It cannot be doubted that in a society like that of Alexandria in its palmy days there were many earnest seekers of the truth, even as Clement himself had sought it. One might even lay it down as a normal fact, that it was the character of an Alexandrian, as distinguished from an Athenian, to speculate for the sake of practising, and not to spend his time in "either telling or hearing some new thing." If an Alexandrian was a Stoic, never was Stoic more demure or more intent on warring against his body, after Stoic [{42}] fashion; if a geometrican, no disciple of Bacon was ever more assiduous in experimentalizing, measuring, comparing, and deducing laws; if a Platonist, then geometry, ethics, poetry, and everything else, were enthusiastically pressed into the one great occupation of life—the realizing the ideal and the getting face to face with the unseen. That all this earnestness did not uniformly result in success was only too true. Much speculation, great earnestness, and no grand objective truth at the end of it—this was often the lot of the philosophic inquirer of Alexandria. The consequence was that not unfrequently, disgusted by failure, he ended by rushing headlong into the most vicious excesses, or, becoming a victim to despair, perished by his own hand. So familiar, indeed, had this resource of disappointment become to the philosophic mind, that Hegesias, a professor in the Museum, a little before the Christian era, wrote a book counselling self-murder; and so many people actually followed his advice as to oblige the reigning Ptolemy to turn Grand Inquisitor even in free-thinking Egypt, and forbid the circulation of the book. Yet all this, while it revealed a depth of moral wretchedness which it is frightful to contemplate, showed also a certain desperate earnestness; and doubtless there were, even among those who took refuge in one or other of these dreadful alternatives, men who, in their beginnings, had genuine aspirations after truth, mingled with the pride of knowledge and a mere intellectual curiosity. Doubtless, too, there was many a sincere and guileless soul among the philosophic herd, to whom, humanly speaking, nothing more was wanting than the preaching of the faith. Their eyes were open, as far as they could be without the light of revelation: let the light shine, and, by the help of divine grace, they would admit its beams into their souls.
There are many such, in every form of error. In Clement's days, especially, there were many whom Neo-Platonism, the Puseyism of paganism, cast up from the ocean of unclean error upon the shores of the Church. Take the case of Justin Martyr: he was a young Oriental of noble birth and considerable wealth. In the early part of the second century, we find him trying first one school of philosophers and then another, and abandoning each in disgust. The Stoics would talk to him of nothing but virtues and vices, of regulating the diet and curbing the passions, and keeping the intellect as quiet as possible—a convenient way, as experience taught them, of avoiding trouble; whereas Justin wanted to hear something of the Absolute Being, and of that Being's dealings with his own soul—a kind of inquiry which the Stoics considered altogether useless and ridiculous, if not reprehensible. Leaving the Stoics, he devoted himself heart and soul to a sharp Peripatetic, but quarrelled with him shortly and left him in disgust; the cause of disagreement being, apparently, a practical theory entertained by his preceptor on the subject of fees. He next took to the disciples of Pythagoras. But with these he succeeded no better than with the others; for the Pythagoreans reminded him that no one ignorant of mathematics could be admitted into their select society. Mathematics, in a Pythagorean point of view, included geometry, astronomy, and music—all those sciences, in fact, in which there was any scope for those extraordinary freaks of numbers which delighted the followers of the old vegetarian. Justin, having no inclination to undergo a novitiate in mathematics, abandoned the Pythagoreans and went elsewhere. The Platonists were the next who attracted him. He found no lack of employment for the highest qualities of his really noble soul in the lofty visions of Plato and the sublimated theories of his disciples and commentators; though it appears a little singular that, with his propensities toward the ideal and abstract, he should have tried so many masters before he [{43}] sat down under Plato. However, be that as it may, Plato seems to have satisfied him for a while, and he began to think he was growing a very wise man, when these illusions were rudely dispelled. One day he had walked down to a lonely spot by the sea-shore, meditating, probably, some deep idea, and perhaps declaiming occasionally some passage of Plato's Olympian Greek. In his solitary walk he met an old man, and entered into conversation with him. The event of this conversation was that Justin went home with a wonderfully reduced estimate of his own wisdom, and a determination to get to know a few things about which Plato, on the old man's showing, had been woefully in the dark. Justin became a convert to Christianity. Now, Justin had been at Alexandria, and, whether the conversation he relates ever really took place, or is merely an oratorical fiction, the story is one that represents substantially what must have happened over and over again to those who thronged the university of Alexandria, wearing the black cloak of the philosopher.
