Alexandria and her Schools
by
Charles Kingsley
Part 1 out of 2
ALEXANDRIA AND HER SCHOOLS {1}
PREFACE
I should not have presumed to choose for any lectures of mine such a
subject as that which I have tried to treat in this book. The subject
was chosen by the Institution where the lectures were delivered. Still
less should I have presumed to print them of my own accord, knowing how
fragmentary and crude they are. They were printed at the special
request of my audience. Least of all, perhaps, ought I to have presumed
to publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or
sciolism (and that such defects exist in these pages, I cannot but fear)
would be instantly detected, and severely censured: but nevertheless,
it seemed to me that Cambridge was the fittest place in which they could
see the light, because to Cambridge I mainly owe what little right
method or sound thought may be found in them, or indeed, in anything
which I have ever written. In the heyday of youthful greediness and
ambition, when the mind, dazzled by the vastness and variety of the
universe, must needs know everything, or rather know about everything,
at once and on the spot, too many are apt, as I have been in past years,
to complain of Cambridge studies as too dry and narrow: but as time
teaches the student, year by year, what is really required for an
understanding of the objects with which he meets, he begins to find that
his University, in as far as he has really received her teaching into
himself, has given him, in her criticism, her mathematics, above all, in
Plato, something which all the popular knowledge, the lectures and
institutions of the day, and even good books themselves, cannot give, a
boon more precious than learning; namely, the art of learning. That
instead of casting into his lazy lap treasures which he would not have
known how to use, she has taught him to mine for them himself; and has
by her wise refusal to gratify his intellectual greediness, excited his
hunger, only that he may be the stronger to hunt and till for his own
subsistence; and thus, the deeper he drinks, in after years, at
fountains wisely forbidden to him while he was a Cambridge student, and
sees his old companions growing up into sound-headed and sound-hearted
practical men, liberal and expansive, and yet with a firm standing-
ground for thought and action, he learns to complain less and less of
Cambridge studies, and more and more of that conceit and haste of his
own, which kept him from reaping the full advantage of her training.
These Lectures, as I have said, are altogether crude and fragmentary--
how, indeed, could they be otherwise, dealing with so vast a subject,
and so long a period of time? They are meant neither as Essays nor as
Orations, but simply as a collection of hints to those who may wish to
work out the subject for themselves; and, I trust, as giving some
glimpses of a central idea, in the light of which the spiritual history
of Alexandria, and perhaps of other countries also, may be seen to have
in itself a coherence and organic method.
I was of course compelled, by the circumstances under which these
Lectures were delivered, to keep clear of all points which are commonly
called "controversial." I cannot but feel that this was a gain, rather
than a loss; because it forced me, if I wished to give any
interpretation at all of Alexandrian thought, any Theodicy at all of her
fate, to refer to laws which I cannot but believe to be deeper, wider,
more truly eternal than the points which cause most of our modern
controversies, either theological or political; laws which will, I
cannot but believe also, reassert themselves, and have to be reasserted
by all wise teachers, very soon indeed, and it may be under most novel
embodiments, but without any change in their eternal spirit.
For I may say, I hope, now (what if said ten years ago would have only
excited laughter), that I cannot but subscribe to the opinion of the
many wise men who believe that Europe, and England as an integral part
thereof, is on the eve of a revolution, spiritual and political, as vast
and awful as that which took place at the Reformation; and that,
beneficial as that revolution will doubtless be to the destinies of
mankind in general, it depends upon the wisdom and courage of each
nation individually, whether that great deluge shall issue, as the
Reformation did, in a fresh outgrowth of European nobleness and strength
or usher in, after pitiable confusions and sorrows, a second Byzantine
age of stereotyped effeminacy and imbecility. For I have as little
sympathy with those who prate so loudly of the progress of the species,
and the advent of I know-not-what Cockaigne of universal peace and
plenty, as I have with those who believe on the strength of "unfulfilled
prophecy," the downfall of Christianity, and the end of the human race
to be at hand. Nevertheless, one may well believe that prophecy will be
fulfilled in this great crisis, as it is in every great crisis, although
one be unable to conceive by what method of symbolism the drying up of
the Euphrates can be twisted to signify the fall of Constantinople: and
one can well believe that a day of judgment is at hand, in which for
every nation and institution, the wheat will be sifted out and gathered
into God's garner, for the use of future generations, and the chaff
burnt up with that fire unquenchable which will try every man's work,
without being of opinion that after a few more years are over, the great
majority of the human race will be consigned hopelessly to never-ending
torments.
If prophecy be indeed a divine message to man; if it be anything but a
cabbala, useless either to the simple-minded or to the logical, intended
only for the plaything of a few devout fancies, it must declare the
unchangeable laws by which the unchangeable God is governing, and has
always governed, the human race; and therefore only by understanding
what has happened, can we understand what will happen; only by
understanding history, can we understand prophecy; and that not merely
by picking out--too often arbitrarily and unfairly--a few names and
dates from the records of all the ages, but by trying to discover its
organic laws, and the causes which produce in nations, creeds, and
systems, health and disease, growth, change, decay and death. If, in
one small corner of this vast field, I shall have thrown a single ray of
light upon these subjects--if I shall have done anything in these pages
towards illustrating the pathology of a single people, I shall believe
that I have done better service to the Catholic Faith and the
Scriptures, than if I did really "know the times and the seasons, which
the Father has kept in His own hand." For by the former act I may have
helped to make some one man more prudent and brave to see and to do what
God requires of him; by the latter I could only add to that paralysis of
superstitious fear, which is already but too common among us, and but
too likely to hinder us from doing our duty manfully against our real
foes, whether it be pestilence at home or tyranny abroad.
These last words lead me to another subject, on which I am bound to say
a few words. I have, at the end of these Lectures, made some allusion
to the present war. To have entered further into political questions
would have been improper in the place where those Lectures were
delivered: but I cannot refrain from saying here something more on this
matter; and that, first, because all political questions have their real
root in moral and spiritual ones, and not (as too many fancy) in
questions merely relating to the balance of power or commercial economy,
and are (the world being under the guidance of a spiritual, and not a
physical Being) finally decided on those spiritual grounds, and
according to the just laws of the kingdom of God; and, therefore, the
future political horoscope of the East depends entirely on the present
spiritual state of its inhabitants, and of us who have (and rightly)
taken up their cause; in short, on many of those questions on which I
have touched in these Lectures: and next, because I feel bound, in
justice to myself, to guard against any mistake about my meaning or
supposition that I consider the Turkish empire a righteous thing, or one
likely to stand much longer on the face of God's earth.
The Turkish empire, as it now exists, seems to me an altogether
unrighteous and worthless thing. It stands no longer upon the assertion
of the great truth of Islam, but on the merest brute force and
oppression. It has long since lost the only excuse which one race can
have for holding another in subjection; that which we have for taking on
ourselves the tutelage of the Hindoos, and which Rome had for its
tutelage of the Syrians and Egyptians; namely, the governing with
tolerable justice those who cannot govern themselves, and making them
better and more prosperous people, by compelling them to submit to law.
I do not know when this excuse is a sufficient one. God showed that it
was so for several centuries in the case of the Romans; God will show
whether it is in the case of our Indian empire: but this I say, that
the Turkish empire has not even that excuse to plead; as is proved by
the patent fact that the whole East, the very garden of the old world,
has become a desert and a ruin under the upas-blight of their
government.
As for the regeneration of Turkey, it is a question whether the
regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant
savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. Still
more is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the
rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply
by more perfect material appliances, and commercial prudence. History
gives no instance, it seems to me, of either case; and if our attempt to
regenerate Greece by freeing it has been an utter failure, much more, it
seems to me, would any such attempt fail in the case of the Turkish
race. For what can be done with a people which has lost the one great
quality which was the tenure of its existence, its military skill? Let
any one read the accounts of the Turkish armies in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when they were the tutors and
models of all Europe in the art of war, and then consider the fact that
those very armies require now to be officered by foreign adventurers, in
order to make them capable of even keeping together, and let him ask
himself seriously, whether such a fall can ever be recovered. When, in
the age of Theodosius, and again in that of Justinian, the Roman armies
had fallen into the same state; when the Italian legions required to be
led by Stilicho the Vandal, and the Byzantine by Belisar the Sclav and
Narses the Persian, the end of all things was at hand, and came; as it
will come soon to Turkey.
But if Turkey deserves to fall, and must fall, it must not fall by our
treachery. Its sins will surely be avenged upon it: but wrong must not
avenge wrong, or the penalty is only passed on from one sinner to
another. Whatsoever element of good is left in the Turk, to that we
must appeal as our only means, if not of saving him, still of helping
him to a quiet euthanasia, and absorption into a worthier race of
successors. He is said (I know not how truly) to have one virtue left;
that of faithfulness to his word. Only by showing him that we too abhor
treachery and bad faith, can we either do him good, or take a safe
standing-ground in our own peril. And this we have done; and for this
we shall be rewarded. But this is surely not all our duty. Even if we
should be able to make the civil and religious freedom of the Eastern
Christians the price of our assistance to the Mussulman, the struggle
will not be over; for Russia will still be what she has always been, and
the northern Anarch will be checked, only to return to the contest with
fiercer lust of aggrandisement, to enact the part of a new Macedon,
against a new Greece, divided, not united, by the treacherous bond of
that balance of power, which is but war under the guise of peace.
Europe needs a holier and more spiritual, and therefore a stronger
union, than can be given by armed neutralities, and the so-called cause
of order. She needs such a bond as in the Elizabethan age united the
free states of Europe against the Anarch of Spain, and delivered the
Western nations from a rising world-tyranny, which promised to be even
more hideous than the elder one of Rome. If, as then, England shall
proclaim herself the champion of freedom by acts, and not by words and
paper, she may, as she did then, defy the rulers of the darkness of this
world, for the God of Light will be with her. But, as yet, it is
impossible to look without sad forebodings upon the destiny of a war,
begun upon the express understanding that evil shall be left triumphant
throughout Europe, wheresoever that evil does not seem, to our own
selfish short-sightedness, to threaten us with immediate danger; with
promises, that under the hollow name of the Cause of Order--and that
promise made by a revolutionary Anarch--the wrongs of Italy, Hungary,
Poland, Sweden, shall remain unredressed, and that Prussia and Austria,
two tyrannies, the one far more false and hypocritical, the other even
more rotten than that of Turkey, shall, if they will but observe a
hollow and uncertain neutrality (for who can trust the liar and the
oppressor?)--be allowed not only to keep their ill-gotten spoils, but
even now to play into the hands of our foe, by guarding his Polish
frontier for him, and keeping down the victims of his cruelty, under
pretence of keeping down those of their own.
It is true, the alternative is an awful one; one from which statesmen
and nations may well shrink: but it is a question, whether that
alternative may not be forced upon us sooner or later, whether we must
not from the first look it boldly in the face, as that which must be
some day, and for which we must prepare, not cowardly, and with cries
about God's wrath and judgments against us--which would be abject, were
they not expressed in such second-hand stock-phrases as to make one
altogether doubt their sincerity, but chivalrously, and with awful joy,
as a noble calling, an honour put upon us by the God of Nations, who
demands of us, as some small return for all His free bounties, that we
should be, in this great crisis, the champions of Freedom and of
Justice, which are the cause of God. At all events, we shall not escape
our duty by being afraid of it; we shall not escape our duty by
inventing to ourselves some other duty, and calling it "Order."
Elizabeth did so at first. She tried to keep the peace with Spain; she
shrank from injuring the cause of Order (then a nobler one than now,
because it was the cause of Loyalty, and not merely of Mammon) by
assisting the Scotch and the Netherlanders: but her duty was forced
upon her; and she did it at last, cheerfully, boldly, utterly, like a
hero; she put herself at the head of the battle for the freedom of the
world, and she conquered, for God was with her; and so that seemingly
most fearful of all England's perils, when the real meaning of it was
seen, and God's will in it obeyed manfully, became the foundation of
England's naval and colonial empire, and laid the foundation of all her
future glories. So it was then, so it is now; so it will be for ever:
he who seeks to save his life will lose it: he who willingly throws
away his life for the cause of mankind, which is the cause of God, the
Father of mankind, he shall save it, and be rewarded a hundred-fold.
That God may grant us, the children of the Elizabethan heroes, all
wisdom to see our duty, and courage to do it, even to the death, should
be our earliest prayer. Our statesmen have done wisely and well in
refusing, in spite of hot-headed clamours, to appeal to the sword as
long as there was any chance of a peaceful settlement even of a single
evil. They are doing wisely and well now in declining to throw away the
scabbard as long as there is hope that a determined front will awe the
offender into submission: but the day may come when the scabbard must
be thrown away; and God grant that they may have the courage to do it.
