It must not, however, be supposed that the Christian school of Alexandria was wholly, or even chiefly, employed in controversy with the schools of the heathen. The first care of the Church was, as at all times, the household of the faith: a care, however, in the fulfilment of which there is less that strikes as novel or interesting at first sight than in that remarkable aggressive movement of which it has been our object to give some idea. But even in the Church's household working there is much that is both instructive and interesting, as we get a glimpse of it in Clement of Alexandria. The Church in Alexandria, as elsewhere, was made up of men from every lot and condition of life. There were officials, civil and military, merchants, shop-keepers, work-people—plain, hard-striving men, husbands, and fathers of families. In the wake of the upper thousands followed a long and wide train—the multitude who compose the middle classes of a great city; and it was from their ranks that the Church was mainly recruited. They might not feel much interest in the university, beyond the fact that its numerous and wealthy students were a welcome stimulus to trade; but still they had moral and intellectual natures. They must have craved for some kind of food for their minds and hearts, and cannot have been satisfied with the dry, unnourishing scraps that were flung to them by the supercilious philosophers. They must have felt no small content—those among them who had the grace to hearken to the teachings of Clement—when he told them that the philosophy he taught was as much for them as for their masters and their betters. They listened to him, weighed his words, and accepted them; and then a great question arose. It was a question that was being debated and settled at Antioch, at Rome, and at Athens, no less than at Alexandria; but at Alexandria it was Clement who answered it. "We believe your good tidings," they said; "but tell us, must we change our lives wholly and entirely? Is everything that we have been doing so far, and our fathers have been doing before us, miserably and radically wrong?" They had bought and sold; they had married and given in marriage; they had filled their warehouses and freighted their ships; they had planted and builded, and brought up their sons and daughters. They had loved money, and the praise of their fellow-men; they had their fashions and their customs, old and time-honored, and so interwoven with their very life as to be almost identified with it. Some of their notions and practices the bare announcement of the Gospel sufficiently condemned; and these must go at once. But where was the line to be drawn? Did the Gospel aim at regenerating the world by forbidding marriage and laying a ban on human labor; by making life intolerable with asceticism; by emptying the streets and the market-places, and driving men to Nitria and the frightful rocks of the Upper Nile? And what made the question doubly exciting was the two-fold fact, first, that in those very days men and women were continually fleeing from home and family, and hiding, in the desert; and secondly, that there were in that very city congregations of [{50}] men calling themselves Christians, who proclaimed that it was wrong to marry, and that flesh-meat and wine were sinful indulgences.
The answer that Clement gave to these questionings is found mainly in that work of his which is called Paedagogus, or "The Teacher." The answer needed was a sharp, a short, and a decisive one. It needed to be like a surgical operation—rapidly performed, completed, with nothing further to be done but to fasten the bandages, and leave the patient to the consequences, whatever they might be. Society had to be reset. We need not repeat for the thousandth time the fact of the unutterable corruptness and rottenness of the whole pagan world. It was not that there were wanting certain true ideas of duty toward the state, the family, the fellow-citizen: the evil lay far deeper. It was not good sense that was wanting; it was the sense of the supernatural. "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," was the formula that expressed the code of popular morality; and because men could not "eat and drink" comfortably and luxuriously without some sort of law, order, and mutual compact, it followed as a necessary consequence that there must be law, order, and compact. It was not, therefore, that Clement had merely to hold up the Gospel and show them its meaning here and its application there. He had to shift the very groundwork of morality, to take up the very foundations of the moral acts that go to make up life as viewed in the light of right and wrong. He had to substitute heaven for earth, hereafter for here, God for self. And he did so—in a fashion not unknown in the Catholic Church since, as indeed it had been not unknown to St. Paul long before. He simply held up to them the crucifix. Let any one turn to the commencement of the Paedagogus, and he will find a description of what a teacher ought to be. At the beginning of the second chapter he will read these words: "My children, our teacher is like the Father, whose Son he is; in whom there is no sin, great or small, nor any temptation to sin; God in the figure of a man, stainless, obedient to his Father's will; the Word, true God, who is in the Father, who is at the Father's right hand, true God in the form of a man; to whom we must strive with all our might to make ourselves like." It sounds like the commencement of a children's retreat in one of our modern cities to hear Clement proclaim so anxiously that the teacher and model of men is no other than Jesus, and that we must all become children, and go and listen to him and study him; yet it is a sentence that must have spoken to the very inmost hearts of all who had a thought or care for their souls in Alexandria; and one can perceive, in the terms used in the original Greek, a conscious adaptation of epithets to meet more than one Platonic difficulty. It was the reconciliation of the true with the beautiful. The Alexandrians, Greek and Egyptian, with their Greek longings for the beautiful, and their Egyptian tendings to the sensible, were not put off by Clement with a cold abstraction. A mathematical deity, formed out of lines, relations, and analogies, such as Neo-Platonism offered, was well enough for the lecture-room, but had small hold upon the heart. Christianity restored the thrilling sense of a personal God, which Neo-Platonism destroyed, but for which men still sighed, though they knew not what they were sighing for; and Christianity, by Clement's mouth, taught that the living and lovely life of Jesus was to be the end and the measure of the life of all. They were to follow him: "My angel shall walk before you," is Clement's own quotation. And having thus laid down the regenerating principle—God through Jesus Christ—he descends safely and fearlessly into details. Minutely and carefully he handles the problems of life, and sets them straight by the light of the life of Jesus.
