ALEXANDRIA.
Wide will wear. Narrow will tear.
Ancient Alexandria left its mark on the world. Its history, however,
appears to connect it rather with great names than with great events.
Fancy is pleased with the picture of the greatest of the Greeks, Philip’s
godlike son, Aristotle’s pupil, who carried about with him his Homer in
a golden casket, the Conquistador of Asia, and the heir of the Pharaohs,
tracing, with the contents of a flour-bag, the outlines of the nascent
city, which was to bear his name of might, and to sepulchre his remains.
The trade of Phœnicia revived in its harbours, and on its quays. It
became the Heliopolis, as well as the Thebes, of Hellenic Egypt. Even
the Hebrew part of the population caught the infection of the place, and
showed some capacity for philosophy and letters. Here it was that their
sacred Scriptures were, in the Septuagint translation, first given to the
educated world. And Plato, too, was soon more studied in the schools of
Alexandria than in his native Greece.
Here fell the Great Pompey. And here, in pursuit of him, came the Cæsar,
who bestrode the world like a Colossus; to be followed in our own time
by the only modern leader of men, whose name, if he had possessed the
generous magnanimity of the two captains of Greece and Rome, history
might have bracketed with theirs.
Here ‘the unparalleled lass,’ rather, perhaps, of the greatest of poets
than of history, having beguiled to his ruin the soft triumvir, preferred
death to the brutalities of a Roman triumph.
Matters, however, of this kind—and they might be multiplied—are only
bubbles on the surface. They interest the fancy, but have no effect on
the great current of events. We, at this day, are neither the better
nor the worse for them. But of the theology of Alexandria we must speak
differently. It is through that that it affected, and still affects, the
whole of Christendom. Sixteen hundred years have passed, and Alexandrian
thought still holds its ground amongst us.
It would help us to a right understanding of what this thought was, and
how it came to be what it was, if we knew something about the city,
the times, the country, and the mental condition of its inhabitants.
Alexandria, like Calcutta and New Orleans, having been called into
existence by the requirements of commerce, had been obliged, for the
sake of a harbour, to accept a singularly monotonous and uninteresting
site. This alone must have had much influence on the cast of thought of
its inhabitants. All who visit it will, I think, feel this. One cannot
imagine a healthy and vigorous literature springing up in a place where
Nature has neither grandeur nor beauty. Being mainly a commercial city,
its inhabitants—as must be the case in all large commercial cities in
the East—were composed of many nationalities. They had brought with
them their respective religions and literatures, as well as manners and
customs. It also contained the most brilliant Greek Court in the world,
in which we might be certain that Greek inquisitiveness, and mental
activity, would not be extinguished. This will account for the libraries
and the schools of Alexandria.
We must understand why it never could become anything in the world of
action. It was not because the Egypt of the Ptolemies was inferior to
the Egypt of the Pharaohs. It might have been its superior in every
particular of power and greatness, and yet have been unable to do
anything in the outer world. What kept it quiet was a consciousness
of moral and intellectual inferiority to the people time had at last
educated and organized on the northern shores of the Mediterranean.
The mental activity of the Alexandrians was all connected with their
libraries and schools. The work they did belongs to a condition of mind
which can use libraries and schools, but which really originates nothing.
It was all work upon other people’s work. They never produced anything
of their own. They never could have had an Æschylus, or an Aristophanes;
a Thucydides, or an Aristotle. The genius that can originate implies
vigour, freedom, individuality, irrepressible impulse—in two words,
expansive humanity. Nothing of this kind could have been the growth of
Alexandria. The possession it was of these qualities which made the
Greeks original, and great in everything they undertook: in art, in war,
in government, in colonization, in philosophy, in poetry, in history.
The genius which showed itself in their literature was only the same
genius which showed itself in other forms and directions, as needs
required: which showed itself in everything Greek. Alexandria could not
have produced a Pericles, or a Phidias, or an Alexander, any more than
a great writer. It would have taken the same mental stuff to make one of
these, as to make a poet, an historian, or a philosopher. They all work
with the same motive power. The main conditions, too, are the same in
all. It is the object only to which the work is directed that varies.
The Greeks were, emphatically, men. It was this that made them creative.
Humanity was the soul of everything they created; the stamp upon
everything they did; and this it is that gives to their work its eternal
value.