Justin lived and was martyred some half a century before Clement sat in the chair of the catechisms. But it is quite plain that, in such a state of society, there would not be wanting many of his class and temperament who, in Clement's time, as well as fifty years before, were in search of the true philosophy. And we must not forget that in Alexandria there were actually thousands of well-born, intellectual young men from every part of the Roman empire. To the earnest among these Clement was, indeed, no ordinary master. In the first place, he was their equal by birth and education, with all the intellectual keenness of his native Athens, and all the ripeness and versatility of one who had "seen many cities of men and their manners." Next, he had himself been a Gentile, and had gone through all those phases of the soul that precede and accompany the process of conversion. If any one knew their difficulties and their sore places, it was he, the converted philosopher. If any one was capable of satisfying a generous mind as to which was the true philosophy, it was he who had travelled the world over in search of it. He could tell the swarthy Syrian that it was of no use to seek the classic regions of Ionia, for he had tried them, and the truth was not there; he could assure him it was waste of time to go to Athens, for the Porch and the Garden were babbling of vain questions—he had listened in them all. He could calm the ardor of the young Athenian, his countryman, eager to try the banks of the Orontes, and to interrogate the sages of Syria; for he could tell him beforehand what they would say. He could shake his head when the young Egyptian, fresh from the provincial luxury of Antinoë, mentioned Magna Graecia as a mysterious land where the secret of knowledge was perhaps in the hands of the descendants of the Pelasgi. He had tried Tarentum, he had tried Neapolis; they were worse than the Serapeion in unnameable licentiousness—less in earnest than the votaries that crowded the pleasure-barges of the Nile at a festival of the Moon. He had asked, he had tried, he had tasted. The truth, he could tell them, was at their doors. It was elsewhere, too. It was in Neapolis, in Antioch, in Athens, in Rome; but they would not find it taught in the chairs of the schools, nor discussed by noble frequenters of the baths and the theatres. He knew it, and he could tell it to them. And as he added many a tale of his wanderings and searchings—many an instance of genius falling short, of good-will laboring in the dark, of earnestness painfully at fault—many of those who heard him would yield themselves up to the vigorous thinker whose brow showed both the capacity and the unwearied activity of the soul within. He was the very man to be made a hero of. Whatever there was in the circle of Gentile philosophy he knew. St. Jerome calls [{44}] him the "most learned of the writers of the Church," and St. Jerome must have spoken with the sons of those who had heard him lecture—noble Christian patricians, perchance, whose fathers had often told them how, in fervent boyhood, they had been spell-bound by his words in the Christian school of Alexandria, or learned bishops of Palestine, who had heard of him from Origen at Caesarea or St. Alexander at Jerusalem. From the same St. Alexander, who had listened to Pantaenus by his side, we learn that he was as holy as he was learned; and Theodoret, whose school did not dispose him to admire what came from the catechetical doctors of Alexandria, is our authority for saying that his "eloquence was unsurpassed." In the fourth edition of Cave's "Apostolici," there is a portrait that we would fain vouch to be genuine. The massive, earnest face, of the Aristotelian type, the narrow, perpendicular Grecian brow, with its corrugations of thought and care, the venerable flowing beard, dignifying, but not concealing, the homely and fatherly mouth, seem to suggest a man who had made all science his own, yet who now valued a little one of Jesus Christ above all human wisdom and learning. But we have no record of those features that were once the cynosure of many eyes in the "many-peopled" city; we have no memorial of the figure that spoke the truths of the Gospel in the words of Plato. We know not how he looked, nor how he sat, when he began with his favorite master, and showed, with inexhaustible learning, where he had caught sight of the truth, and, again, where his mighty but finite intellect had failed for want of a more "admirable light;" nor how he kindled when he had led his hearers through the vestibule of the old philosophy, and stood ready to lift the curtain of that which was at once its consummation and its annihilation.