These details and these directions, [{51}] as left to us by Clement in the Paedagogus, are only what we might anticipate from a Christian teacher to his flock; and yet they are very interesting, and disclose many facts that are full of suggestion to one who reads by the light of the Catholic faith. Who would not like to hear what Clement said to the Church of Alexandria about dress, beauty, feasting, drinking, furniture, conversation, money, theatres, sleep, labor, and housekeeping? We know well that there must have been ample scope for discourse on all these topics. The rich Alexandrians, like the rich Romans, and the rich Corinthians, and the rich everywhere, were fearfully addicted to luxury, and their poorer neighbors followed their example as well as they could. But there were circumstances peculiar to Alexandria that enabled it to outdo the rest of the world in this matter; putting Rome, of course, out of the question. It was the market for India; and seeing that almost everything in the way of apparel came from India, Alexandria had the pick of the best that the world could afford, and seems not to have been behindhand in taking advantage of its privilege. Nobody enjoyed more than the Alexandrian— whether he were a descendant of the Macedonian who came in with the Conqueror, or a parvenu of yesterday grown great by his wheat-ships or his silk-bales—to sweep the Heptastadion, or promenade the Great Quay, or lounge in the gardens of the Museum, in what ancient tailors and milliners would call a synthesis of garments, as ample, and stiff, and brilliant as Indian looms could make them. Then, again, Alexandria was a university town. Two hundred years of effeminate Ptolemies and four hundred of wealthy students had been more than enough to create a tradition of high, luxurious living. The conjunction of all that was to be got for money, with any amount of money to get it with, had made Alexandria a model city for carrying out the only maxim which the greater number even of the philosophers themselves really understood and practically followed: "Let us eat and drink!" Again, a navigable river, a rainless sky, and a climate perhaps the finest in the world, offered both inducements and facilities for parties of pleasure and conviviality in general. It is true the river was only a canal: one thing was wanting to the perfection of Alexandria as a site for an empire city, viz., the Nile; but that the canal was a moderate success in the eyes of the Alexandrians may be inferred from the fact that Canopus, where it finished its short course of thirteen or fourteen miles, and joined the Nile, was a perfect city of river-side hotels, to which the boats brought every day crowds of pleasure-seekers. Very gay were the silken and gilded boats, with their pleasant canopies and soothing music; and very gay and brilliant, but not very reputable, were the groups that filled them, with their crowns of flowers, their Grecian attitudinizing, and their ingenious arrangements of fan-working slaves. This was the population which it was Clement's work to convert to purity and moderation.
