Chapter IV: The Explanation (2)

Between the time when Philon astonished the orthodox money-getting Hebrews of the Jews' quarter by his daring adoption of Plato's Logos, and the day when poor old Proclus--his once handsome and strong frame wasted by fasting and Pythagorean austerities--died, a drivelling old man, in sight of the groves of the Academe and the tomb of Plato, not far from whom he himself was to lie, many a busy generation had trodden the halls of the Museum of Alexandria. All that time the strife of words had never ceased, in the lecture-hall, in the gardens of the departed Ptolemies, round the banquet-table where the professors were feasted at the state's expense. All that time the fame of Alexandria had gathered to her Museum the young generations that succeeded each other in the patrician homes and wealthy burghs of Syria, Greece, and Italy. They came in crowds, with their fathers' money in their purses, to be made learned by those of whose exploits report had told so much. Some came with an earnest purpose. To the young medical student, the Alexandrian school of anatomy and the Alexandrian diploma (in whatever shape it was given)--not to mention the opportunity of perusing the works of the immortal Hippocrates in forty substantial rolls of papyrus--were worth all the expense of a journey from Rome or Edessa. To the lawyer, the splendid collections of laws, from those of the Pentateuch to those of Zamolxis the Scythian, were treasures only to be found in the library where the zeal of Demetrius Phalerius and the munificence of Ptolemy Philadelphus had placed them. But the vast majority of the youth who flocked to the Museum came with no other purpose than the very general one of finishing their education and fitting themselves for the world. With these, the agreeable arts of poetry and polite literature were in far greater request than law, medicine, astronomy, or geography. If they could get a sight of the popular poet of the hour in his morning meditation under the plane-trees of the gardens, or could crush into a place in the theatre when he recited his new "Ode to the Empress's Hair;" or if they attended the lecture of the most fashionable exponent of the myths of the Iliad, and clapped him whenever he introduced an allusion to the divine Plato, it was considered a very fair morning's work, and might be fitly rewarded by a boating party to Canopus in the afternoon, or a revel far into the night in any of those thousand palaces of vice {37} with which luxurious Alexandria was so well provided. And yet there is no doubt that the young men carried away from their university a certain education and a certain refinement--an education which, though it taught them to relish the pleasures of intellect, in no wise disposed them to forego the enjoyments of sense; and a refinement which, while imparting a graceful polish to the mind, was quite compatible with the deepest moral depravity. Pagans as they were, they were the fairest portion of the whole world, for intellect, for manliness, for generosity, for wit, for beauty and strength of mind and body--natural gifts that, like the sun and the rain, are bestowed upon just and unjust. Their own intercourse with each other taught them far more than the speculations of any of the myth-hunting professors of the Museum. They crowded in to hear them, they cheered them, they would dispute and even fight for a favorite theory that no one understood, with the doubtful exception of its inventor. But it was not to be supposed that they really cared for abysms or mystical mathematics, or that they were not a great deal more zealous for suppers, and drinking bouts, and boating parties. These latter employments, indeed, may be said to have formed their real education. Greek intellect, Greek taste, wit, and beauty, in the sunniest hour of its bloom, mingled with its like in the grandest city that, perhaps, the earth has ever seen. The very harbors, and temples, and palaces were an education. The first rounding of the Pharos--when the six-mile semicircle of granite quay and marble emporia burst on the view, with the Egyptian sun flashing from white wall and blue sea, and glancing and sparkling amidst the dense picturesque multitude that roared and surged on the esplanade--disclosed a sight to make the soul grow larger. The wonderful city itself was a teaching: the assemblage of all that was best and rarest in old Egyptian art, and all that was freshest and most lovely in the art of Greece, left no corner of a street without its lesson to the eye. Indoors, there was the Museum, with its miles of corridors and galleries, filled with paintings and sculptures; outside, the Serapeion, the Caesareum, the exchange, the palace, the university itself, each a more effective instructor than a year's course in the schools. And after all this came the library, with its 700,000 volumes!

In the year of our Lord 181, ships filled the Great Port, merchants congregated in the exchange, sailors and porters thronged the quays; crowds of rich and poor, high and low, flocked through the streets; youths poured in to listen to Ammonius Saccas, and poured out again to riot and sin; philosophers talked, Jews made money, fashionable men took their pleasure, slaves toiled, citizens bought and sold and made marriages; all the forms of busy life that had their existence within the circuit of the many-peopled city were noisily working themselves out. In the same year, Pantaenus became the head of the catechetical school of the patriarchal Church of Alexandria.