But the philosophers of Alexandria, so-called, were by no means, without exception, earnest, high-minded, and well-meaning. Leaving out of the question the mob of students who came ostensibly for wisdom, but got only a very doubtful substitute, and were quite content with it, we know that the Museum was the headquarters of an anti-Christian philosophy which, in Clement's time, was in the very spring of its vigorous development. Exactly contemporary with him was the celebrated Ammonius the Porter, the teacher of Plotinus, and therefore the parent of Neo-Platonism. Ammonius had a very great name and a very numerous school. That he was a Christian by birth, there is no doubt; and he was probably a Christian still when he landed at the Great Port and found employment as a ship-porter. History is divided as to his behavior after his wonderful elevation from the warehouses to the halls of the Museum. St. Jerome and Eusebius deny that he apostatized, while the very questionable authority of the unscrupulous Porphyry is the only testimony that can be adduced on the other side; but, even if he continued to be a Christian, his orthodoxy is rather damaged when we find him praised by such men as Plotinus, Longinus, and Hierocles. Some would cut the knot by asserting the existence of two Ammoniuses, one a pagan apostate, the other a Christian bishop—a solution equally contradicted by the witnesses on both sides. But, whatever Saccas was, there is no doubt as to what was the effect of his teaching on, at least, half of his hearers. If we might hazard a conjecture, we should say that he appears to have been a man of great cleverness, and even genius, but too much in love with his own brilliancy and his own speculations not to come across the ecclesiastical authority in a more or less direct way. He supplied many imposing premises which Origen, representing the sound half of his audience, used for Christian purposes, whilst Plotinus employed them for revivifying the dead body of paganism. The brilliant sack-bearer seems to have been, at the very least, a liberal [{45}] Christian, who was too gentlemanly to mention so very vulgar a thing as the Christian "superstition" in the classic gardens of the palace, or at the serene banquets of sages in the Symposium.
The question, then, is, How did Christianity, as a philosophy, stand in relation to the affluent professors of Ptolemy's university? That they had been forced to see there was such a thing as Christianity, before the time of which we speak (A.D. 200), it is impossible to doubt. It must have dawned upon the comprehension of the most imperturbable grammarian and the most materialist surgeon of the Museum that a new teaching of some kind was slowly but surely striking root in the many forms of life that surrounded them. Rumors must long before have been heard in the common hall that executions had taken place of several members of a new sect or society, said to be impious in its tenets and disloyal in its practice. No doubt the assembled sages had expended at the time much intricate quibble and pun, after heavy Alexandrian fashion, on the subject of those wretched men; more especially when it was put beyond doubt that no promises of reward or threats of punishment had availed to make them compromise their "opinions" in the slightest tittle. Then the matter would die out, to be revived several times in the same way; until at last some one would make inquiries, and would find that the new sect was not only spreading, but, though composed apparently of the poor and the humble, was clearly something very different from the fantastic religions or brutal no-religions of the Alexandrian mob. It would be gradually found out, moreover, that men of name and of parts were in its ranks; nay, some day of days, that learned company in the Hall would miss one of its own number, after the most reverend the curator had asked a blessing—if ever he did—and it would come out that Professor So-and-so, learned and austere as he was, had become a Christian! And some would merely wonder, but, that past, would ask their neighbor, in the equivalent Attic, if there were to be no more cakes and ale, because he had proved himself a fool; others would wonder, and feel disturbed, and think about asking a question or two, though not to the extent of abandoning their seats at that comfortable board.
The majority, doubtless, at Alexandria as elsewhere, set down Christianity as some new superstition, freshly imported from the home of all superstitions, the East. There were some who hated it, and pursued it with a vehemence of malignant lying that can suggest only one source of inspiration, that is to say, the father of all lies himself. Of this class were Crescens the Cynic, the prime favorite of Marcus Aurelius, and Celsus, called the Epicurean, but who, in his celebrated book, written at this very time, appears as veritable a Platonist as Plotinus himself. Then, again, there were others who found no difficulty in recognizing Christianity as a sister philosophy—who, in fact, rather welcomed it as affording fresh material for dialectics—good, easy men of routine, blind enough to the vital questions which the devil's advocates clearly saw to be at stake. Galen is pre-eminently a writer who has reflected the current gossip of the day. He was a hard student in his youth, and a learned and even high-minded man in his maturity, but he frequently shows himself in his writings as the "fashionable physician," with one or two of the weaknesses of that well-known character. He spent a long time at Alexandria, just before Clement became famous, studying under Heraclian, consulting the immortal Hippocrates, and profiting by the celebrated dissecting-rooms of the Museum, in which, unless they are belied, the interests of science were so paramount that they used to dissect—not live horses; but living slaves. He could not, therefore, fail to have known how Christianity was regarded at the Museum. Speaking of Christians, then, in his works, he of course retails a good deal of [{46}] nonsense about them, such as we can imagine him to have exchanged with the rich gluttons and swollen philosophers whom he had to attend professionally in Roman society; but when he speaks seriously, and of what he had himself observed, he says, frankly and honestly, that the Christians deserved very great praise for sobriety of life, and for their love of virtue, in which they equalled or surpassed the greatest philosophers of the age. So thought, in all probability, many of the learned men of Alexandria.
