6. THE SCHOOL OF ALEXANDRIA -- ORIGEN

Alexandria, in the third century, was still the intellectual capital of the Roman world. Thanks to its great library and the marvellous scientific organisation of the Museum, the city never failed to draw to itself leading thinkers of every kind of learning. It had been the centre of the learned Judaeo-Hellenic speculation associated ever after with the name of Philo; from Alexandria, too, had come many of the leading Gnostics -- Valentine certainly, and Cerdon who was responsible for the Gnostic element in the theology of Marcion. It was in Alexandria, too, that the effort of philosophy to replace the Hellenistic religions as interpreter of the riddle of life now reached its full perfection. The thinkers who now built from it a kind of Hellenistic theology and mysticism were three, Ammonius Saccas (d. 242), Plotinus (d. 270) and Porphyry (d. 304).

Their system is Neo-Platonism properly so called. Ammonius Saccas, an Alexandrian labourer, is known chiefly by the work of Plotinus, his pupil, for, if he himself wrote at all, his works have all perished. Plotinus, also an Egyptian by birth, left Alexandria for Rome after the death of his master. There he lectured and taught for the next twenty years -- the elite of the world capital filling his rooms, the Emperor Gallienus among his audience-but not until the last few years of his life did he commit his ideas to writing. As Plotinus developed Ammonius Saccas, so Porphyry, his own confidential pupil, arranged and systematised the teaching of Plotinus. But Plotinus is the real founder of the new faith and its principal saint. That faith was not, of course, anything so simple as the mere revival of a cult of Plato's philosophy. The spirit of syncretism, powerful for three centuries and more everywhere, except in the domain of the Church's tradition, showed itself very apparently in Neo-Platonism. Plato's ideas found a place in it, but so, too, did those of the Stoic Zeno, of Pythagoras, of Aristotle, and of Philo. Finally there was the influence of the Gnostic movement, with all its strange amalgam of oriental ideas and Gnostically interpreted Christian traditions. Out of these elements the genius of the Neo-Platonists, during the third century, devised their system.

These Neo-Platonists were, however, very far from desiring any reconciliation of philosophy with the religion of the Church. On the contrary the movement was markedly hostile to the Church; Porphyry, amongst his other works, writing classical antiquity's masterpiece of anti-Christian polemic -- a great work in fifteen books of which, however, only a few pages have survived. Anti-Catholic might be a truer description than anti-Christian, for Porphyry shows great reverence for the memory and character of Our Lord; and his attack, on the lines of the familiar modern historical criticism of the gospels, is directed rather against what he considered the influence of St. Paul. Porphyry lived to see the last of the persecutions in full swing; and it was the Neo-Platonist movement which, in more than one important instance, lent the illiterate and uncouth Galerius, who was that persecution's real author, a logical excuse for his hate and something of a system in his pursuit of it.

Neo-Platonism, in itself a vaguely rational justification of religious sentiment, with a worked out scheme relating the fundamental problems of the nature of God, the creation of man and man's destiny, and offering to man the chance of recovery, of a gradual ascent by increase of knowledge to the actual vision of God Himself, could scarcely ever have progressed beyond the elite of a small philosophical school But, by an ingenious exegesis of the mythologies, this religious idealism was combined with the old classical Paganism, all of whose rites and practices found in the new system an allegorical interpretation to sanction them. This sagacious combination met with much success. It helped once more to its feet the religion so often condemned to die since the days of Euripides; and whatever hold these ancient beliefs maintained for the next three centuries on the allegiance of the intelligent, can be set to the credit of the system which had at last given them a philosophical setting, something even of a body of doctrine, and which was offering to their devotees a way to heaven even in this life of earth. Of the movement's influence on the Church much must be said, but in dealing with a later period of the Church's history. The harm it did the Church of the third and fourth centuries was that, as an attractive willo'-the-wisp, it distracted from their real goal those who anxiously sought for truth, and that it armed the fiercest of the Church's persecutors. But in a later age, through the genius of St. Augustine, and through the writer who passed, for centuries, as Denis the Areopagite, more than one idea that derived through Plotinus entered into the service of Catholic theology and Catholic mysticism.

Of the first introduction of the Church into Egypt we know nothing. The legend of the foundation of the see of Alexandria by St. Mark was, apparently, unknown even to Alexandrians before the fourth century; and except for the names of the handful -of Alexandrian Gnostics, all that we know of the Egyptian Churches before the end of the second century is a list of bishops of Alexandria that goes back to A.D. 61. It is only in the last twenty years of the second century that the darkness lifts, and it lifts to reveal to us the existence at Alexandria of a flourishing school of Christian culture under the guidance of Pantenus.

