Alexandria and Her Schools

This passage is exceedingly interesting, as containing both the marrow of old Hebrew metaphysic, and also certain notional elements, of which we find no trace in the Scripture, and which may lead—as we shall find they afterwards did lead—to confusing the moral with the notional, and finally the notional with the material; in plain words, to Pantheism.

You find this tendency, in short, in all the philosophers who flourished between the age of Augustus and the rise of Alexandrian Neoplatonism.  Gibbon, while he gives an approving pat on the back to his pet “Philosophic Emperor,” Marcus Aurelius, blinks the fact that Marcus’s philosophy, like that of Plutarch, contains as an integral element, a belief which to him would have been, I fear, simply ludicrous, from its strange analogy with the belief of John, the Christian Apostle.  What is Marcus Aurelius’s cardinal doctrine?  That there is a God within him, a Word, a Logos, which “has hold of him,” and who is his teacher and guardian; that over and above his body and his soul, he has a Reason which is capable of “hearing that Divine Word, and obeying the monitions of that God.”  What is Plutarch’s cardinal doctrine?  That the same Word, the Dæmon who spoke to the heart of Socrates, is speaking to him and to every philosopher; “coming into contact,” he says, “with him in some wonderful manner;” addressing the reason of those who, like Socrates, keep their reason pure, not under the dominion of passion, nor mixing itself greatly with the body, and therefore quick and sensitive in responding to that which encountered it.

You see from these two extracts what questions were arising in the minds of men, and how they touched on ethical and theological questions.  I say arising in their minds: I believe that I ought to say rather, stirred up in their minds by One greater than they.  At all events, there they appeared, utterly independent of any Christian teaching.  The belief in this Logos or Dæmon speaking to the Reason of man, was one which neither Plutarch nor Marcus, neither Numenius nor Ammonius, as far as we can see, learnt from the Christians; it was the common ground which they held with them; the common battlefield which they disputed with them.

Neither have we any reason to suppose that they learnt it from the Hindoos.  That much Hindoo thought mixed with Neoplatonist speculation we cannot doubt; but there is not a jot more evidence to prove that Alexandrians borrowed this conception from the Mahabharavata, than that George Fox the Quaker, or the author of the “Deutsche Theologie,” did so.  They may have gone to Hindoo philosophy, or rather, to second and third hand traditions thereof, for corroborations of the belief; but be sure, it must have existed in their own hearts first, or they would never have gone thither.  Believe it; be sure of it.  No earnest thinker is a plagiarist pure and simple.  He will never borrow from others that which he has not already, more or less, thought out for himself.  When once a great idea, instinctive, inductive (for the two expressions are nearer akin than most fancy), has dawned on his soul, he will welcome lovingly, awfully, any corroboration from foreign schools, and cry with joy: “Behold, this is not altogether a dream: for others have found it also.  Surely it must be real, universal, eternal.”  No; be sure there is far more originality (in the common sense of the word), and far less (in the true sense of the word), than we fancy; and that it is a paltry and shallow doctrine which represents each succeeding school as merely the puppets and dupes of the preceding.  More originality, because each earnest man seems to think out for himself the deepest grounds of his creed.  Less originality, because, as I believe, one common Logos, Word, Reason, reveals and unveils the same eternal truth to all who seek and hunger for it.

Therefore we can, as the Christian philosophers of Alexandria did, rejoice over every truth which their heathen adversaries beheld, and attribute them, as Clement does, to the highest source, to the inspiration of the one and universal Logos.  With Clement, philosophy is only hurtful when it is untrue to itself, and philosophy falsely so called; true philosophy is an image of the truth, a divine gift bestowed on the Greeks.  The Bible, in his eyes, asserts that all forms of art and wisdom are from God.  The wise in mind have no doubt some peculiar endowment of nature, but when they have offered themselves for their work, they receive a spirit of perception from the Highest Wisdom, giving them a new fitness for it.  All severe study, all cultivation of sympathy, are exercises of this spiritual endowment.  The whole intellectual discipline of the Greeks, with their philosophy, came down from God to men.  Philosophy, he concludes in one place, carries on “an inquiry concerning Truth and the nature of Being; and this Truth is that concerning which the Lord Himself said: ‘I am the Truth.’  And when the initiated find, or rather receive, the true philosophy, they have it from the Truth itself; that is from Him who is true.”