It is reported that our rulers have said, that English diplomacy can no
longer recognise "nationalities," but only existing "governments." God
grant that they may see in time that the assertion of national life, as
a spiritual and indefeasible existence, was for centuries the central
idea of English policy; the idea by faith in which she delivered first
herself, and then the Protestant nations of the Continent, successively
from the yokes of Rome, of Spain, of France; and that they may reassert
that most English of all truths again, let the apparent cost be what it
may.
It is true, that this end will not be attained without what is called
nowadays "a destruction of human life." But we have yet to learn (at
least if the doctrines which I have tried to illustrate in this little
book have any truth in them) whether shot or shell has the power of
taking away human life; and to believe, if we believe our Bibles, that
human life can only be destroyed by sin, and that all which is lost in
battle is that animal life of which it is written, "Fear not those who
can kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do: but I
will forewarn you whom you shall fear; him who, after he has killed, has
power to destroy both body and soul in hell." Let a man fear him, the
destroying devil, and fear therefore cowardice, disloyalty, selfishness,
sluggishness, which are his works, and to be utterly afraid of which is
to be truly brave. God grant that we of the clergy may remember this
during the coming war, and instead of weakening the righteous courage
and honour of our countrymen by instilling into them selfish and
superstitious fears, and a theory of the future state which represents
God, not as a saviour, but a tormentor, may boldly tell them that "He is
not the God of the dead but of the living; for all live unto Him;" and
that he who renders up his animal life as a worthless thing, in the
cause of duty, commits his real and human life, his very soul and self,
into the hands of a just and merciful Father, who has promised to leave
no good deed unrewarded, and least of all that most noble deed, the
dying like a man for the sake not merely of this land of England, but of
the freedom and national life of half the world.
LECTURE I--THE PTOLEMAIC ERA
Before I begin to lecture upon the Physical and Metaphysical schools of
Alexandria, it may be better, perhaps, to define the meaning of these
two epithets. Physical, we shall all agree, means that which belongs to
[Greek text: phusis]; natura; nature, that which [Greek text:
phuetai], nascitur, grows, by an organic life, and therefore decays
again; which has a beginning, and therefore, I presume, an end. And
Metaphysical means that which we learn to think of after we think of
nature; that which is supernatural, in fact, having neither beginning
nor end, imperishable, immovable, and eternal, which does not become,
but always is. These, at least, are the wisest definitions of these two
terms for us just now; for they are those which were received by the
whole Alexandrian school, even by those commentators who say that
Aristotle, the inventor of the term Metaphysics, named his treatise so
only on account of its following in philosophic sequence his book on
Physics.
But, according to these definitions, the whole history of Alexandria
might be to us, from one point of view, a physical school; for
Alexandria, its society and its philosophy, were born, and grew, and
fed, and reached their vigour, and had their old age, their death, even
as a plant or an animal has; and after they were dead and dissolved, the
atoms of them formed food for new creations, entered into new
organisations, just as the atoms of a dead plant or animal might do.
Was Alexandria then, from beginning to end, merely a natural and
physical phenomenon?
It may have been. And yet we cannot deny that Alexandria was also a
metaphysical phenomenon, vast and deep enough; seeing that it held for
some eighteen hundred years a population of several hundred thousand
souls; each of whom, at least according to the Alexandrian philosophy,
stood in a very intimate relation to those metaphysic things which are
imperishable and immovable and eternal, and indeed, contained them more
or less, each man, woman, and child of them in themselves; having wills,
reasons, consciences, affections, relations to each other; being
parents, children, helpmates, bound together by laws concerning right
and wrong, and numberless other unseen and spiritual relations.
Surely such a body was not merely natural, any more than any other
nation, society, or scientific school, made up of men and of the
spirits, thoughts, affections of men. It, like them, was surely
spiritual; and could be only living and healthy, in as far as it was in
harmony with certain spiritual, unseen, and everlasting laws of God;
perhaps, as certain Alexandrian philosophers would have held, in as far
as it was a pattern of that ideal constitution and polity after which
man was created, the city of God which is eternal in the Heavens. If
so, may we not suspect of this Alexandria that it was its own fault if
it became a merely physical phenomenon; and that it stooped to become a
part of nature, and took its place among the things which are born to
die, only by breaking the law which God had appointed for it; so
fulfilling, in its own case, St. Paul's great words, that death entered
into the world by sin, and that sin is the transgression of the law?
Be that as it may, there must have been metaphysic enough to be learnt
in that, or any city of three hundred thousand inhabitants, even though
it had never contained lecture-room or philosopher's chair, and had
never heard the names of Aristotle and Plato. Metaphysic enough,
indeed, to be learnt there, could we but enter into the heart of even
the most brutish negro slave who ever was brought down the Nile out of
the desert by Nubian merchants, to build piers and docks in whose
commerce he did not share, temples whose worship he did not comprehend,
libraries and theatres whose learning and civilisation were to him as
much a sealed book as they were to his countryman, and fellow-slave, and
only friend, the ape. There was metaphysic enough in him truly, and
things eternal and immutable, though his dark-skinned descendants were
three hundred years in discovering the fact, and in proving it
satisfactorily to all mankind for ever. You must pardon me if I seem
obscure; I cannot help looking at the question with a somewhat
Alexandrian eye, and talking of the poor negro dock-worker as certain
Alexandrian philosophers would have talked, of whom I shall have to
speak hereafter.
I should have been glad, therefore, had time permitted me, instead of
confining myself strictly to what are now called "the physic and
metaphysic schools" of Alexandria, to have tried as well as I could to
make you understand how the whole vast phenomenon grew up, and supported
a peculiar life of its own, for fifteen hundred years and more, and was
felt to be the third, perhaps the second city of the known world, and
one so important to the great world-tyrant, the Caesar of Rome, that no
Roman of distinction was ever sent there as prefect, but the Alexandrian
national vanity and pride of race was allowed to the last to pet itself
by having its tyrant chosen from its own people.
But, though this cannot be, we may find human elements enough in the
schools of Alexandria, strictly so called, to interest us for a few
evenings; for these schools were schools of men; what was discovered and
taught was discovered and taught by men, and not by thinking-machines;
and whether they would have been inclined to confess it or not, their
own personal characters, likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, strength
and weakness, beliefs and disbeliefs, determined their metaphysics and
their physics for them, quite enough to enable us to feel for them as
men of like passions with ourselves; and for that reason only, men whose
thoughts and speculations are worthy of a moment's attention from us.
For what is really interesting to man, save men, and God, the Father of
men?
In the year 331 B.C. one of the greatest intellects whose influence the
world has ever felt, saw, with his eagle glance, the unrivalled
advantage of the spot which is now Alexandria; and conceived the mighty
project of making it the point of union of two, or rather of three
worlds. In a new city, named after himself, Europe, Asia, and Africa
were to meet and to hold communion. A glance at the map will show you
what an [Greek text: omphalosgees], a centre of the world, this
Alexandria is, and perhaps arouse in your minds, as it has often done in
mine, the suspicion that it has not yet fulfilled its whole destiny, but
may become at any time a prize for contending nations, or the centre of
some world-wide empire to come. Communicating with Europe and the
Levant by the Mediterranean, with India by the Red Sea, certain of
boundless supplies of food from the desert-guarded valley of the Nile,
to which it formed the only key, thus keeping all Egypt, as it were, for
its own private farm, it was weak only on one side, that of Judea. That
small strip of fertile mountain land, containing innumerable military
positions from which an enemy might annoy Egypt, being, in fact, one
natural chain of fortresses, was the key to Phoenicia and Syria. It was
an eagle's eyrie by the side of a pen of fowls. It must not be left
defenceless for a single year. Tyre and Gaza had been taken; so no
danger was to be apprehended from the seaboard: but to subdue the
Judean mountaineers, a race whose past sufferings had hardened them in a
dogged fanaticism of courage and endurance, would be a long and
sanguinary task. It was better to make terms with them; to employ them
as friendly warders of their own mountain walls. Their very fanaticism
and isolation made them sure allies. There was no fear of their
fraternising with the Eastern invaders. If the country was left in
their hands, they would hold it against all comers. Terms were made
with them; and for several centuries they fulfilled their trust.
This I apprehend to be the explanation of that conciliatory policy of
Alexander's toward the Jews, which was pursued steadily by the
Ptolemies, by Pompey, and by the Romans, as long as these same Jews
continued to be endurable upon the face of the land. At least, we shall
find the history of Alexandria and that of Judea inextricably united for
more than three hundred years.
So arose, at the command of the great conqueror, a mighty city, around
those two harbours, of which the western one only is now in use. The
Pharos was then an island. It was connected with the mainland by a
great mole, furnished with forts and drawbridges. On the ruins of that
mole now stands the greater part of the modern city; the vast site of
the ancient one is a wilderness.
But Alexander was not destined to carry out his own magnificent project.
That was left for the general whom he most esteemed, and to whose
personal prowess he had once owed his life; a man than whom history
knows few greater, Ptolemy, the son of Lagus. He was an adventurer, the
son of an adventurer, his mother a cast-off concubine of Philip of
Macedon. There were those who said that he was in reality a son of
Philip himself. However, he rose at court, became a private friend of
young Alexander, and at last his Somatophylax, some sort of Colonel of
the Life Guards. And from thence he rose rapidly, till after his great
master's death he found himself despot of Egypt.
His face, as it appears on his coins, is of the loftiest and most Jove-
like type of Greek beauty. There is a possibility about it, as about
most old Greek faces, of boundless cunning; a lofty irony too, and a
contemptuousness, especially about the mouth, which puts one in mind of
Goethe's expression; the face, altogether, of one who knew men too well
to respect them. At least, he was a man of clear enough vision. He saw
what was needed in those strange times, and he went straight to the
thing which he saw. It was his wisdom which perceived that the huge
amorphous empire of Alexander could not be kept together, and advised
its partition among the generals, taking care to obtain himself the
lion's share; not in size, indeed, but in capability. He saw, too (what
every man does not see), that the only way to keep what he had got was
to make it better, and not worse, than he found it. His first Egyptian
act was to put to death Cleomenes, Alexander's lieutenant, who had
amassed vast treasures by extortion; and who was, moreover, (for Ptolemy
was a prudent man) a dangerous partisan of his great enemy, Perdiccas.
We do not read that he refunded the treasures: but the Egyptians
surnamed him Soter, the Saviour; and on the whole he deserved the title.
Instead of the wretched misrule and slavery of the conquering Persian
dynasty, they had at least law and order, reviving commerce, and a
system of administration, we are told (I confess to speaking here quite
at second-hand), especially adapted to the peculiar caste-society, and
the religious prejudices of Egypt. But Ptolemy's political genius went
beyond such merely material and Warburtonian care for the conservation
of body and goods of his subjects. He effected with complete success a
feat which has been attempted, before and since, by very many princes
and potentates, but has always, except in Ptolemy's case, proved
somewhat of a failure, namely, the making a new deity. Mythology in
general was in a rusty state. The old Egyptian gods had grown in his
dominions very unfashionable, under the summary iconoclasm to which they
had been subjected by the Monotheist Persians--the Puritans of the old
world, as they have been well called. Indeed, all the dolls, and the
treasure of the dolls' temples too, had been carried off by Cambyses to
Babylon. And as for the Greek gods, philosophers had sublimed them away
sadly during the last century: not to mention that Alexander's
Macedonians, during their wanderings over the world, had probably become
rather remiss in their religious exercises, and had possibly given up
mentioning the Unseen world, except for those hortatory purposes for
which it used to be employed by Nelson's veterans. But, as Ptolemy
felt, people (women especially) must have something wherein to believe.
The "Religious Sentiment" in man must be satisfied. But, how to do it?
How to find a deity who would meet the aspirations of conquerors as well
as conquered--of his most irreligious Macedonians, as well as of his
most religious Egyptians? It was a great problem: but Ptolemy solved
it. He seems to have taken the same method which Brindley the engineer
used in his perplexities, for he went to bed. And there he had a dream:
How the foreign god Serapis, of Pontus (somewhere near this present
hapless Sinope), appeared to him, and expressed his wish to come to
Alexandria, and there try his influence on the Religious Sentiment. So
Serapis was sent for, and came--at least the idol of him, and--
accommodating personage!--he actually fitted. After he had been there
awhile, he was found to be quite an old acquaintance--to be, in fact,
the Greek Jove, and two or three other Greek gods, and also two or three
Egyptian gods beside--indeed, to be no other than the bull Apis, after
his death and deification. I can tell you no more. I never could find
that anything more was known. You may see him among Greek and Roman
statues as a young man, with a sort of high basket-shaped Persian turban
on his head. But, at least, he was found so pleasant and accommodating
a conscience-keeper, that he spread, with Isis, his newly-found mother,
or wife, over the whole East, and even to Rome. The Consuls there--50
years B.C.--found the pair not too respectable, and pulled down their
temples. But, so popular were they, in spite of their bad fame, that
seven years after, the Triumvirs had to build the temples up again
elsewhere; and from that time forth, Isis and Serapis, in spite, poor
things, of much persecution, were the fashionable deities of the Roman
world. Surely this Ptolemy was a man of genius!