It was the time when those who had lived and walked with the Apostles had passed away, and when the third generation of the Church's rulers was already growing old. St. Irenaeus was near his glorious end; St. Eleutherius, of memory dear to Britain, had just closed his pontificate by martyrdom, and St. Victor sat in his place. The echoes of the voice of Peter had hardly died out in Rome and Antioch; the traditions of Paul's bodily presence were yet living in Asia, in Greece, and the Islands; and the sweet odor of John's life still hung about the places where his sojourning had been: many a church of Greece and Egypt and of the far East had the sepulchre of its founder, an Apostle or an apostolic man, round which to pray. It was the age of the persecutions, and the age of the apologies. In every {38} city that was coming about which from the first had been inevitable. The Church was laying hold of human learning, and setting it to do her own work. In fixing upon Alexandria as the spot where, at this period, the contest between Christian science and Gentile learning, Gentile ignorance and Gentile brute force, was most interesting and most developed, we must pass by many other Churches, not in forgetfulness, though in silence. We must pass by Rome, the capital of the world, not because there were not learned men there whom Jesus Christ had raised up to battle with heathen philosophy; for it was but a few years since Justin Martyr had shed his blood for the faith, and Apollonius from his place in the senate had spoken his "apology" for his fellow Christians. But the enemies which the Gospel had to meet at Rome were not so much the learning and science of the heathen as his evil passions and vicious life; and the sword of persecution, at Rome hardly ever sheathed, kept down all attempts at regularity or organization in public teaching. We must pass by Athens, still the intellectual capital of the world, not because there were not at Athens also worthy doctors of the wisdom of the cross--witness, to the contrary, Athenagoras, the Christian philosopher, who presented his apology to Marcus Aurelius. But Athens, though at the end of the second century and long afterward she was the mother of orators, poets, and philosophers, seems to have been too thoroughly steeped in the sensuous idolatry of Greece to have harbored a school of Christianity by the side of the Porch and the Lyceum. If the same was true of Athens then as a century afterward, her smooth-tongued, "babbling" sophists, and her pagan charms, must have had to answer for the soul of many a poor Christian youth that went to seek learning and found perdition. We pass by Carthage, in spite of Tertullian's great name; Antioch, notwithstanding Theophilus, whose labors against the heathen still bore fruit; Sardis, in spite of Melito, then just dead, but living still in men's mouths by the fame of his learning, eloquence, and miracles; and Hierapolis, in spite of Apollinaris, who, like so many others, approached the emperor himself with an apology. All over the Church there were men raised up by God, and fitted with learning to confront learning, patience to instruct ignorance, and unflinching fortitude to endure persecution--men in every way worthy to be the instruments of that great change which was being wrought out through the wide world of the Roman empire.

But at Alexandria, the school of Christianity existed under interesting and peculiar conditions. St. Mark had landed on the granite quay of the Great Port with Peter's commission; he had been martyred, and his successors had been martyred after him; and for a long time Christianity here, as everywhere else, had been contemptuously ignored. It spread, however, as we know. In time, more than one student, before he attended his lecture in the splendid halls of the Museum, had given ear to a far different lesson in a different school. The Christian catechetical school of Alexandria is said to have been founded by St. Mark himself. If so, it is only what we might naturally expect; for wherever heathens were being converted, there a school of teachers had to be provided for their instruction; and we read of similar institutions at Jerusalem, at Antioch, and at Rome. But the catechetical school of Alexandria soon assumed an importance that no other school of those times ever attained. Whether it was that the influence of the university gave an impetus to regular and methodical teaching, or that the converts in Alexandria were in great measure from a cultivated and intellectual class, it appears to have been found necessary from the earliest times to have an efficient school, with a man of vigor and intellect at its head, capable of maintaining his position even when compared {39} with the professors of the university. The first of the heads or doctors of the school of whom history has left any account, is Pantaenus. Pantaenus is not so well known as his place in Church history and his influence on his age would seem to warrant. He was appointed to his important post at a time when Christians all over the world must have been rejoicing. The fourth persecution was just dying out. For twenty years, with the exception of the short interval immediately after the miracle of the Thundering Legion, had Marcus Aurelius, imperial philosopher of the Stoic sort, continued to command or connive at the butchery of his Christian subjects. What were the motives that led this paragon of virtuous pagans to lower himself to the commonplace practices of racking, scourging, and burning, is a question that depends for its answer upon who the answerer is. Philosophers of a certain class, from Gibbon to Mr. Mill, are disposed to take a lenient, if not a laudatory, estimate of his conduct in this matter, and think that the emperor could not have acted otherwise consistently with his principles and convictions, as handed down to us in his "Meditations." Doubtless he had strong convictions on the subject of Christianity, though it might be questioned whether he came honestly by them. But his convictions, whatever they were, would probably have ended in the harmless shape of philosophic contempt, had it not been for the men by whom he was surrounded. They were Stoics, of course, like their master, but their stoicism was far from confining itself to convictions and meditations. They were practical Stoics, of the severest type which that old-world Puritanism admitted. As good Stoics, they were of all philosophers the most conceited, and took it especially ill that any sect should presume to rival them in their private virtues of obstinacy and endurance. It is extremely probable that the fourth persecution, both in its commencement and its revival, was owing to the good offices of Marcus Aurelius's solemn-faced favorites. But, whatever be the blame that attaches to him, he has answered for it at the same dread tribunal at which he has answered for the deification of Faustina and the education of Commodus.

