Alexandria and her Schools
by
Charles Kingsley

Part 2 out of 2



in heaven and in earth in one inspiring and creating Logos, who is both
God and Man?

Be this as it may, we find that from the time of Philo, the deepest
thought of the heathen world began to flow in a theologic channel. All
the great heathen thinkers henceforth are theologians. In the times of
Nero, for instance, Epictetus the slave, the regenerator of Stoicism, is
no mere speculator concerning entities and quiddities, correct or
incorrect. He is a slave searching for the secret of freedom, and
finding that it consists in escaping not from a master, but from self:
not to wealth and power, but to Jove. He discovers that Jove is, in
some most mysterious, but most real sense, the Father of men; he learns
to look up to that Father as his guide and friend.

Numenius, again, in the second century, was a man who had evidently
studied Philo. He perceived so deeply, I may say so exaggeratedly, the
analogy between the Jewish and the Platonic assertions of an Absolute
and Eternal Being, side by side with the assertion of a Divine Teacher
of man, that he is said to have uttered the startling saying: "What is
Plato but Moses talking Attic?" Doubtless Plato is not that: but the
expression is remarkable, as showing the tendency of the age. He too
looks up to God with prayers for the guidance of his reason. He too
enters into speculation concerning God in His absoluteness, and in His
connection with the universe. "The Primary God," he says, "must be free
from works and a King; but the Demiurgus must exercise government, going
through the heavens. Through Him comes this our condition; through Him
Reason being sent down in efflux, holds communion with all who are
prepared for it: God then looking down, and turning Himself to each of
us, it comes to pass that our bodies live and are nourished, receiving
strength from the outer rays which come from Him. But when God turns us
to the contemplation of Himself, it comes to pass that these things are
worn out and consumed, but that the reason lives, being partaker of a
blessed life."

This passage is exceedingly interesting, as containing both the marrow
of old Hebrew metaphysic, and also certain notional elements, of which
we find no trace in the Scripture, and which may lead--as we shall find
they afterwards did lead--to confusing the moral with the notional, and
finally the notional with the material; in plain words, to Pantheism.

You find this tendency, in short, in all the philosophers who flourished
between the age of Augustus and the rise of Alexandrian Neoplatonism.
Gibbon, while he gives an approving pat on the back to his pet
"Philosophic Emperor," Marcus Aurelius, blinks the fact that Marcus's
philosophy, like that of Plutarch, contains as an integral element, a
belief which to him would have been, I fear, simply ludicrous, from its
strange analogy with the belief of John, the Christian Apostle. What is
Marcus Aurelius's cardinal doctrine? That there is a God within him, a
Word, a Logos, which "has hold of him," and who is his teacher and
guardian; that over and above his body and his soul, he has a Reason
which is capable of "hearing that Divine Word, and obeying the monitions
of that God." What is Plutarch's cardinal doctrine? That the same
Word, the Daemon who spoke to the heart of Socrates, is speaking to him
and to every philosopher; "coming into contact," he says, "with him in
some wonderful manner; addressing the reason of those who, like
Socrates, keep their reason pure, not under the dominion of passion, nor
mixing itself greatly with the body, and therefore quick and sensitive
in responding to that which encountered it.

You see from these two extracts what questions were arising in the minds
of men, and how they touched on ethical and theological questions. I
say arising in their minds: I believe that I ought to say rather,
stirred up in their minds by One greater than they. At all events,
there they appeared, utterly independent of any Christian teaching. The
belief in this Logos or Daemon speaking to the Reason of man, was one
which neither Plutarch nor Marcus, neither Numenius nor Ammonius, as far
as we can see, learnt from the Christians; it was the common ground
which they held with them; the common battlefield which they disputed
with them.

Neither have we any reason to suppose that they learnt it from the
Hindoos. That much Hindoo thought mixed with Neoplatonist speculation
we cannot doubt; but there is not a jot more evidence to prove that
Alexandrians borrowed this conception from the Mahabharavata, than that
George Fox the Quaker, or the author of the "Deutsche Theologie," did
so. They may have gone to Hindoo philosophy, or rather, to second and
third hand traditions thereof, for corroborations of the belief; but be
sure, it must have existed in their own hearts first, or they would
never have gone thither. Believe it; be sure of it. No earnest thinker
is a plagiarist pure and simple. He will never borrow from others that
which he has not already, more or less, thought out for himself. When
once a great idea, instinctive, inductive (for the two expressions are
nearer akin than most fancy), has dawned on his soul, he will welcome
lovingly, awfully, any corroboration from foreign schools, and cry with
joy: "Behold, this is not altogether a dream: for others have found it
also. Surely it must be real, universal, eternal." No; be sure there
is far more originality (in the common sense of the word), and far less
(in the true sense of the word), than we fancy; and that it is a paltry
and shallow doctrine which represents each succeeding school as merely
the puppets and dupes of the preceding. More originality, because each
earnest man seems to think out for himself the deepest grounds of his
creed. Less originality, because, as I believe, one common Logos, Word,
Reason, reveals and unveils the same eternal truth to all who seek and
hunger for it.

Therefore we can, as the Christian philosophers of Alexandria did,
rejoice over every truth which their heathen adversaries beheld, and
attribute them, as Clement does, to the highest source, to the
inspiration of the one and universal Logos. With Clement, philosophy is
only hurtful when it is untrue to itself, and philosophy falsely so
called; true philosophy is an image of the truth, a divine gift bestowed
on the Greeks. The Bible, in his eyes, asserts that all forms of art
and wisdom are from God. The wise in mind have no doubt some peculiar
endowment of nature, but when they have offered themselves for their
work, they receive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom,
giving them a new fitness for it. All severe study, all cultivation of
sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment. The whole
intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came down
from God to men. Philosophy, he concludes in one place, carries on "an
inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of Being; and this Truth is that
concerning which the Lord Himself said: 'I am the Truth.' And when the
initiated find, or rather receive, the true philosophy, they have it
from the Truth itself; that is from Him who is true."

While, then, these two schools had so many grounds in common, where was
their point of divergence? We shall find it, I believe, fairly
expressed in the dying words of Plotinus, the great father of
Neoplatonism. "I am striving to bring the God which is in us into
harmony with the God which is in the universe." Whether or not Plotinus
actually so spoke, that was what his disciples not only said that he
spoke, but what they would have wished him to speak. That one sentence
expresses the whole object of their philosophy.

But to that Pantaenus, Origen, Clement, and Augustine would have
answered: "And we, on the other hand, assert that the God which is in
the universe, is the same as the God which is in you, and is striving to
bring you into harmony with Himself." There is the experimentum crucis.
There is the vast gulf between the Christian and the Heathen schools,
which when any man had overleaped, the whole problem of the universe was
from that moment inverted. With Plotinus and his school man is seeking
for God: with Clement and his, God is seeking for man. With the
former, God is passive, and man active: with the latter, God is active,
man is passive--passive, that is, in so far as his business is to listen
when he is spoken to, to look at the light which is unveiled to him, to
submit himself to the inward laws which he feels reproving and checking
him at every turn, as Socrates was reproved and checked by his inward
Daemon.

Whether of these two theorems gives the higher conception either of the
Divine Being, or of man, I leave it for you to judge. To those old
Alexandrian Christians, a being who was not seeking after every single
creature, and trying to raise him, could not be a Being of absolute
Righteousness, Power, Love; could not be a Being worthy of respect or
admiration, even of philosophic speculation. Human righteousness and
love flows forth disinterestedly to all around it, however unconscious,
however unworthy they may be; human power associated with goodness,
seeks for objects which it may raise and benefit by that power. We must
confess this, with the Christian schools, or, with the Heathen schools,
we must allow another theory, which brought them into awful depths;
which may bring any generation which holds it into the same depths.

If Clement had asked the Neoplatonists: "You believe, Plotinus, in an
absolutely Good Being. Do you believe that it desires to shed forth its
goodness on all?" "Of course," they would have answered, "on those who
seek for it, on the philosopher."

"But not, it seems, Plotinus, on the herd, the brutal, ignorant mass,
wallowing in those foul crimes above which you have risen?" And at that
question there would have been not a little hesitation. These brutes in
human form, these souls wallowing in earthly mire, could hardly, in the
Neoplatonists' eyes, be objects of the Divine desire.

"Then this Absolute Good, you say, Plotinus, has no relation with them,
no care to raise them. In fact, it cannot raise them, because they have
nothing in common with it. Is that your notion?" And the Neoplatonists
would have, on the whole, allowed that argument. And if Clement had
answered, that such was not his notion of Goodness, or of a Good Being,
and that therefore the goodness of their Absolute Good, careless of the
degradation and misery around it, must be something very different from
his notions of human goodness; the Neoplatonists would have answered--
indeed they did answer--"After all, why not? Why should the Absolute
Goodness be like our human goodness?" This is Plotinus's own belief.
It is a question with him, it was still more a question with those who
came after him, whether virtues could be predicated of the Divine
nature; courage, for instance, of one who had nothing to fear; self-
restraint, of one who had nothing to desire. And thus, by setting up a
different standard of morality for the divine and for the human,
Plotinus gradually arrives at the conclusion, that virtue is not the
end, but the means; not the Divine nature itself, as the Christian
schools held, but only the purgative process by which man was to ascend
into heaven, and which was necessary to arrive at that nature--that
nature itself being--what?