But Ptolemy had even more important work to do than making gods. He had
to make men; for he had few or none ready made among his old veterans
from Issus and Arbela. He had no hereditary aristocracy: and he wanted
none. No aristocracy of wealth; that might grow of itself, only too
fast for his despotic power. But as a despot, he must have a knot of
men round him who would do his work. And here came out his deep insight
into fact. It had not escaped that man, what was the secret of Greek
supremacy. How had he come there? How had his great master conquered
half the world? How had the little semi-barbarous mountain tribe up
there in Pella, risen under Philip to be the master-race of the globe?
How, indeed, had Xenophon and his Ten Thousand, how had the handfuls of
Salamis and Marathon, held out triumphantly century after century,
against the vast weight of the barbarian? The simple answer was:
Because the Greek has mind, the barbarian mere brute force. Because
mind is the lord of matter; because the Greek being the cultivated man,
is the only true man; the rest are [Greek text: barbaroi], mere things,
clods, tools for the wise Greeks' use, in spite of all their material
phantom-strength of elephants, and treasures, and tributaries by the
million. Mind was the secret of Greek power; and for that Ptolemy would
work. He would have an aristocracy of intellect; he would gather round
him the wise men of the world (glad enough most of them to leave that
miserable Greece, where every man's life was in his hand from hour to
hour), and he would develop to its highest the conception of Philip,
when he made Aristotle the tutor of his son Alexander. The consequences
of that attempt were written in letters of blood, over half the world;
Ptolemy would attempt it once more, with gentler results. For though he
fought long, and often, and well, as Despot of Egypt, no less than as
general of Alexander, he was not at heart a man of blood, and made peace
the end of all his wars.
So he begins. Aristotle is gone: but in Aristotle's place Philetas the
sweet singer of Cos, and Zenodotus the grammarian of Ephesus, shall
educate his favourite son, and he will have a literary court, and a
literary age. Demetrius Phalereus, the Admirable Crichton of his time,
the last of Attic orators, statesman, philosopher, poet, warrior, and
each of them in the most graceful, insinuating, courtly way, migrates to
Alexandria, after having had the three hundred and sixty statues, which
the Athenians had too hastily erected to his honour, as hastily pulled
down again. Here was a prize for Ptolemy! The charming man became his
bosom friend and fellow, even revised the laws of his kingdom, and fired
him, if report says true, with a mighty thought--no less a one than the
great public Library of Alexandria; the first such institution, it is
said, which the world had ever seen.
So a library is begun by Soter, and organised and completed by
Philadelphus; or rather two libraries, for while one part was kept at
the Serapeium, that vast temple on the inland rising ground, of which,
as far as we can discover, Pompey's Pillar alone remains, one column out
of four hundred, the rest was in the Brucheion adjoining the Palace and
the Museum. Philadelphus buys Aristotle's collection to add to the
stock, and Euergetes cheats the Athenians out of the original MSS. of
AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and adds largely to it by more
honest methods. Eumenes, King of Pergamus in Asia Minor, fired with
emulation, commences a similar collection, and is so successful, that
the reigning Ptolemy has to cut off his rival's supplies by prohibiting
the exportation of papyrus; and the Pergamenian books are henceforth
transcribed on parchment, parchemin, Pergamene, which thus has its name
to this day, from Pergamus. That collection, too, found its way at last
to Alexandria. For Antony having become possessor of it by right of the
stronger, gave it to Cleopatra; and it remained at Alexandria for seven
hundred years. But we must not anticipate events.
Then there must be besides a Mouseion, a Temple of the Muses, with all
due appliances, in a vast building adjoining the palace itself, under
the very wing of royalty; and it must have porticos, wherein sages may
converse; lecture-rooms, where they may display themselves at their will
to their rapt scholars, each like a turkey-cock before his brood; and a
large dining-hall, where they may enjoy themselves in moderation, as
befits sages, not without puns and repartees, epigrams, anagrams, and
Attic salt, to be fatal, alas, to poor Diodorus the dialectician. For
Stilpo, prince of sophists, having silenced him by some quibbling puzzle
of logic, Ptolemy surnamed him Chronos the Slow. Poor Diodorus went
home, took pen and ink, wrote a treatise on the awful nothing, and died
in despair, leaving five "dialectical daughters" behind him, to be
thorns in the sides of some five hapless men of Macedonia, as
"emancipated women;" a class but too common in the later days of Greece,
as they will always be, perhaps, in civilisations which are decaying and
crumbling to pieces, leaving their members to seek in bewilderment what
they are, and what bonds connect them with their fellow-beings. But to
return: funds shall be provided for the Museum from the treasury; a
priest of rank, appointed by royalty, shall be curator; botanical and
zoological gardens shall be attached; collections of wonders made. In
all things the presiding genius of Aristotle shall be worshipped; for
these, like Alexander, were his pupils. Had he not mapped out all
heaven and earth, things seen and unseen, with his entelechies, and
energies, and dunameis, and put every created and uncreated thing
henceforth into its proper place, from the ascidians and polypes of the
sea to the virtues and the vices--yea, to that Great Deity and Prime
Cause (which indeed was all things), Noesis Noeseon, "the Thought of
Thoughts," whom he discovered by irrefragable processes of logic, and in
whom the philosophers believe privately, leaving Serapis to the women
and the sailors? All they had to do was to follow in his steps; to take
each of them a branch, of science or literature, or as many branches as
one man conveniently can; and working them out on the approved methods,
end in a few years, as Alexander did, by weeping on the utmost shore of
creation that there are no more worlds left to conquer.
Alas! the Muses are shy and wild; and though they will haunt, like
skylarks, on the bleakest northern moor as cheerfully as on the sunny
hills of Greece, and rise thence singing into the heaven of heavens, yet
they are hard to tempt into a gilded cage, however amusingly made and
plentifully stored with comforts. Royal societies, associations of
savants, and the like, are good for many things, but not for the
breeding of art and genius: for they are things which cannot be bred.
Such institutions are excellent for physical science, when, as among us
now, physical science is going on the right method: but where, as in
Alexandria, it was going on an utterly wrong method, they stereotype the
errors of the age, and invest them with the prestige of authority, and
produce mere Sorbonnes, and schools of pedants. To literature, too,
they do some good, that is, in a literary age--an age of reflection
rather than of production, of antiquarian research, criticism,
imitation, when book-making has become an easy and respectable pursuit
for the many who cannot dig, and are ashamed to beg. And yet, by adding
that same prestige of authority, not to mention of good society and
Court favour, to the popular mania for literature, they help on the
growing evil, and increase the multitude of prophets who prophesy out of
their own heart and have seen nothing.
And this was, it must be said, the outcome of all the Ptolemaean
appliances.
In Physics they did little. In Art nothing. In Metaphysics less than
nothing.
We will first examine, as the more pleasant spectacle of the two, that
branch of thought in which some progress was really made, and in which
the Ptolemaic schools helped forward the development of men who have
become world-famous, and will remain so, I suppose, until the end of
time.
Four names at once attract us: Euclid, Aristarchus, Eratosthenes,
Hipparchus. Archimedes, also, should be included in the list, for he
was a pupil of the Alexandrian school, having studied (if Proclus is to
be trusted) in Egypt, under Conon the Samian, during the reigns of two
Ptolemies, Philadelphus and Euergetes.
Of Euclid, as the founder (according to Proclus) of the Alexandrian
Mathematical school, I must of course speak first. Those who wish to
attain to a juster conception of the man and his work than they can do
from any other source, will do well to read Professor De Morgan's
admirable article on him in "Smith's Classical Dictionary;" which
includes, also, a valuable little sketch of the rise of Geometric
science, from Pythagoras and Plato, of whose school Euclid was, to the
great master himself.
I shall confine myself to one observation on Euclid's genius, and on the
immense influence which it exerted on after generations. It seems to
me, speaking under correction, that it exerted this, because it was so
complete a type of the general tendency of the Greek mind, deductive,
rather than inductive; of unrivalled subtlety in obtaining results from
principles, and results again from them ad infinitum: deficient in that
sturdy moral patience which is required for the examination of facts,
and which has made Britain at once a land of practical craftsmen, and of
earnest scientific discoverers.
Volatile, restless, "always children longing for something new," as the
Egyptian priest said of them, they were too ready to believe that they
had attained laws, and then, tired with their toy, throw away those
hastily assumed laws, and wander off in search of others. Gifted,
beyond all the sons of men, with the most exquisite perception of form,
both physical and metaphysical, they could become geometers and
logicians as they became sculptors and artists; beyond that they could
hardly rise. The were conscious of their power to build; and it made
them ashamed to dig.
Four men only among them seem, as far as I can judge, to have had a
great inductive power: Socrates and Plato in Metaphysics; Archimedes
and Hipparchus in Physics. But these men ran so far counter to the
national genius, that their examples were not followed. As you will
hear presently, the discoveries of Archimedes and Hipparchus were
allowed to remain where they were for centuries. The Dialectic of Plato
and Socrates was degraded into a mere art for making anything appear
alternately true and false, and among the Megaric school, for
undermining the ground of all science, and paving the way for
scepticism, by denying the natural world to be the object of certain
knowledge. The only element of Plato's thought to which they clung was,
as we shall find from the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in
which, deserting his inductive method, he has fallen below himself into
the popular cacoethes, and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the
mysterious powers of numbers, and of the regular solids.
Such a people, when they took to studying physical science, would be,
and in fact were, incapable of Chemistry, Geognosy, Comparative Anatomy,
or any of that noble choir of sister sciences, which are now building up
the material as well as the intellectual glory of Britain.
To Astronomy, on the other hand, the pupils of Euclid turned naturally,
as to the science which required the greatest amount of their favourite
geometry: but even that they were content to let pass from its
inductive to its deductive stage--not as we have done now, after two
centuries of inductive search for the true laws, and their final
discovery by Kepler and Newton: but as soon as Hipparchus had
propounded any theory which would do instead of the true laws, content
there to stop their experiments, and return to their favourite work of
commenting, deducing, spinning notion out of notion, ad infinitum.
Still, they were not all of this temper. Had they been, they would have
discovered, not merely a little, but absolutely nothing. For after all,
if we will consider, induction being the right path to knowledge, every
man, whether he knows it or not, uses induction, more or less, by the
mere fact of his having a human reason, and knowing anything at all; as
M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without being aware of it.
Aristarchus is principally famous for his attempt to discover the
distance of the sun as compared with that of the moon. His method was
ingenious enough, but too rough for success, as it depended principally
on the belief that the line bounding the bright part of the moon was an
exact straight line. The result was of course erroneous. He concluded
that the sun was 18 times as far as the moon, and not, as we now know,
400; but his conclusion, like his conception of the vast extent of the
sphere of the fixed stars, was far enough in advance of the popular
doctrine to subject him, according to Plutarch, to a charge of impiety.
Eratosthenes, again, contributed his mite to the treasure of human
science--his one mite; and yet by that he is better known than by all
the volumes which he seems to have poured out, on Ethics, Chronology,
Criticism on the Old Attic Comedy, and what not, spun out of his weary
brain during a long life of research and meditation. They have all
perished,--like ninety-nine hundredths of the labours of that great
literary age; and perhaps the world is no poorer for the loss. But one
thing, which he attempted on a sound and practical philosophic method,
stands, and will stand for ever. And after all, is not that enough to
have lived for? to have found out one true thing, and, therefore, one
imperishable thing, in one's life? If each one of us could but say when
he died: "This one thing I have found out; this one thing I have proved
to be possible; this one eternal fact I have rescued from Hela, the
realm of the formless and unknown," how rich one such generation might
make the world for ever!
But such is not the appointed method. The finders are few and far
between, because the true seekers are few and far between; and a whole
generation has often nothing to show for its existence but one solitary
gem which some one man--often unnoticed in his time--has picked up for
them, and so given them "a local habitation and a name."
Eratosthenes had heard that in Syene, in Upper Egypt, deep wells were
enlightened to the bottom on the day of the summer solstice, and that
vertical objects cast no shadows.
He had before suggested, as is supposed, to Ptolemy Euergetes, to make
him the two great copper armillae, or circles for determining the
equinox, which stood for centuries in "that which is called the Square
Porch"--probably somewhere in the Museum. By these he had calculated
the obliquity of the ecliptic, closely enough to serve for a thousand
years after. That was one work done. But what had the Syene shadows to
do with that? Syene must be under that ecliptic. On the edge of it.
