have given way, that the Alexandrian divines were mere mystics, who
corrupted Christianity by an admixture of Oriental and Greek thought. My
own belief is that they expanded and corroborated Christianity, in spite
of great errors and defects on certain points, far more than they
corrupted it; that they presented it to the minds of cultivated and
scientific men in the only form in which it would have satisfied their
philosophic aspirations, and yet contrived, with wonderful wisdom, to
ground their philosophy on the very same truths which they taught to the
meanest slaves, and to appeal in the philosophers to the same inward
faculty to which they appealed in the slave; namely, to that inward eye,
that moral sense and reason, whereby each and every man can, if he will,
“judge of himself that which is right.” I boldly say that I believe the
Alexandrian Christians to have made the best, perhaps the only, attempt
yet made by men, to proclaim a true world-philosophy; whereby I mean a
philosophy common to all races, ranks, and intellects, embracing the
whole phenomena of humanity, and not an arbitrarily small portion of
them, and capable of being understood and appreciated by every human
being from the highest to the lowest. And when you hear of a system of
reserve in teaching, a _disciplina arcani_, of an esoteric and exoteric,
an inner and outer school, among these men, you must not be frightened at
the words, as if they spoke of priestcraft, or an intellectual
aristocracy, who kept the kernel of the nut for themselves, and gave the
husks to the mob. It was not so with the Christian schools; it was so
with the Heathen ones. The Heathens were content that the mob, the herd,
should have the husks. Their avowed intention and wish was to leave the
herd, as they called them, in the mere outward observance of the old
idolatries, while they themselves, the cultivated philosophers, had the
monopoly of those deeper spiritual truths which were contained under the
old superstitions, and were too sacred to be profaned by the vulgar eyes.
The Christian method was the exact opposite. They boldly called those
vulgar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and there gaze on the
very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy. They owned no ground for
their own speculations which was not common to the harlots and the slaves
around. And this was what enabled them to do this; this was what brought
on them the charge of demagogism, the hatred of philosophers, the
persecution of princes—that their ground was a moral ground, and not a
merely intellectual one; that they started, not from any notions of the
understanding, but from the inward conscience, that truly pure Reason in
which the intellectual and the moral spheres are united, which they
believed to exist, however dimmed or crushed, in every human being,
capable of being awakened, purified, and raised up to a noble and heroic
life. They concealed nothing moral from their disciples: only they
forbade them to meddle with intellectual matters, before they had had a
regular intellectual training. The witnesses of reason and conscience
were sufficient guides for all men, and at them the many might well stop
short. The teacher only needed to proceed further, not into a higher
region, but into a lower one, namely, into the region of the logical
understanding, and there make deductions from, and illustrations of,
those higher truths which he held in common with every slave, and held on
the same ground as they.
And the consequence of this method of philosophising was patent. They
were enabled to produce, in the lives of millions, generation after
generation, a more immense moral improvement than the world had ever seen
before. Their disciples did actually become righteous and good men, just
in proportion as they were true to the lessons they learnt. They did,
for centuries, work a distinct and palpable deliverance on the earth;
while all the solemn and earnest meditation of the Neoplatonists, however
good or true, worked no deliverance whatsoever. Plotinus longed at one
time to make a practical attempt. He asked the Emperor Gallienus, his
patron, to rebuild for him a city in Campania; to allow him to call it
Platonopolis, and put it into the hands of him and his disciples, that
they might there realise Plato’s ideal republic. Luckily for the
reputation of Neoplatonism, the scheme was swamped by the courtiers of
Gallienus, and the earth was saved the sad and ludicrous sight of a
realised Laputa; probably a very quarrelsome one. That was his highest
practical conception: the foundation of a new society: not the
regeneration of society as it existed.
That work was left for the Christian schools; and up to a certain point
they performed it. They made men good. _This_ was the test, which of
the schools was in the right: this was the test, which of the two had
hold of the eternal roots of metaphysic. Cicero says, that he had learnt
more philosophy from the Laws of the Twelve Tables than from all the
Greeks. Clement and his school might have said the same of the Hebrew
Ten Commandments and Jewish Law, which are so marvellously analogous to
the old Roman laws, founded, as they are, on the belief in a Supreme
Being, a Jupiter—literally a Heavenly Father—who is the source and the
sanction of law; of whose justice man’s justice is the pattern; who is
the avenger of crimes against marriage, property, life; on whom depends
the sanctity of an oath. And so, to compare great things with small,
there was a truly practical human element here in the Christian teaching;
purely ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the simplest and
lowest, which gave to it a regenerating force which the highest efforts
of Neoplatonism could never attain.
And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously enough, rotted away, and
perished hideously. Most true. But what if the causes of its decay and
death were owing to its being untrue to itself?
