When the assertions that were made at one time and another in the
uplands of Palestine descended from their home, and, taking the ancient
caravan route, crossed the River of Egypt and approached Alexandria,
they entered into a new spiritual atmosphere where they were obliged to
transform themselves or to perish. The atmosphere was not hostile to the
assertions, indeed it welcomed them, but it insisted that, however
unphilosophic they might be, they should wear the philosophic dress,
that they should take some account of the assertions that had arrived
previously, should recognize the existence of libraries and museums,
should approach with circumspection the souls of the rich. Under these
conditions they might remain. And exactly the same thing happened on two
distinct occasions. We are here concerned with the second of the
occasions, but it is convenient to glance at the first; it was soon
after Alexandria had been founded, and Jews were flocking to her
markets. An unexpected problem confronted them. Jehovah had said, “I Am
that I Am,” and so long as they remained in Palestine this seemed
enough. But now they had to face disquieting comments, such as “This
statement predicates existence merely,” or “This statement, while
professing merely to predicate existence, assumes the attribute of
speech,” and they grew aware of the inaccessibility and illogicality of
their national God. The result was a series of attempts on their part to
explain and recommend Jehovah to the Greeks—culminating in the great
system of Philo, who, by the doctrine of the Mediating Logos, ensured
that the deity should be at the same time accessible and inaccessible:
“The Logos,” he writes, “dwells on the margin between the Created and
the Increate, and delights to serve them both.” And there, for a little,
the matter rested.
But in Philo’s own lifetime a second assertion had been made among the
Judæan hills. We do not know its original form—too many minds have
worked over it since—but we know that it was unphilosophic and
anti-social. For it was addressed to the uneducated and it promised them
a kingdom. Following the usual route, it reached Alexandria, where the
same fate overtook it: it had to face comments, and in so doing was
transformed. It too evolved a system which, though not logical, paid the
lip service to logic that a great city demands, and interspersed bridges
of argument among the flights of faith. All Greek thinkers, except
Socrates, had done the same, so that, on its intellectual side, the new
religion did not break with the past; it consisted of an assertion in a
philosophic dress, and Clement of Alexandria, its first theologian, used
methods that were familiar to Philo two hundred years before. Not only
did he bring allegory to bear upon the more intractable passages of
Scripture, but he adapted the Philonian Logos and identified it with the
Founder of the new religion. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word
was with God.” Philo might have written this. St. John had added to it
two statements distinctly Christian, namely, “The Word was God” and “The
Word was made flesh.” And now Clement, taking over the completed
conception, raised upon it a storied fabric such as the Alexandrians
loved, and ensured that the deity should be at the same time accessible
and inaccessible, merciful and just, human and divine. The fabric would
have bewildered the fishermen of Galilee, and it had in it a flaw which
became evident in the fourth century and produced the Arian schism. But
it impressed the passing age; Clement, working in and through
Alexandria, did more than even St. Paul to recommend Christianity to the
Gentiles.
He was probably born in Greece about A.D. 150 and initiated into
Mysteries there. Then he was converted and became head of the
theological college in Alexandria, where he remained until his exile in
202. But little is known of his life and nothing of his character,
though one may assume it was conciliatory: Christianity was not yet
official, and thus in no position to fulminate. Of his treatises the
“Exhortation to the Greeks” acknowledges several merits in pagan
thought, while “The Rich Man’s Salvation” handles with delicacy a
problem on which business men are naturally sensitive, and arrives at
the comforting conclusion that Christ did not mean what He said. One
recognizes the wary resident. And when he attacks Paganism he seldom
denounces: he mocks, knowing this to be the better way. For the age is
literal. It had lost resilience and spring, and if one pointed out to it
that Zeus had behaved absurdly in Homer, it could summon no rush of
instinct or of poetry with which to defend his worship. Demeter too! And
shrines to the sneezing Apollo and to the gouty and to the coughing
Artemis! Ha! Ha! Fancy believing in a goddess with the gout. Clement
makes great play with such nonsense. For a new religion has, as far as
persiflage is concerned, an advantage over an old one: it has not had
time itself to evolve a mythology, and his adversaries could not retort
with references to St. Simeon Stylites, or to the plague spot of St.
