First of all, then, the scholar was not of an emphatically philosophic cast of mind. The Greek philosophers were absolutely unknown to him. He was a rich and clever young [{363}] man, bade fair to be a good speaker, studied the law not because he liked it, but because his friends and his master wished it; thought the Latin language very imperial, but very difficult; and had a habit of taking up what opinions he did adopt more after the manner of clothes that he could change as he pleased than as immutable truths. He was of a warm and affectionate disposition, and had a keen appreciation of physical and moral beauty. He was not without leanings to Christianity, but he leaned to it in an easy, off-hand sort of way, as he might have leaned to a new school in poetry or a new style of dress. He had no idea that there is such a thing as the absolutely right and the absolutely wrong in ethics any more than in taste. He was confirmed in this state of mind by the philosophic schools of the day, among whom it was considered disreputable to change one's opinions, however good the reasons for a change might be; which was to degrade philosophy from truth to the mere spirit of party, and to make a philosopher not a lover of wisdom but a volunteer of opinion. So prepared and constituted, the scholar, on his way to Berytus, fell in with Origen, not so much by accident as by the disposition of Providence and the guidance of his angel guardian; so at least he thought himself. The first process which he went through at the hands of the master is compared by the scholar to the catching of a beast, or a bird, or a fish, in a net. Philosophizing had small charms for the accomplished young man; to philosophize was precisely what the master had determined he should do. We must remember the meaning of the word
; it meant to think, act, and live as a man who seeks true wisdom. All the sects acknowledge this theoretically; what Clement and Origen wanted to show, among other things, was that only a Christian was a true philosopher in practice. Hence the net he spread for Theodore, a net of words, strong and not to be broken. "You are a fine and clever young man," he seemed to say; "but to what purpose are your accomplishments and your journeys hither and thither? you cannot answer me the simple question, Who are you? You are going to study the laws of Rome, but should you not first have some definite notion as to your last end, as to what is real evil and what is real good? You are looking forward to enjoyment from your wealth and honor from your talents; why, so does every poor, sordid, creeping mortal on the earth; so even do the brute beasts. Surely the divine gift of reason was given you to help you to live to some higher end than this." The scholar hesitated, the master insisted. The view was striking in itself, but the teacher's personal gifts made it strike far more effectually. "He was a mixture," says the scholar, "of geniality, persuasiveness, and compulsion. I wanted to go away, but could not; his words held me like a cord." The young man, unsettled as his mind had been, yet had always at heart believed in some sort of Divine Being. Origen completed the conquest of his intellect by showing him that without philosophy, that is, without correct views on morality, the worship of God, or piety, as it used to be called, is impossible. And yet wisdom and eloquence might have been thrown away here as in so many other cases had not another influence, imperious and all-powerful, been all this time rising up in his heart. The scholar began to love the master. It was not an ordinary love, the love with which Origen inspired his hearers. It was an intense, almost a fierce, love (we are almost translating the words of the original), a fitting response to the genuineness and kindly spirit of one who seemed to think no pains or kindness too great to win the young heart to true morality, and thereby to the worship of the only God--"to that saving word," says St. Gregory, in his lofty style, "which alone can teach God-service, which to whomsoever it comes home [{364}] it makes a conquest of them; and this gift God seems to have given to him, beyond all men now in the world." To that sacred and lovely word, therefore, and to the man who was its interpreter and its friend, sprang up in the heart of the scholar a deep, inextinguishable love. For that the abandoned pursuits and studies which he had hitherto considered indispensable; for that he left the "grand" laws of Rome, and forsook the friends he had left at home, and the friends that were then at his side. "And the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David," quotes the scholar, noting that the text speaks emphatically of the union of the soul, which no earthly accidents can affect, and finding a parallel to himself in Jonathan, to his master in David, the wise, the holy, and the strong. And though the hour for parting had come, the moment when these bonds of the soul should be severed would never come!
The scholar was now completely in the hands of his teacher---"as a land," he says, "empty, unproductive, and the reverse of fertile, saline" (like the waste lands near the Nile), "burnt up, stony, drifted with sand; yet not absolutely barren; nay, with qualities which might be worth cultivating, but which had hitherto been left without tillage or care, to be overgrown with thorn and thicket." He can hardly make enough of this metaphor of land and cultivation to show the nature of the work that the teacher had with his mind. We have to read on for some time before we find out that all this vigorous grubbing, ploughing, harrowing, and sowing represents the dialectical training which Origen gave his pupils, such pupils, at least, as those of whom Gregory Thaumaturgus was the type. In fact, the dialectics of the Platonists and their off-shoots is very inadequately represented by the modern use of the word logic. It seems to have signified, as nearly as a short definition can express it, the rectifying the ideas of the mind about itself, and about those things most intimately connected with it. A modern student takes up his manual of logic, or sits down in his class-room with his most important ideas, either correct and settled, or else incorrect, beyond the cure of logic. At Alexandria manuals were scarce, and the ideas of the converts from heathenism were so utterly and fundamentally confused, that the first lessons of the Christian teacher to an educated Greek or Syrian necessarily took the shape of a Socratic discussion, or a disquisition on principles. And so the scholar, not without much amazement and ruffling of the feelings, found the field of his mind unceremoniously cleared out, broken up, and freshly planted. But, the process once complete, the result was worth the inconvenience.