It is very common with Clement's modern critics, when making what our French allies would call "an appreciation" him, to set him down as a solemn trifler. They complain that they cannot get any "system of theology" out of his writings; indeed, they doubt whether he so much as had one. They find him use the term "faith" first in one sense and then in another, and they are especially offended by his minute instructions on certain matters pertaining to meat, drink, and dress. To any one who considers what Clement intended to do in his writings, and especially in the Paedagogus, there is no difficulty in seeing an answer to a difficulty like this. He did not mean to construct a "system of theology," and therefore it is no wonder if his critics cannot find one. He did not even mean to state the broad, general principles of the Gospel: his hearers knew these well enough. What he did mean to do was, [{52}] to apply these general rules and principles to a variety of cases occurring in everyday life. And yet, as a matter of fact, it is to be observed that he always does lay down broad principles before entering into details. In the matter of eating, for instance, regarding which he is very severe in his denunciations, and not without reason, he takes care to state distinctly the great Catholic canon of mortification: "Though all things were made for man, yet it is not good to use all, nor at all times." Again, in the midst of his contemptuous enumeration of ancient wines, he does not forget to say, "You are not robbed of your drink: it is given to you, and awaits your hand;" that which is blamed is excess. He sums up what he has been saying against the voluptuous entertainments then so universal by the following sentence—a novelty, surely, to both extremes of pagan society in Alexandria—"In one word, whatever is natural to man must not be taken from him; but, instead thereof, must be regulated according to fitting measure and time."
In deciding whether Clement was a "solemn trifler," or not, there is another consideration which must not be omitted, and that is his sense of the humorous. It may sound incongruous when speaking of a Father of the Church, and much more of a reputed mystical Father like Clement, but we think no one can deny that he often supplements a serious argument by a little stroke of pleasantry. As many of his sentences stand, a look or a smile would lighten them up and make them sparkle into humor. Paper and ink cannot carry the tone of the voice or the glance of the eye, and Clement's voice has been silent and his eye dimmed for many a century; but may we not imagine that at times something of archness in the teacher's manner would impart to his weighty words a touch of quaintness, and the habitually thoughtful eye twinkle with a gleam of pleasantry? He would be no true follower of Plato if it were not so. Who shall say he was not smiling when he gave out that formal list of wines, of eatables, and of scents most affected by the fashionables of those days? He concludes an invective against scandalous feats by condemning the universal crown of roses as a "nuisance:" it was damp, it was cold; it hindered one from using either his eyes or his ears properly. He advises his audience to avoid much curious carving and ornamenting of bed-posts; for creeping things, he says, have a habit of making themselves at home in the mouldings. He asks if one's hands cannot be as well washed in a clay basin as in a silver one. He wonders how one can dare to put a plain little loaf on a grand "wing-footed" table. He cannot see why a lamp of earthenware will not give as good a light as one of silver. He alludes with disgust to "hissing frying-pans," to "spoon and pestle," and even to the "packed stomachs" of their proprietors; to Sicilian lampreys, and Attican eels; shell-fish from Capo di Faro, and Ascrean beet from the foot of Helicon; mullet from the Gulf of Thermae, and pheasants from the Crimea. We hear him contemptuously repeat the phrases of connoisseurs about their wines, the startling variety of which we know from other sources besides his writings: he speaks of the "scented Thasian," the aromatic "Lesbian," the "sweet wine of Crete," the "pleasant Syracusan." The articles of plate which he enumerates to condemn would be more than sufficient to furnish out a modern wedding breakfast. To scents he gives no quarter. We have heard a distinguished professor of chemistry assert, in a lecture, that wherever there is scent on the surface there is sure to be dirt beneath; and, from the well-known fact that in Capua there was one whole street occupied by perfumers, he could draw no other inference than that Capua must have been "a very dirty city." It would appear that Clement of Alexandria was much of this opinion. He gives a picture of a pompous [{53}] personage in a procession, "going along marvellously scented, for the purpose of producing a sensation, and yet underneath as foul as he could be." He enumerates the absurd varieties of ointments in fashion, and orders them to be thrown away. He is indignant at the saffron-colored scented robe that the gentlemen wore. He will have no flowing or trailing vestments; no "Attic buskins," no "Persian sandals." He complains that the ladies go and spend the whole day at the perfumer's, the goldsmith's, and the milliner's, just as if he were speaking of "shopping" in the nineteenth century, instead of A.D. 200. He blames the men for frequenting the barbers' shops, the taverns, and the dicing-houses. It is amusing in these days to read of his denunciations of shaving. He has no patience with "hair-haters:" a man without the hair that God gave him is a "base sight." "God attached such importance to hair," he says, "that he makes a man come to hair and sense at the same time." But, in reality, this vehement attack on the "smooth men," as he calls them, points to one of the most flagrant of heathen immoralities, and reveals in the context a state of things to which we may not do more than allude. He condemns luxury in furniture, from "beds with silver feet, made of ivory and adorned with gold and tortoise-shell," down to "little table-daggers," that ancient ladies and gentlemen used indifferently to their food and to their slaves. All this is not very deep, but it is just what Clement wanted to say, and a great deal more useful in its place and connection than a "system of theology." We may add that it is a great deal more interesting to us, who know pretty well what Clement's "system of theology" was, but not so well what were the faults and failings of his Christian men and women in those far-off Alexandrian times.