While, then, these two schools had so many grounds in common, where was their point of divergence?  We shall find it, I believe, fairly expressed in the dying words of Plotinus, the great father of Neoplatonism.  “I am striving to bring the God which is in us into harmony with the God which is in the universe.”  Whether or not Plotinus actually so spoke, that was what his disciples not only said that he spoke, but what they would have wished him to speak.  That one sentence expresses the whole object of their philosophy.

But to that Pantænus, Origen, Clement, and Augustine would have answered: “And we, on the other hand, assert that the God which is in the universe, is the same as the God which is in you, and is striving to bring you into harmony with Himself.”  There is the experimentum crucis.  There is the vast gulf between the Christian and the Heathen schools, which when any man had overleaped, the whole problem of the universe was from that moment inverted.  With Plotinus and his school man is seeking for God: with Clement and his, God is seeking for man.  With the former, God is passive, and man active: with the latter, God is active, man is passive—passive, that is, in so far as his business is to listen when he is spoken to, to look at the light which is unveiled to him, to submit himself to the inward laws which he feels reproving and checking him at every turn, as Socrates was reproved and checked by his inward Dæmon.

Whether of these two theorems gives the higher conception either of the Divine Being, or of man, I leave it for you to judge.  To those old Alexandrian Christians, a being who was not seeking after every single creature, and trying to raise him, could not be a Being of absolute Righteousness, Power, Love; could not be a Being worthy of respect or admiration, even of philosophic speculation.  Human righteousness and love flows forth disinterestedly to all around it, however unconscious, however unworthy they may be; human power associated with goodness, seeks for objects which it may raise and benefit by that power.  We must confess this, with the Christian schools, or, with the Heathen schools, we must allow another theory, which brought them into awful depths; which may bring any generation which holds it into the same depths.

If Clement had asked the Neoplatonists: “You believe, Plotinus, in an absolutely Good Being.  Do you believe that it desires to shed forth its goodness on all?”  “Of course,” they would have answered, “on those who seek for it, on the philosopher.”

“But not, it seems, Plotinus, on the herd, the brutal, ignorant mass, wallowing in those foul crimes above which you have risen?”  And at that question there would have been not a little hesitation.  These brutes in human form, these souls wallowing in earthly mire, could hardly, in the Neoplatonists’ eyes, be objects of the Divine desire.

“Then this Absolute Good, you say, Plotinus, has no relation with them, no care to raise them.  In fact, it cannot raise them, because they have nothing in common with it.  Is that your notion?”  And the Neoplatonists would have, on the whole, allowed that argument.  And if Clement had answered, that such was not his notion of Goodness, or of a Good Being, and that therefore the goodness of their Absolute Good, careless of the degradation and misery around it, must be something very different from his notions of human goodness; the Neoplatonists would have answered—indeed they did answer—“After all, why not?  Why should the Absolute Goodness be like our human goodness?”  This is Plotinus’s own belief.  It is a question with him, it was still more a question with those who came after him, whether virtues could be predicated of the Divine nature; courage, for instance, of one who had nothing to fear; self-restraint, of one who had nothing to desire.  And thus, by setting up a different standard of morality for the divine and for the human, Plotinus gradually arrives at the conclusion, that virtue is not the end, but the means; not the Divine nature itself, as the Christian schools held, but only the purgative process by which man was to ascend into heaven, and which was necessary to arrive at that nature—that nature itself being—what?

And how to answer that last question was the abysmal problem of the whole of Neoplatonic philosophy, in searching for which it wearied itself out, generation after generation, till tired equally of seeking and of speaking, it fairly lay down and died.  In proportion as it refused to acknowledge a common divine nature with the degraded mass, it deserted its first healthy instinct, which told it that the spiritual world is identical with the moral world, with right, love, justice; it tried to find new definitions for the spiritual; it conceived it to be identical with the intellectual.  That did not satisfy its heart.  It had to repeople the spiritual world, which it had emptied of its proper denizens, with ghosts; to reinvent the old dæmonologies and polytheisms—from thence to descend into lower depths, of which we will speak hereafter.