However, about the year 180, persecution ceased at Alexandria, and the Christians held up their heads and revived again, after the bitter winter through which they had just passed. Their first thoughts and efforts appear to have been directed to their school. The name of Pantaenus was already celebrated. He was a convert from paganism, born probably in Sicily, but certainly brought up in Alexandria. Curiously enough, he had been a zealous Stoic, and remained so, in the Christian sense, after his conversion. There is no doubt that he was well known among the Gentile philosophers of Alexandria. Perhaps he had lectured in the Museum and dined in the Hall. Probably he had spent many a day buried in the recesses of the great libraries, and could give a good account of not a few of their thousands of volumes. He must have known Justin Martyr--perhaps had something to say to the conversion of that brilliant genius, not as a teacher, but as a friend and fellow-student. He may have come across Galen, when that lively medical man was pursuing his researches on the immortal Hippocrates, or entertaining a select circle, in the calm of the evening, under one of the porticos of the Heptastadion. No sooner was he placed at the head of the Christian school than he inaugurated a great change, or rather a great development. Formerly the instruction had been intended solely for converts, that is, catechumens, and the matter of the teaching had corresponded with this object. Pantaenus changed all this. The cessation of the persecution had, perhaps, encouraged bolder measures; men would think there was no prospect of another, as men generally think when a long and difficult trial is over; so the Christian schools were to be opened {40} to all the world. If Aristotle and Plato, Epicurus and Zeno, had their lecturers, should not Jesus Christ have schools and teachers too? And what matter if the Christian doctrine were somewhat novel and hard--was not Ammonius the Porter, at that very time, turning the heads of half the students in the city, and filling his lecture-room to suffocation, by expounding transcendental theories about Plato's Logos, and actually teaching the doctrine of a Trinity? Shame upon the Christian name, then, if they who bear it do not open their doors, now that danger is past, and break the true bread to the hungry souls that eagerly snatch at the stones and dry sticks that others give! So thought Pantaenus. Of his teachings and writings hardly a trace or a record has reached us. We know that he wrote valued commentaries on Holy Scripture, but no fragment of them remains. His teaching, however, as might have been expected, was chiefly oral. He met the philosophers of Alexandria on their own ground. He showed that the fame of learning, the earnestness of character, the vivid personal influence that were so powerful in the cause of heathen philosophy, could be as serviceable to the philosophy of Christ. The plan was novel in the Christian world--at least, in its systematic thoroughness. That Pantaenus had great influence and many worthy disciples is evident from the fact that St. Clement of Alexandria, his successor, was formed in his school, and that St. Alexander of Jerusalem, the celebrated founder of the library which Eusebius consulted at Jerusalem, writing half a century afterward to Alexandria, speaks with nothing less than enthusiasm of the "happy memory" of his old master. If we could pierce the secrets of those long-past times, what a stirring scene of reverend wisdom and youthful enthusiasm would the forgotten school of the Sicilian convert unfold to our sight! Doubtless, from amidst the confused jargon of all manner of philosophies, the voice of the Christian teacher arose with a clear and distinct utterance; and the fame of Pantaenus was carried to far countries by many a noble Roman and many an accomplished Greek, zealous, like all true academic sons, for the glory of their favorite master.

After ten years of such work as this, Pantaenus vacated his chair, and went forth as a missionary bishop to convert the Indians. Before passing on to his successor, a few words on this Indian mission, apparently so inopportune for such a man at such a time, will be interesting, and not unconnected with the history of the Christian schools.

In the "many-peopled" city there were men from all lands and of all shades of complexion. It was nothing strange, then, that an embassy of swarthy Indians should have one day waited on the patriarch and begged for an apostle to take home with them to their countrymen. No wonder, either, that they specified the celebrated master of the catechisms as their _dignissimus_. The only wonder is that he was allowed to go. Yet he went; he set out with them, sailed to Canopus, the Alexandrian Richmond, where the canal joined the Nile; sailed up the ancient stream to Koptos, where the overland route began; joined the caravan that travelled thence, from well to well, to Berenice, Philadelphus's harbor on the Red Sea; embarked, and, after sailing before the monsoon for seventy days, arrived at the first Indian port, probably that which is now Mangalore, in the presidency of Bombay. This, in all likelihood, was the route and the destination of Pantaenus. Now those among whom his missionary labors appear to have lain were Brahmins, and Brahmins of great learning and extraordinary strictness of life. Moreover, there appears to be no reason to doubt that the Church founded by St. Thomas still existed, and even flourished, in these very parts, though its apostolic founder had been martyred a hundred years before. It was not so unreasonable, then, that {41} a bishop like Pantaenus should have been selected for such a Church and such a people. Let the reader turn to the story of Robert de' Nobili, and of John de Britto, whose field of labor extended to within a hundred miles of master in human learning when the the very spot where Pantaenus probably landed. St. Francis Xavier had already found Christians in that region who bore distinct traces of a former connection with Alexandria, in the very points in which they deviated from orthodoxy. De' Nobili's transformation of himself into a Brahmin of the strictest and most learned caste is well known. He dressed and lived as a Brahmin, roused the curiosity of his adopted brethren, opened school, and taught philosophy, inculcating such practical conclusions as it is unnecessary to specify. De Britto did the very same things. If any one will compare the Brahmins of De Britto and De' Nobili with those earlier Brahmins of Pantaenus, as described, for instance, by Cave from Palladius, he will not fail to be struck with the similarity of accounts; and if we might be permitted to fill up the picture upon these conjectural hints, we should say that it seems to us very likely that Pantaenus, during the years that he was lost to Alexandria, was expounding and enforcing, in the flowing cotton robes of a venerable Saniastes, the same deep philosophy to Indian audiences as he had taught to admiring Greeks in the modest pallium of a Stoic. Recent missionary experience has uniformly gone to prove that deep learning and asceticism are, humanly speaking, absolutely necessary in order to attempt the conversion of Brahmins with any prospect of success: and the mission of Pantaenus seems at once to furnish an illustration of this fact, and to afford an interesting glimpse of "Christian Missions" in the second century. But we must return to Alexandria.