And how to answer that last question was the abysmal problem of the
whole of Neoplatonic philosophy, in searching for which it wearied
itself out, generation after generation, till tired equally of seeking
and of speaking, it fairly lay down and died. In proportion as it
refused to acknowledge a common divine nature with the degraded mass, it
deserted its first healthy instinct, which told it that the spiritual
world is identical with the moral world, with right, love, justice; it
tried to find new definitions for the spiritual; it conceived it to be
identical with the intellectual. That did not satisfy its heart. It
had to repeople the spiritual world, which it had emptied of its proper
denizens, with ghosts; to reinvent the old daemonologies and
polytheisms--from thence to descend into lower depths, of which we will
speak hereafter.

But in the meanwhile we must look at another quarrel which arose between
the two twin schools of Alexandria. The Neoplatonists said that there
is a divine element in man. The Christian philosophers assented
fervently, and raised the old disagreeable question: "Is it in every
man? In the publicans and harlots as well as in the philosophers? We
say that it is." And there again the Neoplatonist finds it over hard to
assent to a doctrine, equally contrary to outward appearance, and
galling to Pharisaic pride; and enters into a hundred honest self-
puzzles and self-contradictions, which seem to justify him at last in
saying, No. It is in the philosopher, who is ready by nature, as
Plotinus has it, and as it were furnished with wings, and not needing to
sever himself from matter like the rest, but disposed already to ascend
to that which is above. And in a degree too, it is in the "lover," who,
according to Plotinus, has a certain innate recollection of beauty, and
hovers round it, and desires it, wherever he sees it. Him you may raise
to the apprehension of the one incorporeal Beauty, by teaching him to
separate beauty from the various objects in which it appears scattered
and divided. And it is even in the third class, the lowest of whom
there is hope, namely, the musical man, capable of being passively
affected by beauty, without having any active appetite for it; the
sentimentalist, in short, as we should call him nowadays.

But for the herd, Plotinus cannot say that there is anything divine in
them. And thus it gradually comes out in all Neoplatonist writings
which I have yet examined, that the Divine only exists in a man, in
proportion as he is conscious of its existence in him. From which
spring two conceptions of the Divine in man. First, is it a part of
him, if it is dependent for its existence on his consciousness of it?
Or is it, as Philo, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius would have held, as the
Christians held, something independent of him, without him, a Logos or
Word speaking to his reason and conscience? With this question Plotinus
grapples, earnestly, shrewdly, fairly. If you wish to see how he does
it, you should read the fourth and fifth books of the sixth Ennead,
especially if you be lucky enough to light on a copy of that rare book,
Taylor's faithful though crabbed translation.

Not that the result of his search is altogether satisfactory. He enters
into subtle and severe disquisitions concerning soul. Whether it is one
or many. How it can be both one and many. He has the strongest
perception that, to use the noble saying of the Germans, "Time and Space
are no gods." He sees clearly that the soul, and the whole unseen world
of truly existing being, is independent of time and space: and yet,
after he has wrestled with the two Titans, through page after page, and
apparently conquered them, they slip in again unawares into the battle-
field, the moment his back is turned. He denies that the one Reason has
parts--it must exist as a whole wheresoever it exists: and yet he
cannot express the relation of the individual soul to it, but by saying
that we are parts of it; or that each thing, down to the lowest,
receives as much soul as it is capable of possessing. Ritter has worked
out at length, though in a somewhat dry and lifeless way, the hundred
contradictions of this kind which you meet in Plotinus; contradictions
which I suspect to be inseparable from any philosophy starting from his
grounds. Is he not looking for the spiritual in a region where it does
not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which
are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we
express to ourselves the processes of our own brain? May not his
Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as
nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that
that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived
of as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and
has to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and
wrong, love and hate, and all which, in the common instincts of men,
involves a free will, a free judgment, a free responsibility and desert?
And that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Daemonic Element, an
universal Reason, a Logos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man,
that one Reason, that one Divine Element, must be a person also? At
least, so strong was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this
direction, that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which
yawned between man and the invisible things after which he yearned, by
reviving the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and adding to it a Daemonology
borrowed partly from the Chaldees, and partly from the Jewish rabbis,
which formed a descending chain of persons, downward from the highest
Deities to heroes, and to the guardian angel of each man; the meed of
the philosopher being, that by self-culture and self-restraint he could
rise above the tutelage of some lower and more earthly daemon, and
become the pupil of a God, and finally a God himself.

These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neoplatonism in
our eyes, as a moral being. All accounts of him seem to prove him to
have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have been,
"good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, and pleasant in all his
conversation." He gave good advice about earthly matters, was a
faithful steward of moneys deposited with him, a guardian of widows and
orphans, a righteous and loving man. In his practical life, the ascetic
and gnostic element comes out strongly enough. The body, with him, was
not evil, neither was it good; it was simply nothing--why care about it?
He would have no portrait taken of his person: "It was humiliating
enough to be obliged to carry a shadow about with him, without having a
shadow made of that shadow." He refused animal food, abstained from
baths, declined medicine in his last illness, and so died about 200 A.D.

It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such cases, that the
weakness of his conceptions comes out. Plotinus was an earnest thinker,
slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an
infallible oracle, with a "He says," as if there were but one he in the
universe: but he tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he conceived
to be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down. His dialectic is
far superior, both in quantity and in quality, to that of those who come
after him. He is a seeker. His followers are not. The great work
which marks the second stage of his school is not an inquiry, but a
justification, not only of the Egyptian, but of all possible theurgies
and superstitions; perhaps the best attempt of the kind which the world
has ever seen; that which marks the third is a mere cloud-castle, an
inverted pyramid, not of speculation, but of dogmatic assertion, patched
together from all accessible rags and bones of the dead world. Some
here will, perhaps, guess from my rough descriptions, that I speak of
Iamblichus and Proclus.

Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work usually attributed to
him, which describes itself as the letter of Abamnon the Teacher to
Porphyry, he became the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell
back on theurgy and magic, and utterly swallowed up the more rational,
though more hopeless, school of Porphyry. Not that Porphyry, too, with
all his dislike of magic and the vulgar superstitions--a dislike
intimately connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the common
herd, and therefore of Christianity, as a religion for the common herd--
did not believe a fact or two, which looks to us, nowadays, somewhat
unphilosophical. From him we learn that one Ammonius, trying to crush
Plotinus by magic arts, had his weapons so completely turned against
himself, that all his limbs were contracted. From him we learn that
Plotinus, having summoned in the temple of Isis his familiar spirit, a
god, and not a mere daemon, appeared. He writes sensibly enough however
to one Anebos, an Egyptian priest, stating his doubts as to the popular
notions of the Gods, as beings subject to human passions and vices, and
of theurgy and magic, as material means of compelling them to appear, or
alluring them to favour man. The answer of Abamnon, Anebos, Iamblichus,
or whoever the real author may have been, is worthy of perusal by every
metaphysical student, as a curious phase of thought, not confined to
that time, but rife, under some shape or other, in every age of the
world's history, and in this as much as in any. There are many passages
full of eloquence, many more full of true and noble thought: but on the
whole, it is the sewing of new cloth into an old garment; the attempt to
suit the old superstition to the new one, by eclectically picking and
choosing, and special pleading, on both sides; but the rent is only made
worse. There is no base superstition which Abamnon does not
unconsciously justify. And yet he is rapidly losing sight of the real
eternal human germs of truth round which those superstitions clustered,
and is really further from truth and reason than old Homer or Hesiod,
because further from the simple, universal, everyday facts, and
relations, and duties of man, which are, after all, among the most
mysterious, and also among the most sacred objects which man can
contemplate.

It was not wonderful, however, that Neoplatonism took the course it did.
Spirit, they felt rightly, was meant to rule matter; it was to be freed
from matter only for that very purpose. No one could well deny that.
The philosopher, as he rose and became, according to Plotinus, a god, or
at least approached toward the gods, must partake of some mysterious and
transcendental power. No one could well deny that conclusion, granting
the premiss. But of what power? What had he to show as the result of
his intimate communion with an unseen Being? The Christian Schools, who
held that the spiritual is the moral, answered accordingly. He must
show righteousness, and love, and peace in a Holy Spirit. That is the
likeness of God. In proportion as a man has them, he is partaker of a
Divine nature. He can rise no higher, and he needs no more. Platonists
had said--No, that is only virtue; and virtue is the means, not the end.
We want proof of having something above that; something more than any
man of the herd, any Christian slave, can perform; something above
nature; portents and wonders. So they set to work to perform wonders;
and succeeded, I suppose, more or less. For now one enters into a whole
fairyland of those very phenomena which are puzzling us so nowadays--
ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the
effect of what we now call mesmerism. They are all there, these modern
puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wisdom. It
makes us love them, while it saddens us to see that their difficulties
were the same as ours, and that there is nothing new under the sun. Of
course, a great deal of it all was "imagination." But the question
then, as now is, what is this wonder-working imagination?--unless the
word be used as a mere euphemism for lying, which really, in many cases,
is hardly fair. We cannot wonder at the old Neoplatonists for
attributing these strange phenomena to spiritual influence, when we see
some who ought to know better doing the same thing now; and others, who
more wisely believe them to be strictly physical and nervous, so utterly
unable to give reasons for them, that they feel it expedient to ignore
them for awhile, till they know more about those physical phenomena
which can be put under some sort of classification, and attributed to
some sort of inductive law.