But in the meanwhile we must look at another quarrel which arose between the two twin schools of Alexandria.  The Neoplatonists said that there is a divine element in man.  The Christian philosophers assented fervently, and raised the old disagreeable question: “Is it in every man?  In the publicans and harlots as well as in the philosophers?  We say that it is.”  And there again the Neoplatonist finds it over hard to assent to a doctrine, equally contrary to outward appearance, and galling to Pharisaic pride; and enters into a hundred honest self-puzzles and self-contradictions, which seem to justify him at last in saying, No.  It is in the philosopher, who is ready by nature, as Plotinus has it, and as it were furnished with wings, and not needing to sever himself from matter like the rest, but disposed already to ascend to that which is above.  And in a degree too, it is in the “lover,” who, according to Plotinus, has a certain innate recollection of beauty, and hovers round it, and desires it, wherever he sees it.  Him you may raise to the apprehension of the one incorporeal Beauty, by teaching him to separate beauty from the various objects in which it appears scattered and divided.  And it is even in the third class, the lowest of whom there is hope, namely, the musical man, capable of being passively affected by beauty, without having any active appetite for it; the sentimentalist, in short, as we should call him nowadays.

But for the herd, Plotinus cannot say that there is anything divine in them.  And thus it gradually comes out in all Neoplatonist writings which I have yet examined, that the Divine only exists in a man, in proportion as he is conscious of its existence in him.  From which spring two conceptions of the Divine in man.  First, is it a part of him, if it is dependent for its existence on his consciousness of it? Or is it, as Philo, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius would have held, as the Christians held, something independent of him, without him, a Logos or Word speaking to his reason and conscience?  With this question Plotinus grapples, earnestly, shrewdly, fairly.  If you wish to see how he does it, you should read the fourth and fifth books of the sixth Ennead, especially if you be lucky enough to light on a copy of that rare book, Taylor’s faithful though crabbed translation.

Not that the result of his search is altogether satisfactory.  He enters into subtle and severe disquisitions concerning soul.  Whether it is one or many.  How it can be both one and many.  He has the strongest perception that, to use the noble saying of the Germans, “Time and Space are no gods.”  He sees clearly that the soul, and the whole unseen world of truly existing being, is independent of time and space: and yet, after he has wrestled with the two Titans, through page after page, and apparently conquered them, they slip in again unawares into the battle-field, the moment his back is turned.  He denies that the one Reason has parts—it must exist as a whole wheresoever it exists: and yet he cannot express the relation of the individual soul to it, but by saying that we are parts of it; or that each thing, down to the lowest, receives as much soul as it is capable of possessing.  Ritter has worked out at length, though in a somewhat dry and lifeless way, the hundred contradictions of this kind which you meet in Plotinus; contradictions which I suspect to be inseparable from any philosophy starting from his grounds.  Is he not looking for the spiritual in a region where it does not exist; in the region of logical conceptions and abstractions, which are not realities, but only, after all, symbols of our own, whereby we express to ourselves the processes of our own brain?  May not his Christian contemporaries have been nearer scientific truth, as well as nearer the common sense and practical belief of mankind, in holding that that which is spiritual is personal, and can only be seen or conceived of as residing in persons; and that that which is personal is moral, and has to do, not with abstractions of the intellect, but with right and wrong, love and hate, and all which, in the common instincts of men, involves a free will, a free judgment, a free responsibility and desert? And that, therefore, if there were a Spirit, a Dæmonic Element, an universal Reason, a Logos, a Divine Element, closely connected with man, that one Reason, that one Divine Element, must be a person also?  At least, so strong was the instinct of even the Heathen schools in this direction, that the followers of Plotinus had to fill up the void which yawned between man and the invisible things after which he yearned, by reviving the whole old Pagan Polytheism, and adding to it a Dæmonology borrowed partly from the Chaldees, and partly from the Jewish rabbis, which formed a descending chain of persons, downward from the highest Deities to heroes, and to the guardian angel of each man; the meed of the philosopher being, that by self-culture and self-restraint he could rise above the tutelage of some lower and more earthly dæmon, and become the pupil of a God, and finally a God himself.