The name that succeeds Pantaenus on the rolls of the School of the Catechisms is Titus Flavius Clemens, immortalized in history as Clement of Alexandria. He had sat under Pantaemus, but he was no ordinary scholar. Like his instructor, he was a convert from paganism. He was already master in human learning when the grace came. He had sought far and wide for the truth, and had found it in the Catholic Church, and into the lap of his new mother he had poured all the treasures of Egyptian wisdom which he had gathered in his quest. Athens, Southern Italy, Assyria, and Palestine had each been visited by the eager searcher; and, last of all, Egypt, and Alexandria, and Pantaenus had been the term of his travels, and had given to his lofty soul the "admirable light" of Jesus Christ. When Pantaenus went out as a missioner to India, Clement, who had already assisted his beloved master in the work of the schools, succeeded him as their director and head. It was to be Clement's task to carry on and to develop the work that Pantaenus had inaugurated--to make Christianity not only understood by the catechumens and loved by the faithful, but recognized and respected by the pagan philosophers. Unless we can clearly see the necessity, or, at least, the reality of the philosophical side of his character, and the influences that were at work to make him hold fast to Aristotle and Plato, even after he had got far beyond them, we shall infallibly set him down, like his modern biographers, as a half-converted heathen, with the shell of Platonism still adhering to him.

It cannot be doubted that in a society like that of Alexandria in its palmy days there were many earnest seekers of the truth, even as Clement himself had sought it. One might even lay it down as a normal fact, that it was the character of an Alexandrian, as distinguished from an Athenian, to speculate for the sake of practising, and not to spend his time in "either telling or hearing some new thing." If an Alexandrian was a Stoic, never was Stoic more demure or more intent on warring against his body, after Stoic {42} fashion; if a geometrican, no disciple of Bacon was ever more assiduous in experimentalizing, measuring, comparing, and deducing laws; if a Platonist, then geometry, ethics, poetry, and everything else, were enthusiastically pressed into the one great occupation of life--the realizing the ideal and the getting face to face with the unseen. That all this earnestness did not uniformly result in success was only too true. Much speculation, great earnestness, and no grand objective truth at the end of it--this was often the lot of the philosophic inquirer of Alexandria. The consequence was that not unfrequently, disgusted by failure, he ended by rushing headlong into the most vicious excesses, or, becoming a victim to despair, perished by his own hand. So familiar, indeed, had this resource of disappointment become to the philosophic mind, that Hegesias, a professor in the Museum, a little before the Christian era, wrote a book counselling self-murder; and so many people actually followed his advice as to oblige the reigning Ptolemy to turn Grand Inquisitor even in free-thinking Egypt, and forbid the circulation of the book. Yet all this, while it revealed a depth of moral wretchedness which it is frightful to contemplate, showed also a certain desperate earnestness; and doubtless there were, even among those who took refuge in one or other of these dreadful alternatives, men who, in their beginnings, had genuine aspirations after truth, mingled with the pride of knowledge and a mere intellectual curiosity. Doubtless, too, there was many a sincere and guileless soul among the philosophic herd, to whom, humanly speaking, nothing more was wanting than the preaching of the faith. Their eyes were open, as far as they could be without the light of revelation: let the light shine, and, by the help of divine grace, they would admit its beams into their souls.

