Thus wrote an unknown admirer at the beginning of the 5th Century. None of Hypatia’s discourses have been preserved, but we know that with her and with her father, Theon, the great tradition of Plotinus expired at Alexandria.
III. CHRISTIANITY.
INTRODUCTION.
Percolating through the Jewish Communities, the Christian religion reached Egypt as early as the 1st cent. A.D. On its arrival, it found, already established there, two distinct forms of spiritual life.
The first was the spiritual life of Ancient Egypt, which had clung to the soil of the Nile valley for over 4,000 years. It had existed so long that though Christianity could close its temples she never quite uprooted it from the heart of the people. The resurrection of Osiris as Sun God; the partaking of him as Corn God by the blessed in the world below; the beneficent group of the mother Isis with Horus her child; the same Horus as a young warrior slaying the snaky Set; the key-shaped “ankh” that the gods and goddesses carried as a sign of their immortality:—these symbols had sunk too deeply into the minds of the native Egyptians to be removed by episcopal decrees. Consequently there were cases of reversion—e.g. at Menouthis (near Aboukir) in 480, when some villagers were discovered worshipping the ancient deities in a private house. And there were also cases of confusion, where the old religion passed imperceptibly into the new. Did Christianity borrow from the Osiris cult her doctrines of the Resurrection and Personal Immortality, and her sacrament of the Eucharist? The suggestion has been made. It is more certain that she borrowed much of her symbolism and popular art. Isis and Horus become the Virgin and Child, Horus and Set St. George and the Dragon, while the “ankh” appears unaltered on some of the Christian tomb stones as a looped cross, and slightly altered on others as a cross with a handle.
The second form of spiritual life was the life of Alexandria. Its quality (mainly Hellenic and philosophic) has already been indicated. Christianity, to begin with, was not philosophic, being addressed to poor and unfashionable people in Palestine. But as soon as it reached Alexandria its character altered, the turning point in its worldly career arrived. The Alexandrians were highly cultivated, they had libraries where all the wisdom of the Mediterranean was accessible, and their faith inevitably took a philosophic form. Occupied by their favourite problem of the relation between God and Man, they at once asked the same question of the new religion as they asked the Jews and the Greeks—namely, What is the link? Philo said the Logos, Plotinus the Emanations. The new religion replied “Christ.” There was nothing startling to the Alexandrians in such a reply. Christ too was the Word, he too proceeded from the Father. His incarnation, his redemption of mankind through suffering—even these were not strange ideas to people who were accustomed to “divine” kings, and familiar with the myths of Prometheus and Adonis. Alexandrian orthodoxy, Alexandrian heresies, both centred round the problem that was familiar to Alexandrian paganism—the relation between God and Man.
Thus Christianity did not burst upon Egypt or upon Alexandria like a clap of thunder, but stole into ears already prepared. Neither on her popular nor on her philosophic side was she a creed apart. Only politically did she stand out as an innovator, through her denial of divinity to the Imperial Government at Rome.
Ankh: Museum, Room 8.