These contradictions need not lower the great Father of Neoplatonism in our eyes, as a moral being.  All accounts of him seem to prove him to have been what Apollo, in a lengthy oracle, declared him to have been, “good and gentle, and benignant exceedingly, and pleasant in all his conversation.”  He gave good advice about earthly matters, was a faithful steward of moneys deposited with him, a guardian of widows and orphans, a righteous and loving man.  In his practical life, the ascetic and gnostic element comes out strongly enough.  The body, with him, was not evil, neither was it good; it was simply nothing—why care about it? He would have no portrait taken of his person: “It was humiliating enough to be obliged to carry a shadow about with him, without having a shadow made of that shadow.”  He refused animal food, abstained from baths, declined medicine in his last illness, and so died about 200 A.D.

It is in his followers, as one generally sees in such cases, that the weakness of his conceptions comes out.  Plotinus was an earnest thinker, slavishly enough reverencing the opinion of Plato, whom he quotes as an infallible oracle, with a “He says,” as if there were but one he in the universe: but he tried honestly to develop Plato, or what he conceived to be Plato, on the method which Plato had laid down.  His dialectic is far superior, both in quantity and in quality, to that of those who come after him.  He is a seeker.  His followers are not.  The great work which marks the second stage of his school is not an inquiry, but a justification, not only of the Egyptian, but of all possible theurgies and superstitions; perhaps the best attempt of the kind which the world has ever seen; that which marks the third is a mere cloud-castle, an inverted pyramid, not of speculation, but of dogmatic assertion, patched together from all accessible rags and bones of the dead world.  Some here will, perhaps, guess from my rough descriptions, that I speak of Iamblichus and Proclus.

Whether or not Iamblichus wrote the famous work usually attributed to him, which describes itself as the letter of Abamnon the Teacher to Porphyry, he became the head of that school of Neoplatonists who fell back on theurgy and magic, and utterly swallowed up the more rational, though more hopeless, school of Porphyry.  Not that Porphyry, too, with all his dislike of magic and the vulgar superstitions—a dislike intimately connected with his loudly expressed dislike of the common herd, and therefore of Christianity, as a religion for the common herd—did not believe a fact or two, which looks to us, nowadays, somewhat unphilosophical.  From him we learn that one Ammonius, trying to crush Plotinus by magic arts, had his weapons so completely turned against himself, that all his limbs were contracted.  From him we learn that Plotinus, having summoned in the temple of Isis his familiar spirit, a god, and not a mere dæmon, appeared.  He writes sensibly enough however to one Anebos, an Egyptian priest, stating his doubts as to the popular notions of the Gods, as beings subject to human passions and vices, and of theurgy and magic, as material means of compelling them to appear, or alluring them to favour man.  The answer of Abamnon, Anebos, Iamblichus, or whoever the real author may have been, is worthy of perusal by every metaphysical student, as a curious phase of thought, not confined to that time, but rife, under some shape or other, in every age of the world’s history, and in this as much as in any.  There are many passages full of eloquence, many more full of true and noble thought: but on the whole, it is the sewing of new cloth into an old garment; the attempt to suit the old superstition to the new one, by eclectically picking and choosing, and special pleading, on both sides; but the rent is only made worse.  There is no base superstition which Abamnon does not unconsciously justify.  And yet he is rapidly losing sight of the real eternal human germs of truth round which those superstitions clustered, and is really further from truth and reason than old Homer or Hesiod, because further from the simple, universal, everyday facts, and relations, and duties of man, which are, after all, among the most mysterious, and also among the most sacred objects which man can contemplate.