It was about this stage, also, that the master insisted on a special training in natural history and mathematics. In his youth Origen had been educated, as we have seen, by his father in the whole circle of the sciences of the day. Such an education was possible then, though impossible now, and the spirit of Alexandrian teaching was especially attached to the sciences that regarded numbers, the figure of the earth, and nature. The schools of the Greek philosophers had always tolerated these sciences in their own precincts; nay, most of the schools themselves had arisen from attempts made in the direction of those very sciences, and few of them had attempted to distinguish accurately between physics and metaphysics. Moreover, geography, astronomy, and geometry, were the peculiar property of the Museum, for Eratosthenes, Euclid, Ilipparchus, and Ptolemy himself, had observed and taught within its walls. Origen, therefore, would not be likely to undervalue those interesting sciences which he had studied with his father, and which nine out of ten of his educated catechumens were more or less [{365}] acquainted, and puzzled, or delighted, with. Happy days when mathematics was little and chemistry in its infancy, when astronomy lived shut up in a tower, clad in mystic vesture, and when geology was yet in the womb of its mother earth! Enviable times, when they all (such at least as were born) could be sufficiently attended to and provided for in a casual paragraph of a theological instruction, or brought into a philosophical discussion to be admired and dismissed! Origen, however, had, as usual, a deeper motive for bringing physics and mathematics into his system. We need not remind the reader that, if Plato can be considered to have a weak part, that part is where he goes into Pythagorean speculations about bodies, numbers, and regular solids. His revivers, about the time we are speaking of, had with the usual instinct of revivers found out his weak part, and made the most of it, as if it had been the sublimest evolution of his genius. We may guess what was taking place from what afterward did take place, when even Porphyry fluctuated all his life between pretensions to philosophy and what Saint Augustine calls "sacrilegious curiosity," and when the whimsical triads of poor old Proclus were powerless to stop the deluge of theurgy, incantations, and all superstitions that finally swamped Neo-Platonism for ever. With this view present to our minds the words of the scholar in this place are very significant "By these two studies, geometry and astronomy, he made us a path toward heaven," The three words that Saint Gregory uses in the description of this part of the master's teaching are worth noticing. The first is Geometry, which is taken to mean everything that relates to the earth's surface. The second is astronomy, which treats of the face of the heavens. The third is physiology, which is the science of nature, or of all that comes between heaven and earth. So that Origen's scientific teaching was truly encyclopaedic. He was, moreover, an experimental philosopher, and did not merely retail the theories of others. He analyzed things and resolved them into their elements (their "very first" elements, says the scholar); he descanted on the multiform changes and conversions of things, partly from his own discoveries, and gave his hearers a rational admiration for the sacredness and perfection of nature, instead of a blind and stupid bewilderment; he "carved on their minds geometry the unquestionable, so dear to all, and astronomy that searches the upper air." What were the precise details of his teachings on these subjects it would be unfair to ask, even if it were possible to answer. We know that he thought diamonds and precious stones were formed from dew, but this is no proof he was behind his age; and his acquaintance with the literature of the subject proves he was, if anything, before it. With regard to naphtha, the magnet, and the looking-glass, it will be pleasing to know he was substantially right. He was, perhaps, the first to make a spiritual use of the accepted notion that the serpent was powerless against the stag; the reason is, he says, that the stag is the type of Christ warring against Anti-Christ. That he believed in griffins is unfortunate, but natural in an Alexandrian, who had lived in an atmosphere d stories brought down from the upper Nile by the ingenious sailors. As to his "denying the existence of the Tragelaphus" we must remain ignorant whether it redounds to his credit or otherwise, until modern researches have exhausted the African continent.
TO BE CONTINUED.
Translated from the Revue Contemporaine.
EVE DE LA TOUR-D'ADAM.
BY G. DE LA LANDELLE.
I hate those pretentious and high-sounding Christian names which certain upstarts inflict as a label of ridicule on their children; but, though I should be accused of having two weights and two measures, I should be pleased to see perpetuated in the descendants of a noble race the most fantastic of those chosen by their ancestors. My antipathy gives way before the religion of remembrance, before heroic or knightly traditions. I love then even their oddity. I can pardon even their triviality. I perceive only the old glory, the reflection of which is preserved by these consecrated names.