had spread by 150 A.D. all round the Mediterranean, and threatened to defeat orthodox Christianity. But it was pessimistic, imaginative, esoteric—three great obstacles to success. It was not a creed any society could adopt, being anti-social, and by the time of Constantine its vogue was over.

GNOSTIC AMULETS: Museum, Room 17.

(II). ORTHODOXY. (Early).

CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA—about 200.
ORIGEN—185-253.

Orthodoxy at Alexandria did not begin on clear cut lines; indeed the more we look at it the more it melts into its surroundings. It adapted from Philo his doctrine of the Logos, and identified the Logos with Christ. It shared with Gnosticism the desire for knowledge of God, while declaring that such knowledge need not be esoteric. It has its special Gospel—St. Mark’s—but other Gospels, since condemned as uncanonical, were equally read in its churches, e.g. the Gospels of the Hebrews and of the Egyptians. It was permeated by Greek thought—Neo-Platonists became Christians, and _vice versa_. But one distinguishing doctrine it did have—the supreme value of Christ. Christ was the “Word” incarnate, through whom the love and power of God could alone be “known.” Problems as to Christ’s nature did not trouble the earlier theologians. Their impulse was to testify, not to analyse. A feeling of joy inspires their interminable writings, and it is possible to detect through their circumlocution the faith that steeled the martyrs, their contemporaries.

Clement of Alexandria (probably a Greek from Athens) was head of the big theological college here. His problem, like that of the Jews before him, was to recommend his religion to a subtle and philosophic city, and his methods forestall those of the advanced missionary to-day. He does not denounce Greek philosophy. His line is that it is a preparation for the Gospel, that the Jewish law was also a preparation, and that all that happened before the birth of Christ is indeed a divine approach to that supreme event. Learned and enlightened, he set Christianity upon a path that she did not long consent to follow. He raised her from intellectual obscurity, he lent her for a little Hellenic persuasion, and the graciousness of Greece seems in his pages not incompatible with the Grace of God.

He is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven who shall do and teach
in imitation of God by showing free Grace like His; for the bounties
of God are for the common benefits.

Only in Alexandria could such a theologian have arisen.

His work was carried on by his pupil Origen, the strangest and most adventurous of the Early Fathers. Gentle and scholarly by nature, Origen had an instinct for self-immolation that troubled his life and the lives of his friends. He was an Egyptian (the name is connected with Horus), and he was born here of Christian parents and tried as a boy to share his father’s martyrdom at the Temple of Serapis. Calmed for a while, he supported his mother and brothers, and was fellow pupil with Plotinus. Then he became head of the Theological College, and having attained fame as a teacher and lay preacher, castrated himself (a “Eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake.”—Matt. xix, 12). His patron, the Bishop of Alexandria, disowned him for this, and ruled that he could not now take orders; other bishops declared that he could, and the Christian communities were divided by the grotesque controversy. Origen was considerate and even repentant; he had no wish to cause scandal, and when ordered to leave Alexandria he obeyed. But his opinions ever verged towards the incorrect; he believed, like Plotinus, in pre-existence, he disbelieved in the eternity of punishment, and it is with the greatest hesitation that orthodoxy has received him to her bosom. In the main he developed the theory of his master Clement—that Christianity is the heir of the past and the interpreter of the future,—and he taught that Christ has been with mankind not only at his incarnation but since the beginning of creation, and has in all ages linked them, according to their capacity, with God.

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Thus the characteristic of early orthodoxy was a belief in Christ as the link between God and Man. A humanising belief; the work of the Greek scholars who had subtilised and universalised the simpler faith of Palestine, and had imparted into it doctrines taught by Paganism. We must now watch it harden and transform. Several causes transformed it—e.g. the growth of an ignorant monasticism in Egypt, the growth in Northern Africa, of a gloomier type of Christianity under Tertullian, and the general spirit of aggression the new religion everywhere displayed as soon as Constantine labelled it as official. But there was one cause that was inherent in the belief itself, and that alone concerns us here. Christ was the Son of God. All agreed. But what was the _Nature_ of Christ? The subtle Alexandrian intellect asked this question about the year 300, and the Arian heresy was the result. It asked it again about 400 and produced the Monophysite heresy. And a third query about 600 produced a third heresy, the Monothelite. Let us glance at these three in turn. Heresies to others, they were of course orthodox in their own eyes. Each believed itself the only interpreter of the link that binds God to Man.