In short, just under the tropic. Now he had ascertained exactly the
latitude of one place on the earth's surface. He had his known point
from whence to start on a world-journey, and he would use it; he would
calculate the circumference of the earth--and he did it. By
observations made at Alexandria, he ascertained its latitude compared
with that of Syene; and so ascertained what proportion to the whole
circumference was borne by the 5000 stadia between Alexandria and Syene.
He fell into an error, by supposing Alexandria and Syene to be under the
same meridians of longitude: but that did not prevent his arriving at a
fair rough result of 252,000 stadia--31,500 Roman miles; considerably
too much; but still, before him, I suppose, none knew whether it was
10,000, or 10,000,000. The right method having once been found, nothing
remained but to employ it more accurately.
One other great merit of Eratosthenes is, that he first raised Geography
to the rank of a science. His Geographica were an organic collection,
the first the world had ever seen, of all the travels and books of
earth-description heaped together in the Great Library, of which he was
for many years the keeper. He began with a geognostic book, touched on
the traces of Cataclysms and Change visible on the earth's surface;
followed by two books, one a mathematical book, the other on political
geography, and completed by a map--which one would like to see: but--
not a trace of all remains, save a few quoted fragments -
We are such stuff
As dreams are made of.
But if Eratosthenes had hold of eternal fact and law on one point, there
was a contemporary who had hold of it in more than one. I mean
Archimedes; of whom, as I have said, we must speak as of an Alexandrian.
It was as a mechanician, rather than as an astronomer, that he gained
his reputation. The stories of his Hydraulic Screw, the Great Ship
which he built for Hiero, and launched by means of machinery, his crane,
his war-engines, above all his somewhat mythical arrangement of mirrors,
by which he set fire to ships in the harbour--all these, like the story
of his detecting the alloy in Hiero's crown, while he himself was in the
bath, and running home undressed shouting [Greek text: eureeka]--all
these are schoolboys' tales. To the thoughtful person it is the method
of the man which constitutes his real greatness, that power of insight
by which he solved the two great problems of the nature of the lever and
of hydrostatic pressure, which form the basis of all static and
hydrostatic science to this day. And yet on that very question of the
lever the great mind of Aristotle babbles--neither sees the thing
itself, nor the way towards seeing it. But since Archimedes spoke, the
thing seems self-evident to every schoolboy. There is something to me
very solemn in such a fact as this. It brings us down to some of the
very deepest questions of metaphysic. This mental insight of which we
boast so much, what is it? Is it altogether a process of our own brain
and will? If it be, why have so few the power, even among men of power,
and they so seldom? If brain alone were what was wanted, what could not
Aristotle have discovered? Or is it that no man can see a thing unless
God shows it him? Is it that in each separate act of induction, that
mysterious and transcendental process which cannot, let logicians try as
they will, be expressed by any merely logical formula, Aristotelian or
other--is it I say, that in each separate act of induction we do not
find the law, but the law is shown to us, by Him who made the law?
Bacon thought so. Of that you may find clear proof in his writings.
May not Bacon be right? May it not be true that God does in science, as
well as in ethics, hide things from the wise and prudent, from the
proud, complete, self-contained systematiser like Aristotle, who must
needs explain all things in heaven and earth by his own formulae, and
his entelechies and energies, and the rest of the notions which he has
made for himself out of his own brain, and then pack each thing away in
its proper niche in his great cloud-universe of conceptions? Is it that
God hides things from such men many a time, and reveals them to babes,
to gentle, affectionate, simple-hearted men, such as we know Archimedes
to have been, who do not try to give an explanation for a fact, but feel
how awful and divine it is, and wrestle reverently and stedfastly with
it, as Jacob with the Angel, and will not let it go, until it bless
them? Sure I am, from what I have seen of scientific men, that there is
an intimate connection between the health of the moral faculties and the
health of the inductive ones; and that the proud, self-conceited, and
passionate man will see nothing: perhaps because nothing will be shown
him.
But we must leave Archimedes for a man not perhaps so well known, but to
whom we owe as much as to the great Syracusan--Hipparchus the
astronomer. To his case much which I have just said applies. In him
astronomic science seemed to awaken suddenly to a true inductive method,
and after him to fall into its old slumber for 300 years. In the
meantime Timocharis, Aristyllus, and Conon had each added their mites to
the discoveries of Eratosthenes: but to Hipparchus we owe that theory
of the heavens, commonly called the Ptolemaic system, which, starting
from the assumption that the earth was the centre of the universe,
attempted to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies by a complex
system of supposed eccentrics and epicycles. This has of course now
vanished before modern discoveries. But its value as a scientific
attempt lies in this: that the method being a correct one, correct
results were obtained, though starting from a false assumption; and
Hipparchus and his successors were enabled by it to calculate and
predict the changes of the heavens, in spite of their clumsy
instruments, with almost as much accuracy as we do now.
For the purpose of working out this theory he required a science of
trigonometry, plane and spherical: and this he accordingly seems to
have invented. To him also we owe the discovery of that vast gradual
change in the position of the fixed stars, in fact, of the whole
celestial system, now known by the name of the precession of the
equinoxes; the first great catalogue of fixed stars, to the number of
1080; attempts to ascertain whether the length of years and days were
constant; with which, with his characteristic love of truth, he seems to
have been hardly satisfied. He too invented the planisphere, or mode of
representing the starry heavens upon a plane, and is the father of true
geography, having formed the happy notion of mapping out the earth, as
well as the heavens, by degrees of latitude and longitude.
Strange it is, and somewhat sad, that we should know nothing of this
great man, should be hardly able to distinguish him from others of the
same name, but through the works of a commentator, who wrote and
observed in Alexandria 300 years after, during the age of the Antonines.
I mean, of course, the famous Ptolemy, whose name so long bore the
honour of that system which really belonged to Hipparchus.
This single fact speaks volumes for the real weakness of the great
artificial school of literature and science founded by the kings of
Egypt. From the father of Astronomy, as Delambre calls him, to Ptolemy,
the first man who seems really to have appreciated him, we have not a
discovery, hardly an observation or a name, to fill the gap. Physical
sages there were; but they were geometers and mathematicians, rather
than astronomic observers and inquirers. And in spite of all the huge
appliances and advantages of that great Museum, its inhabitants were
content, in physical science, as in all other branches of thought, to
comment, to expound, to do everything but open their eyes and observe
facts, and learn from them, as the predecessors whom they pretended to
honour had done. But so it is always. A genius, an original man
appears. He puts himself boldly in contact with facts, asks them what
they mean, and writes down their answer for the world's use. And then
his disciples must needs form a school, and a system; and fancy that
they do honour to their master by refusing to follow in his steps; by
making his book a fixed dogmatic canon; attaching to it some magical
infallibility; declaring the very lie which he disproved by his whole
existence, that discovery is henceforth impossible, and the sum of
knowledge complete: instead of going on to discover as he discovered
before them, and in following his method, show that they honour him, not
in the letter, but in spirit and in truth.
For this, if you will consider, is the true meaning of that great
command, "Honour thy father and mother, that thy days may be long in the
land." On reverence for the authority of bygone generations depends the
permanence of every form of thought or belief, as much as of all social,
national, and family life: but on reverence of the spirit, not merely
of the letter; of the methods of our ancestors, not merely of their
conclusions. Ay, and we shall not be able to preserve their
conclusions, not even to understand them; they will die away on our lips
into skeleton notions, and soulless phrases, unless we see that the
greatness of the mighty dead has always consisted in this, that they
were seekers, improvers, inventors, endued with that divine power and
right of discovery which has been bestowed on us, even as on them;
unless we become such men as they were, and go on to cultivate and
develop the precious heritage which they have bequeathed to us, instead
of hiding their talent in a napkin and burying it in the earth; making
their greatness an excuse for our own littleness, their industry for our
laziness, their faith for our despair; and prating about the old paths,
while we forget that paths were made that men might walk in them, and
not stand still, and try in vain to stop the way.
It may be said, certainly, as an excuse for these Alexandrian Greeks,
that they were a people in a state of old age and decay; and that they
only exhibited the common and natural faults of old age. For as with
individuals, so with races, nations, societies, schools of thought--
youth is the time of free fancy and poetry; manhood of calm and strong
induction; old age of deduction, when men settle down upon their lees,
and content themselves with reaffirming and verifying the conclusions of
their earlier years, and too often, alas! with denying and
anathematising all conclusions which have been arrived at since their
own meridian. It is sad: but it is patent and common. It is sad to
think that the day may come to each of us, when we shall have ceased to
hope for discovery and for progress; when a thing will seem e priori
false to us, simply because it is new; and we shall be saying
querulously to the Divine Light which lightens every man who comes into
the world: "Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further. Thou hast taught
men enough; yea rather, thou hast exhausted thine own infinitude, and
hast no more to teach them." Surely such a temper is to be fought
against, prayed against, both in ourselves, and in the generation in
which we live. Surely there is no reason why such a temper should
overtake old age. There may be reason enough, "in the nature of
things." For that which is of nature is born only to decay and die.
But in man there is more than dying nature; there is spirit, and a
capability of spiritual and everlasting life, which renews its youth
like the eagle's, and goes on from strength to strength, and which, if
it have its autumns and its winters, has no less its ever-recurring
springs and summers; if it has its Sabbaths, finds in them only rest and
refreshment for coming labour. And why not in nations, societies,
scientific schools? These too are not merely natural: they are
spiritual, and are only living and healthy in as far as they are in
harmony with spiritual, unseen, and everlasting laws of God. May not
they, too, have a capability of everlasting life, as long as they obey
those laws in faith, and patience, and humility? We cannot deny the
analogy between the individual man and these societies of men. We
cannot, at least, deny the analogy between them in growth, decay, and
death. May we not have hope that it holds good also for that which can
never die; and that if they do die, as this old Greek society did, it is
by no brute natural necessity, but by their own unfaithfulness to that
which they knew, to that which they ought to have known? It is always
more hopeful, always, as I think, more philosophic, to throw the blame
of failure on man, on our own selves, rather than on God, and the
perfect law of His universe. At least let us be sure for ourselves,
that such an old age as befell this Greek society, as befalls many a man
nowadays, need not be our lot. Let us be sure that earth shows no
fairer sight than the old man, whose worn-out brain and nerves make it
painful, and perhaps impossible, to produce fresh thought himself: but
who can yet welcome smilingly and joyfully the fresh thoughts of others;
who keeps unwearied his faith in God's government of the universe, in
God's continual education of the human race; who draws around him the
young and the sanguine, not merely to check their rashness by his wise
cautions, but to inspirit their sloth by the memories of his own past
victories; who hands over, without envy or repining, the lamp of truth
to younger runners than himself, and sits contented by, bidding the new
generation God speed along the paths untrodden by him, but seen afar off
by faith. A few such old persons have I seen, both men and women; in
whom the young heart beat pure and fresh, beneath the cautious and
practised brain of age, and gray hairs which were indeed a crown of
glory. A few such have I seen; and from them I seemed to learn what was
the likeness of our Father who is in heaven. To such an old age may He
bring you and me, and all for whom we are bound to pray.
LECTURE II--THE PTOLEMAIC ERA (Continued.)
I said in my first Lecture, that even if royal influence be profitable
for the prosecution of physical science, it cannot be profitable for
art. It can only produce a literary age, as it did in the Ptolemaic
era; a generation of innumerable court-poets, artificial epigrammatists,
artificial idyllists, artificial dramatists and epicists; above all, a
generation of critics. Or rather shall we say, that the dynasty was not
the cause of a literary age, but only its correlative? That when the
old Greeks lost the power of being free, of being anything but the
slaves of oriental despots, as the Ptolemies in reality were, they lost
also the power of producing true works of art; because they had lost
that youthful vigour of mind from which both art and freedom sprang?
Let the case be as it will, Alexandrian literature need not detain us
long--though, alas! it has detained every boy who ever trembled over his
Greek grammar, for many a weary year; and, I cannot help suspecting, has
been the main cause that so many young men who have spent seven years in
learning Greek, know nothing about it at the end of the seven. For I
must say, that as far as we can see, these Alexandrian pedants were
thorough pedants; very polished and learned gentlemen, no doubt, and,
like Callimachus, the pets of princes: but after all, men who thought
that they could make up for not writing great works themselves, by
showing, with careful analysis and commentation, how men used to write
them of old, or rather how they fancied men used to write them; for,
consider, if they had really known how the thing was done, they must
needs have been able to do it themselves. Thus Callimachus, the
favourite of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and librarian of his Museum, is the
most distinguished grammarian, critic, and poet of his day, and has for
pupils Eratosthenes, Apollonius Rhodius, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and
a goodly list more. He is an encyclopaedia in himself. There is
nothing the man does not know, or probably, if we spoke more correctly,
nothing he does not know about. He writes on history, on the Museum, on
barbarous names, on the wonders of the world, on public games, on
colonisation, on winds, on birds, on the rivers of the world, and--
ominous subject--a sort of comprehensive history of Greek literature,
with a careful classification of all authors, each under his own
heading. Greek literature was rather in the sere and yellow leaf, be
sure, when men thought of writing that sort of thing about it. But
still, he is an encyclopaedic man, and, moreover, a poet. He writes an
epic, "Aitia," in four books, on the causes of the myths, religious
ceremonies, and so forth--an ominous sign for the myths also, and the
belief in them; also a Hecate, Galataea, Glaucus--four epics, besides
comedies, tragedies, iambics, choriambics, elegies, hymns, epigrams
seventy-three--and of these last alone can we say that they are in any
degree readable; and they are courtly, far-fetched, neat, and that is
all. Six hymns remain, and a few fragments of the elegies: but the
most famous elegy, on Berenice's hair, is preserved to us only in a
Latin paraphrase of Catullus. It is curious, as the earliest instance
we have of genuinely ungenuine Court poetry, and of the complimentary
lie which does not even pretend to be true; the flattery which will not
take the trouble to prevent your seeing that it is laughing in your
face.