I do not say that they had no excuses for being untrue to their own
faith. We are not here to judge them. That peculiar subtlety of mind,
which rendered the Alexandrians the great thinkers of the then world, had
with Christians, as well as Heathens, the effect of alluring them away
from practice to speculation. The Christian school, as was to be
expected from the moral ground of their philosophy, yielded to it far
more slowly than the Heathen, but they did yield, and especially after
they had conquered and expelled the Heathen school. Moreover, the long
battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them habits of
exclusiveness, of denunciation; the spirit which cannot assert a fact,
without dogmatising rashly and harshly on the consequences of denying
that fact. Their minds assumed a permanent habit of combativeness.
Having no more Heathens to fight, they began fighting each other,
excommunicating each other; denying to all who differed from them any
share of that light, to claim which for all men had been the very ground
of their philosophy. Not that they would have refused the Logos to all
men in words. They would have cursed a man for denying the existence of
the Logos in every man; but they would have equally cursed him for acting
on his existence in practice, and treating the heretic as one who had
that within him to which a preacher might appeal. Thus they became
Dogmatists; that is, men who assert a truth so fiercely, as to forget
that a truth is meant to be used, and not merely asserted—if, indeed, the
fierce assertion of a truth in frail man is not generally a sign of some
secret doubt of it, and in inverse proportion to his practical living
faith in it: just as he who is always telling you that he is a man, is
not the most likely to behave like a man. And why did this befall them?
Because they forgot practically that the light proceeded from a Person.
They could argue over notions and dogmas deduced from the notion of His
personality: but they were shut up in those notions; they had forgotten
that if He was a Person, His eye was on them, His rule and kingdom within
them; and that if He was a Person, He had a character, and that that
character was a righteous and a loving character: and therefore they were
not ashamed, in defending these notions and dogmas about Him, to commit
acts abhorrent to His character, to lie, to slander, to intrigue, to
hate, even to murder, for the sake of what they madly called His glory:
but which was really only their own glory—the glory of their own dogmas;
of propositions and conclusions in their own brain, which, true or false,
were equally heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as
watchwords of division. Orthodox or unorthodox, they lost the knowledge
of God, for they lost the knowledge of righteousness, and love, and
peace. That Divine Logos, and theology as a whole, receded further and
further aloft into abysmal heights, as it became a mere dreary system of
dead scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their hearts and
lives; and then they, as the Neoplatonists had done before them, filled
up the void by those dæmonologies, images, base Fetish worships, which
made the Mohammedan invaders regard them, and I believe justly, as
polytheists and idolaters, base as the pagan Arabs of the desert.
I cannot but believe them, moreover, to have been untrue to the teaching
of Clement and his school, in that coarse and materialist admiration of
celibacy which ruined Alexandrian society, as their dogmatic ferocity
ruined Alexandrian thought. The Creed which taught them that in the
person of the Incarnate Logos, that which was most divine had been proved
to be most human, that which was most human had been proved to be most
divine, ought surely to have given to them, as it has given to modern
Europe, nobler, clearer, simpler views of the true relation of the sexes.
However, on this matter they did not see their way. Perhaps, in so
debased an age, so profligate a world, as that out of which Christianity
had risen, it was impossible to see the true beauty and sanctity of those
primary bonds of humanity. And while the relation of the sexes was
looked on in a wrong light, all other social relations were necessarily
also misconceived. “The very ideas of family and national life,” as it
has been said, “those two divine roots of the Church, severed from which
she is certain to wither away into that most cruel and most godless of
spectres, a religious world, had perished in the East, from the evil
influence of the universal practice of slave-holding, as well as from the
degradation of that Jewish nation which had been for ages the great
witness for these ideas; and all classes, like their forefather
Adam—like, indeed, the Old Adam—the selfish, cowardly, brute nature in
every man and in every age—were shifting the blame of sin from their own
consciences to human relationships and duties, and therein, to the God
who had appointed them; and saying, as of old, ‘The woman whom Thou
gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’”
Much as Christianity did, even in Egypt, for woman, by asserting her
moral and spiritual equality with the man, there seems to have been no
suspicion that she was the true complement of the man, not merely by
softening him, but by strengthening him; that true manhood can be no more
developed without the influence of the woman, than true womanhood without
the influence of the man. There is no trace among the Egyptian celibates
of that chivalrous woman-worship which our Gothic forefathers brought
with them into the West, which shed a softening and ennobling light round
the mediæval convent life, and warded off for centuries the worst effects
of monasticism. Among the religious of Egypt, the monk regarded the nun,
the nun the monk, with dread and aversion; while both looked on the
married population of the opposite sex with a coarse contempt and disgust
which is hardly credible, did not the foul records of it stand written to
this day, in Rosweyde’s extraordinary “Vitæ Patrum Eremiticorum;” no
barren school of metaphysic, truly, for those who are philosophic enough
to believe that all phenomena whatsoever of the human mind are worthy
matter for scientific induction.