The writings of this doctor of the Alexandrian Church have perished. That he was a convert from Stoicism, and that before setting up at Alexandria he had shared in the evangelisation of "the Indians," and that among his pupils were Alexander, later bishop in Cappadocia, and Titus Flavius Clemens who succeeded him in the direction of the school, is the sum of our information regarding him. For these scanty data it is to that successor that we are indebted. Titus Flavius Clemens -- Clement of Alexandria -- unlike the master to whom he owed so much and whom he so greatly venerated, is very well known to us, is in fact one of the best known, as he is one of the most lovable personages of the Church's early history. His work at Alexandria, and the work of the genius who was first his pupil there and then his successor-Origen, was to exercise an influence far beyond the local church that bore them to the faith. It was to be a leading influence in Western theology until the time of St. Augustine, and to give to the theology of the Eastern Church an orientation and a spirit which it has perhaps never lost. Also this Alexandrian theology, like its two great teachers, was to be a sign of contradiction among Catholics for all time -- contradiction always sufficiently lively to be a barrier to any official recognition of the sanctity of the two pioneers of the Church's systematic theology. Neither Clement of Alexandria nor Origen, for all their heroic life, are invoked as saints or enrolled among the Doctors of the Church.

Clement was born in Athens, probably about 150, a Pagan. We are ignorant of what brought him to the faith, but he has himself listed the different influences which, after his conversion, perfected the formation of his Christian culture. He names a Greek of Ionia, another of Greater Greece, a Syrian, an Egyptian, an Assyrian and a Palestinian convert from Judaism. Then he met Pantenus, and with him found his vocation in the explanation to educated Catholics of the religion they professed. To the lecture rooms of the school in Alexandria came a varied and distinguished audience, of men and women alike, drawn from the leisured and educated classes of the Church. Clement, now a priest of the Alexandrian Church, set their Faith before them scientifically. Like himself, they were, the most of them, converts from Paganism. He showed them, with all his own rich knowledge of Paganism, the world they had gained in comparison with what they had given up. At every turn he cites the treasures of that ancient culture, in which they had been bred. Its poets, its philosophers, its orators - - he knows them all, and in his instructions the appropriate citation from them is always to hand. Like St. Justin he is optimistic in his view of the Pagan culture and the pre-Christian philosophies. Both have in them a vast amount of good; both rightly used can greatly assist the instructed Christian; the religion revealed to the Church is, yet once again, the crown of truth naturally known.

This cultured critique of Paganism, none the less effective for its sympathy with the Pagan's craving for certitude and security, is only one part of Clement's mission. He shows himself -- this man driven by his nature to teach -- equally enthusiastic, equally cultured, equally painstaking in his elaborate instructions on the life the Christian should lead. Not a single occupation of the day, not one of the phases of that sophisticated civilisation escapes him. His audience is made up of that immense majority of human beings who are tied to the life of the city by a hundred obligations. They cannot, if they would, leave the world for the desert. Clement proposes to teach them how to remain in the world and yet be perfect Christians. It is a little the mission of St. Francis d Sales fourteen hundred years later, in a civilisation so very different, and where yet human nature is so very much the same, and tried in the same way. And it is in the same spirit of cultured optimism that Clement too, priest here as well as philosopher, directs his hearers.

Finally Clement is a theologian, using his trained mind to develop the data of the traditional belief. As a theologian he knows, and respects, and makes much of "the fixed rule of the tradition." He proclaims himself as heir of the ancients from whom he learnt the Faith in the days before he met Pantenus, and is careful to note that what they taught was valuable because they had received it from the Apostles, from Peter and Paul, John and James. Peter is "the chosen one, the elect, the first of the disciples for whom alone the Saviour paid the tribute money," and so attached is Clement to Peter's prestige that he will not have it that it was Peter the Apostle whom St. Paul "resisted to his face" at Antioch. That unfortunate was another Peter. one of the seventy-two disciples ! It is from the Apostles, again, that bishops derive the authority by which they rule. Of all doctrines the Church's doctrine is to be preferred, because it is traditional. It is the role of Philosophy to prepare the mind to receive this doctrine, and it is on the basis of this doctrine that Clement proposes to build what is, for him, the crown of the Christian's achievement, the perfect knowledge (Gnosis) to which only the perfect Christian attains.

