separating process is going on in the human mind! Whether it take the
form of a religion or of a philosophy, it is at once the sign and the
cause of senility, decay, and death. If man begins to forget that he is
a social being, a member of a body, and that the only truths which can
avail him anything, the only truths which are worthy objects of his
philosophical search, are those which are equally true for every man,
which will equally avail every man, which he must proclaim, as far as he
can, to every man, from the proudest sage to the meanest outcast, he
enters, I believe, into a lie, and helps forward the dissolution of that
society of which he is a member. I care little whether what he holds be
true or not. If it be true, he has made it a lie by appropriating it
proudly and selfishly to himself, and by excluding others from it. He
has darkened his own power of vision by that act of self-appropriation,
so that even if he sees a truth, he can only see it refractedly,
discoloured by the medium of his own private likes and dislikes, and
fulfils that great and truly philosophic law, that he who loveth not his
brother is in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth. And so it
befell those old Greek schools. It is out of our path to follow them to
Italy, where sturdy old Roman patriots cursed them, and with good reason,
as corrupting the morals of the young. Our business is with Alexandria;
and there, certainly, they did nothing for the elevation of humanity.
What culture they may have given, probably helped to make the
Alexandrians, what Cæsar calls them, the most ingenious of all nations:
but righteous or valiant men it did not make them. When, after the three
great reigns of Soter, Philadelphus, and Euergetes, the race of the
Ptolemies began to wear itself out, Alexandria fell morally, as its
sovereigns fell; and during a miserable and shameful decline of a hundred
and eighty years, sophists wrangled, pedants fought over accents and
readings with the true _odium gammaticum_, and kings plunged deeper and
deeper into the abysses of luxury and incest, laziness and cruelty, till
the flood came, and swept them all away. Cleopatra, the Helen of Egypt,
betrayed her country to the Roman; and thenceforth the Alexandrians
became slaves in all but name.
And now that Alexandria has become a tributary province, is it to share
the usual lot of enslaved countries and lose all originality and vigour
of thought? Not so. From this point, strangely enough, it begins to
have a philosophy of its own. Hitherto it has been importing Greek
thought into Egypt and Syria, even to the furthest boundaries of Persia;
and the whole East has become Greek: but it has received little in
return. The Indian Gymnosophists, or Brahmins, had little or no effect
on Greek philosophy, except in the case of Pyrrho: the Persian Dualism
still less. The Egyptian symbolic nature-worship had been too gross to
be regarded by the cultivated Alexandrian as anything but a barbaric
superstition. One eastern nation had intermingled closely with the
Macedonian race, and from it Alexandrian thought received a new impulse.
I mentioned in my first lecture the conciliatory policy which the
Ptolemies had pursued toward the Jews. Soter had not only allowed but
encouraged them to settle in Alexandria and Egypt, granting them the same
political privileges with the Macedonians and other Greeks. Soon they
built themselves a temple there, in obedience to some supposed prophecy
in their sacred writings, which seems most probably to have been a wilful
interpolation. Whatsoever value we may attach to the various myths
concerning the translation of their Scriptures into Greek, there can be
no doubt that they were translated in the reign of Soter, and that the
exceedingly valuable Septuagint version is the work of that period.
Moreover, their numbers in Alexandria were very great. When Amrou took
Constantinople in A.D. 640, there were 40,000 Jews in it; and their
numbers during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, before their temporary
expulsion by Cyril about 412, were probably greater; and Egypt altogether
is said to have contained 200,000 Jews. They had schools there, which
were so esteemed by their whole nation throughout the East, that the
Alexandrian Rabbis, the Light of Israel, as they were called, may be
fairly considered as the centre of Jewish thought and learning for
several centuries.
We are accustomed, and not without reason, to think with some contempt of
these old Rabbis. Rabbinism, Cabbalism, are become by-words in the
mouths of men. It may be instructive for us—it is certainly necessary
for us, if we wish to understand Alexandria—to examine a little how they
became so fallen.
Their philosophy took its stand, as you all know, on certain ancient
books of their people; histories, laws, poems, philosophical treatises,
which all have one element peculiar to themselves, namely, the assertion
of a living personal Ruler and Teacher, not merely of the Jewish race,
but of all the nations of the earth. After the return of their race from
Babylon, their own records give abundant evidence that this strange
people became the most exclusive and sectarian which the world ever saw.