The mind of Alexandria was a parasitical plant. It fastened itself on the
work of others; and endeavoured to extract from it what they had already
assimilated, and which its own limited capacities disqualified it from
extracting, first hand, for itself from the rich store-house of Nature.
It could live upon their work, and turn it to its own narrowly-bounded
purposes. For instance, the Greek language had been perfected by the
long series of generations who had used it, and who had known nothing of
grammars and dictionaries: but at Alexandria it was studied for the sake
of the grammar and of the dictionary. Homer had been loved in the Greek
world, because he spoke, as a man, to men’s hearts and imaginations. He
was valued at Alexandria, not for his poetry—the men and women he had
created—but because he supplied a text to comment on. So with the divine
dreams of Plato: their use, at Alexandria, was that they supplied some
materials for the construction of systems.
It was exactly in this spirit that the Gospel was laid on the dissecting
tables of Alexandria. The object proposed was to set up a skeleton
to be called Christian Theology; and to inject and arrange certain
preparations, to be called Christian doctrines. Here was a strange
perversion. Never were the uses to which a thing had been ingeniously
turned so thoroughly alien to its real nature and design. The objects
of the Gospel were moral and religious. Its appeals were addressed to
the ordinary conscience, and to the ordinary understanding: in them
its philosophy is to be found. But the systematizers of Alexandria had
no taste for dealing with such materials. The Christian religion, as
presented to us in their theology, has not one particle of the Gospel in
it: no heart, no soul; no human duties, no human motives—nothing human,
nothing divine. It is something as hard, and as dry, as a mummy; and
would be as dead, were it not for its savage, truculent spirit. It is an
attempt to construct a material god, mechanically, of body, parts, and
passions—the Egyptian passions of the day; such as burnt, volcanically,
in the hearts of the crocodile haters, and crocodile worshippers, of
Ombos and Tentyra, and impelled them to eat each other’s still quivering
flesh, and drink each other’s blood hot. The watch-word, the source,
the main-spring, of Christ’s religion, the one word that fulfils it, is
absent from this travesty of it.
This anatomical Christianity, in which there is no Gospel, this
systematic divinity, in which there is nothing divine, this mechanical
theology, which contradicts the idea of God, Alexandria had the chief
hand in inflicting on the world, and a grievous infliction they were.
Christendom is still suffering from it. It is the anatomy of a body from
which the heart, the blood, the flesh, the muscles, all that rendered
it a living power, and made it beautiful and beneficent, have been
removed. It is the systematization of a _Hortus Siccus_. It is a theology
that kills religion, in order that it may examine it. The religion
that is fixed and formulated; a matter of definitions, and quantitive
proportions; that can be handled, and measured, and weighed; that can
be taken to pieces, and put together again by a monk in his cell, just
as if it were a Chinese puzzle; cannot be the living growth of minds
whose knowledge is ever being extended, and of consciences that are ever
becoming more sensitive. It cannot indeed, as far as these things go, be
a religion at all. A religion, though burdened with them, and perpetually
dragged by them into the sphere of formalism, controversy, and passion,
may, and will, live on in spite of them; for nothing can kill religion:
still the two are antagonistic and incompatible.
The Alexandrian theologians interpreted Christianity in accordance with
the criticism, the knowledge, the ignorance, the mind, and the conscience
of their day. They could hardly have done otherwise. They came from caves
in the desert, and from old tombs, and they returned to them for fresh
inspiration. They had a right to interpret things according to the light
that was in them. So have we. Our light, however, is somewhat different
from theirs. ‘The New Commandment’ was not one that at all commended
itself to their sepulchral, troglodytic minds. It finds no place in their
creeds. We, however, give it the first place in ours. The perfect law of
liberty was unintelligible to them: their only thought about it was to
make it impossible: to us it is as necessary as the air we breathe. They
held that man is for the creed: we that the creed is for man. Which is
right makes much difference.
* * * * *
For the traveller who is desirous of seeing the present in connexion
with the past, Alexandria has many other reminiscences. Homer mentions
the Isle of Pharos, which formed the harbour. On this classic rock
Ptolemy Philadelphus built a magnificent lighthouse of white marble.