The Church, on her side, was not averse to appearing before the Gentiles in the garb of philosophy, and it was very natural that the Christian teachers should encourage this idea, with the aim and hope of gaining admittance for themselves and their good tidings into the very heart of pagan learning. And was not Christianity a philosophy? In the truest sense of the word—and, what is more to the purpose, in the sense of the philosophers of Alexandria—it was a philosophy. The narrowed meaning that in our days is assigned to philosophy, as distinguished from religion, had no existence in the days of Clement. Wisdom was the wisdom by excellence, the highest, the ultimate wisdom. What the Hebrew preacher meant when he said, "Wisdom is better than all the most precious things," the same was intended by the Alexandrian lecturer when he offered to show his hearers where wisdom was to be found. It meant the fruit of the highest speculation, and at the same time the necessary ground of all-important practice. In our days the child learns at the altar-rails that its end is to love God, and serve him, and be happy with him; and after many years have passed, the child, now a man, studies and speculates on the reasons and the bearings of that short, momentous sentence. In the old Greek world the intellectual search came first, and the practical sentence was the wished-for result. A system of philosophy was, therefore, in Clement's time, tantamount to a religion. It was the case especially with the learned. Serapis and Isis were all very well for the "old women and the sailors," but the laureate and the astronomer royal of the Ptolemies, and the professors, many and diverse, of arts and ethics, in the Museum, scarcely took pains to conceal their utter contempt for the worship of the vulgar. Their idols were something more spiritual, their incense was of a more ethereal kind. Could they not dispute about the Absolute Being? and had they not glimpses of something indefinitely above and yet indefinably related to their own souls, in the Logos of the divine Plato? So the Stoic mortified his flesh for the sake of some ulterior perfectibility of which he could give no clear account to himself; the Epicurean contrived to take his fill of pleasure, on the maxim that enjoyment was the end of our being, "and tomorrow we die;" the Platonist speculated and pursued his "air-travelling and cloud-questioning," like Socrates in the basket, in a vain but tempting endeavor to see what God was to man and man to God; the Peripatetic, the Eclectic, and all the rest, disputed, scoffed, or dogmatized about many things, certainly, but, mainly and finally, on those questions that will never lie still:—Who are we? and, Who placed us here? Philosophy included religion, and therefore Christianity was a philosophy.
When Clement, then, told the philosophers of Alexandria that he could teach them the true philosophy, he was saying not only what was perfectly true, but what was perfectly understood by them. The catechetical school was, and appeared to them, as truly a philosophical lecture-room as the halls of the Museum. Clement himself had been an ardent philosopher, and he reverently loved his masters, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, whilst he had the feelings of a brother toward the philosophers of his own day. He became a Christian, and his dearest object was to win his brethren to a participation in his own good fortune. [{47}] He did not burn his philosophical books and anathematize his masters; like St. Paul, he availed himself of the good that was in them and commended it, and then proclaimed that he had the key of the treasure which they had labored to find and had not found. This explains how it is that, in Clement of Alexandria, the philosopher's mantle seems almost to hide the simple garb of the Christian. This also explains why he is called, and indeed calls himself, an Eclectic in his system; and this marks out the drift and the aim of the many allusions to philosophy that we find in his extant works, and in the traditions of his teaching that have come down to us. If Christianity was truly called a philosophy, what should we expect in its champion but that he should be a philosopher? Men in these days read the Stromata, and find that it is, on the outside, more like Plato than like Jesus Christ; and thus they make small account of it, because they cannot understand its style, or the reason for its adoption. The grounds of questions and the forms of thought have shifted since the days of the catechetical school. But Clement's fellow-citizens understood him. The thrifty young Byzantine, for instance, understood him, who had been half-inclined to join the Stoics, but had come, in his threadbare pallium, to hear the Christian teacher, and who was told that asceticism was very good and commendable, but that the end of it all was God and the love of God, and that this end could only be attained by a Christian. The languid but intellectual man of fashion understood him, who had grown sick of the jargon of his Platonist professors about the perfect man and the archetypal humanity, and who now felt his inmost nature stirred to its depths by the announcement and description of the Word made flesh. The learned stranger from Antioch or Athens, seeking for the truth, understood him, when he said that the Christian dogma alone could create and perfect the true Gnostic or Knower; he understood perfectly the importance of the object, provided the assertion were true, as it might turn out to be. Unless Clement had spoken of asceticism, of the perfect man, and of the true Gnostic, his teaching would not have come home to the self-denying student, to the thoughtful sage, to the brilliant youth, to all that was great and generous and amiable in the huge heathen society of the crowded city. As it was, he gained a hearing, and, having done so, he said to the Alexandrians, "Your masters in philosophy are great and noble: I honor them, I admire and accept them; but they did not go far enough, as you all acknowledge. Come to us, then, and we will show what is wanting in them. Listen to these old Hebrew writers whom I will quote to you. You see that they treated of all your problems, and had solved the deepest of them, whilst your forefathers were groping in darkness. All their light, and much more, is our inheritance. The truth, which you seek, we possess. 'What you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you.' God's Word has been made flesh—has lived on this earth, the model man, the absolute man. Come to us, and we will show you how you may know God through him, and how through him God communicates himself to you." But here he stopped. The "discipline of the secret" allowed him to go no further in public. The listening Christians knew well what he meant; his pagan hearers only surmised that there was more behind. And was it not much that Christianity should thus measure strength and challenge a contest with the old Greek civilization on equal terms, and about those very matters of intellect and high ethics in which it especially prided itself?