Into the causes of that exclusiveness I will not now enter; suffice it to
say, that it was pardonable enough in a people asserting Monotheism in
the midst of idolatrous nations, and who knew, from experience even more
bitter than that which taught Plato and Socrates, how directly all those
popular idolatries led to every form of baseness and immorality. But we
may trace in them, from the date of their return from Babylon, especially
from their settlement in Alexandria, a singular change of opinion. In
proportion as they began to deny that their unseen personal Ruler had
anything to do with the Gentiles—the nations of the earth, as they called
them—in proportion as they considered themselves as His only subjects—or
rather, Him and His guidance as their own private property—exactly in
that proportion they began to lose all living or practical belief that He
did guide them. He became a being of the past; one who had taught and
governed their forefathers in old times: not one who was teaching and
governing them now. I beg you to pay attention to this curious result;
because you will see, I think, the very same thing occurring in two other
Alexandrian schools, of which I shall speak hereafter.
The result to these Rabbis was, that the inspired books which spoke of
this Divine guidance and government became objects of superstitious
reverence, just in proportion as they lost all understanding of their
real value and meaning. Nevertheless, this too produced good results;
for the greatest possible care was taken to fix the Canon of these books;
to settle, as far as possible, the exact time at which the Divine
guidance was supposed to have ceased; after which it was impious to claim
a Divine teaching; when their sages were left to themselves, as they
fancied, with a complete body of knowledge, on which they were henceforth
only to comment. Thus, whether or not they were right in supposing that
the Divine Teacher had ceased to teach and inspire them, they did
infinite service by marking out for us certain writers whom He had
certainly taught and inspired. No doubt they were right in their sense
of the awful change which had passed over their nation. There was an
infinite difference between them and the old Hebrew writers. They had
lost something which those old prophets possessed. I invite you to
ponder, each for himself, on the causes of this strange loss; bearing in
mind that they lost their forefathers’ heirloom, exactly in proportion as
they began to believe it to be their exclusive possession, and to deny
other human beings any right to or share in it. It may have been that
the light given to their forefathers had, as they thought, really
departed. It may have been, also, that the light was there all around
them still, as bright as ever, but that they would not open their eyes
and behold it; or rather, could not open them, because selfishness and
pride had sealed them. It may have been, that inspiration was still very
near _them_ too, if their spirits had been willing to receive it. But of
the fact of the change there was no doubt. For the old Hebrew seers were
men dealing with the loftiest and deepest laws: the Rabbis were shallow
pedants. The old Hebrew seers were righteous and virtuous men: the
Rabbis became, in due time, some of the worst and wickedest men who ever
trod this earth.
Thus they too had their share in that downward career of pedantry which
we have seen characterise the whole past Alexandrine age. They, like
Zenodotus and Aristarchus, were commentators, grammarians, sectarian
disputers: they were not thinkers or actors. Their inspired books were
to them no more the words of living human beings who had sought for the
Absolute Wisdom, and found it after many sins and doubts and sorrows.
The human writers became in their eyes the puppets and mouthpieces of
some magical influence, not the disciples of a living and loving person.
The book itself was, in their belief, not in any true sense inspired, but
magically dictated—by what power they cared not to define. His character
was unimportant to them, provided He had inspired no nation but their
own. But, thought they, if the words were dictated, each of them must
have some mysterious value. And if each word had a mysterious value, why
not each letter? And how could they set limits to that mysterious value?
Might not these words, even rearrangements of the letters of them, be
useful in protecting them against the sorceries of the heathen, in
driving away those evil spirits, or evoking those good spirits, who,
though seldom mentioned in their early records, had after their return
from Babylon begun to form an important part of their unseen world? For
as they had lost faith in the One Preserver of their race, they had
filled up the void by a ponderous demonology of innumerable preservers.
This process of thought was not confined to Alexandria. Dr. Layard, in
his last book on Nineveh, gives some curious instances of its prevalence
among them at an earlier period, well worth your careful study. But it
was at Alexandria that the Jewish Cabbalism formed itself into a system.