There is another epithet bestowed upon Clement, more widely and with better authority than that of "trifler." He is called a mystic. He deals in allegorical interpretations of Holy Scripture, in fanciful analogies, and whimsical reasonings; he was carried away by the spirit of Neo-Platonism, and substituted a number of idle myths for the stern realities of the Gospel. It is not our business at present to show, by references, that this accusation is untrue; but we may admit at once that it is not unfounded, and we maintain that it points to an excellence, rather than a defect, in his teaching. From the remarks made just now, the reader will be prepared to expect that a teacher in Alexandria in Clement's days must have been a mystic. It was simply the fashion; and a fashion, in thought and speech, exacts a certain amount of compliance from those who think or speak for the good of its followers. Neo-Platonism was not extant in his time as a definite system, but ever since the days of Philon its spirit had been the spirit of the Museum. Nature, in its beauty and variety, was an allegory of the soul so said the philosophers, and the crowd caught it up with eagerness. The natural philosopher could not lecture on Aristotle De Animalibus without deducing morals in the style of AEsop. The moralist, in his turn, could hardly keep up his class-list without embodying his Beautiful and his Good in the aesthetical garb of a myth—the more like Plato, the better. The mathematician discoursed of numbers, of lines, and of angles, but the interesting part of his lecture was when he drew the analogy from lines and numbers to the soul and to God. Alexandria liked allegory, and believed, or thought she believed, that the Seen was always a type of the Unseen. Such a belief was not unnatural, and by no means hopelessly erroneous; nay, was it not highly useful to a Christian teacher, with the Bible in his hand, in which he would really have to show them so many things, per allegoriam dicta? Clement took up the accustomed tone. Had he done otherwise, he would have been strange and old-fashioned, whereas he [{54}] wanted to get the ear of his countrymen, and therefore thought it no harm to fall in with their humor for the mythical; just as good Father Faber preached and wrote like a modern Englishman, and not like an antique Douai controversialist, or a well-meaning translator of "Sermons from the French." But, say the objectors, Clement's interpretation of Scripture is so very forced and unnatural. The whole subject of allegorical interpretation of Sacred Scripture is too wide to be entered upon here; but that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, has an allegorical sense, no one denies, and the decision of what is the true allegorical sense depends more upon the authority of the teacher than upon the interpretation itself. In the time of Clement, when the Gnostics were attributing the Old Testament to the Evil Principle, there was a special necessity for a warm and loving acknowledgment that it was the voice and the teaching of God to man; and it is no wonder, therefore, that he allows himself, with the brilliant fancy of an Athenian, even if sometimes with the fantasticalness of an Alexandrian, to extract meanings out of the sacred text which our sober eyes could never have discovered. As it is, we owe to his mysticism no small portion of the eloquence and beauty of his writings; we may instance that charming passage in the Paedagogus where he alludes to the incident related in the twenty-sixth chapter of Genesis—"Abimelech, King of the Palestines, looking out through a window, saw Isaac playing with Rebecca his wife." Isaac represents, the little one of Christ, and is interpreted to be joy; Rebecca is patience; the royal Abimelech signifies heavenly wisdom. The child of Jesus Christ, joyful with a joy that none but that blessed teacher can give, lovingly sports with his "helpmate," patience, and the wisdom that is from above looks on and wonderingly admires. The beauty of conception and perfection of form that is inseparable from true Greek art, whether in a statue or a medal, an epic or an epigram, is by no means wanting to the first of the Greek Fathers. A reader who should take up the Paedagogus for no other than literary reasons would not be disappointed; he would receive, from his reading, a very high idea of the wisdom, the eloquence, and, above all, the saintly unction of the great Catholic doctor and philosopher who first made human science the handmaid of Christian theology.