Berenice the queen, on Ptolemy's departure to the wars, vows her
beautiful tresses to her favourite goddess, as the price of her
husband's safe return; and duly pays her vow. The hair is hung up in
the temple: in a day or two after it has vanished. Dire is the wrath
of Ptolemy, the consternation of the priests, the scandal to religion;
when Conon, the court-astronomer, luckily searching the heavens, finds
the missing tresses in an utterly unexpected place--as a new
constellation of stars, which to this day bears the title of Coma
Berenices. It is so convenient to believe the fact, that everybody
believes it accordingly; and Callimachus writes an elegy thereon, in
which the constellified, or indeed deified tresses, address in most
melodious and highly-finished Greek, bedizened with concetto on
concetto, that fair and sacred head whereon they grew, to be shorn from
which is so dire a sorrow, that apotheosis itself can hardly reconcile
them to the parting.
Worthy, was not all this, of the descendants of the men who fought at
Marathon and Thermopylae? The old Greek civilisation was rotting
swiftly down; while a fire of God was preparing, slowly and dimly, in
that unnoticed Italian town of Rome, which was destined to burn up that
dead world, and all its works.
Callimachus's hymns, those may read who list. They are highly finished
enough; the work of a man who knew thoroughly what sort of article he
intended to make, and what were the most approved methods of making it.
Curious and cumbrous mythological lore comes out in every other line.
The smartness, the fine epithets, the recondite conceits, the bits of
effect, are beyond all praise; but as for one spark of life, of poetry,
of real belief, you will find none; not even in that famous Lavacrum
Palladis which Angelo Poliziano thought worth translating into Latin
elegiacs, about the same time that the learned Florentine, Antonio Maria
Salviano, found Berenice's Hair worthy to be paraphrased back from
Catullus' Latin into Greek, to give the world some faint notion of the
inestimable and incomparable original. They must have had much time on
their hands. But at the Revival of Letters, as was to be expected, all
works of the ancients, good and bad, were devoured alike with youthful
eagerness by the Medicis and the Popes; and it was not, we shall see,
for more than one century after, that men's taste got sufficiently
matured to distinguish between Callimachus and the Homeric hymns, or
between Plato and Proclus. Yet Callimachus and his fellows had an
effect on the world. His writings, as well as those of Philetas, were
the model on which Ovid, Propertius, Tibullus, formed themselves.
And so I leave him, with two hints. If any one wishes to see the
justice of my censure, let him read one of the Alexandrian hymns, and
immediately after it, one of those glorious old Homeric hymns to the
very same deities; let him contrast the insincere and fulsome idolatry
of Callimachus with the reverent, simple and manful anthropomorphism of
the Homerist--and let him form his own judgment.
The other hint is this. If Callimachus, the founder of Alexandrian
literature, be such as he is, what are his pupils likely to become, at
least without some infusion of healthier blood, such as in the case of
his Roman imitators produced a new and not altogether ignoble school?
Of Lycophron, the fellow-grammarian and poet of Callimachus, we have
nothing left but the Cassandra, a long iambic poem, stuffed with
traditionary learning, and so obscure, that it obtained for him the
surname of [Greek text: skoteinos] the dark one. I have tried in vain
to read it: you, if you will, may do the same.
Philetas, the remaining member of the Alexandrian Triad, seems to have
been a more simple, genial, and graceful spirit than the other two, to
whom he was accordingly esteemed inferior. Only a few fragments are
left; but he was not altogether without his influence, for he was, as I
have just said, one of the models on which Propertius and Ovid formed
themselves; and some, indeed, call him the Father of the Latin elegy,
with its terseness, grace, and clear epigrammatic form of thought, and,
therefore, in a great degree, of our modern eighteenth century poets;
not a useless excellence, seeing that it is, on the whole, good for him
who writes to see clearly what he wants to say, and to be able to make
his readers see it clearly also. And yet one natural strain is heard
amid all this artificial jingle--that of Theocritus. It is not
altogether Alexandrian. Its sweetest notes were learnt amid the
chestnut groves and orchards, the volcanic glens and sunny pastures of
Sicily; but the intercourse, between the courts of Hiero and the
Ptolemies seems to have been continual. Poets and philosophers moved
freely from one to the other, and found a like atmosphere in both; and
in one of Theocritus' idyls, two Sicilian gentlemen, crossed in love,
agree to sail for Alexandria, and volunteer into the army of the great
and good king Ptolemy, of whom a sketch is given worth reading; as a man
noble, generous, and stately, "knowing well who loves him, and still
better who loves him not." He has another encomium on Ptolemy, more
laboured, though not less interesting: but the real value of Theocritus
lies in his power of landscape-painting.
One can well conceive the delight which his idyls must have given to
those dusty Alexandrians, pent up forever between sea and sand-hills,
drinking the tank-water, and never hearing the sound of a running
stream--whirling, too, forever, in all the bustle and intrigue of a
great commercial and literary city. Refreshing indeed it must have been
to them to hear of those simple joys and simple sorrows of the Sicilian
shepherd, in a land where toil was but exercise, and mere existence was
enjoyment. To them, and to us also. I believe Theocritus is one of the
poets who will never die. He sees men and things, in his own light way,
truly; and he describes them simply, honestly, with little careless
touches of pathos and humour, while he floods his whole scene with that
gorgeous Sicilian air, like one of Titian's pictures; with still
sunshine, whispering pines, the lizard sleeping on the wall, and the
sunburnt cicala shrieking on the spray, the pears and apples dropping
from the orchard bough, the goats clambering from crag to crag after the
cistus and the thyme, the brown youths and wanton lasses singing under
the dark chestnut boughs, or by the leafy arch of some
Grot nymph-haunted,
Garlanded over with vine, and acanthus, and clambering roses,
Cool in the fierce still noon, where the streams glance clear in the
moss-beds;
and here and there, beyond the braes and meads, blue glimpses of the
far-off summer sea; and all this told in a language and a metre which
shapes itself almost unconsciously, wave after wave, into the most
luscious song. Doubt not that many a soul then, was the simpler, and
purer, and better, for reading the sweet singer of Syracuse. He has his
immoralities; but they are the immoralities of his age: his
naturalness, his sunny calm and cheerfulness, are all his own.
And now, to leave the poets, and speak of those grammarians to whose
corrections we owe, I suppose, the texts of the Greek poets as they now
stand. They seem to have set to work at their task methodically enough,
under the direction of their most literary monarch, Ptolemy
Philadelphus. Alexander the AEtolian collected and revised the
tragedies, Lycophron the comedies, Zenodotus the poems of Homer, and the
other poets of the Epic cycle, now lost to us. Whether Homer prospered
under all his expungings, alterations, and transpositions--whether, in
fact, he did not treat Homer very much as Bentley wanted to treat
Milton, is a suspicion which one has a right to entertain, though it is
long past the possibility of proof. Let that be as it may, the critical
business grew and prospered. Aristophanes of Byzantium wrote glossaries
and grammars, collected editions of Plato and Aristotle, aesthetic
disquisitions on Homer--one wishes they were preserved, for the sake of
the jest, that one might have seen an Alexandrian cockney's views of
Achilles and Ulysses! Moreover, in a hapless moment, at least for us
moderns, he invented Greek accents; thereby, I fear, so complicating and
confusing our notions of Greek rhythm, that we shall never, to the end
of time, be able to guess what any Greek verse, saving the old Homeric
Hexameter, sounded like. After a while, too, the pedants, according to
their wont, began quarrelling about their accents and their recessions.
Moreover, there was a rival school at Pergamus where the fame of Crates
all but equalled the Egyptian fame of Aristarchus. Insolent! What
right had an Asiatic to know anything? So Aristarchus flew furiously on
Crates, being a man of plain common sense, who felt a correct reading a
far more important thing than any of Crates's illustrations, aesthetic,
historical, or mythological; a preference not yet quite extinct, in one,
at least, of our Universities. "Sir," said a clever Cambridge Tutor to
a philosophically inclined freshman, "remember, that our business is to
translate Plato correctly, not to discover his meaning." And,
paradoxical as it may seem, he was right. Let us first have accuracy,
the merest mechanical accuracy, in every branch of knowledge. Let us
know what the thing is which we are looking at. Let us know the exact
words an author uses. Let us get at the exact value of each word by
that severe induction of which Buttmann and the great Germans have set
such noble examples; and then, and not till then, we may begin to talk
about philosophy, and aesthetics, and the rest. Very Probably
Aristarchus was right in his dislike of Crates's preference of what he
called criticism, to grammar. Very probably he connected it with the
other object of his especial hatred, that fashion of interpreting Homer
allegorically, which was springing up in his time, and which afterwards
under the Neoplatonists rose to a frantic height, and helped to destroy
in them, not only their power of sound judgment, and of asking each
thing patiently what it was, but also any real reverence for, or
understanding of, the very authors over whom they declaimed and
sentimentalised.
Yes--the Cambridge Tutor was right. Before you can tell what a man
means, you must have patience to find out what he says. So far from
wishing our grammatical and philological education to be less severe
than it is, I think it is not severe enough. In an age like this--an
age of lectures, and of popular literature, and of self-culture, too
often random and capricious, however earnest, we cannot be too careful
in asking ourselves, in compelling others to ask themselves, the meaning
of every word which they use, of every word which they read; in assuring
them, whether they will believe us or not, that the moral, as well as
the intellectual culture, acquired by translating accurately one
dialogue of Plato, by making out thoroughly the sense of one chapter of
a standard author, is greater than they will get from skimming whole
folios of Schlegelian aesthetics, resumes, histories of philosophy, and
the like second-hand information, or attending seven lectures a-week
till their lives' end. It is better to know one thing, than to know
about ten thousand things. I cannot help feeling painfully, after
reading those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that
the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness,
sentimental eclecticism--and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed,
that intellectual vagueness and shallowness, however glib, and grand,
and eloquent it may seem, is inevitably the parent of a moral vagueness
and shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks,
without an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to
escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by
plunging desperately into any fetish-worshipping superstition which
holds out to its wearied and yet impatient intellect, the bait of
decisions already made for it, of objects of admiration already formed
and systematised.
Therefore let us honour the grammarian in his place; and, among others,
these old grammarians of Alexandria; only being sure that as soon as any
man begins, as they did, displaying himself peacock-fashion, boasting of
his science as the great pursuit of humanity, and insulting his fellow-
craftsmen, he becomes, ipso facto, unable to discover any more truth for
us, having put on a habit of mind to which induction is impossible; and
is thenceforth to be passed by with a kindly but a pitying smile. And
so, indeed, it happened with these quarrelsome Alexandrian grammarians,
as it did with the Casaubons and Scaligers and Daciers of the last two
centuries. As soon as they began quarrelling they lost the power of
discovering. The want of the inductive faculty in their attempts at
philology is utterly ludicrous. Most of their derivations of words are
about on a par with Jacob Bohmen's etymology of sulphur, wherein he
makes sul, if I recollect right, signify some active principle of
combustion, and phur the passive one. It was left for more patient and
less noisy men, like Grimm, Bopp, and Buttmann, to found a science of
philology, to discover for us those great laws which connect modern
philology with history, ethnology, physiology, and with the very deepest
questions of theology itself. And in the meanwhile, these Alexandrians'
worthless criticism has been utterly swept away; while their real work,
their accurate editions of the classics, remain to us as a precious
heritage. So it is throughout history: nothing dies which is worthy to
live. The wheat is surely gathered into the garner, the chaff is burnt
up by that eternal fire which, happily for this universe, cannot be
quenched by any art of man, but goes on forever, devouring without
indulgence all the folly and the falsehood of the world.
As yet you have heard nothing of the metaphysical schools of Alexandria;
for as yet none have existed, in the modern acceptation of that word.