It was there that the Jews learnt to become the jugglers and
magic-mongers of the whole Roman world, till Claudius had to expel them
from Rome, as pests to rational and moral society.
And yet, among these hapless pedants there lingered nobler thoughts and
hopes. They could not read the glorious heirlooms of their race without
finding in them records of antique greatness and virtue, of old
deliverances worked for their forefathers; and what seemed promises, too,
that that greatness should return. The notion that those promises were
conditional; that they expressed eternal moral laws, and declared the
consequences of obeying those laws, they had lost long ago. By looking
on themselves as exclusively and arbitrarily favoured by Heaven, they
were ruining their own moral sense. Things were not right or wrong to
them because Right was eternal and divine, and Wrong the transgression of
that eternal right. How could that be? For then the right things the
Gentiles seemed to do would be right and divine;—and that supposition in
their eyes was all but impious. None could do right but themselves, for
they only knew the law of God. So, right with them had no absolute or
universal ground, but was reduced in their minds to the performance of
certain acts commanded exclusively to them—a form of ethics which rapidly
sank into the most petty and frivolous casuistry as to the outward
performance of those acts. The sequel of those ethics is known to all
the world, in the spectacle of the most unrivalled religiosity, and
scrupulous respectability, combined with a more utter absence of moral
sense, in their most cultivated and learned men, than the world has ever
beheld before or since.
In such a state of mind it was impossible for them to look on their old
prophets as true seers, beholding and applying eternal moral laws, and,
therefore, seeing the future in the present and in the past. They must
be the mere utterers of an irreversible arbitrary fate; and that fate
must, of course, be favourable to their nation. So now arose a school
who picked out from their old prophets every passage which could be made
to predict their future glory, and a science which settled when that
glory was to return. By the arbitrary rules of criticism a prophetic day
was defined to mean a year; a week, seven years. The most simple and
human utterances were found to have recondite meanings relative to their
future triumph over the heathens whom they cursed and hated. If any of
you ever come across the popular Jewish interpretations of The Song of
Solomon, you will there see the folly in which acute and learned men can
indulge themselves when they have lost hold of the belief in anything
really absolute and eternal and moral, and have made Fate, and Time, and
Self, their real deities. But this dream of a future restoration was in
no wise ennobled, as far as we can see, with any desire for a moral
restoration. They believed that a person would appear some day or other
to deliver them. Even they were happily preserved by their sacred books
from the notion that deliverance was to be found for them, or for any
man, in an abstraction or notion ending in -ation or -ality. In justice
to them it must be said, that they were too wise to believe that personal
qualities, such as power, will, love, righteousness, could reside in any
but in a person, or be manifested except by a person. And among the
earlier of them the belief may have been, that the ancient unseen Teacher
of their race would be their deliverer: but as they lost the thought of
Him, the expected Deliverer became a mere human being: or rather not a
human being; for as they lost their moral sense, they lost in the very
deepest meaning their humanity, and forgot what man was like till they
learned to look only for a conqueror; a manifestation of power, and not
of goodness; a destroyer of the hated heathen, who was to establish them
as the tyrant race of the whole earth. On that fearful day on which, for
a moment, they cast away even that last dream, and cried, “We have no
king but Cæsar,” they spoke the secret of their hearts. It was a Cæsar,
a Jewish Cæsar, for whom they had been longing for centuries. And if
they could not have such a deliverer, they would have none: they would
take up with the best embodiment of brute Titanic power which they could
find, and crucify the embodiment of Righteousness and Love. Amid all the
metaphysical schools of Alexandria, I know none so deeply instructive as
that school of the Rabbis, “the glory of Israel.”
But you will say: “This does not look like a school likely to regenerate
Alexandrian thought.” True: and yet it did regenerate it, both for good
and for evil; for these men had among them and preserved faithfully
enough for all practical purposes, the old literature of their race; a
literature which I firmly believe, if I am to trust the experience of
1900 years, is destined to explain all other literatures; because it has
firm hold of the one eternal root-idea which gives life, meaning, Divine
sanction, to every germ or fragment of human truth which is in any of
them. It did so, at least, in Alexandria for the Greek literature.
