The only Christian writings of this time, that we know of, are the paschal letters of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, which were much praised by Jerome, and by him translated into Latin. They are full of bitter reproaches against Origen and his writings, and they charge him with having treated Jesus more cruelly than Pilate or the Jews had done. John, the famous monk of the Thebaid, was no writer, though believed to have the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold the victory of Theodosius over the rebel Maximus; and, when the emperor had got together his troops to march against Eugenius, another rebel who had seized the passes of the Julian Alps, he sent his trusty eunuch Eutropius to fetch the holy Egyptian, or at least to learn from him what would be the event of the war. John refused to go to Europe, but he told the messenger that Theodosius would conquer the rebel, and soon afterwards die; both of which came to pass as might easily have been guessed.
On the death of Theodosius, in 395, the Roman empire was again divided. Arcadius, his elder son, ruled Egypt and the East, while Honorius, the younger, held the West; and the reins of government at once passed from the ablest to the weakest hands. But the change was little felt in Egypt, which continued to be governed by the patriarch Theophilus, without the name but with very nearly the power of a prefect. He was a bold and wicked man, but as his religious opinions were for the Homoousians as against the Arians, and his political feelings were for the Egyptians as against the Greeks, he rallied to his government the chief strength of the province. As the pagans and Arians of Alexandria were no longer worthy of his enmity, he fanned into a flame a new quarrel which was then breaking out in the Egyptian church. The monks of Upper Egypt, who were mostly ignorant and unlettered men, were anthropomorphites, or believers that God was in outward shape like a man. They quoted from the Jewish Scriptures that he made man in his own image, in support of their opinion. They held that he was of a strictly human form, like Jesus, which to them seemed fully asserted in the Nicene creed. In this opinion they were opposed by those who were better educated, and it suited the policy of Theophilus to side with the more ignorant and larger party. He branded with the name of Origenists those who argued that God was without form, and who quoted the writings of Origen in support of their opinion. This naturally led to a dispute about Origen’s orthodoxy; and that admirable writer, who had been praised by all parties for two hundred years, and who had been quoted as authority as much by Athanasius as by the Arians, was declared to be a heretic by a council of bishops. The writings of Origen were accordingly forbidden to be read, because they contradicted the anthropomorphite opinions.
The quarrel between the Origenists and the anthropomorphites did not end in words. A proposition in theology, or a doubt in metaphysics, was no better cause of civil war than the old quarrels about the bull Apis or the crocodile; but a change of religion had not changed the national character. The patriarch, finding his party the stronger, attacked the enemy in their own monasteries; he marched to Mount Nitria at the head of a strong body of soldiers, and, enrolling under his banners the anthropomorphite monks, attacked Dioscorus and the Origenists, set fire to their monasteries, and laid waste the place.
Theophilus next quarrelled with Peter, the chief of the Alexandrian presbyters, whom he accused of admitting to the sacraments of the church a woman who had not renounced the Manichean heresy; and he then quarrelled with Isidorus, who had the charge of the poor of the church, because he bore witness that Peter had the orders of Theophilus himself for what he did.
In this century there was a general digging up of the bodies of the most celebrated Christians of former ages, to heal the diseases and strengthen the faith of the living; and Constantinople, which as the capital of the empire had been ornamented by the spoils of its subject provinces, had latterly been enriching its churches with the remains of numerous Christian saints. The tombs of Egypt, crowded with mummies that had lain there for centuries, could of course furnish relics more easily than most countries, and in this reign Constantinople received from Alexandria a quantity of bones which were supposed to be those of the martyrs slain in the pagan persecutions. The archbishop John Chrysostom received them gratefully, and, though himself smarting under the reproach that he was not orthodox enough for the superstitious Egyptians, he thanks God that Egypt, which sent forth its grain to feed its hungry neighbours, could also send the bodies of so many martyrs to sanctify their churches.
We have traced the fall of the Greek party in Alexandria, in the victories over the Arians during the religious quarrels of the last hundred years; and in the laws we now read the city’s loss of wealth and power. The corporation of Alexandria was no longer able to bear the expense of cleansing the river and keeping open the canals; and four hundred solidi—about twelve hundred dollars—were each year set apart from the custom-house duties of the city for that useful work.
The arrival of new settlers in Alexandria had been very much checked by the less prosperous state of the country since the reign of Diocletian. We still find, however, that many of the men of note were not born in Egypt. Paulus, the physician, was a native of Ægina. He has left a work on diseases and their remedies. The chief man of learning was Synesius, a platonic philosopher whom the patriarch Theophilus persuaded to join the Christians. As a platonist he naturally leaned towards many of the doctrines of the popular religion, but he could not believe in a resurrection; and it was not till after Theophilus had ordained him Bishop of Ptolemais near Cyrene that he acknowledged the truth of that doctrine. Nor would he then put away or disown his wife, as the custom of the Church required; indeed, he accepted the bishopric very unwillingly. He was as fond of playful sport as he was of books, and very much disliked business. He has left a volume of writings, which has saved the names of two prefects of Cyrene; the one Anysius, under whose good discipline even the barbarians of Hungary behaved like Roman legionaries, and the other Poonius, who cultivated science in this barren spot. To encourage Pasonius in his praiseworthy studies he made him a present of an astrolabe, to measure the distances of the stars and planets, an instrument which was constructed under the guidance of Hypatia.
Trade and industry were checked by the unsettled state of the country, and misery and famine were spreading over the land. The African tribes of Mazices and Auxoriani, leaving the desert in hope of plunder, overran the province of Libya, and laid waste a large part of the Delta. The barbarians and the sands of the desert were alike encroaching on the cultivated fields. Nature seemed changed. The valley of the Nile was growing narrower. Even within the valley the retreating wraters left behind them harvests less rich, and fever more putrid. The quarries were no longer worth working for their building stone. The mines yielded no more gold.
On the death of Arcadius, his son Theodosius was only eight years old, but he was quietly acknowledged as Emperor of the East in 408, and he left the government of Egypt, as heretofore, very much in the hands of the patriarch. In the fifth year of his reign Theophilus died; and, as might be supposed, a successor was not appointed without a struggle for the double honour of Bishop of Alexandria and Governor of Egypt.