The witnessing to the truth before heathen philosophers and the teaching the children of the faith might have fully employed both the zeal and the eloquence of Clement. But there was another and a sadder use for words, in the task of resisting the heresies that seemed to grow like foul excrescences from the very growth of the Church herself. Alexandria, the city of Neo-Platonism, was also with nearly as good a title the city of Gnosticism. To examine the history of Gnosticism is not a tempting undertaking. On the one side, it is like walking into a fog, as dense and unpleasant as ever marked a London November; on the other, it is to disturb a moral cess-pool, proverbially better left alone. Of the five groups of the Gnostic family, which seem to agree in little beside worshipping the devil, holding to "emanations," and owing their origin to Simon Magus, the particular group that made Alexandria its headquarters acknowledged as its leading names Basilides, Valentine, and Mark, each of whom outdid the other in the absurdity of his ravings about eons, generations, and the like, and in the abominableness of his practical licentiousness. Valentine and Mark were contemporaries of Clement, if not personally (Valentine is said to have died A.D. 150) at least in their immediate influence. No one can tell satisfactorily what made these precious followers of Simon Magus spend their days in patching up second-hand systems out of the rags of cast-off Oriental mysticism. No doubt their jargon appeared somewhat less [{55}] unnatural in their own days than it does in ours. They lived nearer the times when the wrecks of primeval revelation and history had been wrought into a thousand fantastic shapes on the banks of the Indus, the Euphrates, and the Nile, and when, in the absence of the true light, men occupied themselves with the theatrical illuminations of Bel, Isis, and Vishnu. But these Gnostics, in the clear dawn of the Gospel, still stuck to the fulsome properties of the devil's play-house. Unsavory and dishonest, they deserve neither respect for sincerity nor allowance for originality; they were mere spinners of "endless genealogies," and, with such a fig-leaf apron, they tried to conceal for a while the rankness of the flesh that finally made the very pagans join in hounding them from the earth. The infamous Mark was holding his conventicles in Alexandria about the very time that Pantaenus and Clement were teaching. To read of his high-flown theories about eons and emanations, his sham magic, his familiarity with demons, his impositions on the weaker sex, and the frightful licentiousness that was the sure end of it all, is like reading the history of the doings of the Egyptian priests in the Serapeion rather than of those who called themselves Christians. And yet these very men, these deluded Marcosians, gave out to learned and unlearned Alexandria that they alone were the true followers of Christ. We may conceive the heart-breaking work it would be for Clement to repel the taunts that their doings brought upon his name and profession, and to refute and keep down false brethren, whose arguments and strength consisted in an appeal to curiosity and brute passion. And yet how nobly he does it, in that picture of the true Gnostic, or Knower, to which he so often returns in all his extant works!
But philosophers, faithful, and heretics do not exhaust the story of Clement's doings. It lends a solemn light to the memorable history we are noting, to bear in mind that the Church's intellectual war with Neo-Platonist and Gnostic was ever and again interrupted by the yells of the blood-thirsty populace, the dragging of confessors to prison, and all the hideous apparatus of persecution. Which of us would have had heart to argue with men who might next day deliver us to the hangman? Who would have found leisure to write books on abstract philosophy with such stern concrete realities as the scourge and the knife waiting for him in the street? Clement's master began to teach just as one persecution was ceasing; Clement himself had to flee from his schools before the "burden and heat" of another; these were not times, one would suppose, for science and orderly teaching. Yet our own English Catholic annals can, in a manner, furnish parallel cases in more than one solid book of controversy and deep ascetical tract, thought out and composed when the pursuivants were almost at the doors. So true it is that when the Church's work demands scientific and written teaching, science appears and books are written, though the Gentiles are raging and the peoples imagining their vain things.
Here, for the present, we draw to a close these desultory notes on the Christian Schools of Alexandria. They will have served their purpose if they have but supplied an outline of that busy intellectual life which is associated with the names of Pantaenus and Clement. There is another name that ought to follow these two—the name of Origen, suggesting another chapter on Church history that should yield to none in interest and usefulness. The mere fact that in old Alexandria, in the face of hostile science, clogged and put to shame by pestilent heresies, ruthlessly chased out of sight ever and again by brute force— in spite of all this, Catholic science won respect from its enemies without for a moment neglecting the interests of its own children, is a teaching that will never be out of date, and least of all at a time like ours, and in a country where learning [{56}] sneers at revelation, where a thousand jarring sects invoke the sacred name of Christ, and where public opinion—the brute force of the modern world, as the rack and the fagot were of the ancient—never howls so loudly as when it catches sight of the one true Church of the living and eternal God.