But again. These ecstasies, cures, and so forth, brought them rapidly
back to the old priestcrafts. The Egyptian priests, the Babylonian and
Jewish sorcerers, had practised all this as a trade for ages, and
reduced it to an art. It was by sleeping in the temples of the deities,
after due mesmeric manipulations, that cures were even then effected.
Surely the old priests were the people to whom to go for information.
The old philosophers of Greece were venerable. How much more those of
the East, in comparison with whom the Greeks were children? Besides, if
these daemons and deities were so near them, might it not be possible to
behold them? They seemed to have given up caring much for the world and
its course -


Effugerant adytis templisque relictis
Di quibus imperium steterat.


The old priests used to make them appear--perhaps they might do it
again. And if spirit could act directly and preternaturally on matter,
in spite of the laws of matter, perhaps matter might act on spirit.
After all, were matter and spirit so absolutely different? Was not
spirit some sort of pervading essence, some subtle ethereal fluid,
differing from matter principally in being less gross and dense? This
was the point to which they went down rapidly enough; the point to which
all philosophies, I firmly believe, will descend, which do not keep in
sight that the spiritual means the moral. In trying to make it mean
exclusively the intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely
logical and abstract; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless
phantom, a mere projection of the human brain, attributing reality to
mere conceptions and names, and confusing the subject with the object,
as logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in despair, the
school will try to make the spiritual something real, or, at least,
something conceivable, by reinvesting it with the properties of matter,
and talking of it as if it were some manner of gas, or heat, or
electricity, or force, pervading time and space, conditioned by the
accidents of brute matter, and a part of that nature which is born to
die.

The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus. The
unfortunate Hypatia, who is the most important personage between him and
Iamblichus, has left no writings to our times; we can only judge of her
doctrine by that of her instructors and her pupils. Proclus was taught
by the men who had heard her lecture; and the golden chain of the
Platonic succession descended from her to him. His throne, however, was
at Athens, not at Alexandria. After the murder of the maiden
philosopher, Neoplatonism prudently retired to Greece. But Proclus is
so essentially the child of the Alexandrian school that we cannot pass
him over. Indeed, according to M. Cousin, as I am credibly informed, he
is the Greek philosopher; the flower and crown of all its schools; in
whom, says the learned Frenchman, "are combined, and from whom shine
forth, in no irregular or uncertain rays, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato,
Aristotle, Zeno, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus;" and who "had so
comprehended all religions in his mind, and paid them such equal
reverence, that he was, as it were, the priest of the whole universe!"

I have not the honour of knowing much of M. Cousin's works. I never
came across them but on one small matter of fact, and on that I found
him copying at second hand an anachronism which one would have conceived
palpable to any reader of the original authorities. This is all I know
of him, saving these his raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted
only a small portion, and of which I can only say, in Mr. Thomas
Carlyle's words, "What things men will worship, in their extreme need!"
Other moderns, however, have expressed their admiration of Proclus; and,
no doubt, many neat sayings may be found in him (for after all he was a
Greek), which will be both pleasing and useful to those who consider
philosophic method to consist in putting forth strings of brilliant
apophthegms, careless about either their consistency or coherence: but
of the method of Plato or Aristotle, any more than of that of Kant or
Mill, you will find nothing in him. He seems to my simplicity to be at
once the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy of
declaimers. He can rave symbolism like Jacob Bohmen, but without an
atom of his originality and earnestness. He can develop an inverted
pyramid of daemonology, like Father Newman himself, but without an atom
of his art, his knowledge of human cravings. He combines all schools,
truly, Chaldee and Egyptian as well as Greek; but only scraps from their
mummies, drops from their quintessences, which satisfy the heart and
conscience as little as they do the logical faculties. His Greek gods
and heroes, even his Alcibiades and Socrates, are "ideas;" that is,
symbols of certain notions or qualities: their flesh and bones, their
heart and brain, have been distilled away, till nothing is left but a
word, a notion, which may patch a hole in his huge heaven-and-earth-
embracing system. He, too, is a commentator and a deducer; all has been
discovered; and he tries to discover nothing more. Those who followed
him seem to have commented on his comments. With him Neoplatonism
properly ends. Is its last utterance a culmination or a fall? Have the
Titans sealed heaven, or died of old age, "exhibiting," as Gibbon says
of them, "a deplorable instance of the senility of the human mind?"
Read Proclus, and judge for yourselves: but first contrive to finish
everything else you have to do which can possibly be useful to any human
being. Life is short, and Art--at least the art of obtaining practical
guidance from the last of the Alexandrians--very long.

And yet--if Proclus and his school became gradually unfaithful to the
great root-idea of their philosophy, we must not imitate them. We must
not believe that the last of the Alexandrians was under no divine
teaching, because he had be-systemed himself into confused notions of
what that teaching was like. Yes, there was good in poor old Proclus;
and it too came from the only source whence all good comes. Were there
no good in him I could not laugh at him as I have done; I could only
hate him. There are moments when he rises above his theories; moments
when he recurs in spirit, if not in the letter, to the faith of Homer,
almost to the faith of Philo. Whether these are the passages of his
which his modern admirers prize most, I cannot tell. I should fancy
not: nevertheless I will read you one of them.

He is about to commence his discourses on the Parmenides, that book in
which we generally now consider that Plato has been most untrue to
himself, and fallen from his usual inductive method to the ground of a
mere e priori theoriser--and yet of which Proclus is reported to have
said, and, I should conceive, said honestly, that if it, the Timaeus,
and the Orphic fragments were preserved, he did not care whether every
other book on earth were destroyed. But how does he commence?

"I pray to all the gods and goddesses to guide my reason in the
speculation which lies before me, and having kindled in me the pure
light of truth, to direct my mind upward to the very knowledge of the
things which are, and to open the doors of my soul to receive the divine
guidance of Plato, and, having directed my knowledge into the very
brightness of being, to withdraw me from the various forms of opinion,
from the apparent wisdom, from the wandering about things which do not
exist, by that purest intellectual exercise about the things which do
exist, whereby alone the eye of the soul is nourished and brightened, as
Socrates says in the Phaedrus; and that the Noetic Gods will give to me
the perfect reason, and the Noeric Gods the power which leads up to
this, and that the rulers of the Universe above the heaven will impart
to me an energy unshaken by material notions and emancipated from them,
and those to whom the world is given as their dominion a winged life,
and the angelic choirs a true manifestation of divine things, and the
good daemons the fulness of the inspiration which comes from the Gods,
and the heroes a grand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and
the whole divine race together a perfect preparation for sharing in
Plato's most mystical and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to
us himself in the Parmenides, with the profundity befitting such topics,
but which he (i.e. his master Syrianus) completed by his most pure and
luminous apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic feast, and
was the medium for transmitting the divine truth, the guide in our
speculations, and the hierophant of these divine words; who, as I think,
came down as a type of philosophy, to do good to the souls that are
here, in place of idols, sacrifices, and the whole mystery of
purification, a leader of salvation to the men who are now and who shall
be hereafter. And may the whole band of those who are above us be
propitious; and may the whole force which they supply be at hand,
kindling before us that light which, proceeding from them, may guide us
to them."

Surely this is an interesting document. The last Pagan Greek prayer, I
believe, which we have on record; the death-wail of the old world--not
without a touch of melody. One cannot altogether admire the style; it
is inflated, pedantic, written, I fear, with a considerable
consciousness that he was saying the right thing and in the very finest
way: but still it is a prayer. A cry for light--by no means,
certainly, like that noble one in Tennyson's "In Memoriam:"


So runs my dream. But what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language but a cry.


Yet he asks for light: perhaps he had settled already for himself--like
too many more of us--what sort of light he chose to have: but still the
eye is turned upward to the sun, not inward in conceited fancy that self
is its own illumination. He asks--surely not in vain. There was light
to be had for asking. That prayer certainly was not answered in the
letter: it may have been ere now in the spirit. And yet it is a sad
prayer enough. Poor old man, and poor old philosophy!

This he and his teachers had gained by despising the simpler and yet far
profounder doctrine of the Christian schools, that the Logos, the Divine
Teacher in whom both Christians and Heathens believed, was the very
archetype of men, and that He had proved that fact by being made flesh,
and dwelling bodily among them, that they might behold His glory, full
of grace and truth, and see that it was at once the perfection of man
and the perfection of God: that that which was most divine was most
human, and that which was most human, most divine. That was the outcome
of their metaphysic, that they had found the Absolute One; because One
existed in whom the apparent antagonism between that which is eternally
and that which becomes in time, between the ideal and the actual,
between the spiritual and the material, in a word, between God and man,
was explained and reconciled for ever.