This was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the world. Its name, which
was borrowed from the rock on which it had been placed, has passed into
most of the languages of Europe, as the appellative of these useful
structures. We, however, who employ them more largely than any other
people, and who have in our Eddystone the finest and most interesting
structure of this kind in the world, built under widely different
conditions from those of the tideless middle sea, very properly give to
them a name of our own.
The causeway, three-quarters of a mile in length, which was formed for
the purpose of connecting Ptolemy’s Pharos with the mainland, having been
enormously expanded, in the course of two thousand years, by the same
process, which, in the same period, has raised the present to more than
twenty feet above the original level of Rome, is now the Frank quarter of
the city. The whole of this space must, therefore, in the time of Homer,
and down to the time of Alexander, have been under water.
The city, having become the capital of Egypt, grew rapidly in population,
wealth, and splendour. The Ptolemies disposed of the revenue of Egypt,
which had now become the chief entrepôt of the commerce of the world; and
they spent it with no niggard hand in embellishing their capital. Few
great cities have had so large a proportion of their space occupied by
magnificent public buildings. Nothing, however, need be said here of its
palaces, theatres, and temples, except that they were worthy of the city
which filled the first place in the cities of the Greek world, and in the
universal empire of the Cæsars was second only to Rome.
Pompey’s Pillar, as the inscription upon it informs us, was erected in
honour of Diocletian.
Cleopatra’s Needle had originally stood at Heliopolis, where it had been
set up by Thuthmosis III., and afterwards seen by Joseph and Moses.
It was transplanted from Heliopolis to Alexandria by one of the Roman
Emperors, after the time of Cleopatra. It had been cut from the granite
quarries of Syené. It has, therefore, travelled from the John o’Groat’s
House to the Land’s End of Egypt.
Its deservedly world-famous library recurs to every one who thinks about
Old Alexandria. No other library had ever such a history. It was founded
two hundred and eighty-three years before the Christian era; that is to
say, before Rome had entered on her Punic wars. While those wars were
raging the Alexandrians must, within the walls of this library, have
canvassed the news of the day with much the same feelings with which we
were ourselves, but just now, talking over the last intelligence from
Sedan and Metz, from the Loire and the Seine. In the Greek world a public
library had never before been heard of. It was connected with a great
mass of buildings called the Museum, which was a kind of institution for
the promotion of study, discussion, and learning. Eventually it contained
700,000 volumes. Of these 400,000 were at the Museum; the remainder
were in a building connected with the great Temple of Serapis. With the
Ptolemies the enrichment of this library was always a great concern.
They dispersed their collectors wherever books were to be obtained; and
were ready to pay the highest price for them. It was the boast of the
city that the library contained a copy of every known book. At last it
was overtaken by the fate which awaits all the works of man. In Cæsar’s
attack on the city the great library of the Museum was accidentally
burnt. The library, therefore, which is supposed to have been destroyed
by the command of the Caliph Omar, could only have contained the books,
that might have remained to his time, of the inferior library of the
Serapeum. This we know had been very much dilapidated by neglect, and
in other ways, during the intervening seven centuries of occasional
violence, and of constant decay. One, however, is hardly disposed to
acquiesce in the opinion on this subject of the historian of the _Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire_; for, among so large a collection of
books, there must, one would suppose, have been some precious works of
antiquity, which we should now value highly, but which were then lost to
us irreparably.
While we regard with reverence this great library, both for the antiquity
of the date of its establishment, and for the useful and noble purposes
it was intended to serve, those of perpetuating, and of extending,
knowledge, we should be guilty of an injustice if we were to forget that
it was not the first institution of its kind. The idea of establishing
a public library, which the Ptolemies deserve much credit for carrying
out liberally and thoroughly, had nothing original in it in one country,
at all events, of the world, and that one was Egypt. Eleven centuries
before their time, as we have already seen, the Great Rameses, in his
temple-palace at Thebes, had erected a public library. The walls of
it are still standing. We need not repeat what we have said elsewhere
about the sculptures on its walls, the inscription over its doors, the
manuscripts dated from it still in existence, and the tombs of its
librarians. This was done more than three thousand years ago. Perhaps,
then, other ideas and practices, we may be in the habit of regarding as
modern, were also familiar to the Egyptians of that remote day. Those
times, indeed, may, in some not unimportant matters, be virtually nearer
to us than the times of our Edwards and Henries.