UNCANONICAL GOSPELS: Appendix p. 217.

(III). ARIANISM.

Christ is the Son of God. Then is he not younger than God? Arius held that he was and that there was a period before time began when the First Person of the Trinity existed and the Second did not. A typical Alexandrian theologian, occupied with the favourite problem of linking human and divine, Arius thought to solve the problem by making the link predominately human. He did not deny the Godhead of Christ, but he did make him inferior to the Father—of _like_ substance, not of the _same_ substance, which was the view held by Athanasius, and stamped as orthodox by the Council of Nicaea. Moreover the Arian Christ, like the Gnostic Demiurge, made the world;—creation, an inferior activity, being entrusted to him by the Father, who had Himself created nothing but Christ.

It is easy to see why Arianism became popular. By making Christ younger and lower than God it brought him nearer to us—indeed it tended to level him into a mere good man and to forestall Unitarianism. It appealed to the untheologically minded, to emperors and even more to empresses. But St. Athanasius, who viewed the innovation with an expert eye, saw that while it popularised Christ it isolated God, and he fought it with vigour and venom. His success has been described (p. 47). It was condemned as heretical in 325, and by the end of the century had been expelled from orthodox Christendom. Of the theatre of this ancient strife no trace remains at Alexandria; the church of St. Mark where Arius was presbyter has vanished: so have the churches where Athanasius thundered—St. Theonas and the Caesareum. Nor do we know in which street Arius died of epilepsy. But the strife still continues in the hearts of men, who always tend to magnify the human in the divine, and it is probable that many an individual Christian to-day is an Arian without knowing it.

NICENE CREED (original text): Appendix p. 218.
PICTURE OF COUNCIL OF NICAEA: p. 106.

(IV). MONOPHYSISM. (“Single Nature.”)

Christ is the Son of God, but also the Son of Mary. Then has he two natures or one? The Monophysites said “one.” They did not deny Christ’s incarnation, but they asserted that the divine in him had quite absorbed the human. The question was first raised in clerical circles in Constantinople, but Alexandria took it up hotly, and “Single Nature” became the national cry of Egypt. We have already seen (p. 51) the political importance of this heresy, how it was connected with a racial movement against the Greeks, how when it was condemned at Chalcedon (451) Egypt slipped into permanent mutiny against the Empire. The Council announced that Christ had two natures, unmixed and unchangeable but at the same time indistinguishable and inseparable. This is the orthodox view—the one we hold. The Copts (and Abyssinians) are still Monophysites, and consequently not in communion with the rest of Christendom.

COPTIC CHURCH: p. 160, 212.

(V). MONOTHELISM. (“Single Will.”)

As the minds of the Alexandrians decayed, their heresies became more and more technical. Arianism enshrines a real problem which the layman as well as the cleric can apprehend. Monophysism is more remote. And Monothelism is difficult to state in the language of theology, and almost impossible to state in the language of common sense. Perhaps it bears in it the signs of carelessness, for as we have seen (p. 54) it was the invention of the Emperor Heraclius in the last desperate days when he was trying to conciliate Egypt.

If Christ has one Nature he has of course one will. But suppose he has two Natures. How many wills has he then? The Monothelites said “One.” The orthodox view—the one we hold—is “Two, one human the other divine, but both operating in unison.” Obscure indeed is the problem, and we can well believe that the Alexandrians, against whom the Arabs were then marching, did not understand Monothelism when it was hurriedly explained to them by a preoccupied general. But it was not without a future. It failed as a compromise but survived as a heresy, and long after the Imperial Government had disowned it and Egypt had fallen to Islam, it was cherished in the uplands of Syria by the Maronite Church.

MARONITE CHURCH: p. 140, 213.