And Proclus's prayer, on the other hand, was the outcome of the
Neoplatonists' metaphysic, the end of all their search after the One,
the Indivisible, the Absolute, this cry to all manner of innumerable
phantoms, ghosts of ideas, ghosts of traditions, neither things nor
persons, but thoughts, to give the philosopher each something or other,
according to the nature of each. Not that he very clearly defines what
each is to give him; but still he feels himself in want of all manner of
things, and it is as well to have as many friends at court as possible--
Noetic Gods, Noeric Gods, rulers, angels, daemons, heroes--to enable him
to do what? To understand Plato's most mystical and far-seeing
speculations. The Eternal Nous, the Intellectual Teacher has vanished
further and further off; further off still some dim vision of a supreme
Goodness. Infinite spaces above that looms through the mist of the
abyss a Primaeval One. But even that has a predicate, for it is one; it
is not pure essence. Must there not be something beyond that again,
which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, absolute? What
an abyss! How shall the human mind find anything whereon to rest, in
the vast nowhere between it and the object of its search? The search
after the One issues in a wail to the innumerable; and kind gods,
angels, and heroes, not human indeed, but still conceivable enough to
satisfy at least the imagination, step in to fill the void, as they have
done since, and may do again; and so, as Mr. Carlyle has it, "the
bottomless pit got roofed over," as it may be again ere long.

Are we then to say, that Neoplatonism was a failure? That Alexandria,
during four centuries of profound and earnest thought, added nothing?
Heaven forbid that we should say so of a philosophy which has exercised
on European thought, at the crisis of its noblest life and action, an
influence as great as did the Aristotelian system during the Middle
Ages. We must never forget, that during the two centuries which
commence with the fall of Constantinople, and end with our civil wars,
not merely almost all great thinkers, but courtiers, statesmen,
warriors, poets, were more or less Neoplatonists. The Greek
grammarians, who migrated into Italy, brought with them the works of
Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus; and their gorgeous reveries were
welcomed eagerly by the European mind, just revelling in the free
thought of youthful manhood. And yet the Alexandrian impotence for any
practical and social purposes was to be manifested, as utterly as it was
in Alexandria or in Athens of old. Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola
worked no deliverance, either for Italian morals or polity, at a time
when such deliverance was needed bitterly enough. Neoplatonism was
petted by luxurious and heathen popes, as an elegant play of the
cultivated fancy, which could do their real power, their practical
system, neither good nor harm. And one cannot help feeling, while
reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which
Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier," puts into the mouth
of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to
dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in
England, during Elizabeth's reign, the practical weakness of
Neoplatonism was compensated by the noble practical life which men were
compelled to live in those great times; by the strong hold which they
had of the ideas of family and national life, of law and personal faith.
And I cannot but believe it to have been a mighty gain to such men as
Sidney, Raleigh, and Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of
the wells of Proclus and Plotinus. One cannot read Spenser's "Fairy
Queen," above all his Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability,
without feeling that his Neoplatonism must have kept him safe from many
a dark eschatological superstition, many a narrow and bitter dogmatism,
which was even then tormenting the English mind, and must have helped to
give him altogether a freer and more loving conception, if not a
consistent or accurate one, of the wondrous harmony of that mysterious
analogy between the physical and the spiritual, which alone makes poetry
(and I had almost said philosophy also) possible, and have taught him to
behold alike in suns and planets, in flowers and insects, in man and in
beings higher than man, one glorious order of love and wisdom, linking
them all to Him from whom they all proceed, rays from His cloudless
sunlight, mirrors of His eternal glory.

But as the Elizabethan age, exhausted by its own fertility, gave place
to the Caroline, Neoplatonism ran through much the same changes. It was
good for us, after all, that the plain strength of the Puritans,
unphilosophical as they were, swept it away. One feels in reading the
later Neoplatonists, Henry More, Smith, even Cudworth (valuable as he
is), that the old accursed distinction between the philosopher, the
scholar, the illuminate, and the plain righteous man, was growing up
again very fast. The school from which the "Religio Medici" issued was
not likely to make any bad men good, or any foolish men wise.

Besides, as long as men were continuing to quote poor old Proclus as an
irrefragable authority, and believing that he, forsooth, represented the
sense of Plato, the new-born Baconian philosophy had but little chance
in the world. Bacon had been right in his dislike of Platonism years
before, though he was unjust to Plato himself. It was Proclus whom he
was really reviling; Proclus as Plato's commentator and representative.
The lion had for once got into the ass's skin, and was treated
accordingly. The true Platonic method, that dialectic which the
Alexandrians gradually abandoned, remains yet to be tried, both in
England and in Germany; and I am much mistaken, if, when fairly used, it
be not found the ally, not the enemy, of the Baconian philosophy; in
fact, the inductive method applied to words, as the expressions of
Metaphysic Laws, instead of to natural phenomena, as the expressions of
Physical ones. If you wish to see the highest instances of this method,
read Plato himself, not Proclus. If you wish to see how the same method
can be applied to Christian truth, read the dialectic passages in
Augustine's "Confessions." Whether or not you shall agree with their
conclusions, you will not be likely, if you have a truly scientific
habit of mind, to complain that they want either profundity, severity,
or simplicity.

So concludes the history of one of the Alexandrian schools of
Metaphysic. What was the fate of the other is a subject which I must
postpone to my next Lecture.



LECTURE IV--THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT



I tried to point out, in my last Lecture, the causes which led to the
decay of the Pagan metaphysic of Alexandria. We have now to consider
the fate of the Christian school.

You may have remarked that I have said little or nothing about the
positive dogmas of Clement, Origen, and their disciples; but have only
brought out the especial points of departure between them and the
Heathens. My reason for so doing was twofold: first, I could not have
examined them without entering on controversial ground; next, I am very
desirous to excite some of my hearers, at least, to examine these
questions for themselves.

I entreat them not to listen to the hasty sneer to which many of late
have given way, that the Alexandrian divines were mere mystics, who
corrupted Christianity by an admixture of Oriental and Greek thought.
My own belief is that they expanded and corroborated Christianity, in
spite of great errors and defects on certain points, far more than they
corrupted it; that they presented it to the minds of cultivated and
scientific men in the only form in which it would have satisfied their
philosophic aspirations, and yet contrived, with wonderful wisdom, to
ground their philosophy on the very same truths which they taught to the
meanest slaves, and to appeal in the philosophers to the same inward
faculty to which they appealed in the slave; namely, to that inward eye,
that moral sense and reason, whereby each and every man can, if he will,
"judge of himself that which is right." I boldly say that I believe the
Alexandrian Christians to have made the best, perhaps the only, attempt
yet made by men, to proclaim a true world-philosophy; whereby I mean a
philosophy common to all races, ranks, and intellects, embracing the
whole phenomena of humanity, and not an arbitrarily small portion of
them, and capable of being understood and appreciated by every human
being from the highest to the lowest. And when you hear of a system of
reserve in teaching, a disciplina arcani, of an esoteric and exoteric,
an inner and outer school, among these men, you must not be frightened
at the words, as if they spoke of priestcraft, or an intellectual
aristocracy, who kept the kernel of the nut for themselves, and gave the
husks to the mob. It was not so with the Christian schools; it was so
with the Heathen ones. The Heathens were content that the mob, the
herd, should have the husks. Their avowed intention and wish was to
leave the herd, as they called them, in the mere outward observance of
the old idolatries, while they themselves, the cultivated philosophers,
had the monopoly of those deeper spiritual truths which were contained
under the old superstitions, and were too sacred to be profaned by the
vulgar eyes. The Christian method was the exact opposite. They boldly
called those vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and
there gaze on the very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy. They
owned no ground for their own speculations which was not common to the
harlots and the slaves around. And this was what enabled them to do
this; this was what brought on them the charge of demagogism, the hatred
of philosophers, the persecution of princes--that their ground was a
moral ground, and not a merely intellectual one; that they started, not
from any notions of the understanding, but from the inward conscience,
that truly pure Reason in which the intellectual and the moral spheres
are united, which they believed to exist, however dimmed or crushed, in
every human being, capable of being awakened, purified, and raised up to
a noble and heroic life. They concealed nothing moral from their
disciples: only they forbade them to meddle with intellectual matters,
before they had had a regular intellectual training. The witnesses of
reason and conscience were sufficient guides for all men, and at them
the many might well stop short. The teacher only needed to proceed
further, not into a higher region, but into a lower one, namely, into
the region of the logical understanding, and there make deductions from,
and illustrations of, those higher truths which he held in common with
every slave, and held on the same ground as they.