Indeed, I am not sure that I must not tell you frankly, that none ever
existed at all in Alexandria, in that same modern acceptation. Ritter,
I think, it is who complains naively enough, that the Alexandrian
Neoplatonists had a bad habit, which grew on them more and more as the
years rolled on, of mixing up philosophy with theology, and so defiling,
or at all events colouring, its pure transparency. There is no denying
the imputation, as I shall show at greater length in my next Lecture.
But one would have thought, looking back through history, that the
Alexandrians were not the only philosophers guilty of this shameful act
of syncretism. Plato, one would have thought, was as great a sinner as
they. So were the Hindoos. In spite of all their logical and
metaphysical acuteness, they were, you will find, unable to get rid of
the notion that theological inquiries concerning Brahma, Atma, Creeshna,
were indissolubly mixed up with that same logic and metaphysic. The
Parsees could not separate questions about Ahriman and Ormuzd from
Kant's three great philosophic problems: What is Man?--What may be
known?--What should be done? Neither, indeed, could the earlier Greek
sages. Not one of them, of any school whatsoever--from the semi-mythic
Seven Sages to Plato and Aristotle--but finds it necessary to consider
not in passing, but as the great object of research, questions
concerning the gods:- whether they are real or not; one or many;
personal or impersonal; cosmic, and parts of the universe, or organisers
and rulers of it; in relation to man, or without relation to him. Even
in those who flatly deny the existence of the gods, even in Lucretius
himself, these questions have to be considered, before the question,
What is man? can get any solution at all. On the answer given to them
is found to depend intimately the answer to the question, What is the
immaterial part of man? Is it a part of nature, or of something above
nature? Has he an immaterial part at all?--in one word, Is a human
metaphysic possible at all? So it was with the Greek philosophers of
old, even, as Asclepius and Ammonius say, with Aristotle himself. "The
object of Aristotle's metaphysic," one of them says, "is theological.
Herein Aristotle theologises." And there is no denying the assertion.
We must not then be hard on the Neoplatonists, as if they were the first
to mix things separate from the foundation of the world. I do not say
that theology and metaphysic are separate studies. That is to be
ascertained only by seeing some one separate them. And when I see them
separated, I shall believe them separable. Only the separation must not
be produced by the simple expedient of denying the existence of either
one of them, or at least of ignoring the existence of one steadily
during the study of the other. If they can be parted without injury to
each other, let them be parted; and till then let us suspend hard
judgments on the Alexandrian school of metaphysic, and also on the
schools of that curious people the Jews, who had at this period a
steadily increasing influence on the thought, as well as on the
commercial prosperity, of Alexandria.
You must not suppose, in the meanwhile, that the philosophers whom the
Ptolemies collected (as they would have any other marketable article) by
liberal offers of pay and patronage, were such men as the old Seven
Sages of Greece, or as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In these three
last indeed, Greek thought reached not merely its greatest height, but
the edge of a precipice, down which it rolled headlong after their
decease. The intellectual defects of the Greek mind, of which I have
already spoken, were doubtless one great cause of this decay: but, to
my mind, moral causes had still more to do with it. The more cultivated
Greek states, to judge from the writings of Plato, had not been an over-
righteous people during the generation in which he lived. And in the
generations which followed, they became an altogether wicked people;
immoral, unbelieving, hating good, and delighting in all which was evil.
And it was in consequence of these very sins of theirs, as I think, that
the old Hellenic race began to die out physically, and population
throughout Greece to decrease with frightful rapidity, after the time of
the Achaean league. The facts are well known; and foul enough they are.
When the Romans destroyed Greece, God was just and merciful. The eagles
were gathered together only because the carrion needed to be removed
from the face of God's earth. And at the time of which I now speak, the
signs of approaching death were fearfully apparent. Hapless and
hopeless enough were the clique of men out of whom the first two
Ptolemies hoped to form a school of philosophy; men certainly clever
enough, and amusing withal, who might give the kings of Egypt many a
shrewd lesson in king-craft, and the ways of this world, and the art of
profiting by the folly of fools, and the selfishness of the selfish; or
who might amuse them, in default of fighting-cocks, by puns and
repartees, and battles of logic; "how one thing cannot be predicated of
another," or "how the wise man is not only to overcome every misfortune,
but not even to feel it," and other such mighty questions, which in
those days hid that deep unbelief in any truth whatsoever which was
spreading fast over the minds of men. Such word-splitters were Stilpo
and Diodorus, the slayer and the slain. They were of the Megaran
school, and were named Dialectics; and also, with more truth, Eristics,
or quarrellers. Their clique had professed to follow Zeno and Socrates
in declaring the instability of sensible presumptions and conclusions,
in preaching an absolute and eternal Being. But there was this deep
gulf between them and Socrates; that while Socrates professed to be
seeking for the Absolute and Eternal, for that which is, they were
content with affirming that it exists. With him, as with the older
sages, philosophy was a search for truth. With them it was a scheme of
doctrines to be defended. And the dialectic on which they prided
themselves so much, differed from his accordingly. He used it
inductively, to seek out, under the notions and conceptions of the mind,
certain absolute truths and laws of which they were only the embodiment.
Words and thought were to him a field for careful and reverent
induction, as the phenomena of nature are to us the disciples of Bacon.
But with these hapless Megarans, who thought that they had found that
for which Socrates professed only to seek dimly and afar off, and had
got it safe in a dogma, preserved as it were in spirits, and put by in a
museum, the great use of dialectic was to confute opponents. Delight in
their own subtlety grew on them, the worship not of objective truth, but
of the forms of the intellect whereby it may be demonstrated; till they
became the veriest word-splitters, rivals of the old sophists whom their
master had attacked, and justified too often Aristophanes' calumny,
which confounded Socrates with his opponents, as a man whose aim was to
make the worse appear the better reason.
We have here, in both parties, all the marks of an age of exhaustion, of
scepticism, of despair about finding any real truth. No wonder that
they were superseded by the Pyrrhonists, who doubted all things, and by
the Academy, which prided itself on setting up each thing to knock it
down again; and so by prudent and well-bred and tolerant qualifying of
every assertion, neither affirming too much, nor denying too much, keep
their minds in a wholesome--or unwholesome--state of equilibrium, as
stagnant pools are kept, that everything may have free toleration to rot
undisturbed.
These hapless caricaturists of the dialectic of Plato, and the logic of
Aristotle, careless of any vital principles or real results, ready
enough to use fallacies each for their own party, and openly proud of
their success in doing so, were assisted by worthy compeers of an
outwardly opposite tone of thought, the Cyrenaics, Theodorus and
Hegesias. With their clique, as with their master Aristippus, the
senses were the only avenues to knowledge; man was the measure of all
things; and "happiness our being's end and aim." Theodorus was surnamed
the Atheist; and, it seems, not without good reason; for he taught that
there was no absolute or eternal difference between good and evil;
nothing really disgraceful in crimes; no divine ground for laws, which
according to him had been invented by men to prevent fools from making
themselves disagreeable; on which theory, laws must be confessed to have
been in all ages somewhat of a failure. He seems to have been, like his
master, an impudent light-hearted fellow, who took life easily enough,
laughed at patriotism, and all other high-flown notions, boasted that
the world was his country, and was no doubt excellent after-dinner
company for the great king. Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of
a darker and more melancholic temperament; and while Theodorus contented
himself with preaching a comfortable selfishness, and obtaining
pleasure, made it rather his study to avoid pain. Doubtless both their
theories were popular enough at Alexandria, as they were in France
during the analogous period, the Siecle Louis Quinze. The "Contrat
Social," and the rest of their doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will
always have their admirers on earth, as long as that variety of the
human species exists for whose especial behoof Theodorus held that laws
were made; and the whole form of thought met with great approbation in
after years at Rome, where Epicurus carried it to its highest
perfection. After that, under the pressure of a train of rather severe
lessons, which Gibbon has detailed in his "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire," little or nothing was heard of it, save sotto voce, perhaps, at
the Papal courts of the sixteenth century. To revive it publicly, or at
least as much of it as could be borne by a world now for seventeen
centuries Christian, was the glory of the eighteenth century. The moral
scheme of Theodorus has now nearly vanished among us, at least as a
confessed creed; and, in spite of the authority of Mr. Locke's great and
good name, his metaphysical scheme is showing signs of a like
approaching disappearance. Let us hope that it may be a speedy one; for
if the senses be the only avenues to knowledge; if man be the measure of
all things; and if law have not, as Hooker says, her fount and home in
the very bosom of God himself, then was Homer's Zeus right in declaring
man to be "the most wretched of all the beasts of the field."
And yet one cannot help looking with a sort of awe (I dare not call it
respect) at that melancholic faithless Hegesias. Doubtless he, like his
compeers, and indeed all Alexandria for three hundred years, cultivated
philosophy with no more real purpose than it was cultivated by the
graceless beaux-esprits of Louis XV.'s court, and with as little
practical effect on morality; but of this Hegesias alone it stands
written, that his teaching actually made men do something; and moreover,
do the most solemn and important thing which any man can do, excepting
always doing right. I must confess, however, that the result of his
teaching took so unexpected a form, that the reigning Ptolemy,
apparently Philadelphus, had to interfere with the sacred right of every
man to talk as much nonsense as he likes, and forbade Hegesias to teach
at Alexandria. For Hegesias, a Cyrenaic like Theodorus, but a rather
more morose pedant than that saucy and happy scoffer, having discovered
that the great end of man was to avoid pain, also discovered (his
digestion being probably in a disordered state) that there was so much
more pain than pleasure in the world, as to make it a thoroughly
disagreeable place, of which man was well rid at any price. Whereon he
wrote a book called, [Greek text: apokarteroon], in which a man who had
determined to starve himself, preached the miseries of human life, and
the blessings of death, with such overpowering force, that the book
actually drove many persons to commit suicide, and escape from a world
which was not fit to dwell in. A fearful proof of how rotten the state
of society was becoming, how desperate the minds of men, during those
frightful centuries which immediately preceded the Christian era, and
how fast was approaching that dark chaos of unbelief and
unrighteousness, which Paul of Tarsus so analyses and describes in the
first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans--when the old light was lost,
the old faiths extinct, the old reverence for the laws of family and
national life, destroyed, yea even the natural instincts themselves
perverted; that chaos whose darkness Juvenal, and Petronius, and Tacitus
have proved, in their fearful pages, not to have been exaggerated by the
more compassionate though more righteous Jew.
And now observe, that this selfishness--this wholesome state of
equilibrium--this philosophic calm, which is really only a lazy pride,
was, as far as we can tell, the main object of all the schools from the
time of Alexander to the Christian era. We know very little of those
Sceptics, Cynics, Epicureans, Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, of whom
there has been so much talk, except at second-hand, through the Romans,
from whom Stoicism in after ages received a new and not ignoble life.
But this we do know of the later sets, that they gradually gave up the
search for truth, and propounded to themselves as the great type for a
philosopher, How shall a man save his own soul from this evil world?
They may have been right; it may have been the best thing to think about
in those exhausted and decaying times: but it was a question of ethics,
not of philosophy, in the sense which the old Greek sages put on that
latter word. Their object was, not to get at the laws of all things,
but to fortify themselves against all things, each according to his
scheme, and so to be self-sufficient and alone. Even in the Stoics, who
boldly and righteously asserted an immutable morality, this was the
leading conception. As has been well said of them:
"If we reflect how deeply the feeling of an intercourse between men and
a divine race superior to themselves had worked itself into the Greek
character--what a number of fables, some beautiful, some impure, it had
impregnated and procured credence for--how it sustained every form of
polity and every system of laws, we may imagine what the effects must
have been of its disappearance. If it is possible for any man, it was
not, certainly, possible for a Greek, to feel himself connected by any
real bonds with his fellow-creatures around him, while he felt himself
utterly separated from any being above his fellow-creatures. But the
sense of that isolation would affect different minds very differently.
It drove the Epicurean to consider how he might make a world in which he
should live comfortably, without distracting visions of the past and
future, and the dread of those upper powers who no longer awakened in
him any feelings of sympathy. It drove Zeno the Stoic to consider
whether a man may not find enough in himself to satisfy him, though what
is beyond him be ever so unfriendly. . . . We may trace in the
productions which are attributed to Zone a very clear indication of the
feeling which was at work in his mind. He undertook, for instance,
among other tasks, to answer Plato's 'Republic.' The truth that a man
is a political being, which informs and pervades that book, was one
which must have been particularly harassing to his mind, and which he
felt must be got rid of, before he could hope to assert his doctrine of
a man's solitary dignity."