About the Christian era, a cultivated Alexandrian Jew, a disciple of
Plato and of Aristotle, did seem to himself to find in the sacred books
of his nation that which agreed with the deepest discoveries of Greek
philosophy; which explained and corroborated them. And his announcement
of this fact, weak and defective as it was, had the most enormous and
unexpected results. The father of New Platonism was Philo the Jew.
LECTURE III.
NEOPLATONISM.
WE now approach the period in which Alexandria began to have a philosophy
of its own—to be, indeed, the leader of human thought for several
centuries.
I shall enter on this branch of my subject with some fear and trembling;
not only on account of my own ignorance, but on account of the great
difficulty of handling it without trenching on certain controversial
subjects which are rightly and wisely forbidden here. For there was not
one school of Metaphysic at Alexandria: there were two; which, during the
whole period of their existence, were in internecine struggle with each
other, and yet mutually borrowing from each other; the Heathen, namely,
and the Christian. And you cannot contemplate, still less can you
understand, the one without the other. Some of late years have become
all but unaware of the existence of that Christian school; and the word
Philosophy, on the authority of Gibbon, who, however excellent an
authority for facts, knew nothing about Philosophy, and cared less, has
been used exclusively to express heathen thought; a misnomer which in
Alexandria would have astonished Plotinus or Hypatia as much as it would
Clement or Origen. I do not say that there is, or ought to be, a
Christian Metaphysic. I am speaking, as you know, merely as a historian,
dealing with facts; and I say that there was one; as profound, as
scientific, as severe, as that of the Pagan Neoplatonists; starting
indeed, as I shall show hereafter, on many points from common ground with
theirs. One can hardly doubt, I should fancy, that many parts of St.
John’s Gospel and Epistles, whatever view we may take of them, if they
are to be called anything, are to be called metaphysic and philosophic.
And one can no more doubt that before writing them he had studied Philo,
and was expanding Philo’s thought in the direction which seemed fit to
him, than we can doubt it of the earlier Neoplatonists. The technical
language is often identical; so are the primary ideas from which he
starts, howsoever widely the conclusions may differ. If Plotinus
considered himself an intellectual disciple of Plato, so did Origen and
Clemens. And I must, as I said before, speak of both, or of neither. My
only hope of escaping delicate ground lies in the curious fact, that
rightly or wrongly, the form in which Christianity presented itself to
the old Alexandrian thinkers was so utterly different from the popular
conception of it in modern England, that one may very likely be able to
tell what little one knows about it, almost without mentioning a single
doctrine which now influences the religious world.
But far greater is my fear, that to a modern British auditory, trained in
the school of Locke, much of ancient thought, heathen as well as
Christian, may seem so utterly the product of the imagination, so utterly
without any corresponding reality in the universe, as to look like mere
unintelligible madness. Still, I must try; only entreating my hearers to
consider, that how much soever we may honour Locke and his great Scotch
followers, we are not bound to believe them either infallible, or
altogether world-embracing; that there have been other methods than
theirs of conceiving the Unseen; that the common ground from which both
Christian and heathen Alexandrians start, is not merely a private vagary
of their own, but one which has been accepted undoubtingly, under so many
various forms, by so many different races, as to give something of an
inductive probability that it is not a mere dream, but may be a right and
true instinct of the human mind. I mean the belief that the things which
we see—nature and all her phenomena—are temporal, and born only to die;
mere shadows of some unseen realities, from whom their laws and life are
derived; while the eternal things which subsist without growth, decay, or
change, the only real, only truly existing things, in short, are certain
things which are not seen; inappreciable by sense, or understanding, or
imagination, perceived only by the conscience and the reason. And that,
again, the problem of philosophy, the highest good for man, that for the
sake of which death were a gain, without which life is worthless, a
drudgery, a degradation, a failure, and a ruin, is to discover what those
unseen eternal things are, to know them, possess them, be in harmony with
them, and thereby alone to rise to any real and solid power, or safety,
or nobleness. It is a strange dream. But you will see that it is one
which does not bear much upon “points of controversy,” any more than on
“Locke’s philosophy;” nevertheless, when we find this same strange dream
arising, apparently without intercommunion of thought, among the old
Hindoos, among the Greeks, among the Jews; and lastly, when we see it
springing again in the Middle Age, in the mind of the almost forgotten
author of the “Deutsche Theologie,” and so becoming the parent, not
merely of Luther’s deepest belief, or of the German mystic schools of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but of the great German Philosophy
itself as developed by Kant, and Fichte, and Schelling, and Hegel, we
must at least confess it to be a popular delusion, if nothing better,
vast enough and common enough to be worth a little patient investigation,
wheresoever we may find it stirring the human mind.