Roch, or to St. Fina who allowed a devil to throw her mother down the
stairs. They could only hang their heads and assent, and when Clement
derided the priests in the idol-temples for their dirt, they could not
foresee that in the following century dirt would be recommended as holy
by the Church. They were caught by his genial air and by his “logic”;
there is nothing morose about the treatises, and even to-day they are
readable, though not quite in the way that the author intended.
A solemn assembly of Greeks, held in honour of a dead serpent,
was gathering at Pytho, and Eunomus sang a funeral ode for the
reptile. Whether his song was a hymn in praise of the snake or a
lamentation over it, I cannot say; but there was a competition
and Eunomus was playing the lyre in the heat of the day, at the
time when the grasshoppers, warmed by the sun, were singing
under the leaves along the hills. They were singing, you see,
not to the dead serpent of Pytho, but to the all-wise God, a
spontaneous song, better than the measured strains of Eunomus. A
string breaks in the Locrian’s hands; the grasshopper settles
upon the neck of the lyre and begins to twitter there as if upon
a branch: whereupon the minstrel, by adapting his music to the
grasshopper’s lay, supplied the place of the missing string. So
it was not Eunomus that drew the grasshopper by his song, as the
legend would have it, when it set up the bronze figure at Pytho,
showing Eunomus with his lyre and his ally in the contest. No,
the grasshopper flew of its own accord, and sang of its own
accord, although the Greeks thought it to have been responsive
to music.
How in the world is it that you have given credence to worthless
legends, imagining....
and blasts of theology ensue. But how grateful one is to Clement for
mentioning the grasshopper, and how probable it seems, from the way he
tells the story, that he had a faint consciousness of its beauty—just as
his risqué passages emanate a furtive consciousness of their riskiness.
His learning is immense: he is said to allude to three hundred Greek
writers of whom we should not otherwise have heard, and one gladly
follows him through the back-yards of the Classical world. The results
of his ramble are most fully stated in two other of his treatises, the
“Rug roll” and the “Tutor.” His verdict is that, though the poetry of
Hellas is false and its cults absurd or vile, yet its philosophers and
grasshoppers possessed a certain measure of divine truth; some of the
speculations of Plato, for instance, had been inspired by the Psalms. It
is not much of a verdict in the light of modern research; but it is a
moderate verdict for a Father; he spares his thunders, he does not exalt
asceticism, he is never anti-social.
Till the ground if you are a husbandman; but recognize God in
your husbandry. Sail the sea, you who love sea-faring; but ever
call upon the heavenly pilot. Were you a soldier on campaign
when the knowledge of God laid hold of you? Then listen to the
commander who signals righteousness.
Here he shows his respect for the existing fabric and his hope that it
may pass without catastrophe from Pagan to Christian, a hope that could
have found expression only at Alexandria, where contending assertions
have so often been harmonized, and whose own god, Serapis, had expressed
the union of Egypt and Greece.
Looking back—it is so easy now to look back!—one can see that the hope
was vain. Christianity, though she contained little that was fresh
doctrinally, yet descended with a double-edged sword that hacked the
ancient world to pieces. For she had declared war against two great
forces—Sex and the State—and during her complicated contest with them
the old order was bound to disappear. The contest had not really begun
in Clement’s day. Sex disquieted him, but he did not revolt against it
like his successor Origen. The State exiled him, but it had not yet put
forth, as it did under Diocletian, its full claims to divinity. He lived
in a period of transition, and in Alexandria. And in that curious city,
which had never been young and hoped never to grow old, conciliation
must have seemed more possible than elsewhere, and the graciousness of
Greece not quite incompatible with the Grace of God.
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