But the contest, never a friendly one, save with the dullest and easiest of the pagan philosophers, very soon grew to be war to the knife. We have said that the quiet lovers of literature among the heathen men of science were perfectly ready to admit the Christian philosophy to a fair share [{48}] in the arena of disputation and discussion, looking upon it as being, at worst, only a foolish system of obtrusive novelties, which might safely be left to their own insignificancy. But, quite unexpectedly and startlingly for easy-going philosophers, Christianity was found, not merely to claim the possession of truth, but to claim it wholly and solely. And, what was still more intolerable, its doctors maintained that its adoption or rejection was no open speculative question, but a tremendous practical matter, involving nothing less than all morality here and all happiness hereafter; and that the unfortunate philosopher, who, in his lofty serenity, approved it as right, and yet followed the wrong, would have to undergo certain horrors after death, the bare suggestion of which seemed an outrage on the dignity of the philosophical character. This was quite enough for hatred; and the philosophers, as their eyes began to open, saw that Crescens and Celsus were right, and accorded their hatred most freely and heartily.
But Christianity did not stop here. With the old original schools and their offshoots it was a recognized principle that philosophy was only for philosophers; and this was especially true of Clement's most influential contemporaries, the Neo-Platonists. The vulgar had no part in it, in fact could not come within the sphere of its influence; how could they? How could the sailors, who, after a voyage, went to pay their vows in the temple of Neptune on the quay, or the porters who dragged the grain sacks and the hemp bundles from the tall warehouses to the holds of Syrian and Greek merchantmen, or the negro slaves who fanned the brows of the foreign prince, or the armorers of the Jews' quarter, or the dark-skinned, bright-eyed Egyptian women of the Rhacôtis suspected of all evil from thieving to sorcery, or, more than all, the drunken revellers and poor harlots who made night hideous when the Egyptian moon looked down on the palaces of the Brucheion—how could any of these find access to the sublime secrets of Plato or the profound commentaries of his disciples? Even if they had come in crowds to the lecture-halls—which no one wanted them to do, or supposed they would do—they could not have been admitted nor entertained; for even the honest occupations of life, the daily labors necessary in a city of 300,000 freemen, were incompatible with imbibing the divine spirit of philosophy. So the philosophers had nothing to say to all these. If they had been asked what would become of such poor workers and sinners, they would probably have avoided an answer as best they could. There were the temples and Serapis and Isis and the priests—they might go to them. It was certain that philosophy was not meant for the vulgar. In fact, philosophy would be unworthy of a habitation like the Museum—would deserve to have its pensions stopped, its common hall abolished, and its lecture-rooms shut up—if ever it should condescend to step into the streets and speak to the herd. It was, therefore, with a disgust unspeakable, and a swiftly-ripening hatred, that the philosophers saw Christianity openly proclaiming and practising the very opposite of all this. True, it had learned men and respected men in its ranks, but it loudly declared that its mission was to the lowly, and the mean, and the degraded, quite as much as to the noble, and the rich, and the virtuous. It maintained that the true divine philosophy, the source of joy for the present and hope for the future, was as much in the power of the despised bondsman, trembling under the lash, as of the prince-governor, or the Caesar himself, haughtily wielding the insignia of sovereignty. We know what its pretensions and tenets were, but it is difficult to realize how they must have clashed with the notions of intellectual paganism in the city of Plotinus—how the hands that would have been gladly held out in friendship, had it come in respectable [{49}] and conventional guise, were shut and clenched, when they saw in its train the rough mechanic, the poor maid-servant, the negro, and the harlot. There could be no compromise between two systems such as these. For a time it might have seemed as if they could decide their quarrel in the schools, but the old Serpent and his chief agents knew better: and so did Clement and the Christian doctors, at the very time that they were taking advantage of fair weather to occupy every really strong position which the enemy held. The struggle soon grew into the deadly hand-to-hand grapple that ended in leaving the corpse of paganism on the ground, dead but not buried, to be gradually trodden out of sight by a new order of things.