But I have hope, still, that I may find sympathy and comprehension among
some, at least, of my audience, as I proceed to examine the ancient
realist schools of Alexandria, on account of their knowledge of the
modern realist schools of Germany. For I cannot but see, that a
revulsion is taking place in the thoughts of our nation upon metaphysic
subjects, and that Scotland, as usual, is taking the lead therein. That
most illustrious Scotchman, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, first vindicated the
great German Realists from the vulgar misconceptions about them which
were so common at the beginning of this century, and brought the minds of
studious men to a more just appreciation of the philosophic severity, the
moral grandeur, of such thinkers as Emmanuel Kant, and Gottlieb Fichte.
To another Scotch gentleman, who, I believe, has honoured me by his
presence here to-night, we owe most valuable translations of some of
Fichte’s works; to be followed, I trust, by more. And though, as a
humble disciple of Bacon, I cannot but think that the method both of Kant
and Fichte possesses somewhat of the same inherent defect as the method
of the Neoplatonist school, yet I should be most unfair did I not express
my deep obligations to them, and advise all those to study them
carefully, who wish to gain a clear conception either of the old
Alexandrian schools, or of those intellectual movements which are
agitating the modern mind, and which will, I doubt not, issue in a
clearer light, and in a nobler life, if not for us, yet still for our
children’s children for ever.
The name of Philo the Jew is now all but forgotten among us. He was
laughed out of sight during the last century, as a dreamer and an
allegorist, who tried eclectically to patch together Plato and Moses.
The present age, however, is rapidly beginning to suspect that all who
thought before the eighteenth century were not altogether either fools or
impostors; old wisdom is obtaining a fairer hearing day by day, and is
found not to be so contradictory to new wisdom as was supposed. We are
beginning, too, to be more inclined to justify Providence, by believing
that lies are by their very nature impotent and doomed to die; that
everything which has had any great or permanent influence on the human
mind, must have in it some germ of eternal truth; and setting ourselves
to separate that germ of truth from the mistakes which may have distorted
and overlaid it. Let us believe, or at least hope, the same for a few
minutes, of Philo, and try to find out what was the secret of his power,
what the secret of his weakness.
First: I cannot think that he had to treat his own sacred books unfairly,
to make them agree with the root-idea of Socrates and Plato. Socrates
and Plato acknowledged a Divine teacher of the human spirit; that was the
ground of their philosophy. So did the literature of the Jews. Socrates
and Plato, with all the Greek sages till the Sophistic era, held that the
object of philosophy was the search after that which truly exists: that
he who found that, found wisdom: Philo’s books taught him the same truth:
but they taught him also, that the search for wisdom was not merely the
search for that which is, but for Him who is; not for a thing, but for a
person. I do not mean that Plato and the elder Greeks had not that
object also in view; for I have said already that Theology was with them
the ultimate object of all metaphysic science: but I do think that they
saw it infinitely less clearly than the old Jewish sages. Those sages
were utterly unable to conceive of an absolute truth, except as residing
in an absolutely true person; of absolute wisdom, except in an absolutely
wise person; of an absolute order and law, except in a lawgiver; of an
absolute good, except in an absolutely good person: any more than either
they or we can conceive of an absolute love, except in an absolutely
loving person. I say boldly, that I think them right, on all grounds of
Baconian induction. For all these qualities are only known to us as
exhibited in persons; and if we believe them to have any absolute and
eternal existence at all, to be objective, and independent of us, and the
momentary moods and sentiments of our own mind, they must exist in some
absolute and eternal person, or they are mere notions, abstractions,
words, which have no counterparts.