And the consequence of this method of philosophising was patent. They
were enabled to produce, in the lives of millions, generation after
generation, a more immense moral improvement than the world had ever
seen before. Their disciples did actually become righteous and good
men, just in proportion as they were true to the lessons they learnt.
They did, for centuries, work a distinct and palpable deliverance on the
earth; while all the solemn and earnest meditation of the Neoplatonists,
however good or true, worked no deliverance whatsoever. Plotinus longed
at one time to make a practical attempt. He asked the Emperor
Gallienus, his patron, to rebuild for him a city in Campania; to allow
him to call it Platonopolis, and put it into the hands of him and his
disciples, that they might there realise Plato's ideal republic.
Luckily for the reputation of Neoplatonism, the scheme was swamped by
the courtiers of Gallienus, and the earth was saved the sad and
ludicrous sight of a realised Laputa; probably a very quarrelsome one.
That was his highest practical conception: the foundation of a new
society: not the regeneration of society as it existed.

That work was left for the Christian schools; and up to a certain point
they performed it. They made men good. This was the test, which of the
schools was in the right: this was the test, which of the two had hold
of the eternal roots of metaphysic. Cicero says, that he had learnt
more philosophy from the Laws of the Twelve Tables than from all the
Greeks. Clement and his school might have said the same of the Hebrew
Ten Commandments and Jewish Law, which are so marvellously analogous to
the old Roman laws, founded, as they are, on the belief in a Supreme
Being, a Jupiter--literally a Heavenly Father--who is the source and the
sanction of law; of whose justice man's justice is the pattern; who is
the avenger of crimes against marriage, property, life; on whom depends
the sanctity of an oath. And so, to compare great things with small,
there was a truly practical human element here in the Christian
teaching; purely ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the
simplest and lowest, which gave to it a regenerating force which the
highest efforts of Neoplatonism could never attain.

And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously enough, rotted away, and
perished hideously. Most true. But what if the causes of its decay and
death were owing to its being untrue to itself?

I do not say that they had no excuses for being untrue to their own
faith. We are not here to judge them. That peculiar subtlety of mind,
which rendered the Alexandrians the great thinkers of the then world,
had with Christians, as well as Heathens, the effect of alluring them
away from practice to speculation. The Christian school, as was to be
expected from the moral ground of their philosophy, yielded to it far
more slowly than the Heathen, but they did yield, and especially after
they had conquered and expelled the Heathen school. Moreover, the long
battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them habits of
exclusiveness, of denunciation; the spirit which cannot assert a fact,
without dogmatising rashly and harshly on the consequences of denying
that fact. Their minds assumed a permanent habit of combativeness.
Having no more Heathens to fight, they began fighting each other,
excommunicating each other; denying to all who differed from them any
share of that light, to claim which for all men had been the very ground
of their philosophy. Not that they would have refused the Logos to all
men in words. They would have cursed a man for denying the existence of
the Logos in every man; but they would have equally cursed him for
acting on his existence in practice, and treating the heretic as one who
had that within him to which a preacher might appeal. Thus they became
Dogmatists; that is, men who assert a truth so fiercely, as to forget
that a truth is meant to be used, and not merely asserted--if, indeed,
the fierce assertion of a truth in frail man is not generally a sign of
some secret doubt of it, and in inverse proportion to his practical
living faith in it: just as he who is always telling you that he is a
man, is not the most likely to behave like a man. And why did this
befall them? Because they forgot practically that the light proceeded
from a Person. They could argue over notions and dogmas deduced from
the notion of His personality: but they were shut up in those notions;
they had forgotten that if He was a Person, His eye was on them, His
rule and kingdom within them; and that if He was a Person, He had a
character, and that that character was a righteous and a loving
character: and therefore they were not ashamed, in defending these
notions and dogmas about Him, to commit acts abhorrent to His character,
to lie, to slander, to intrigue, to hate, even to murder, for the sake
of what they madly called His glory: but which was really only their
own glory--the glory of their own dogmas; of propositions and
conclusions in their own brain, which, true or false, were equally
heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as watchwords of
division. Orthodox or unorthodox, they lost the knowledge of God, for
they lost the knowledge of righteousness, and love, and peace. That
Divine Logos, and theology as a whole, receded further and further aloft
into abysmal heights, as it became a mere dreary system of dead
scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their hearts and lives;
and then they, as the Neoplatonists had done before them, filled up the
void by those daemonologies, images, base Fetish worships, which made
the Mohammedan invaders regard them, and I believe justly, as
polytheists and idolaters, base as the pagan Arabs of the desert.

I cannot but believe them, moreover, to have been untrue to the teaching
of Clement and his school, in that coarse and materialist admiration of
celibacy which ruined Alexandrian society, as their dogmatic ferocity
ruined Alexandrian thought. The Creed which taught them that in the
person of the Incarnate Logos, that which was most divine had been
proved to be most human, that which was most human had been proved to be
most divine, ought surely to have given to them, as it has given to
modern Europe, nobler, clearer, simpler views of the true relation of
the sexes. However, on this matter they did not see their way.
Perhaps, in so debased an age, so profligate a world, as that out of
which Christianity had risen, it was impossible to see the true beauty
and sanctity of those primary bonds of humanity. And while the relation
of the sexes was looked on in a wrong light, all other social relations
were necessarily also misconceived. "The very ideas of family and
national life," as it has been said, "those two divine roots of the
Church, severed from which she is certain to wither away into that most
cruel and most godless of spectres, a religious world, had perished in
the East, from the evil influence of the universal practice of slave-
holding, as well as from the degradation of that Jewish nation which had
been for ages the great witness for these ideas; and all classes, like
their forefather Adam--like, indeed, the Old Adam--the selfish,
cowardly, brute nature in every man and in every age--were shifting the
blame of sin from their own consciences to human relationships and
duties, and therein, to the God who had appointed them; and saying, as
of old, 'The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the
tree, and I did eat.'"

Much as Christianity did, even in Egypt, for woman, by asserting her
moral and spiritual equality with the man, there seems to have been no
suspicion that she was the true complement of the man, not merely by
softening him, but by strengthening him; that true manhood can be no
more developed without the influence of the woman, than true womanhood
without the influence of the man. There is no trace among the Egyptian
celibates of that chivalrous woman-worship which our Gothic forefathers
brought with them into the West, which shed a softening and ennobling
light round the mediaeval convent life, and warded off for centuries the
worst effects of monasticism. Among the religious of Egypt, the monk
regarded the nun, the nun the monk, with dread and aversion; while both
looked on the married population of the opposite sex with a coarse
contempt and disgust which is hardly credible, did not the foul records
of it stand written to this day, in Rosweyde's extraordinary "Vitae
Patrum Eremiticorum;" no barren school of metaphysic, truly, for those
who are philosophic enough to believe that all phenomena whatsoever of
the human mind are worthy matter for scientific induction.

And thus grew up in Egypt a monastic world, of such vastness that it was
said to equal in number the laity. This produced, no doubt, an enormous
increase in the actual amount of moral evil. But it produced three
other effects, which were the ruin of Alexandria. First, a continually
growing enervation and numerical decrease of the population; next, a
carelessness of, and contempt for social and political life; and lastly,
a most brutalising effect on the lay population; who, told that they
were, and believing themselves to be, beings of a lower order, and
living by a lower standard, sank down more and more generation after
generation. They were of the world, and the ways of the world they must
follow. Political life had no inherent sanctity or nobleness; why act
holily and nobly in it? Family life had no inherent sanctity or
nobleness; why act holily and nobly in it either, if there were no holy,
noble, and divine principle or ground for it? And thus grew up, both in
Egypt, Syria, and Byzantium, a chaos of profligacy and chicanery, in
rulers and people, in the home and the market, in the theatre and the
senate, such as the world has rarely seen before or since; a chaos which
reached its culmination in the seventh century, the age of Justinian and
Theodora, perhaps the two most hideous sovereigns, worshipped by the
most hideous empire of parasites and hypocrites, cowards and wantons,
that ever insulted the long-suffering of a righteous God.

But, for Alexandria at least, the cup was now full. In the year 640 the
Alexandrians were tearing each other in pieces about some Jacobite and
Melchite controversy, to me incomprehensible, to you unimportant,
because the fighters on both sides seem to have lost (as all parties do
in their old age) the knowledge of what they were fighting for, and to
have so bewildered the question with personal intrigues, spites, and
quarrels, as to make it nearly as enigmatic as that famous contemporary
war between the blue and green factions at Constantinople, which began
by backing in the theatre, the charioteers who drove in blue dresses,
against those wild drove in green; then went on to identify themselves
each with one of the prevailing theological factions; gradually
developed, the one into an aristocratic, the other into a democratic,
religious party; and ended by a civil war in the streets of
Constantinople, accompanied by the most horrible excesses, which had
nearly, at one time, given up the city to the flames, and driven
Justinian from his throne.

In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite controversies and riots,
appeared before the city the armies of certain wild and unlettered Arab
tribes. A short and fruitless struggle followed; and, strange to say, a
few months swept away from the face of the earth, not only the wealth,
the commerce, the castles, and the liberty, but the philosophy and the
Christianity of Alexandria; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, all
that had been built up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and
the philosophers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years
of human toil. The people, having no real hold on their hereditary
Creed, accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman invaders.
The Christian remnant became tributaries; and Alexandria dwindled, from
that time forth, into a petty seaport town.