There are many such, in every form of error. In Clement's days, especially, there were many whom Neo-Platonism, the Puseyism of paganism, cast up from the ocean of unclean error upon the shores of the Church. Take the case of Justin Martyr: he was a young Oriental of noble birth and considerable wealth. In the early part of the second century, we find him trying first one school of philosophers and then another, and abandoning each in disgust. The Stoics would talk to him of nothing but virtues and vices, of regulating the diet and curbing the passions, and keeping the intellect as quiet as possible--a convenient way, as experience taught them, of avoiding trouble; whereas Justin wanted to hear something of the Absolute Being, and of that Being's dealings with his own soul--a kind of inquiry which the Stoics considered altogether useless and ridiculous, if not reprehensible. Leaving the Stoics, he devoted himself heart and soul to a sharp Peripatetic, but quarrelled with him shortly and left him in disgust; the cause of disagreement being, apparently, a practical theory entertained by his preceptor on the subject of fees. He next took to the disciples of Pythagoras. But with these he succeeded no better than with the others; for the Pythagoreans reminded him that no one ignorant of mathematics could be admitted into their select society. Mathematics, in a Pythagorean point of view, included geometry, astronomy, and music--all those sciences, in fact, in which there was any scope for those extraordinary freaks of numbers which delighted the followers of the old vegetarian. Justin, having no inclination to undergo a novitiate in mathematics, abandoned the Pythagoreans and went elsewhere. The Platonists were the next who attracted him. He found no lack of employment for the highest qualities of his really noble soul in the lofty visions of Plato and the sublimated theories of his disciples and commentators; though it appears a little singular that, with his propensities toward the ideal and abstract, he should have tried so many masters before he {43} sat down under Plato. However, be that as it may, Plato seems to have satisfied him for a while, and he began to think he was growing a very wise man, when these illusions were rudely dispelled. One day he had walked down to a lonely spot by the sea-shore, meditating, probably, some deep idea, and perhaps declaiming occasionally some passage of Plato's Olympian Greek. In his solitary walk he met an old man, and entered into conversation with him. The event of this conversation was that Justin went home with a wonderfully reduced estimate of his own wisdom, and a determination to get to know a few things about which Plato, on the old man's showing, had been woefully in the dark. Justin became a convert to Christianity. Now, Justin had been at Alexandria, and, whether the conversation he relates ever really took place, or is merely an oratorical fiction, the story is one that represents substantially what must have happened over and over again to those who thronged the university of Alexandria, wearing the black cloak of the philosopher.

Justin lived and was martyred some half a century before Clement sat in the chair of the catechisms. But it is quite plain that, in such a state of society, there would not be wanting many of his class and temperament who, in Clement's time, as well as fifty years before, were in search of the true philosophy. And we must not forget that in Alexandria there were actually thousands of well-born, intellectual young men from every part of the Roman empire. To the earnest among these Clement was, indeed, no ordinary master. In the first place, he was their equal by birth and education, with all the intellectual keenness of his native Athens, and all the ripeness and versatility of one who had "seen many cities of men and their manners." Next, he had himself been a Gentile, and had gone through all those phases of the soul that precede and accompany the process of conversion. If any one knew their difficulties and their sore places, it was he, the converted philosopher. If any one was capable of satisfying a generous mind as to which was the true philosophy, it was he who had travelled the world over in search of it. He could tell the swarthy Syrian that it was of no use to seek the classic regions of Ionia, for he had tried them, and the truth was not there; he could assure him it was waste of time to go to Athens, for the Porch and the Garden were babbling of vain questions--he had listened in them all. He could calm the ardor of the young Athenian, his countryman, eager to try the banks of the Orontes, and to interrogate the sages of Syria; for he could tell him beforehand what they would say. He could shake his head when the young Egyptian, fresh from the provincial luxury of Antinoe, mentioned Magna Graecia as a mysterious land where the secret of knowledge was perhaps in the hands of the descendants of the Pelasgi. _He_ had tried Tarentum, he had tried Neapolis; they were worse than the Serapeion in unnameable licentiousness--less in earnest than the votaries that crowded the pleasure-barges of the Nile at a festival of the Moon. He had asked, he had tried, he had tasted. The truth, he could tell them, was at their doors. It was elsewhere, too. It was in Neapolis, in Antioch, in Athens, in Rome; but they would not find it taught in the chairs of the schools, nor discussed by noble frequenters of the baths and the theatres. He knew it, and he could tell it to them. And as he added many a tale of his wanderings and searchings--many an instance of genius falling short, of good-will laboring in the dark, of earnestness painfully at fault--many of those who heard him would yield themselves up to the vigorous thinker whose brow showed both the capacity and the unwearied activity of the soul within. He was the very man to be made a hero of. Whatever there was in the circle of Gentile philosophy he knew. St. Jerome calls {44} him the "most learned of the writers of the Church," and St. Jerome must have spoken with the sons of those who had heard him lecture--noble Christian patricians, perchance, whose fathers had often told them how, in fervent boyhood, they had been spell-bound by his words in the Christian school of Alexandria, or learned bishops of Palestine, who had heard of him from Origen at Caesarea or St. Alexander at Jerusalem. From the same St. Alexander, who had listened to Pantaenus by his side, we learn that he was as holy as he was learned; and Theodoret, whose school did not dispose him to admire what came from the catechetical doctors of Alexandria, is our authority for saying that his "eloquence was unsurpassed." In the fourth edition of Cave's "Apostolici," there is a portrait that we would fain vouch to be genuine. The massive, earnest face, of the Aristotelian type, the narrow, perpendicular Grecian brow, with its corrugations of thought and care, the venerable flowing beard, dignifying, but not concealing, the homely and fatherly mouth, seem to suggest a man who had made all science his own, yet who now valued a little one of Jesus Christ above all human wisdom and learning. But we have no record of those features that were once the cynosure of many eyes in the "many-peopled" city; we have no memorial of the figure that spoke the truths of the Gospel in the words of Plato. We know not how he looked, nor how he sat, when he began with his favorite master, and showed, with inexhaustible learning, where he had caught sight of the truth, and, again, where his mighty but finite intellect had failed for want of a more "admirable light;" nor how he kindled when he had led his hearers through the vestibule of the old philosophy, and stood ready to lift the curtain of that which was at once its consummation and its annihilation.