And thus grew up in Egypt a monastic world, of such vastness that it was
said to equal in number the laity. This produced, no doubt, an enormous
increase in the actual amount of moral evil. But it produced three other
effects, which were the ruin of Alexandria. First, a continually growing
enervation and numerical decrease of the population; next, a carelessness
of, and contempt for social and political life; and lastly, a most
brutalising effect on the lay population; who, told that they were, and
believing themselves to be, beings of a lower order, and living by a
lower standard, sank down more and more generation after generation.
They were of the world, and the ways of the world they must follow.
Political life had no inherent sanctity or nobleness; why act holily and
nobly in it? Family life had no inherent sanctity or nobleness; why act
holily and nobly in it either, if there were no holy, noble, and divine
principle or ground for it? And thus grew up, both in Egypt, Syria, and
Byzantium, a chaos of profligacy and chicanery, in rulers and people, in
the home and the market, in the theatre and the senate, such as the world
has rarely seen before or since; a chaos which reached its culmination in
the seventh century, the age of Justinian and Theodora, perhaps the two
most hideous sovereigns, worshipped by the most hideous empire of
parasites and hypocrites, cowards and wantons, that ever insulted the
long-suffering of a righteous God.
But, for Alexandria at least, the cup was now full. In the year 640 the
Alexandrians were tearing each other in pieces about some Jacobite and
Melchite controversy, to me incomprehensible, to you unimportant, because
the fighters on both sides seem to have lost (as all parties do in their
old age) the knowledge of what they were fighting for, and to have so
bewildered the question with personal intrigues, spites, and quarrels, as
to make it nearly as enigmatic as that famous contemporary war between
the blue and green factions at Constantinople, which began by backing in
the theatre, the charioteers who drove in blue dresses, against those
wild drove in green; then went on to identify themselves each with one of
the prevailing theological factions; gradually developed, the one into an
aristocratic, the other into a democratic, religious party; and ended by
a civil war in the streets of Constantinople, accompanied by the most
horrible excesses, which had nearly, at one time, given up the city to
the flames, and driven Justinian from his throne.
In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite controversies and riots,
appeared before the city the armies of certain wild and unlettered Arab
tribes. A short and fruitless struggle followed; and, strange to say, a
few months swept away from the face of the earth, not only the wealth,
the commerce, the castles, and the liberty, but the philosophy and the
Christianity of Alexandria; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, all
that had been built up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and the
philosophers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years of
human toil. The people, having no real hold on their hereditary Creed,
accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman invaders. The
Christian remnant became tributaries; and Alexandria dwindled, from that
time forth, into a petty seaport town.
And now—can we pass over this new metaphysical school of Alexandria? Can
we help inquiring in what the strength of Islamism lay? I, at least,
cannot. I cannot help feeling that I am bound to examine in what
relation the creed of Omar and Amrou stands to the Alexandrian
speculations of five hundred years, and how it had power to sweep those
speculations utterly from the Eastern mind. It is a difficult problem;
to me, as a Christian priest, a very awful problem. What more awful
historic problem, than to see the lower creed destroying the higher? to
see God, as it were, undoing his own work, and repenting Him that He had
made man? Awful indeed: but I can honestly say, that it is one from the
investigation of which I have learnt—I cannot yet tell how much: and of
this I am sure, that without that old Alexandrian philosophy, I should
not have been able to do justice to Islam; without Islam I should not
have been able to find in that Alexandrian philosophy, an ever-living and
practical element.
I must, however, first entreat you to dismiss from your minds the vulgar
notion that Mohammed was in anywise a bad man, or a conscious deceiver,
pretending to work miracles, or to do things which he did not do. He
sinned in one instance: but, as far as I can see, only in that one—I mean
against what he must have known to be right. I allude to his relaxing in
his own case those wise restrictions on polygamy which he had proclaimed.
And yet, even in this case, the desire for a child may have been the true
cause of his weakness. He did not see the whole truth, of course: but he
was an infinitely better man than the men around: perhaps, all in all,
one of the best men of his day. Many here may have read Mr. Carlyle’s
vindication of Mohammed in his Lectures on Hero Worship; to those who
have not, I shall only say, that I entreat them to do so; and that I
assure them, that though I differ in many things utterly from Mr.
Carlyle’s inferences and deductions in that lecture, yet that I am
convinced, from my own acquaintance with the original facts and
documents, that the picture there drawn of Mohammed is a true and a just
description of a much-calumniated man.