And now--can we pass over this new metaphysical school of Alexandria?
Can we help inquiring in what the strength of Islamism lay? I, at
least, cannot. I cannot help feeling that I am bound to examine in what
relation the creed of Omar and Amrou stands to the Alexandrian
speculations of five hundred years, and how it had power to sweep those
speculations utterly from the Eastern mind. It is a difficult problem;
to me, as a Christian priest, a very awful problem. What more awful
historic problem, than to see the lower creed destroying the higher? to
see God, as it were, undoing his own work, and repenting Him that He had
made man? Awful indeed: but I can honestly say, that it is one from
the investigation of which I have learnt--I cannot yet tell how much:
and of this I am sure, that without that old Alexandrian philosophy, I
should not have been able to do justice to Islam; without Islam I should
not have been able to find in that Alexandrian philosophy, an ever-
living and practical element.

I must, however, first entreat you to dismiss from your minds the vulgar
notion that Mohammed was in anywise a bad man, or a conscious deceiver,
pretending to work miracles, or to do things which he did not do. He
sinned in one instance: but, as far as I can see, only in that one--I
mean against what he must have known to be right. I allude to his
relaxing in his own case those wise restrictions on polygamy which he
had proclaimed. And yet, even in this case, the desire for a child may
have been the true cause of his weakness. He did not see the whole
truth, of course: but he was an infinitely better man than the men
around: perhaps, all in all, one of the best men of his day. Many here
may have read Mr. Carlyle's vindication of Mohammed in his Lectures on
Hero Worship; to those who have not, I shall only say, that I entreat
them to do so; and that I assure them, that though I differ in many
things utterly from Mr. Carlyle's inferences and deductions in that
lecture, yet that I am convinced, from my own acquaintance with the
original facts and documents, that the picture there drawn of Mohammed
is a true and a just description of a much-calumniated man.

Now, what was the strength of Islam? The common answer is, fanaticism
and enthusiasm. To such answers I can only rejoin: Such terms must be
defined before they are used, and we must be told what fanaticism and
enthusiasm are. Till then I have no more e priori respect for a long
word ending in -ism or -asm than I have for one ending in -ation or -
ality. But while fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined--a work
more difficult than is commonly fancied--we will go on to consider
another answer. We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope
of their sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna. If so,
this is the first and last time in the world's history that the strength
of any large body of people--perhaps of any single man--lay in such a
hope. History gives us innumerable proofs that such merely selfish
motives are the parents of slavish impotence, of pedantry and conceit,
of pious frauds, often of the most devilish cruelty: but, as far as my
reading extends, of nothing better. Moreover, the Christian Greeks had
much the same hopes on those points as the Mussulmans; and similar
causes should produce similar effects: but those hopes gave them no
strength. Besides, according to the Mussulmans' own account, this was
not their great inspiring idea; and it is absurd to consider the wild
battle-cries of a few imaginative youths, about black-eyed and green-
kerchiefed Houris calling to them from the skies, as representing the
average feelings of a generation of sober and self-restraining men, who
showed themselves actuated by far higher motives.

Another answer, and one very popular now, is that the Mussulmans were
strong, because they believed what they said; and the Greeks weak,
because they did not believe what they said. From this notion I shall
appeal to another doctrine of the very same men who put it forth, and
ask them, Can any man be strong by believing a lie? Have you not told
us, nobly enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to
death, certain to prove its own impotence, and be shattered to atoms the
moment you try to use it, to bring it into rude actual contact with
fact, and Nature, and the eternal laws? Faith to be strong must be
faith in something which is not one's self; faith in something eternal,
something objective, something true, which would exist just as much
though we and all the world disbelieved it. The strength of belief
comes from that which is believed in; if you separate it from that, it
becomes a mere self-opinion, a sensation of positiveness; and what sort
of strength that will give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the
Jews who opposed Titus, of the rabble who followed Walter the Penniless
to the Crusades, of the Munster Anabaptists, and many another sad page
of human folly. It may give the fury of idiots; not the deliberate
might of valiant men. Let us pass this by, then; believing that faith
can only give strength where it is faith in something true and right:
and go on to another answer almost as popular as the last.

We are told that the might of Islam lay in a certain innate force and
savage virtue of the Arab character. If we have discovered this in the
followers of Mohammed, they certainly had not discovered it in
themselves. They spoke of themselves, rightly or wrongly, as men who
had received a divine light, and that light a moral light, to teach them
to love that which was good, and refuse that which was evil; and to that
divine light they stedfastly and honestly attributed every right action
of their lives. Most noble and affecting, in my eyes, is that answer of
Saad's aged envoy to Yezdegird, king of Persia, when he reproached him
with the past savagery and poverty of the Arabs. "Whatsoever thou hast
said," answered the old man, "regarding the former condition of the
Arabs is true. Their food was green lizards; they buried their infant
daughters alive; nay, some of them feasted on dead carcases, and drank
blood; while others slew their kinsfolk, and thought themselves great
and valiant, when by so doing they became possessed of more property.
They were clothed with hair garments, they knew not good from evil, and
made no distinction between that which was lawful and unlawful. Such
was our state; but God in his mercy has sent us, by a holy prophet, a
sacred volume, which teaches us the true faith."

These words, I think, show us the secret of Islam. They are a just
comment on that short and rugged chapter of the Koran which is said to
have been Mohammed's first attempt either at prophecy or writing; when,
after long fasting and meditation among the desert hills, under the
glorious eastern stars, he came down and told his good Kadijah that he
had found a great thing, and that she must help him to write it down.
And what was this which seemed to the unlettered camel-driver so
priceless a treasure? Not merely that God was one God--vast as that
discovery was--but that he was a God "who showeth to man the thing which
he knew not;" a "most merciful God;" a God, in a word, who could be
trusted; a God who would teach and strengthen; a God, as he said, who
would give him courage to set his face like a flint, and would put an
answer in his mouth when his idolatrous countrymen cavilled and sneered
at his message to them, to turn from their idols of wood and stone, and
become righteous men, as Abraham their forefather was righteous.

"A God who showeth to man the thing which he knew not." That idea gave
might to Islam, because it was a real idea, an eternal fact; the result
of a true insight into the character of God. And that idea alone,
believe me, will give conquering might either to creed, philosophy, or
heart of man. Each will be strong, each will endure, in proportion as
it believes that God is one who shows to man the thing which he knew
not: as it believes, in short, in that Logos of which Saint John wrote,
that He was the light who lightens every man who comes into the world.

In a word, the wild Koreish had discovered, more or less clearly, that
end and object of all metaphysic whereof I have already spoken so often;
that external and imperishable beauty for which Plato sought of old; and
had seen that its name was righteousness, and that it dwelt absolutely
in an absolutely righteous person; and moreover, that this person was no
careless self-contented epicurean deity; but that He was, as they loved
to call Him, the most merciful God; that He cared for men; that He
desired to make men righteous. Of that they could not doubt. The fact
was palpable, historic, present. To them the degraded Koreish of the
desert, who as they believed, and I think believed rightly, had fallen
from the old Monotheism of their forefathers Abraham and Ismael, into
the lowest fetishism, and with that into the lowest brutality and
wretchedness--to them, while they were making idols of wood and stone;
eating dead carcases; and burying their daughters alive; careless of
chastity, of justice, of property; sunk in unnatural crimes, dead in
trespasses and sins; hateful and hating one another--a man, one of their
own people had come, saying: "I have a message from the one righteous
God. His curse is on all this, for it is unlike Himself. He will have
you righteous men, after the pattern of your forefather Abraham. Be
that, and arise, body, soul, and spirit, out of your savagery and
brutishness. Then you shall be able to trample under font the
profligate idolaters, to sweep the Greek tyrants from the land which
they have been oppressing for centuries, and to recover the East for its
rightful heirs, the children of Abraham." Was this not, in every sense,
a message from God? I must deny the philosophy of Clement and
Augustine, I must deny my own conscience, my own reason, I must outrage
my own moral sense, and confess that I have no immutable standard of
right, that I know no eternal source of right, if I deny it to have been
one; if I deny what seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those
wild Koreish had in them a reason and a conscience, which could awaken
to that message, and perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless
importance, and that they did accept that message, and lived by it in
proportion as they received it fully, such lives as no men in those
times, and few in after times, have been able to live. If I feel, as I
do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men
than I am, I must throw away all that Philo--all that a Higher
authority--has taught me: or I must attribute their lofty virtues to
the one source of all in man which is not selfishness, and fancy, and
fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish.

Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most patent and complete
failures upon earth, if the true test of a system's success be the
gradual progress and amelioration of the human beings who are under its
influence? First, I believe, from its allowing polygamy. I do not
judge Mohammed for having allowed it. He found it one of the ancestral
and immemorial customs of his nation. He found it throughout the Hebrew
Scriptures. He found it in the case of Abraham, his ideal man; and, as
he believed, the divinely-inspired ancestor of his race. It seemed to
him that what was right for Abraham, could not be wrong for an Arab.
God shall judge him, not I. Moreover, the Christians of the East,
divided into either monks or profligates; and with far lower and more
brutal notions of the married state than were to be found in Arab poetry
and legend, were the very last men on earth to make him feel the eternal
and divine beauty of that pure wedded love which Christianity has not
only proclaimed, but commanded, and thereby emancipated woman from her
old slavery to the stronger sex. And I believe, from his chivalrous
faithfulness to his good wife Kadijah, as long as she lived, that
Mohammed was a man who could have accepted that great truth in all its
fulness, had he but been taught it. He certainly felt the evil of
polyamy so strongly as to restrict it in every possible way, except the
only right way--namely, the proclamation of the true ideal of marriage.
But his ignorance, mistake, sin, if you will, was a deflection from the
right law, from the true constitution of man, and therefore it avenged
itself. That chivalrous respect for woman, which was so strong in the
early Mohammedans, died out. The women themselves--who, in the first
few years of Islamism, rose as the men rose, and became their helpmates,
counsellors, and fellow-warriors--degenerated rapidly into mere
playthings. I need not enter into the painful subject of woman's
present position in the East, and the social consequences thereof. But
I firmly believe, not merely as a theory, but as a fact which may be
proved by abundant evidence, that to polygamy alone is owing nine-tenths
of the present decay and old age of every Mussulman nation; and that
till it be utterly abolished, all Western civilisation and capital, and
all the civil and religious liberty on earth, will not avail one jot
toward their revival. You must regenerate the family before you can
regenerate the nation, and the relation of husband and wife before the
family; because, as long as the root is corrupt, the fruit will be
corrupt also.

But there is another cause of the failure of Islamism, more intimately
connected with those metaphysical questions which we have been hitherto
principally considering.

Among the first Mussulmans, as I have said, there was generally the most
intense belief in each man that he was personally under a divine guide
and teacher. But their creed contained nothing which could keep up that
belief in the minds of succeeding generations. They had destroyed the
good with the evil, and they paid the penalty of their undistinguishing
wrath. In sweeping away the idolatries and fetish worships of the
Syrian Catholics, the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which
alone can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships--if not outward
and material ones, yet the still more subtle, and therefore more
dangerous idolatries of the intellect. For they had swept away the
belief in the Logos; in a divine teacher of every human soul, who was,
in some mysterious way, the pattern and antitype of human virtue and
wisdom. And more, they had swept away that belief in the incarnation of
the Logos, which alone can make man feel that his divine teacher is one
who can enter into the human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human
spirit. And, therefore, when Mohammed and his personal friends were
dead, the belief in a present divine teacher, on the whole, died with
them; and the Mussulmans began to put the Koran in the place of Him of
whom the Koran spoke. They began to worship the book--which after all
is not a book, but only an irregular collection of Mohammed's
meditations, and notes for sermons--with the most slavish and ridiculous
idolatry. They fell into a cabbalism, and a superstitious reverence for
the mere letters and words of the Koran, to which the cabbalism of the
old Rabbis was moderate and rational. They surrounded it, and the
history of Mohammed, with all ridiculous myths, and prodigies, and lying
wonders, whereof the book itself contained not a word; and which
Mohammed, during his existence, had denied and repudiated, saying that
he worked no miracles, and that none were needed; because only reason
was required to show a man the hand of a good God in all human affairs.
Nevertheless, these later Mussulmans found the miracles necessary to
confirm their faith: and why? Because they had lost the sense of a
present God, a God of order; and therefore hankered, as men in such a
mood always will, after prodigious and unnatural proofs of His having
been once present with their founder Mohammed.

And in the meanwhile that absolute and omnipotent Being whom Mohammed,
arising out of his great darkness, had so nobly preached to the Koreish,
receded in the minds of their descendants to an unapproachable and
abysmal distance. For they had lost the sense of His present guidance,
His personal care. They had lost all which could connect Him with the
working of their own souls, with their human duties and struggles, with
the belief that His mercy and love were counterparts of human mercy and
human love; in plain English, that He was loving and merciful at all.
The change came very gradually, thank God; you may read of noble sayings
and deeds here and there, for many centuries after Mohammed: but it
came; and then their belief in God's omnipotence and absoluteness
dwindled into the most dark, and slavish, and benumbing fatalism. His
unchangeableness became in their minds not an unchangeable purpose to
teach, forgive, and deliver men--as it seemed to Mohammed to have been--
but a mere brute necessity, an unchangeable purpose to have His own way,
whatsoever that way might be. That dark fatalism, also, has helped
toward the decay of the Mohammedan nations. It has made them careless
of self-improvement; faithless of the possibility of progress; and has
kept, and will keep, the Mohammedan nations, in all intellectual
matters, whole ages behind the Christian nations of the West.

How far the story of Omar's commanding the baths of Alexandria to be
heated with the books from the great library is true, we shall never
know. Some have doubted the story altogether: but so many fresh
corroborations of it are said to have been lately discovered, in Arabic
writers, that I can hardly doubt that it had some foundation in fact.
One cannot but believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian
grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library,
took care to save some, at least, of its treasures; and howsoever
strongly Omar may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the
Koran were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be
destroyed, the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very
different. As they settled in the various countries which they
conquered, education seems to have been considered by them an important
object. We even find some of them, in the same generation as Mohammed,
obeying strictly the Prophet's command to send all captive children to
school--a fact which speaks as well for the Mussulmans' good sense, as
it speaks ill for the state of education among the degraded descendants
of the Greek conquerors of the East. Gradually philosophic Schools
arose, first at Bagdad, and then at Cordova; and the Arabs carried on
the task of commenting on Aristotle's Logic, and Ptolemy's Megiste
Syntaxis--which last acquired from them the name of Almagest, by which
it was so long known during the Middle Ages.

But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or
mystic element in their commentaries. It seems as if Alexandria was
preordained, by its very central position, to be the city of
commentators, not of originators. It is worthy of remark, that
Philoponus, who may be considered as the man who first introduced the
simple warriors of the Koreish to the treasures of Greek thought, seems
to have been the first rebel against the Neoplatonist eclecticism. He
maintained, and truly, that Porphyry, Proclus, and the rest, had
entirely misunderstood Aristotle, when they attempted to reconcile him
with Plato, or incorporate his philosophy into Platonism. Aristotle was
henceforth the text-book of Arab savants. It was natural enough. The
Mussulman mind was trained in habits of absolute obedience to the
authority of fixed dogmas. All those attempts to follow out metaphysic
to its highest object, theology, would be useless if not wrong in the
eyes of a Mussulman, who had already his simple and sharply-defined
creed on all matters relating to the unseen world. With him metaphysic
was a study altogether divorced from man's higher life and aspirations.
So also were physics. What need had he of Cosmogonies? what need to
trace the relations between man and the universe, or the universe and
its Maker? He had his definite material Elysium and Tartarus, as the
only ultimate relation between man and the universe; his dogma of an
absolute fiat, creating arbitrary and once for all, as the only relation
between the universe and its Maker: and further it was not lawful to
speculate. The idea which I believe unites both physic and metaphysic
with man's highest inspirations and widest speculations--the Alexandria
idea of the Logos, of the Deity working in time and space by successive
thoughts--he had not heard of; for it was dead, as I have said, in
Alexandria itself; and if he had heard of it, he would have spurned it
as detracting from the absoluteness of that abysmal one Being, of whom
he so nobly yet so partially bore witness. So it was to be; doubtless
it was right that it should be so. Man's eye is too narrow to see a
whole truth, his brain too weak to carry a whole truth. Better for him,
and better for the world, is perhaps the method on which man has been
educated in every age, by which to each school, or party, or nation, is
given some one great truth, which they are to work out to its highest
development, to exemplify in actual life, leaving some happier age--
perhaps, alas! only some future state--to reconcile that too favoured
dogma with other truths which lie beside it, and without which it is
always incomplete, and sometimes altogether barren.

But such schools of science, founded on such a ground as this, on the
mere instinct of curiosity, had little chance of originality or
vitality. All the great schools of the world, the elder Greek
philosophy, the Alexandrian, the present Baconian school of physics,
have had a deeper motive for their search, a far higher object which
they hope to discover. But indeed, the Mussulmans did not so much wish
to discover truth, as to cultivate their own intellects. For that
purpose a sharp and subtle systematist, like Aristotle, was the very man
whom they required; and from the destruction of Alexandria may date the
rise of the Aristotelian philosophy. Translations of his works were
made into Arabic, first, it is said, from Persian and Syriac
translations; the former of which had been made during the sixth and
seventh centuries, by the wreck of the Neoplatonist party, during their
visit to the philosophic Chozroos. A century after, they filled
Alexandria. After them Almansoor, Hairoun Alraschid, and their
successors, who patronised the Nestorian Christians, obtained from them
translations of the philosophic, medical, and astronomical Greek works;
while the last of the Omniades, Abdalrahman, had introduced the same
literary taste into Spain, where, in the thirteenth century, Averroes
and Maimonides rivalled the fame of Avicenna, who had flourished at
Bagdad a century before.