Woe to the nation or the society in which this individualising and
separating process is going on in the human mind! Whether it take the
form of a religion or of a philosophy, it is at once the sign and the
cause of senility, decay, and death. If man begins to forget that he is
a social being, a member of a body, and that the only truths which can
avail him anything, the only truths which are worthy objects of his
philosophical search, are those which are equally true for every man,
which will equally avail every man, which he must proclaim, as far as he
can, to every man, from the proudest sage to the meanest outcast, he
enters, I believe, into a lie, and helps forward the dissolution of that
society of which he is a member. I care little whether what he holds be
true or not. If it be true, he has made it a lie by appropriating it
proudly and selfishly to himself, and by excluding others from it. He
has darkened his own power of vision by that act of self-appropriation,
so that even if he sees a truth, he can only see it refractedly,
discoloured by the medium of his own private likes and dislikes, and
fulfils that great and truly philosophic law, that he who loveth not his
brother is in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth. And so it
befell those old Greek schools. It is out of our path to follow them to
Italy, where sturdy old Roman patriots cursed them, and with good
reason, as corrupting the morals of the young. Our business is with
Alexandria; and there, certainly, they did nothing for the elevation of
humanity. What culture they may have given, probably helped to make the
Alexandrians, what Caesar calls them, the most ingenious of all nations:
but righteous or valiant men it did not make them. When, after the
three great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, the race of
the Ptolemies began to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its
sovereigns fell; and during a miserable and shameful decline of a
hundred and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents
and readings with the true odium gammaticum, and kings plunged deeper
and deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and cruelty,
till the flood came, and swept them all away. Cleopatra, the Helen of
Egypt, betrayed her country to the Roman; and thenceforth the
Alexandrians became slaves in all but name.
And now that Alexandria has become a tributary province, is it to share
the usual lot of enslaved countries and lose all originality and vigour
of thought? Not so. From this point, strangely enough, it begins to
have a philosophy of its own. Hitherto it has been importing Greek
thought into Egypt and Syria, even to the furthest boundaries of Persia;
and the whole East has become Greek: but it has received little in
return. The Indian Gymnosophists, or Brahmins, had little or no effect
on Greek philosophy, except in the case of Pyrrho: the Persian Dualism
still less. The Egyptian symbolic nature-worship had been too gross to
be regarded by the cultivated Alexandrian as anything but a barbaric
superstition. One eastern nation had intermingled closely with the
Macedonian race, and from it Alexandrian thought received a new impulse.
I mentioned in my first lecture the conciliatory policy which the
Ptolemies had pursued toward the Jews. Soter had not only allowed but
encouraged them to settle in Alexandria and Egypt, granting them the
same political privileges with the Macedonians and other Greeks. Soon
they built themselves a temple there, in obedience to some supposed
prophecy in their sacred writings, which seems most probably to have
been a wilful interpolation. Whatsoever value we may attach to the
various myths concerning the translation of their Scriptures into Greek,
there can be no doubt that they were translated in the reign of Soter,
and that the exceedingly valuable Septuagint version is the work of that
period. Moreover, their numbers in Alexandria were very great. When
Amrou took Constantinople in A.D. 640, there were 40,000 Jews in it; and
their numbers during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, before their
temporary expulsion by Cyril about 412, were probably greater; and Egypt
altogether is said to have contained 200,000 Jews. They had schools
there, which were so esteemed by their whole nation throughout the East,
that the Alexandrian Rabbis, the Light of Israel, as they were called,
may be fairly considered as the centre of Jewish thought and learning
for several centuries.
We are accustomed, and not without reason, to think with some contempt
of these old Rabbis. Rabbinism, Cabbalism, are become by-words in the
mouths of men. It may be instructive for us--it is certainly necessary
for us, if we wish to understand Alexandria--to examine a little how
they became so fallen.
Their philosophy took its stand, as you all know, on certain ancient
books of their people; histories, laws, poems, philosophical treatises,
which all have one element peculiar to themselves, namely, the assertion
of a living personal Ruler and Teacher, not merely of the Jewish race,
but of all the nations of the earth. After the return of their race
from Babylon, their own records give abundant evidence that this strange
people became the most exclusive and sectarian which the world ever saw.
Into the causes of that exclusiveness I will not now enter; suffice it
to say, that it was pardonable enough in a people asserting Monotheism
in the midst of idolatrous nations, and who knew, from experience even
more bitter than that which taught Plato and Socrates, how directly all
those popular idolatries led to every form of baseness and immorality.
But we may trace in them, from the date of their return from Babylon,
especially from their settlement in Alexandria, a singular change of
opinion. In proportion as they began to deny that their unseen personal
Ruler had anything to do with the Gentiles--the nations of the earth, as
they called them--in proportion as they considered themselves as His
only subjects--or rather, Him and His guidance as their own private
property--exactly in that proportion they began to lose all living or
practical belief that He did guide them. He became a being of the past;
one who had taught and governed their forefathers in old times: not one
who was teaching and governing them now. I beg you to pay attention to
this curious result; because you will see, I think, the very same thing
occurring in two other Alexandrian schools, of which I shall speak
hereafter.
The result to these Rabbis was, that the inspired books which spoke of
this Divine guidance and government became objects of superstitious
reverence, just in proportion as they lost all understanding of their
real value and meaning. Nevertheless, this too produced good results;
for the greatest possible care was taken to fix the Canon of these
books; to settle, as far as possible, the exact time at which the Divine
guidance was supposed to have ceased; after which it was impious to
claim a Divine teaching; when their sages were left to themselves, as
they fancied, with a complete body of knowledge, on which they were
henceforth only to comment. Thus, whether or not they were right in
supposing that the Divine Teacher had ceased to teach and inspire them,
they did infinite service by marking out for us certain writers whom He
had certainly taught and inspired. No doubt they were right in their
sense of the awful change which had passed over their nation. There was
an infinite difference between them and the old Hebrew writers. They
had lost something which those old prophets possessed. I invite you to
ponder, each for himself, on the causes of this strange loss; bearing in
mind that they lost their forefathers' heirloom, exactly in proportion
as they began to believe it to be their exclusive possession, and to
deny other human beings any right to or share in it. It may have been
that the light given to their forefathers had, as they thought, really
departed. It may have been, also, that the light was there all around
them still, as bright as ever, but that they would not open their eyes
and behold it; or rather, could not open them, because selfishness and
pride had sealed them. It may have been, that inspiration was still
very near them too, if their spirits had been willing to receive it.
But of the fact of the change there was no doubt. For the old Hebrew
seers were men dealing with the loftiest and deepest laws: the Rabbis
were shallow pedants. The old Hebrew seers were righteous and virtuous
men: the Rabbis became, in due time, some of the worst and wickedest
men who ever trod this earth.
Thus they too had their share in that downward career of pedantry which
we have seen characterise the whole past Alexandrine age. They, like
Zenodotus and Aristarchus, were commentators, grammarians, sectarian
disputers: they were not thinkers or actors. Their inspired books were
to them no more the words of living human beings who had sought for the
Absolute Wisdom, and found it after many sins and doubts and sorrows.
The human writers became in their eyes the puppets and mouthpieces of
some magical influence, not the disciples of a living and loving person.
The book itself was, in their belief, not in any true sense inspired,
but magically dictated--by what power they cared not to define. His
character was unimportant to them, provided He had inspired no nation
but their own. But, thought they, if the words were dictated, each of
them must have some mysterious value. And if each word had a mysterious
value, why not each letter? And how could they set limits to that
mysterious value? Might not these words, even rearrangements of the
letters of them, be useful in protecting them against the sorceries of
the heathen, in driving away those evil spirits, or evoking those good
spirits, who, though seldom mentioned in their early records, had after
their return from Babylon begun to form an important part of their
unseen world? For as they had lost faith in the One Preserver of their
race, they had filled up the void by a ponderous demonology of
innumerable preservers. This process of thought was not confined to
Alexandria. Dr. Layard, in his last book on Nineveh, gives some curious
instances of its prevalence among them at an earlier period, well worth
your careful study. But it was at Alexandria that the Jewish Cabbalism
formed itself into a system. It was there that the Jews learnt to
become the jugglers and magic-mongers of the whole Roman world, till
Claudius had to expel them from Rome, as pests to rational and moral
society.
And yet, among these hapless pedants there lingered nobler thoughts and
hopes. They could not read the glorious heirlooms of their race without
finding in them records of antique greatness and virtue, of old
deliverances worked for their forefathers; and what seemed promises,
too, that that greatness should return. The notion that those promises
were conditional; that they expressed eternal moral laws, and declared
the consequences of obeying those laws, they had lost long ago. By
looking on themselves as exclusively and arbitrarily favoured by Heaven,
they were ruining their own moral sense. Things were not right or wrong
to them because Right was eternal and divine, and Wrong the
transgression of that eternal right. How could that be? For then the
right things the Gentiles seemed to do would be right and divine;--and
that supposition in their eyes was all but impious. None could do right
but themselves, for they only knew the law of God. So, right with them
had no absolute or universal ground, but was reduced in their minds to
the performance of certain acts commanded exclusively to them--a form of
ethics which rapidly sank into the most petty and frivolous casuistry as
to the outward performance of those acts. The sequel of those ethics is
known to all the world, in the spectacle of the most unrivalled
religiosity, and scrupulous respectability, combined with a more utter
absence of moral sense, in their most cultivated and learned men, than
the world has ever beheld before or since.
In such a state of mind it was impossible for them to look on their old
prophets as true seers, beholding and applying eternal moral laws, and,
therefore, seeing the future in the present and in the past. They must
be the mere utterers of an irreversible arbitrary fate; and that fate
must, of course, be favourable to their nation. So now arose a school
who picked out from their old prophets every passage which could be made
to predict their future glory, and a science which settled when that
glory was to return. By the arbitrary rules of criticism a prophetic
day was defined to mean a year; a week, seven years. The most simple
and human utterances were found to have recondite meanings relative to
their future triumph over the heathens whom they cursed and hated. If
any of you ever come across the popular Jewish interpretations of The
Song of Solomon, you will there see the folly in which acute and learned
men can indulge themselves when they have lost hold of the belief in
anything really absolute and eternal and moral, and have made Fate, and
Time, and Self, their real deities. But this dream of a future
restoration was in no wise ennobled, as far as we can see, with any
desire for a moral restoration. They believed that a person would
appear some day or other to deliver them. Even they were happily
preserved by their sacred books from the notion that deliverance was to
be found for them, or for any man, in an abstraction or notion ending in
-ation or -ality. In justice to them it must be said, that they were
too wise to believe that personal qualities, such as power, will, love,
righteousness, could reside in any but in a person, or be manifested
except by a person. And among the earlier of them the belief may have
been, that the ancient unseen Teacher of their race would be their
deliverer: but as they lost the thought of Him, the expected Deliverer
became a mere human being: or rather not a human being; for as they
lost their moral sense, they lost in the very deepest meaning their
humanity, and forgot what man was like till they learned to look only
for a conqueror; a manifestation of power, and not of goodness; a
destroyer of the hated heathen, who was to establish them as the tyrant
race of the whole earth. On that fearful day on which, for a moment,
they cast away even that last dream, and cried, "We have no king but
Caesar," they spoke the secret of their hearts. It was a Caesar, a
Jewish Caesar, for whom they had been longing for centuries. And if
they could not have such a deliverer, they would have none: they would
take up with the best embodiment of brute Titanic power which they could
find, and crucify the embodiment of Righteousness and Love. Amid all
the metaphysical schools of Alexandria, I know none so deeply
instructive as that school of the Rabbis, "the glory of Israel."
But you will say: "This does not look like a school likely to
regenerate Alexandrian thought." True: and yet it did regenerate it,
both for good and for evil; for these men had among them and preserved
faithfully enough for all practical purposes, the old literature of
their race; a literature which I firmly believe, if I am to trust the
experience of 1900 years, is destined to explain all other literatures;
because it has firm hold of the one eternal root-idea which gives life,
meaning, Divine sanction, to every germ or fragment of human truth which
is in any of them. It did so, at least, in Alexandria for the Greek
literature. About the Christian era, a cultivated Alexandrian Jew, a
disciple of Plato and of Aristotle, did seem to himself to find in the
sacred books of his nation that which agreed with the deepest
discoveries of Greek philosophy; which explained and corroborated them.
And his announcement of this fact, weak and defective as it was, had the
most enormous and unexpected results. The father of New Platonism was
Philo the Jew.
LECTURE III--NEOPLATONISM
We now approach the period in which Alexandria began to have a
philosophy of its own--to be, indeed, the leader of human thought for
several centuries.