This superstructure, or rather Clement's view of its nature, goes beyond what the Church had ever taught. It is Clement's personal (and erroneous) contribution to the theology of man's knowledge of God. But, even for Clement, it depends for whatever truth it can claim to possess on the previous acceptance of the Church's traditional teaching. The point is important, for Clement, so often claimed as a "liberal protestant," born seventeen hundred years before his time, is a Catholic as his very mistakes clearly prove. He shares the common Alexandrian fault of an over-fondness for allegorising the meaning of Sacred Scripture, and, more seriously still, in his eagerness to discover the traditional teaching in his beloved philosophers (the Trinity, for example, in Plato) he runs the risk of deforming it. Again, though his division of practising Christians into two classes, those who live by faith and those raised to knowledge, might accord with the traditional distinction between life according to precept and life according to counsel, Clement's introduction of the Platonic idea that the possession of knowledge adds, of itself, to moral perfection opens the way to all manner of error. In the same spirit of optimism he introduces into his moral teaching a canonisation of what it is hard to distinguish from the Stoic virtue of indifference (apatheia).

Clement guided the school at Alexandria for more than twenty years. In the persecution of 202 he made his way to Cappadocia where his friend Alexander was now bishop, and when Alexander was imprisoned administered the see for him. The last record of him is a letter from Alexander, written in 215, which speaks of him as dead. That letter is addressed to Clement's one time pupil, Origen, now himself in turn director of the theological school. To have formed Origen is perhaps Clement's chief title to fame.

Origen, born 185, was Christian from his birth, the child of parents who lived only for their faith. Unlike Clement in this, he was unlike him, too, in race; for Origen, to all appearance, was of the native Egyptian stock. He was still a student when his father was martyred (202). The sentence entailed the confiscation of the family property, and the youth began his career as a teacher to help t- keep his mother and her numerous family. When Clement fled to Caesarea, Origen took his place as director of the theological school. The heroism to which Origen was so movingly to exhort his contemporaries, was, from his childhood, the daily affair of his life. It was about this time, too, that in an heroic misunderstanding of the Gospel text, Origen submitted to the famous mutilation which was later to form the technical justification for his dismissal from the school. Like Clement, and like St. Justin before him, Origen was not content with what chances of achieving wisdom he found at home. He travelled much. Greece, Palestine, Arabia, Antioch, Nicomedia, Rome -- he had seen them all and was familiar with what each had to offer the scholar. To defend the faith against its critics he must know what the critics themselves believed, and so he spent years in the schools of the leading philosophers, and notably of Ammonius Saccas. His zeal for the study of the Bible drove him to the original texts and to learn Hebrew. He became known as the most learned of all the Christians, and it was to him that the learning-loving mother of the Emperor Alexander Severus applied for instruction as to the Church's teaching.

He was ordained priest in Palestine by a bishop other than his own, and upon his return home was solemnly deposed by the Bishop of Alexandria, and deprived of his position in the school. He betook himself to the friendly bishop who had ordained him, and thenceforward Caesarea, in Palestine, was his headquarters until in 235, driven by the persecution of Maximin, he made his way to Cappadocia. In the persecution of Decius he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured. Four years later -- 254 -- he died at Tyre. He had been for forty years the wonder of the Christian world, the oracle universally consulted on points of doctrine and of practice. His knowledge, his logic, his eloquence knew no equal, and his amazing genius was set in a life of ascetic detachment and humility.

His erudition, and his industry, were indeed immense, and its output reckoned at six thousand volumes -- an enormous total even when the slender possibilities of the "book" as the ancients knew it are borne in mind. More important even than the erudition and the industry was the systematic fashion of its exposition. The learning of Clement -- so far as it found expression in writing -- lacks all order. It resembles only too faithfully the meadow to which he himself compared it -- where all things grow and, if sought, are ultimately found. St. Justin, Tertullian, St. Hippolytus had each of them, for the purpose of his own particular controversy, used secular learning to explain and defend the tradition. But beyond the defence of special points there was as yet no Catholic Theology. The only syntheses which claimed to set out a rational orderly exposition of religious truth, from the first movements of the Divine Life ad extra down to the last destiny of created things, were the Gnostic systems. It is Origen's chief title to fame that, first of all Christian scholars, he set himself to construct a vast synthesis in which the many sided truths of the traditional faith should be displayed in all their related harmony. Much of that work has perished. Enough remains to make very clear the reason of the admiring veneration with which his contemporaries regarded him.