But, as I have said already, these Arabs seem to have invented nothing;
they only commented. And yet not only commented; for they preserved for
us those works of whose real value they were so little aware. Averroes,
in quality of commentator on Aristotle, became his rival in the minds of
the mediaeval schoolmen; Avicenna, in quality of commentator on
Hippocrates and Galen, was for centuries the text-book of all European
physicians; while Albatani and Aboul Wefa, as astronomers, commented on
Ptolemy, not however without making a few important additions to his
knowledge; for Aboul Wefa discovered a third inequality of the moon's
motion, in addition to the two mentioned by Ptolemy, which he did,
according to Professor Whewell, in a truly philosophic manner--an
apparently solitary instance, and one which, in its own day, had no
effect; for the fact was forgotten, and rediscovered centuries after by
Tycho Brahe. To Albatani, however, we owe two really valuable
heirlooms. The one is the use of the sine, or half-chord of the double
arc, instead of the chord of the arc itself, which had been employed by
the Greek astronomers; the other, of even more practical benefit, was
the introduction of the present decimal arithmetic, instead of the
troublesome sexagesimal arithmetic of the Greeks. These ten digits,
however, seem, says Professor Whewell, by the confession of the Arabians
themselves, to be of Indian origin, and thus form no exception to the
sterility of the Arabian genius in scientific inventions. Nevertheless
we are bound, in all fairness, to set against his condemnation of the
Arabs Professor De Morgan's opinion of the Moslem, in his article on
Euclid: "Some writers speak slightingly of this progress, the results
of which they are too apt to compare with those of our own time. They
ought rather to place the Saracens by the side of their own Gothic
ancestors; and making some allowance for the more advantageous
circumstances under which the first started, they should view the second
systematically dispersing the remains of Greek civilisation, while the
first were concentrating the geometry of Alexandria, the arithmetic and
algebra of India, and the astronomy of both, to form a nucleus for the
present state of science."

To this article of Professor De Morgan's on Euclid, {2} and to Professor
Whewell's excellent "History of the Inductive Sciences," from which I,
being neither Arabic scholar nor astronomer, have drawn most of my facts
about physical science, I must refer those who wish to know more of the
early rise of physics, and of their preservation by the Arabs, till a
great and unexpected event brought them back again to the quarter of the
globe where they had their birth, and where alone they could be
regenerated into a new and practical life.

That great event was the Crusades. We have heard little of Alexandria
lately. Its intellectual glory had departed westward and eastward, to
Cordova and to Bagdad; its commercial greatness had left it for Cairo
and Damietta. But Egypt was still the centre of communication between
the two great stations of the Moslem power, and indeed, as Mr. Lane has
shown in his most valuable translation of the "Arabian Nights,"
possessed a peculiar life and character of its own.

It was the rash object of the Crusaders to extinguish that life.
Palestine was their first point of attack: but the later Crusaders seem
to have found, like the rest of the world, that the destinies of
Palestine could not be separated from those of Egypt; and to Damietta,
accordingly, was directed that last disastrous attempt of St. Louis,
which all may read so graphically described in the pages of Joinville.

The Crusaders failed utterly of the object at which they aimed. They
succeeded in an object of which they never dreamed; for in those
Crusades the Moslem and the Christian had met face to face, and found
that both were men, that they had a common humanity, a common eternal
standard of nobleness and virtue. So the Christian knights went home
humbler and wiser men, when they found in the Saracen emirs the same
generosity, truth, mercy, chivalrous self-sacrifice, which they had
fancied their own peculiar possession, and added to that, a civilisation
and a learning which they could only admire and imitate. And thus, from
the era of the Crusades, a kindlier feeling sprang up between the
Crescent and the Cross, till it was again broken by the fearful
invasions of the Turks throughout Eastern Europe. The learning of the
Moslem, as well as their commerce, began to pour rapidly into
Christendom, both from Spain, Egypt, and Syria; and thus the Crusaders
were, indeed, rewarded according to their deeds. They had fancied that
they were bound to vindicate the possession of the earth for Him to whom
they believed the earth belonged. He showed them--or rather He has
shown us, their children--that He can vindicate His own dominion better
far than man can do it for Him; and their cruel and unjust aim was
utterly foiled. That was not the way to make men know or obey Him.
They took the sword, and perished by the sword. But the truly noble
element in them--the element which our hearts and reasons recognise and
love, in spite of all the loud words about the folly and fanaticism of
the Crusades, whensoever we read "The Talisman" or "Ivanhoe"--the
element of loyal faith and self-sacrifice--did not go unrequited. They
learnt wider, juster views of man and virtue, which I cannot help
believing must have had great effect in weakening in their minds their
old, exclusive, and bigoted notions, and in paving the way for the great
outburst of free thought, and the great assertion of the dignity of
humanity, which the fifteenth century beheld. They opened a path for
that influx of scientific knowledge which has produced, in after
centuries, the most enormous effects on the welfare of Europe, and made
life possible for millions who would otherwise have been pent within the
narrow bounds of Europe, to devour each other in the struggle for room
and bread.

But those Arabic translations of Greek authors were a fatal gift for
Egypt, and scarcely less fatal gift for Bagdad. In that Almagest of
Ptolemy, in that Organon of Aristotle, which the Crusaders are said to
have brought home, lay, rude and embryotic, the germs of that physical
science, that geographical knowledge which has opened to the European
the commerce and the colonisation of the globe. Within three hundred
years after his works reached Europe, Ptolemy had taught the Portuguese
to sail round Africa; and from that day the stream of eastern wealth
flowed no longer through the Red Sea, or the Persian Gulf, on its way to
the new countries of the West; and not only Alexandria, but Damietta and
Bagdad, dwindled down to their present insignificance. And yet the
whirligig of time brings about its revenges. The stream of commerce is
now rapidly turning back to its old channel; and British science bids
fair to make Alexandria once more the inn of all the nations.

It is with a feeling of awe that one looks upon the huge possibilities
of her future. Her own physical capacities, as the great mind of
Napoleon saw, are what they always have been, inexhaustible; and science
has learnt to set at naught the only defect of situation which has ever
injured her prosperity, namely, the short land passage from the Nile to
the Red Sea. The fate of Palestine is now more than ever bound up with
her fate; and a British or French colony might, holding the two
countries, develop itself into a nation as vast as sprang from
Alexander's handful of Macedonians, and become the meeting point for the
nations of the West and those great Anglo-Saxon peoples who seem
destined to spring up in the Australian ocean. Wide as the dream may
appear, steam has made it a far narrower one than the old actual fact,
that for centuries the Phoenician and the Arabian interchanged at
Alexandria the produce of Britain for that of Ceylon and Hindostan. And
as for intellectual development, though Alexandria wants, as she has
always wanted, that insular and exclusive position which seems almost
necessary to develop original thought and original national life, yet
she may still act as the point of fusion for distinct schools and
polities, and the young and buoyant vigour of the new-born nations may
at once teach, and learn from, the prudence, the experience, the
traditional wisdom of the ancient Europeans.

This vision, however possible, may be a far-off one: but the first step
towards it, at least, is being laid before our eyes--and that is, a
fresh reconciliation between the Crescent and the Cross. Apart from all
political considerations, which would be out of place here, I hail, as a
student of philosophy, the school which is now, both in Alexandria and
in Constantinople, teaching to Moslem and to Christians the same lesson
which the Crusaders learnt in Egypt five hundred years ago. A few
years' more perseverance in the valiant and righteous course which
Britain has now chosen, will reward itself by opening a vast field for
capital and enterprise, for the introduction of civil and religious
liberty among the down-trodden peasantry of Egypt; as the Giaour becomes
an object of respect, and trust, and gratitude to the Moslem; and as the
feeling that Moslem and Giaour own a common humanity, a common eternal
standard of justice and mercy, a common sacred obligation to perform our
promises, and to succour the oppressed, shall have taken place of the
old brute wonder at our careless audacity, and awkward assertion of
power, which now expresses itself in the somewhat left-handed
Alexandrian compliment--"There is one Satan, and there are many Satans:
but there is no Satan like a Frank in a round hat."


It would be both uncourteous and unfair of me to close these my hasty
Lectures, without expressing my hearty thanks for the great courtesy and
kindness which I have received in this my first visit to your most noble
and beautiful city; and often, I am proud to say, from those who differ
from me deeply on many important points; and also for the attention with
which I have been listened to while trying, clumsily enough, to explain
dry and repulsive subjects, and to express opinions which may be new,
and perhaps startling, to many of my hearers. If my imperfect hints
shall have stirred up but one hearer to investigate this obscure and yet
most important subject, and to examine for himself the original
documents, I shall feel that my words in this place have not been spoken
in vain; for even if such a seeker should arrive at conclusions
different from my own (and I pretend to no infallibility), he will at
least have learnt new facts, the parents of new thought, perhaps of new
action; he will have come face to face with new human beings, in whom he
will have been compelled to take a human interest; and will surely rise
from his researches, let them lead him where they will, at least
somewhat of a wider-minded and a wider-hearted man.



Footnotes:

{1} These Lectures were delivered at the Philosophical Institution,
Edinburgh, in February, 1854, at the commencement of the Crimean War.

{2} Smith's "Classical Dictionary."







 


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