But the philosophers of Alexandria, so-called, were by no means, without exception, earnest, high-minded, and well-meaning. Leaving out of the question the mob of students who came ostensibly for wisdom, but got only a very doubtful substitute, and were quite content with it, we know that the Museum was the headquarters of an anti-Christian philosophy which, in Clement's time, was in the very spring of its vigorous development. Exactly contemporary with him was the celebrated Ammonius the Porter, the teacher of Plotinus, and therefore the parent of Neo-Platonism. Ammonius had a very great name and a very numerous school. That he was a Christian by birth, there is no doubt; and he was probably a Christian still when he landed at the Great Port and found employment as a ship-porter. History is divided as to his behavior after his wonderful elevation from the warehouses to the halls of the Museum. St. Jerome and Eusebius deny that he apostatized, while the very questionable authority of the unscrupulous Porphyry is the only testimony that can be adduced on the other side; but, even if he continued to be a Christian, his orthodoxy is rather damaged when we find him praised by such men as Plotinus, Longinus, and Hierocles. Some would cut the knot by asserting the existence of two Ammoniuses, one a pagan apostate, the other a Christian bishop--a solution equally contradicted by the witnesses on both sides. But, whatever Saccas was, there is no doubt as to what was the effect of his teaching on, at least, half of his hearers. If we might hazard a conjecture, we should say that he appears to have been a man of great cleverness, and even genius, but too much in love with his own brilliancy and his own speculations not to come across the ecclesiastical authority in a more or less direct way. He supplied many imposing premises which Origen, representing the sound half of his audience, used for Christian purposes, whilst Plotinus employed them for revivifying the dead body of paganism. The brilliant sack-bearer seems to have been, at the very least, a liberal {45} Christian, who was too gentlemanly to mention so very vulgar a thing as the Christian "superstition" in the classic gardens of the palace, or at the serene banquets of sages in the Symposium.

The question, then, is, How did Christianity, as a philosophy, stand in relation to the affluent professors of Ptolemy's university? That they had been forced to see there was such a thing as Christianity, before the time of which we speak (A.D. 200), it is impossible to doubt. It must have dawned upon the comprehension of the most imperturbable grammarian and the most materialist surgeon of the Museum that a new teaching of some kind was slowly but surely striking root in the many forms of life that surrounded them. Rumors must long before have been heard in the common hall that executions had taken place of several members of a new sect or society, said to be impious in its tenets and disloyal in its practice. No doubt the assembled sages had expended at the time much intricate quibble and pun, after heavy Alexandrian fashion, on the subject of those wretched men; more especially when it was put beyond doubt that no promises of reward or threats of punishment had availed to make them compromise their "opinions" in the slightest tittle. Then the matter would die out, to be revived several times in the same way; until at last some one would make inquiries, and would find that the new sect was not only spreading, but, though composed apparently of the poor and the humble, was clearly something very different from the fantastic religions or brutal no-religions of the Alexandrian mob. It would be gradually found out, moreover, that men of name and of parts were in its ranks; nay, some day of days, that learned company in the Hall would miss one of its own number, after the most reverend the curator had asked a blessing--if ever he did--and it would come out that Professor So-and-so, learned and austere as he was, had become a Christian! And some would merely wonder, but, that past, would ask their neighbor, in the equivalent Attic, if there were to be no more cakes and ale, because _he_ had proved himself a fool; others would wonder, and feel disturbed, and think about asking a question or two, though not to the extent of abandoning their seats at that comfortable board.

The majority, doubtless, at Alexandria as elsewhere, set down Christianity as some new superstition, freshly imported from the home of all superstitions, the East. There were some who hated it, and pursued it with a vehemence of malignant lying that can suggest only one source of inspiration, that is to say, the father of all lies himself. Of this class were Crescens the Cynic, the prime favorite of Marcus Aurelius, and Celsus, called the Epicurean, but who, in his celebrated book, written at this very time, appears as veritable a Platonist as Plotinus himself. Then, again, there were others who found no difficulty in recognizing Christianity as a sister philosophy--who, in fact, rather welcomed it as affording fresh material for dialectics--good, easy men of routine, blind enough to the vital questions which the devil's advocates clearly saw to be at stake. Galen is pre-eminently a writer who has reflected the current gossip of the day. He was a hard student in his youth, and a learned and even high-minded man in his maturity, but he frequently shows himself in his writings as the "fashionable physician," with one or two of the weaknesses of that well-known character. He spent a long time at Alexandria, just before Clement became famous, studying under Heraclian, consulting the immortal Hippocrates, and profiting by the celebrated dissecting-rooms of the Museum, in which, unless they are belied, the interests of science were so paramount that they used to dissect--not live horses; but living slaves. He could not, therefore, fail to have known how Christianity was regarded at the Museum. Speaking of Christians, then, in his works, he of course retails a good deal of {46} nonsense about them, such as we can imagine him to have exchanged with the rich gluttons and swollen philosophers whom he had to attend professionally in Roman society; but when he speaks seriously, and of what he had himself observed, he says, frankly and honestly, that the Christians deserved very great praise for sobriety of life, and for their love of virtue, in which they equalled or surpassed the greatest philosophers of the age. So thought, in all probability, many of the learned men of Alexandria.