In Scripture, besides a great mass of commentaries which covered every book of the Bible, he published that stupendous instrument of textual scholarship, the Hexapla. Here were set out, in six parallel columns, four Greek versions and two Hebrew versions of the Old Testament in an endeavour to ascertain the value of the Septuagint text. Then, as an apologist, he wrote the eight books Against Celsus, the most perfect apologetic work of the primitive Church, in answer to the mightiest attack on Christianity that Paganism ever produced. His theological reputation depends chiefly, however, on his Summa, the Book of Principles (Peri Archon). Here, for the first time, a Christian writer, with no preoccupation with controversy to influence the order of his work or his style, endeavours to explain systematically the whole body of the tradition. That the technical language of theological science was as yet too undeveloped -- to say nothing of the notion of Theology as a science -- to make success possible, does not detract from the glory of the pioneer. Faults, and serious faults, were in the circumstances inevitable; and the product of Origen's mighty erudition was, in the centuries that followed his death, to be more than once the occasion of controversies that aroused the whole Church. Nor are Catholic scholars at one, even to-day, in their opinion of Origen's orthodoxy on many points. But of the genius which places him near to St. Augustine himself, of the encyclopaedic learning, of Origen's real holiness of life and of his constancy in the presence of persecution, there has never been any question. In his own lifetime, for all the misunderstanding between himself and the Bishop of Alexandria, there was never any condemnation of his theories. He died venerated by all the Catholicism of his time. But almost from the moment of his death discussion began and presently from one quarter and another condemnations began to shower upon his work -- though never were any made of the man himself.

The gibe of Celsus -- and of contemporary Paganism generally-that the Church has no message for any but the illiterate, Origen turns against its authors. The truth of the faith is capable of scientific proof in the Greek manner, and the Christian gladly makes use of other knowledge to explain and prove his Christianity. "The disciples of the philosophers say that Geometry Music, Grammar, Rhetoric, Astronomy are the born companions of Philosophy. We say the same thing of Philosophy itself with regard to Christianity." Nowhere in all this early Christian literature is there a keener realisation of the beauty and the value of the Pagan culture, nowhere a greater confidence in its role of pedagogue to bring the Pagan mind to Christ. Not that, for Origen, the religion of the Church is merely a matter of philosophy, of principle and conclusion. It is for him as for his predecessors a thing revealed, "the model made over to the Churches," and the true prophets of Christ are they who teach the word "as the Church." The test by which he would have his hearers distinguish the true exposition of Christ's teaching from the false is the ancient one -- " Make use of the Church's preaching handed down by the Apostles through the order of succession, which still to this day remains in the churches. That alone is to be believed as true, which, in every way, accords with the tradition of the Church and the Apostles."

To this tradition all else, even that pursuit of a deeper knowledge which Origen, following Clement, acclaims as a Christian's noblest virtue, is subject. To the primacy of the Church's traditional teaching, even the Hellenic culture must yield. There is no place in the Church for contrary philosophies, and to attempt to introduce them is criminal. Hoc fecit infelix Valentinus, et Basilides, hoc fecit et Marcion haereticus. The schools where these men expound their personal interpretations are no better than brothels. Haeretici aedificant lupanar in omni via, ut puta magister de officina Valentini, magister de coetu Basilidis, magister de tabernaculo Marcionis. The Church has its rulers the bishops. Not all of them, he notes, are models. "At times we surpass in pride the wicked princes of the heathens. A little more of it and we, too, shall have our bodyguard like the King. Terror walks in our wake. We live apart, inaccessible to all -- and especially to the poor. To those who petition us we are haughtier than any tyrant, than even the most cruel of kings. Such is the state of things in many a famous church, especially in the churches of our greatest cities." Origen knows then what a bad bishop can be. He is not thereby confused as to the place of the bishop in the Church. The bishop is sovereign over clergy and laity alike. As he has the power to offer sacrifice, so he has the power to rule and to expel unworthy members for the safety of the whole body. Finally the bishop is the teacher. Origen makes much of the possession of knowledge as itself a virtue, and the perfect Christian is the instructed Christian, the Christian who "knows", Origen's " gnostic." Logically he makes much, also, of the Church's learned men, doctores ecclesiae, of whom he is proud to be one. But the final word, yet once again, is not with individual learning but with authority. In doctrine, as in morals, the bishops are the judge of what is in conformity with the tradition.

The Church's teaching is, then, the starting point of Origen's exposition. He notes that while some truths are taught as certain others are to some extent matters for discussion. The traditional teaching of the Church is completed by the study of Sacred Scripture and of Philosophy. Origen is perhaps the most scriptural of all theologians. It is to Scripture he goes for the solution of all his problems; and Scripture for him had three meanings the literal; the moral -- that is, the meaning useful for the spiritual welfare of the soul; and finally the " spiritual " -- that is, the allegory which contains a doctrine about the relation of God to His universe. Origen by no means ignores or discounts the literal sense, but it is the allegory of the moral and spiritual interpretations which most attract this great Alexandrian, as it had attracted Alexandrian Judaism centuries before him.