Now, what was the strength of Islam? The common answer is, fanaticism
and enthusiasm. To such answers I can only rejoin: Such terms must be
defined before they are used, and we must be told what fanaticism and
enthusiasm are. Till then I have no more _à priori_ respect for a long
word ending in -ism or -asm than I have for one ending in -ation or
-ality. But while fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined—a work
more difficult than is commonly fancied—we will go on to consider another
answer. We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope of their
sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna. If so, this is the
first and last time in the world’s history that the strength of any large
body of people—perhaps of any single man—lay in such a hope. History
gives us innumerable proofs that such merely selfish motives are the
parents of slavish impotence, of pedantry and conceit, of pious frauds,
often of the most devilish cruelty: but, as far as my reading extends, of
nothing better. Moreover, the Christian Greeks had much the same hopes
on those points as the Mussulmans; and similar causes should produce
similar effects: but those hopes gave them no strength. Besides,
according to the Mussulmans’ own account, this was _not_ their great
inspiring idea; and it is absurd to consider the wild battle-cries of a
few imaginative youths, about black-eyed and green-kerchiefed Houris
calling to them from the skies, as representing the average feelings of a
generation of sober and self-restraining men, who showed themselves
actuated by far higher motives.
Another answer, and one very popular now, is that the Mussulmans were
strong, because they believed what they said; and the Greeks weak,
because they did not believe what they said. From this notion I shall
appeal to another doctrine of the very same men who put it forth, and ask
them, Can any man be strong by believing a lie? Have you not told us,
nobly enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to death,
certain to prove its own impotence, and be shattered to atoms the moment
you try to use it, to bring it into rude actual contact with fact, and
Nature, and the eternal laws? Faith to be strong must be faith in
something which is not one’s self; faith in something eternal, something
objective, something true, which would exist just as much though we and
all the world disbelieved it. The strength of belief comes from that
which is believed in; if you separate it from that, it becomes a mere
self-opinion, a sensation of positiveness; and what sort of strength that
will give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the Jews who opposed
Titus, of the rabble who followed Walter the Penniless to the Crusades,
of the Munster Anabaptists, and many another sad page of human folly. It
may give the fury of idiots; not the deliberate might of valiant men.
Let us pass this by, then; believing that faith can only give strength
where it is faith in something true and right: and go on to another
answer almost as popular as the last.
We are told that the might of Islam lay in a certain innate force and
savage virtue of the Arab character. If we have discovered this in the
followers of Mohammed, they certainly had not discovered it in
themselves. They spoke of themselves, rightly or wrongly, as men who had
received a divine light, and that light a moral light, to teach them to
love that which was good, and refuse that which was evil; and to that
divine light they stedfastly and honestly attributed every right action
of their lives. Most noble and affecting, in my eyes, is that answer of
Saad’s aged envoy to Yezdegird, king of Persia, when he reproached him
with the past savagery and poverty of the Arabs. “Whatsoever thou hast
said,” answered the old man, “regarding the former condition of the Arabs
is true. Their food _was_ green lizards; they buried their infant
daughters alive; nay, some of them feasted on dead carcases, and drank
blood; while others slew their kinsfolk, and thought themselves great and
valiant, when by so doing they became possessed of more property. They
_were_ clothed with hair garments, they knew not good from evil, and made
no distinction between that which was lawful and unlawful. Such was our
state; but God in his mercy has sent us, by a holy prophet, a sacred
volume, which teaches us the true faith.”
These words, I think, show us the secret of Islam. They are a just
comment on that short and rugged chapter of the Koran which is said to
have been Mohammed’s first attempt either at prophecy or writing; when,
after long fasting and meditation among the desert hills, under the
glorious eastern stars, he came down and told his good Kadijah that he
had found a great thing, and that she must help him to write it down.
And what was this which seemed to the unlettered camel-driver so
priceless a treasure? Not merely that God was one God—vast as that
discovery was—but that he was a God “who showeth to man the thing which
he knew not;” a “most merciful God;” a God, in a word, who could be
trusted; a God who would teach and strengthen; a God, as he said, who
would give him courage to set his face like a flint, and would put an
answer in his mouth when his idolatrous countrymen cavilled and sneered
at his message to them, to turn from their idols of wood and stone, and
become righteous men, as Abraham their forefather was righteous.
“A God who showeth to man the thing which he knew not.” That idea gave
might to Islam, because it was a real idea, an eternal fact; the result
of a true insight into the character of God. And that idea alone,
believe me, will give conquering might either to creed, philosophy, or
heart of man. Each will be strong, each will endure, in proportion as it
believes that God is one who shows to man the thing which he knew not: as
it believes, in short, in that Logos of which Saint John wrote, that He
was the light who lightens every man who comes into the world.