I shall enter on this branch of my subject with some fear and trembling;
not only on account of my own ignorance, but on account of the great
difficulty of handling it without trenching on certain controversial
subjects which are rightly and wisely forbidden here. For there was not
one school of Metaphysic at Alexandria: there were two; which, during
the whole period of their existence, were in internecine struggle with
each other, and yet mutually borrowing from each other; the Heathen,
namely, and the Christian. And you cannot contemplate, still less can
you understand, the one without the other. Some of late years have
become all but unaware of the existence of that Christian school; and
the word Philosophy, on the authority of Gibbon, who, however excellent
an authority for facts, knew nothing about Philosophy, and cared less,
has been used exclusively to express heathen thought; a misnomer which
in Alexandria would have astonished Plotinus or Hypatia as much as it
would Clement or Origen. I do not say that there is, or ought to be, a
Christian Metaphysic. I am speaking, as you know, merely as a
historian, dealing with facts; and I say that there was one; as
profound, as scientific, as severe, as that of the Pagan Neoplatonists;
starting indeed, as I shall show hereafter, on many points from common
ground with theirs. One can hardly doubt, I should fancy, that many
parts of St. John's Gospel and Epistles, whatever view we may take of
them, if they are to be called anything, are to be called metaphysic and
philosophic. And one can no more doubt that before writing them he had
studied Philo, and was expanding Philo's thought in the direction which
seemed fit to him, than we can doubt it of the earlier Neoplatonists.
The technical language is often identical; so are the primary ideas from
which he starts, howsoever widely the conclusions may differ. If
Plotinus considered himself an intellectual disciple of Plato, so did
Origen and Clemens. And I must, as I said before, speak of both, or of
neither. My only hope of escaping delicate ground lies in the curious
fact, that rightly or wrongly, the form in which Christianity presented
itself to the old Alexandrian thinkers was so utterly different from the
popular conception of it in modern England, that one may very likely be
able to tell what little one knows about it, almost without mentioning a
single doctrine which now influences the religious world.
But far greater is my fear, that to a modern British auditory, trained
in the school of Locke, much of ancient thought, heathen as well as
Christian, may seem so utterly the product of the imagination, so
utterly without any corresponding reality in the universe, as to look
like mere unintelligible madness. Still, I must try; only entreating my
hearers to consider, that how much soever we may honour Locke and his
great Scotch followers, we are not bound to believe them either
infallible, or altogether world-embracing; that there have been other
methods than theirs of conceiving the Unseen; that the common ground
from which both Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is not merely
a private vagary of their own, but one which has been accepted
undoubtingly, under so many various forms, by so many different races,
as to give something of an inductive probability that it is not a mere
dream, but may be a right and true instinct of the human mind. I mean
the belief that the things which we see--nature and all her phenomena--
are temporal, and born only to die; mere shadows of some unseen
realities, from whom their laws and life are derived; while the eternal
things which subsist without growth, decay, or change, the only real,
only truly existing things, in short, are certain things which are not
seen; inappreciable by sense, or understanding, or imagination,
perceived only by the conscience and the reason. And that, again, the
problem of philosophy, the highest good for man, that for the sake of
which death were a gain, without which life is worthless, a drudgery, a
degradation, a failure, and a ruin, is to discover what those unseen
eternal things are, to know them, possess them, be in harmony with them,
and thereby alone to rise to any real and solid power, or safety, or
nobleness. It is a strange dream. But you will see that it is one
which does not bear much upon "points of controversy," any more than on
"Locke's philosophy;" nevertheless, when we find this same strange dream
arising, apparently without intercommunion of thought, among the old
Hindoos, among the Greeks, among the Jews; and lastly, when we see it
springing again in the Middle Age, in the mind of the almost forgotten
author of the "Deutsche Theologie," and so becoming the parent, not
merely of Luther's deepest belief, or of the German mystic schools of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but of the great German
Philosophy itself as developed by Kant, and Fichte, and Schelling, and
Hegel, we must at least confess it to be a popular delusion, if nothing
better, vast enough and common enough to be worth a little patient
investigation, wheresoever we may find it stirring the human mind.
But I have hope, still, that I may find sympathy and comprehension among
some, at least, of my audience, as I proceed to examine the ancient
realist schools of Alexandria, on account of their knowledge of the
modern realist schools of Germany. For I cannot but see, that a
revulsion is taking place in the thoughts of our nation upon metaphysic
subjects, and that Scotland, as usual, is taking the lead therein. That
most illustrious Scotchman, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, first vindicated the
great German Realists from the vulgar misconceptions about them which
were so common at the beginning of this century, and brought the minds
of studious men to a more just appreciation of the philosophic severity,
the moral grandeur, of such thinkers as Emmanuel Kant, and Gottlieb
Fichte. To another Scotch gentleman, who, I believe, has honoured me by
his presence here to-night, we owe most valuable translations of some of
Fichte's works; to be followed, I trust, by more. And though, as a
humble disciple of Bacon, I cannot but think that the method both of
Kant and Fichte possesses somewhat of the same inherent defect as the
method of the Neoplatonist school, yet I should be most unfair did I not
express my deep obligations to them, and advise all those to study them
carefully, who wish to gain a clear conception either of the old
Alexandrian schools, or of those intellectual movements which are
agitating the modern mind, and which will, I doubt not, issue in a
clearer light, and in a nobler life, if not for us, yet still for our
children's children for ever.
The name of Philo the Jew is now all but forgotten among us. He was
laughed out of sight during the last century, as a dreamer and an
allegorist, who tried eclectically to patch together Plato and Moses.
The present age, however, is rapidly beginning to suspect that all who
thought before the eighteenth century were not altogether either fools
or impostors; old wisdom is obtaining a fairer hearing day by day, and
is found not to be so contradictory to new wisdom as was supposed. We
are beginning, too, to be more inclined to justify Providence, by
believing that lies are by their very nature impotent and doomed to die;
that everything which has had any great or permanent influence on the
human mind, must have in it some germ of eternal truth; and setting
ourselves to separate that germ of truth from the mistakes which may
have distorted and overlaid it. Let us believe, or at least hope, the
same for a few minutes, of Philo, and try to find out what was the
secret of his power, what the secret of his weakness.
First: I cannot think that he had to treat his own sacred books
unfairly, to make them agree with the root-idea of Socrates and Plato.
Socrates and Plato acknowledged a Divine teacher of the human spirit;
that was the ground of their philosophy. So did the literature of the
Jews. Socrates and Plato, with all the Greek sages till the Sophistic
era, held that the object of philosophy was the search after that which
truly exists: that he who found that, found wisdom: Philo's books
taught him the same truth: but they taught him also, that the search
for wisdom was not merely the search for that which is, but for Him who
is; not for a thing, but for a person. I do not mean that Plato and the
elder Greeks had not that object also in view; for I have said already
that Theology was with them the ultimate object of all metaphysic
science: but I do think that they saw it infinitely less clearly than
the old Jewish sages. Those sages were utterly unable to conceive of an
absolute truth, except as residing in an absolutely true person; of
absolute wisdom, except in an absolutely wise person; of an absolute
order and law, except in a lawgiver; of an absolute good, except in an
absolutely good person: any more than either they or we can conceive of
an absolute love, except in an absolutely loving person. I say boldly,
that I think them right, on all grounds of Baconian induction. For all
these qualities are only known to us as exhibited in persons; and if we
believe them to have any absolute and eternal existence at all, to be
objective, and independent of us, and the momentary moods and sentiments
of our own mind, they must exist in some absolute and eternal person, or
they are mere notions, abstractions, words, which have no counterparts.
But here arose a puzzle in the mind of Philo, as it in reality had, we
may see, in the minds of Socrates and Plato. How could he reconcile the
idea of that absolute and eternal one Being, that Zeus, Father of Gods
and men, self-perfect, self-contained, without change or motion, in
whom, as a Jew, he believed even more firmly than the Platonists, with
the Daemon of Socrates, the Divine Teacher whom both Plato and Solomon
confessed? Or how, again, could he reconcile the idea of Him with the
creative and providential energy, working in space and time, working on
matter, and apparently affected and limited, if not baffled, by the
imperfection of the minds which he taught, by the imperfection of the
matter which he moulded? This, as all students of philosophy must know,
was one of the great puzzles of old Greek philosophy, as long as it was
earnest and cared to have any puzzles at all: it has been, since the
days of Spinoza, the great puzzle of all earnest modern philosophers.
Philo offered a solution in that idea of a Logos, or Word of God,
Divinity articulate, speaking and acting in time and space, and
therefore by successive acts; and so doing, in time and space, the will
of the timeless and spaceless Father, the Abysmal and Eternal Being, of
whom he was the perfect likeness. In calling this person the Logos, and
making him the source of all human reason, and knowledge of eternal
laws, he only translated from Hebrew into Greek the name which he found
in his sacred books, "The Word of God." As yet we have found no unfair
allegorising of Moses, or twisting of Plato. How then has he incurred
this accusation?
I cannot think, again, that he was unfair in supposing that he might
hold at the same time the Jewish belief concerning Creation, and the
Platonic doctrine of the real existence of Archetypal ideas, both of
moral and of physical phenomena. I do not mean that such a conception
was present consciously to the mind of the old Jews, as it was most
certainly to the mind of St. Paul, a practised Platonic dialectician;
but it seems to me, as to Philo, to be a fair, perhaps a necessary,
corollary from the Genetic Philosophy, both of Moses and of Solomon.
But in one thing he was unfair; namely, in his allegorising. But unfair
to whom? To Socrates and Plato, I believe, as much as to Moses and to
Samuel. For what is the part of the old Jewish books which he
evaporates away into mere mystic symbols of the private experiences of
the devout philosopher? Its practical everyday histories, which deal
with the common human facts of family and national life, of man's
outward and physical labour and craft. These to him have no meaning,
except an allegoric one. But has he thrown them away for the sake of
getting a step nearer to Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle? Surely not.
To them, as to the old Jewish sages, man is most important when regarded
not merely as a soul, but as a man, a social being of flesh and blood.
Aristotle declares politics to be the architectonical science, the
family and social relations to be the eternal master-facts of humanity.
Plato, in his Republic, sets before himself the Constitution of a State,
as the crowning problem of his philosophy. Every work of his, like
every saying of his master Socrates, deals with the common, outward,
vulgar facts of human life, and asserts that there is a divine meaning
in them, and that reverent induction from them is the way to obtain the
deepest truths. Socrates and Plato were as little inclined to separate
the man and the philosopher as Moses, Solomon, or Isaiah were. When
Philo, by allegorising away the simple human parts of his books, is
untrue to Moses's teaching, he becomes untrue to Plato's. He becomes
untrue, I believe, to a higher teaching than Plato's. He loses sight of
an eternal truth, which even old Homer might have taught him, when he
treats Moses as one section of his disciples in after years treated
Homer.
For what is the secret of the eternal freshness, the eternal beauty, ay,
I may say boldly, in spite of all their absurdities and immoralities,
the eternal righteousness of those old Greek myths? What is it which
made Socrates and Plato cling lovingly and reverently to them, they
scarce knew why, while they deplored the immoralities to which they had
given rise? What is it which made those myths, alone of all old
mythologies, the parents of truly beautiful sculpture, painting, poetry?
What is it which makes us love them still; find, even at times against
our consciences, new meaning, new beauty in them; and brings home the
story of Perseas or of Hercules, alike to the practised reason of
Niebuhr, and the untutored instincts of Niebuhr's little child, for whom
he threw them into simplest forms? Why is it that in spite of our
disagreeing with their creed and their morality, we still persist--and
long may we persist, or rather be compelled--as it were by blind
instinct, to train our boys upon those old Greek dreams; and confess,
whenever we try to find a substitute for them in our educational
schemes, that we have as yet none? Because those old Greek stories do
represent the Deities as the archetypes, the kinsmen, the teachers, the
friends, the inspirers of men. Because while the schoolboy reads how
the Gods were like to men, only better, wiser, greater; how the Heroes
are the children of the Gods, and the slayers of the monsters which
devour the earth; how Athene taught men weaving, and Phoebus music, and
Vulcan the cunning of the stithy; how the Gods took pity on the noble-
hearted son of Danae, and lent him celestial arms and guided him over
desert and ocean to fulfil his vow--that boy is learning deep lessons of
metaphysic, more in accordance with the reine vernunft, the pure reason
whereby man perceives that which is moral, and spiritual, and eternal,
than he would from all disquisitions about being and becoming, about
actualities and potentialities, which ever tormented the weary brain of
man.
Let us not despise the gem because it has been broken to fragments,
obscured by silt and mud. Still less let us fancy that one least
fragment of it is not more precious than the most brilliant paste jewel
of our own compounding, though it be polished and faceted never so
completely. For what are all these myths but fragments of that great
metaphysic idea, which, I boldly say, I believe to be at once the
justifier and the harmoniser of all philosophic truth which man has ever
discovered, or will discover; which Philo saw partially, and yet
clearly; which the Hebrew sages perceived far more deeply, because more
humanly and practically; which Saint Paul the Platonist, and yet the
Apostle, raised to its highest power, when he declared that the
immutable and self-existent Being, for whom the Greek sages sought, and
did not altogether seek in vain, has gathered together all things both
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