The Church, on her side, was not averse to appearing before the Gentiles in the garb of philosophy, and it was very natural that the Christian teachers should encourage this idea, with the aim and hope of gaining admittance for themselves and their good tidings into the very heart of pagan learning. And was not Christianity a philosophy? In the truest sense of the word--and, what is more to the purpose, in the sense of the philosophers of Alexandria--it was a philosophy. The narrowed meaning that in our days is assigned to philosophy, as distinguished from religion, had no existence in the days of Clement. Wisdom was the wisdom by excellence, the highest, _the_ ultimate wisdom. What the Hebrew preacher meant when he said, "Wisdom is better than all the most precious things," the same was intended by the Alexandrian lecturer when he offered to show his hearers where wisdom was to be found. It meant the fruit of the highest speculation, and at the same time the necessary ground of all-important practice. In our days the child learns at the altar-rails that its end is to love God, and serve him, and be happy with him; and after many years have passed, the child, now a man, studies and speculates on the reasons and the bearings of that short, momentous sentence. In the old Greek world the intellectual search came first, and the practical sentence was the wished-for result. A system of philosophy was, therefore, in Clement's time, tantamount to a religion. It was the case especially with the learned. Serapis and Isis were all very well for the "old women and the sailors," but the laureate and the astronomer royal of the Ptolemies, and the professors, many and diverse, of arts and ethics, in the Museum, scarcely took pains to conceal their utter contempt for the worship of the vulgar. Their idols were something more spiritual, their incense was of a more ethereal kind. Could they not dispute about the Absolute Being? and had they not glimpses of something indefinitely above and yet indefinably related to their own souls, in the Logos of the divine Plato? So the Stoic mortified his flesh for the sake of some ulterior perfectibility of which he could give no clear account to himself; the Epicurean contrived to take his fill of pleasure, on the maxim that enjoyment was the end of our being, "and tomorrow we die;" the Platonist speculated and pursued his "air-travelling and cloud-questioning," like Socrates in the basket, in a vain but tempting endeavor to see what God was to man and man to God; the Peripatetic, the Eclectic, and all the rest, disputed, scoffed, or dogmatized about many things, certainly, but, mainly and finally, on those questions that will never lie still:--Who are we? and, Who placed us here? Philosophy included religion, and therefore Christianity was a philosophy.

When Clement, then, told the philosophers of Alexandria that he could teach them the true philosophy, he was saying not only what was perfectly true, but what was perfectly understood by them. The catechetical school was, and appeared to them, as truly a philosophical lecture-room as the halls of the Museum. Clement himself had been an ardent philosopher, and he reverently loved his masters, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, whilst he had the feelings of a brother toward the philosophers of his own day. He became a Christian, and his dearest object was to win his brethren to a participation in his own good fortune. {47} He did not burn his philosophical books and anathematize his masters; like St. Paul, he availed himself of the good that was in them and commended it, and then proclaimed that he had the key of the treasure which they had labored to find and had not found. This explains how it is that, in Clement of Alexandria, the philosopher's mantle seems almost to hide the simple garb of the Christian. This also explains why he is called, and indeed calls himself, an Eclectic in his system; and this marks out the drift and the aim of the many allusions to philosophy that we find in his extant works, and in the traditions of his teaching that have come down to us. If Christianity was truly called a philosophy, what should we expect in its champion but that he should be a philosopher? Men in these days read the _Stromata_, and find that it is, on the outside, more like Plato than like Jesus Christ; and thus they make small account of it, because they cannot understand its style, or the reason for its adoption. The grounds of questions and the forms of thought have shifted since the days of the catechetical school. But Clement's fellow-citizens understood him. The thrifty young Byzantine, for instance, understood him, who had been half-inclined to join the Stoics, but had come, in his threadbare pallium, to hear the Christian teacher, and who was told that asceticism was very good and commendable, but that the end of it all was God and the love of God, and that this end could only be attained by a Christian. The languid but intellectual man of fashion understood him, who had grown sick of the jargon of his Platonist professors about the perfect man and the archetypal humanity, and who now felt his inmost nature stirred to its depths by the announcement and description of the Word made flesh. The learned stranger from Antioch or Athens, seeking for the truth, understood him, when he said that the Christian dogma alone could create and perfect the true Gnostic or Knower; he understood perfectly the importance of the object, provided the assertion were true, as it might turn out to be. Unless Clement had spoken of asceticism, of the perfect man, and of the true Gnostic, his teaching would not have come home to the self-denying student, to the thoughtful sage, to the brilliant youth, to all that was great and generous and amiable in the huge heathen society of the crowded city. As it was, he gained a hearing, and, having done so, he said to the Alexandrians, "Your masters in philosophy are great and noble: I honor them, I admire and accept them; but they did not go far enough, as you all acknowledge. Come to us, then, and we will show what is wanting in them. Listen to these old Hebrew writers whom I will quote to you. You see that they treated of all your problems, and had solved the deepest of them, whilst your forefathers were groping in darkness. All their light, and much more, is our inheritance. The truth, which you seek, we possess. 'What you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you.' God's Word has been made flesh--has lived on this earth, the model man, the absolute man. Come to us, and we will show you how you may know God through him, and how through him God communicates himself to you." But here he stopped. The "discipline of the secret" allowed him to go no further in public. The listening Christians knew well what he meant; his pagan hearers only surmised that there was more behind. And was it not much that Christianity should thus measure strength and challenge a contest with the old Greek civilization on equal terms, and about those very matters of intellect and high ethics in which it especially prided itself?

