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ERRATUM.

P. 56, 1. 22-for "Christ," read "Christianity."

UNIV. OF
CALIFORNIA

Clement of Alexandria.

LECTURE I.

CLEMENT AND HIS WRITINGS.

ALEXANDRIA Occupies an important place in the intellectual and spiritual history of the world. Founded by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., with the view of binding the East with Greece not only in an external political union but in the bond of a common intellectual culture, it amply fulfilled, under the Ptolemies, the end for which it had been established. From its geographical position in relation to Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria, it was a natural centre for the commerce of the world; and in the realm of thought in like manner it became a centre of intellectual activity, a bridge between East and West, Greek and barbarian, the gods of Greece and the gods of Egypt. On the institution of the Museum, scholars from Greece of all schools flocked to it, some to study, some to lecture on criticism, or history, or rhetoric, or philosophy. Its two great libraries furnished abundant materials for work in every department of science and scholarship-for the philological criticism which sometimes degenerated into pedantic

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trifling, for the laborious commentaries which took the place of original work, for the dilettantism and endless controversies of the cloistered literati which called forth the gibes of the satirist.1 Some half a century before Clement began his activity there, the Emperor Hadrian visited Alexandria, and in a letter of his which has been preserved we have a vivid, if one-sided and unsympathetic, picture of the restless life, religious and commercial, of the community. "I have now gained full knowledge," he writes, "of that Egypt whose praises you were wont to sing. I have found the people vain and fickle, shifting with every breath of popular opinion. Those who worship Serapis are in fact Christians; and those who call themselves Christian bishops are devotees of Serapis. There is no head of a Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, Christian presbyter, who is not an astrologer, a fortune-teller, or a conjurer. ... The populace are seditious and turbulent to a degree. The city is rich and opulent; in it no one lives at leisure. . . They have but one god-money; him Christians, him Jews, him all the peoples adore." The picture, in part, no doubt, owes its malicious touches to the irritation felt by Hadrian at the rejection by the Alexandrians of his minion Antinous; but it contains sufficient truth to point the sting, and in some of its features it is confirmed by many details in the writings of Clement. To an observer of a different order, the greatness of the city seemed to contend with its beauty, and the people to be rivals of the city. To Hadrian, the syncretism of various forms of religious thought might well seem an amalgam of contradictory elements, a confusion of antagonistic systems in which everything that

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1 Cf. Athenæus, i. 41 (Meineke).

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* Flavius Vopiscus-Saturninus, c. 8-'Scriptores Historia Augustæ,' vol. ii. p. 209 (Hermann Peter). Achil. Tat., v. i.

I was most distinctive of each had been toned down and effaced. So with the material luxury. Even if all allowance be made for the tendency of all moralists in their eagerness to discourage every form of vice or moral weakness to exaggerate its extent, and to ascribe to one city or age the collective vices of all cities and ages, there remains enough in Clement's allusions to show that in spite of its intellectualism the population of Alexandria was passionately devoted to all forms of luxury and enervating pleasure.1 The religious syncretism was in harmony with the aim of its founder. In the centuries that had intervened between its foundation and the Christian era, Alexandria had become a rendezvous of all creeds, all languages, all nationalities, a veritable cosmopolis of intellectual and religious movements, a nursery of all forms of eclecticism. Like as the founder himself had built temples to Isis as well as to the gods of Olympus, so there had been effected there a fusion of forms of thought and belief which elsewhere existed in sharp antagonism to each other. Partly from an apologetic motive, partly in harmony with the tendency to syncretism in its environment, Jewish writers before the Christian era sought to show that the great thinkers of Greece were indebted to the Hebrews for their deepest speculations, and, not out of harmony with some aspects in the literary activity of the period, even fabricated and adulterated writings to prove their thesis. The translation of the Old Testament into Greek not only enabled the Jews of Alexandria to read their sacred books in their own tongue, but excited a measure of interest in Greek-speaking peoples of other nationalities, though mainly an interest of antagonism called forth by what seemed to them the preposterous claims put forth on behalf of the religious literature of a despised

1 See Glaser, 'Zeitbilder aus Alexandrien nach dem Paedagogus des C. A.,' 1905.

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