He is not so enthusiastic as Clement, his master, in the employment of Philosophy as an auxiliary, despite his enthusiasm for Philosophy. He does not so much use philosophical data to explain Christian doctrine, to accredit it with the Pagan world, but rather, in his theological exposition, he thinks like a philosopher. The philosopher, the enthusiast for Greek learning, is revealed in the spirit of his work rather than in the presence there of any definite philosophical teaching. For all the time Origen spent in the schools of Ammonius Saccas, he cannot be claimed as a neo-Platonist. God is one, incomprehensible, impassible; and in this unity there are the three hypostases Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The second term of this Trinity, the Son or Logos, is God, yet distinct from the Father, begotten from all eternity. "There never was a time when the Son was not," he said, refuting Arius a century before that heretical Alexandrian appeared; and the Son is of the [same] substance as the Father -- the Nicene teaching and even, perhaps, the Nicene formula homoousion.

So far, on these fundamental points, Origen is undoubtedly orthodox; but the faulty terminology of some of his obiter dicta led later to the suspicion that, in the matter of the relation of the Son to the Father, he taught a subordinationist theory. Like the Apologists who preceded him, he relates the generation of the Logos to the creation, and, a very serious error, he teaches a theory of eternal creation -- there never was a time, according to Origen, when there were no creatures, God's omnipotence being eternal. Here Origen's speculation leads him to the theories for which, in the centuries ahead, he was to be most savagely attacked. For the subject of this eternal creation is the world of spirits, created equal in gifts and powers and endowed with free will. From the varying degrees in which, at the moment of trial, they were faithful to the Creator there have resulted all the subsequent inequalities of the Universe, moral and physical. Of the original spirits some became angels, the hierarchy of heavenly powers; others, the sun, moon and stars; others, the souls of men; and yet others, the demons. No term has been set to this evolution, and according to their conduct it is in the power of all spirits to regain the height from which they have fallen, and, in another world which will come into being upon the consummation of this present world, to work out their new destinies. The spirits who, in greater or less degree, fell in the hour of trial are provided with bodies of one kind or another -- even the angels have a body of a " subtle " kind -- and in that union of body and soul they expiate their sin and work out their salvation. But not through their own efforts alone are they saved. They are assisted by the intervention of the Logos, Who to that end, finally Himself became incarnate, uniting Himself first to a human soul and thereby to a human body.

Jesus Christ, the Logos became man; He is then really man and really God. The redeeming death of Jesus Christ was universal in its effect, profiting not only men, but all reasonable beings wheresoever found. That this treasury may be his, however, man must co-operate with God Who offers it to him. God's help is essential, a sine qua non, but even this is powerless unless by act and will man co-operates. One form of God's help is the gift of Faith. Another is the higher gift of knowledge (gnosis). "It is much better to be convinced of our teaching by reason and knowledge than by simple faith," and Origen -- though not so enthusiastically as Clement divides the faithful into two classes according to this principle. The Christian who is " gnostic" has greater obligations. He should live austerely, practising continency, preserving virginity and living apart from the world.

After death there is the life to come, and, for most men, a certain purification in quodam eruditionis loco, through a baptism of fire. The less a man has to expiate the less will he suffer. Heaven is the full revelation of the mysteries of God and union with Christ. The old apocalyptic notion of an actual material kingdom of Christ on earth where with His saints he will reign for a thousand years Origen rejects, as he rejects the theories of the transmigration of souls. The wicked will be punished by fire -- a special kind of fire for each individual, bred of his own individual wickedness. Will this punishment last eternally. Here Origen hesitates, and except for some of the fallen angels, teaches that in the end all God's intelligent creation will be reconciled to Him. Not all will enjoy the same degree of happiness, but all will be happy in some degree.

The premises on which the vast system is based are excellent. But along with all the vast learning, and the deep thought, that produces the system, there is an amazing amount of rash conjecture and of unproved assertion. Origen is indeed "like some great river in flood, which in its very abundance, brings down together the rich fertilising mud and the sand whence comes sterility." And in this great synthesis there is one thing lacking. Nowhere does Origen, ex professo, discuss the nature of the Church itself. For good or for ill, however, he was to dominate all theological development until St. Augustine, and in the East until long after. Even his opponents were obliged, in their fight agains this influence, to use his learning and to copy his methods. St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Gregory Nazianzen, the champions of Catholicism in the doctrinal controversies of the next century, are all his pupils; for if there descended from him to the theology of the Greek-speaking Church a looseness and a vagueness from which the West was preserved, that same Church more than once found in Origen the best of defences against the speculations of heresy.