It was not wonderful, however, that Neoplatonism took the course it did.  Spirit, they felt rightly, was meant to rule matter; it was to be freed from matter only for that very purpose.  No one could well deny that.  The philosopher, as he rose and became, according to Plotinus, a god, or at least approached toward the gods, must partake of some mysterious and transcendental power.  No one could well deny that conclusion, granting the premiss.  But of what power?  What had he to show as the result of his intimate communion with an unseen Being?  The Christian Schools, who held that the spiritual is the moral, answered accordingly.  He must show righteousness, and love, and peace in a Holy Spirit.  That is the likeness of God.  In proportion as a man has them, he is partaker of a Divine nature.  He can rise no higher, and he needs no more.  Platonists had said—No, that is only virtue; and virtue is the means, not the end.  We want proof of having something above that; something more than any man of the herd, any Christian slave, can perform; something above nature; portents and wonders.  So they set to work to perform wonders; and succeeded, I suppose, more or less.  For now one enters into a whole fairyland of those very phenomena which are puzzling us so nowadays—ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the effect of what we now call mesmerism.  They are all there, these modern puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wisdom.  It makes us love them, while it saddens us to see that their difficulties were the same as ours, and that there is nothing new under the sun.  Of course, a great deal of it all was “imagination.”  But the question then, as now is, what is this wonder-working imagination?—unless the word be used as a mere euphemism for lying, which really, in many cases, is hardly fair.  We cannot wonder at the old Neoplatonists for attributing these strange phenomena to spiritual influence, when we see some who ought to know better doing the same thing now; and others, who more wisely believe them to be strictly physical and nervous, so utterly unable to give reasons for them, that they feel it expedient to ignore them for awhile, till they know more about those physical phenomena which can be put under some sort of classification, and attributed to some sort of inductive law.

But again.  These ecstasies, cures, and so forth, brought them rapidly back to the old priestcrafts.  The Egyptian priests, the Babylonian and Jewish sorcerers, had practised all this as a trade for ages, and reduced it to an art.  It was by sleeping in the temples of the deities, after due mesmeric manipulations, that cures were even then effected.  Surely the old priests were the people to whom to go for information.  The old philosophers of Greece were venerable.  How much more those of the East, in comparison with whom the Greeks were children?  Besides, if these dæmons and deities were so near them, might it not be possible to behold them?  They seemed to have given up caring much for the world and its course—

         Effugerant adytis templisque relictisDî quibus imperium steterat.

The old priests used to make them appear—perhaps they might do it again.  And if spirit could act directly and preternaturally on matter, in spite of the laws of matter, perhaps matter might act on spirit.  After all, were matter and spirit so absolutely different?  Was not spirit some sort of pervading essence, some subtle ethereal fluid, differing from matter principally in being less gross and dense?  This was the point to which they went down rapidly enough; the point to which all philosophies, I firmly believe, will descend, which do not keep in sight that the spiritual means the moral.  In trying to make it mean exclusively the intellectual, they will degrade it to mean the merely logical and abstract; and when that is found to be a barren and lifeless phantom, a mere projection of the human brain, attributing reality to mere conceptions and names, and confusing the subject with the object, as logicians say truly the Neoplatonists did, then in despair, the school will try to make the spiritual something real, or, at least, something conceivable, by reinvesting it with the properties of matter, and talking of it as if it were some manner of gas, or heat, or electricity, or force, pervading time and space, conditioned by the accidents of brute matter, and a part of that nature which is born to die.

The culmination of all this confusion we see in Proclus.  The unfortunate Hypatia, who is the most important personage between him and Iamblichus, has left no writings to our times; we can only judge of her doctrine by that of her instructors and her pupils.  Proclus was taught by the men who had heard her lecture; and the golden chain of the Platonic succession descended from her to him.  His throne, however, was at Athens, not at Alexandria.  After the murder of the maiden philosopher, Neoplatonism prudently retired to Greece.  But Proclus is so essentially the child of the Alexandrian school that we cannot pass him over.  Indeed, according to M. Cousin, as I am credibly informed, he is the Greek philosopher; the flower and crown of all its schools; in whom, says the learned Frenchman, “are combined, and from whom shine forth, in no irregular or uncertain rays, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus;” and who “had so comprehended all religions in his mind, and paid them such equal reverence, that he was, as it were, the priest of the whole universe!”