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

The Christian Schools of Alexandria.
unnatural in their own days than it
does in ours. They lived nearer the
times when the wrecks of primeval
revelation and history had been
wrought into a thousand fantastic
shapes on the banks of the Indus, the
Euphrates, and the Nile, and when, in
the absence of the true light, men occupied themselves with the theatrical illuminations of Bel, Isis, and Vishnu.
But these Gnostics, in the clear dawn of
the Gospel, still stuck to the fulsome
properties of the devil's play-house.
Unsavory and dishonest, they deserve
neither respect for sincerity nor allowance for originality; they were mere
spinners of "endless genealogies," and,
with such a fig-leaf apron, they tried
to conceal for a while the rankness of
the flesh that finally made the very
pagans join in hounding them from
the earth. The infamous Mark was
holding his conventicles in Alexandria
about the very time that Pantmnus
and Clement were teaching. To read
of his high-flown theories about eons
and emanations, his sham magic, his
familiarity with demons, his impositions on the weaker sex, and the
frightful licentiousness that was the
sure end of it all, is like reading the
history of the doings of the Egyptian
priests in the Serapeion rather than
of those who called themselves Christians. And yet these very men, these
deluded Marcosians, gave out to
learned and unlearned Alexandria that
they alone were the true followers of
Christ. We may conceive the heartbreaking work it would be for Clement
to repel the taunts that their doings
brought upon his name and profession,
and to refute and keep down false
brethren, whose arguments and strength
consisted in an appeal to curiosity
and brute passion. And yet how nobly
he does it, in that picture of the true
Gnostic, or Knower, to which hle so
often returns in all his extant works!
But i)ilosophiers, fititlll, and hleretics do not exhlaust the story of Clement's doing4. It lends a solemn light
to the memorable history we are noting, to bear in mind that the Church's
intellectual war with Neo-Platonist
and Gnostic was ever and again interrupted by the yells of the blood-thirsty
populace, the dragging of confessors
to prison, and all the hideous apparatus of persecution. Which of us would
have had heart to argue with men who
might next day deliver us to the hangman? Who would have found leisure
to write books on abstract philosophy
with such stern concrete realities as
the scourge and the knife waiting
for him in the street? Clement's
master began to teach just as one persecution was ceasing; Clement himself had to flee from his schools before
the "burden and heat" of another;
these were not times, one would suppose, for science and orderly teaching.
Yet our own English Catholic annals
can, in a manner, furnish parallel cases
in more than one solid book of controversy and deep ascetical tract,
thought out and composed when the
pursuivants were almost at the doors.
So true it is that when the Church's
work demands scientific and written
teaching, science appears and books
are written, though the Gentiles are
raging and the peoples imagini'mng their
vain things.
Here, for the present, we draw to a
close these desultory notes on the Christian Schools of Alexandria. They
will have served their purpose if they
have but supplied an outline of that
busy intellectual life which is associated with the names of Pantanus and
Clement. There is another name that
ought to follow- these two - the name
of Origen, suggesting another chapter
on Church history that should yield
to none in interest and usefulness.
The mere fact that in old Alexandria,
in the face of hostile science, clogged
and put to shame by pestilent heresies,
ruthlessly chased out of sight ever and
again by brute force- in spite of all
this, Catholic science won respect from
its enemies without for a moment neglecting the interests of its own children,
is a teaching that will never be out of
date, and least of all at a time like
ours, and in a country where learning
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