The Christian Schools of Alexandria

Excerpt: Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled- Egypt seems destined to be associated with all the signal events of every age of the world. Israel's going into and going out of Egypt is one of the epic pages of Holy Scripture; Sesostris, King of Egypt, left his name written over half of Asia; Alexander, the greatest of the Greeks, laid in Egypt the foundation of a new empire; Cleopatra, the captive and the captor of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, killed herself as the old land passed away for ever from the race of Ptolemy; Clement and Origen, Porphyry and Plotinus, have left Egypt the classic land of the Church's battle against the purest form of heathen philosophy; St. Louis of France has made Egypt the scene of a glorious drama of heroism and devotion; the pyramids have lent their name to swell the list of Napoleon's triumphs; and the Nile is linked for ever with the deathless fame of Nelson. Excerpt: Alexandria, however, in addition to the busy life of commerce and pleasure that went on among Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and Africans, was the home of another kind of life, still more interesting to us. Ptolemy Soter, who carried out Alexander's plans, was a man of no common foresight and strength of character. He was not content with building a city. He performed, in addition, two exploits, either of which, from modern experience, we should be inclined to consider a title to immortality. He invented a new god, and established a university. The god was Serapis, whom he imported from Pergamus, and who soon became popular. The university was the Museum, in which lived and taught Demetrius of Phalerus, Euclid, Stilpo of Megara, Philetas of Cos, Apelles the painter, Callimachus, Theocritus, Eratosthenes, Apollonius Rhodius, and a host of others in philosophy, poetry, geometry, astronomy, and the arts. Here, under successive Ptolemies, professors lectured in splendid halls, amid honored affluence. All that we have of the Greek classics we owe to the learned men of the Museum. Poetry bloomed sweetly and luxuriantly in the gardens of the Ptolemies; though, it must be confessed, not vigorously, not as on Ionic coast-lands, nor as in the earnest life of Athenian freedom-save when some Theocritus appeared, with his broad Doric, fresh from the sheep-covered downs of Sicily. Excerpt: The name that succeeds Pantaenus on the rolls of the School of the Catechisms is Titus Flavius Clemens, immortalized in history as Clement of Alexandria. He had sat under Pantaemus, but he was no ordinary scholar. Like his instructor, he was a convert from paganism. He was already master in human learning when the grace came. He had sought far and wide for the truth, and had found it in the Catholic Church, and into the lap of his new mother he had poured all the treasures of Egyptian wisdom which he had gathered in his quest. Athens, Southern Italy, Assyria, and Palestine had each been visited by the eager searcher; and, last of all, Egypt, and Alexandria, and Pantaenus had been the term of his travels, and had given to his lofty soul the "admirable light" of Jesus Christ. When Pantaenus went out as a missioner to India, Clement, who had already assisted his beloved master in the work of the schools, succeeded him as their director and head. It was to be Clement's task to carry on and to develop the work that Pantaenus had inaugurated-to make Christianity not only understood by the catechumens and loved by the faithful, but recognized and respected by the pagan philosophers. Unless we can clearly see the necessity, or, at least, the reality of the philosophical side of his character, and the influences that were at work to make him hold fast to Aristotle and Plato, even after he had got far beyond them, we shall infallibly set him down, like his modern biographers, as a half-converted heathen, with the shell of Platonism still adhering to him.