The Christian Schools of Alexandria, Part I [pp. 33-56]

The Christian Schools of Alexandria.
wanted to get the ear of his countrymen, and therefore thought it no harm
to fall in with their humor for the
mythical; just as good Father Faber
preached and wrote like a modern
Englishman, and not like an antique
Douai controversialist, or a well-meaning translator of "Sermons from the
French." But, say the objectors,
Clement's interpretation of Scripture
is so very forced and unnatural. The
whole subject of allegorical interpretation of Sacred Scripture is too wide to
be entered upon here; but that the
Bible, especially the Old Testament,
has an allegorical sense, no one denies, and the decision of what is the
true allegorical sense depends more
upon the authority of the teacher than
upon the interpretation itself. In the
time of Clement, when the Gnostics
were attributing the Old Testament to
the Evil Principle, there was a special
necessity for a warm and loving acknowledgment that it was the voice
and the teaching of God to man; and
it is no wonder, therefore, that he allows himself, with the brilliant fancy
of an Athenian, even if sometimes
with the fantasticalness of an Alexandrian, to extract meanings out of the
sacred text which our sober eyes could
never have discovered. As it is, we
owe to his mysticism no small portion
of the eloquence and beauty of his
writings; we may instance that charming passage in the P&edaqogus where
he alludes to the incident related in
the twenty-sixth chapter of Genesis"Abimelech, King of the Palestines,
looking out through a window, saw
Isaac playing with Rebecca his wife"
Isaac represents the little one of
Christ, and is interpreted to be joy;
Rebecca is patience; the royal Abimelech signifies heavenly wisdom. The
child of Jesus Christ, joyful with a joy
that none but that blessed teacher can
give, lovingly sports with his "helpmate," patience, and the wisdom that
is from above looks on and wonderingly
admires. The beauty of conception
and perfection of form that is inseparable from true Greek art, whether in
a statue or a medal, an epic or an
epigram, is by no means wanting to
the first of the Greek Fathers. A
reader who should take up the Paedagogus for no other than literary reasons would not be disappointed; he
would receive, from his reading, a very
high idea of the wisdom, the eloquence,
and, above all, the saintly unction of
the great Catholic doctor and philosopher who first made human science
the handmaid of Christian theology.
The witnessing to the truth before
heathen philosophers and the teaching
the children of the faith might have
fully employed both the zeal and the
eloquence of Clement. But there was
another and a sadder use for words,
in the task of resisting the heresies
that seemed to grow like foul excrescences from the very growth of the
Church herself. Alexandria, the city
of. Neo-Platonism, was also with
nearly as good a title the city of
Gnosticism. To examine the history of Gnosticism is not a tempting
undertaking. On the one side, it is
like walking into a fog, as dense and
unpleasant as ever marked a London
November; on the other, it is to disturb a moral cess-pool, proverbially
better left alone. Of the five groups
of the Gnostic family, which seem to
agree in little beside worshipping the
devil, holding to "emanations," and
owing their origin to Simon Magus,
the particular group that made Alexandria its headquarters acknowledged
as its leading names Basilides, Valentine, and Mark, each of whom outdid
the other in the absurdity of his ravings
about eons, generations, and the like,
and in the abominableness of his practical licentiousness. Valentine and
Mark were contemporaries of Clement, if not personally (Valentine is
said to have died A.D. 150) at least
in their immediate influence. No one
can tell satisfactorily what made these
precious followers of Simon Magus
spend their days in patching up secondhand systems out of the rags of castoff Oriental mysticism. No doubt
their jargon appeared somewhat less
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