But the contest, never a friendly one, save with the dullest and easiest of the pagan philosophers, very soon grew to be war to the knife. We have said that the quiet lovers of literature among the heathen men of science were perfectly ready to admit the Christian philosophy to a fair share {48} in the arena of disputation and discussion, looking upon it as being, at worst, only a foolish system of obtrusive novelties, which might safely be left to their own insignificancy. But, quite unexpectedly and startlingly for easy-going philosophers, Christianity was found, not merely to claim the possession of truth, but to claim it wholly and solely. And, what was still more intolerable, its doctors maintained that its adoption or rejection was no open speculative question, but a tremendous practical matter, involving nothing less than all morality here and all happiness hereafter; and that the unfortunate philosopher, who, in his lofty serenity, approved it as right, and yet followed the wrong, would have to undergo certain horrors after death, the bare suggestion of which seemed an outrage on the dignity of the philosophical character. This was quite enough for hatred; and the philosophers, as their eyes began to open, saw that Crescens and Celsus were right, and accorded their hatred most freely and heartily.

But Christianity did not stop here. With the old original schools and their offshoots it was a recognized principle that philosophy was only for philosophers; and this was especially true of Clement's most influential contemporaries, the Neo-Platonists. The vulgar had no part in it, in fact could not come within the sphere of its influence; how could they? How could the sailors, who, after a voyage, went to pay their vows in the temple of Neptune on the quay, or the porters who dragged the grain sacks and the hemp bundles from the tall warehouses to the holds of Syrian and Greek merchantmen, or the negro slaves who fanned the brows of the foreign prince, or the armorers of the Jews' quarter, or the dark-skinned, bright-eyed Egyptian women of the Rhacotis suspected of all evil from thieving to sorcery, or, more than all, the drunken revellers and poor harlots who made night hideous when the Egyptian moon looked down on the palaces of the Brucheion--how could any of these find access to the sublime secrets of Plato or the profound commentaries of his disciples? Even if they had come in crowds to the lecture-halls--which no one wanted them to do, or supposed they would do--they could not have been admitted nor entertained; for even the honest occupations of life, the daily labors necessary in a city of 300,000 freemen, were incompatible with imbibing the divine spirit of philosophy. So the philosophers had nothing to say to all these. If they had been asked what would become of such poor workers and sinners, they would probably have avoided an answer as best they could. There were the temples and Serapis and Isis and the priests--they might go to them. It was certain that philosophy was not meant for the vulgar. In fact, philosophy would be unworthy of a habitation like the Museum--would deserve to have its pensions stopped, its common hall abolished, and its lecture-rooms shut up--if ever it should condescend to step into the streets and speak to the herd. It was, therefore, with a disgust unspeakable, and a swiftly-ripening hatred, that the philosophers saw Christianity openly proclaiming and practising the very opposite of all this. True, it had learned men and respected men in its ranks, but it loudly declared that its mission was to the lowly, and the mean, and the degraded, quite as much as to the noble, and the rich, and the virtuous. It maintained that the true divine philosophy, the source of joy for the present and hope for the future, was as much in the power of the despised bondsman, trembling under the lash, as of the prince-governor, or the Caesar himself, haughtily wielding the insignia of sovereignty. _We_ know what its pretensions and tenets were, but it is difficult to realize how they must have clashed with the notions of intellectual paganism in the city of Plotinus--how the hands that would have been gladly held out in friendship, had it come in respectable {49} and conventional guise, were shut and clenched, when they saw in its train the rough mechanic, the poor maid-servant, the negro, and the harlot. There could be no compromise between two systems such as these. For a time it might have seemed as if they could decide their quarrel in the schools, but the old Serpent and his chief agents knew better: and so did Clement and the Christian doctors, at the very time that they were taking advantage of fair weather to occupy every really strong position which the enemy held. The struggle soon grew into the deadly hand-to-hand grapple that ended in leaving the corpse of paganism on the ground, dead but not buried, to be gradually trodden out of sight by a new order of things.