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,” 38or “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 39it 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 40is 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 41the 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 42and 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.
