Alexandria and Her Schools

And thus grew up in Egypt a monastic world, of such vastness that it was said to equal in number the laity.  This produced, no doubt, an enormous increase in the actual amount of moral evil.  But it produced three other effects, which were the ruin of Alexandria.  First, a continually growing enervation and numerical decrease of the population; next, a carelessness of, and contempt for social and political life; and lastly, a most brutalising effect on the lay population; who, told that they were, and believing themselves to be, beings of a lower order, and living by a lower standard, sank down more and more generation after generation.  They were of the world, and the ways of the world they must follow.  Political life had no inherent sanctity or nobleness; why act holily and nobly in it?  Family life had no inherent sanctity or nobleness; why act holily and nobly in it either, if there were no holy, noble, and divine principle or ground for it?  And thus grew up, both in Egypt, Syria, and Byzantium, a chaos of profligacy and chicanery, in rulers and people, in the home and the market, in the theatre and the senate, such as the world has rarely seen before or since; a chaos which reached its culmination in the seventh century, the age of Justinian and Theodora, perhaps the two most hideous sovereigns, worshipped by the most hideous empire of parasites and hypocrites, cowards and wantons, that ever insulted the long-suffering of a righteous God.

But, for Alexandria at least, the cup was now full.  In the year 640 the Alexandrians were tearing each other in pieces about some Jacobite and Melchite controversy, to me incomprehensible, to you unimportant, because the fighters on both sides seem to have lost (as all parties do in their old age) the knowledge of what they were fighting for, and to have so bewildered the question with personal intrigues, spites, and quarrels, as to make it nearly as enigmatic as that famous contemporary war between the blue and green factions at Constantinople, which began by backing in the theatre, the charioteers who drove in blue dresses, against those wild drove in green; then went on to identify themselves each with one of the prevailing theological factions; gradually developed, the one into an aristocratic, the other into a democratic, religious party; and ended by a civil war in the streets of Constantinople, accompanied by the most horrible excesses, which had nearly, at one time, given up the city to the flames, and driven Justinian from his throne.

In the midst of these Jacobite and Melchite controversies and riots, appeared before the city the armies of certain wild and unlettered Arab tribes.  A short and fruitless struggle followed; and, strange to say, a few months swept away from the face of the earth, not only the wealth, the commerce, the castles, and the liberty, but the philosophy and the Christianity of Alexandria; crushed to powder by one fearful blow, all that had been built up by Alexander and the Ptolemies, by Clement and the philosophers, and made void, to all appearance, nine hundred years of human toil.  The people, having no real hold on their hereditary Creed, accepted, by tens of thousands, that of the Mussulman invaders.  The Christian remnant became tributaries; and Alexandria dwindled, from that time forth, into a petty seaport town.

And now—can we pass over this new metaphysical school of Alexandria? Can we help inquiring in what the strength of Islamism lay?  I, at least, cannot.  I cannot help feeling that I am bound to examine in what relation the creed of Omar and Amrou stands to the Alexandrian speculations of five hundred years, and how it had power to sweep those speculations utterly from the Eastern mind.  It is a difficult problem; to me, as a Christian priest, a very awful problem.  What more awful historic problem, than to see the lower creed destroying the higher? to see God, as it were, undoing his own work, and repenting Him that He had made man?  Awful indeed: but I can honestly say, that it is one from the investigation of which I have learnt—I cannot yet tell how much: and of this I am sure, that without that old Alexandrian philosophy, I should not have been able to do justice to Islam; without Islam I should not have been able to find in that Alexandrian philosophy, an ever-living and practical element.

I must, however, first entreat you to dismiss from your minds the vulgar notion that Mohammed was in anywise a bad man, or a conscious deceiver, pretending to work miracles, or to do things which he did not do.  He sinned in one instance: but, as far as I can see, only in that one—I mean against what he must have known to be right.  I allude to his relaxing in his own case those wise restrictions on polygamy which he had proclaimed.  And yet, even in this case, the desire for a child may have been the true cause of his weakness.  He did not see the whole truth, of course: but he was an infinitely better man than the men around: perhaps, all in all, one of the best men of his day.  Many here may have read Mr. Carlyle’s vindication of Mohammed in his Lectures on Hero Worship; to those who have not, I shall only say, that I entreat them to do so; and that I assure them, that though I differ in many things utterly from Mr. Carlyle’s inferences and deductions in that lecture, yet that I am convinced, from my own acquaintance with the original facts and documents, that the picture there drawn of Mohammed is a true and a just description of a much-calumniated man.

Now, what was the strength of Islam?  The common answer is, fanaticism and enthusiasm.  To such answers I can only rejoin: Such terms must be defined before they are used, and we must be told what fanaticism and enthusiasm are.  Till then I have no more à priori respect for a long word ending in -ism or -asm than I have for one ending in -ation or -ality.  But while fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined—a work more difficult than is commonly fancied—we will go on to consider another answer.  We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope of their sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna.  If so, this is the first and last time in the world’s history that the strength of any large body of people—perhaps of any single man—lay in such a hope.  History gives us innumerable proofs that such merely selfish motives are the parents of slavish impotence, of pedantry and conceit, of pious frauds, often of the most devilish cruelty: but, as far as my reading extends, of nothing better.  Moreover, the Christian Greeks had much the same hopes on those points as the Mussulmans; and similar causes should produce similar effects: but those hopes gave them no strength.  Besides, according to the Mussulmans’ own account, this was not their great inspiring idea; and it is absurd to consider the wild battle-cries of a few imaginative youths, about black-eyed and green-kerchiefed Houris calling to them from the skies, as representing the average feelings of a generation of sober and self-restraining men, who showed themselves actuated by far higher motives.

Another answer, and one very popular now, is that the Mussulmans were strong, because they believed what they said; and the Greeks weak, because they did not believe what they said.  From this notion I shall appeal to another doctrine of the very same men who put it forth, and ask them, Can any man be strong by believing a lie?  Have you not told us, nobly enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to death, certain to prove its own impotence, and be shattered to atoms the moment you try to use it, to bring it into rude actual contact with fact, and Nature, and the eternal laws?  Faith to be strong must be faith in something which is not one’s self; faith in something eternal, something objective, something true, which would exist just as much though we and all the world disbelieved it.  The strength of belief comes from that which is believed in; if you separate it from that, it becomes a mere self-opinion, a sensation of positiveness; and what sort of strength that will give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the Jews who opposed Titus, of the rabble who followed Walter the Penniless to the Crusades, of the Munster Anabaptists, and many another sad page of human folly.  It may give the fury of idiots; not the deliberate might of valiant men.  Let us pass this by, then; believing that faith can only give strength where it is faith in something true and right: and go on to another answer almost as popular as the last.

We are told that the might of Islam lay in a certain innate force and savage virtue of the Arab character.  If we have discovered this in the followers of Mohammed, they certainly had not discovered it in themselves.  They spoke of themselves, rightly or wrongly, as men who had received a divine light, and that light a moral light, to teach them to love that which was good, and refuse that which was evil; and to that divine light they stedfastly and honestly attributed every right action of their lives.  Most noble and affecting, in my eyes, is that answer of Saad’s aged envoy to Yezdegird, king of Persia, when he reproached him with the past savagery and poverty of the Arabs.  “Whatsoever thou hast said,” answered the old man, “regarding the former condition of the Arabs is true.  Their food was green lizards; they buried their infant daughters alive; nay, some of them feasted on dead carcases, and drank blood; while others slew their kinsfolk, and thought themselves great and valiant, when by so doing they became possessed of more property.  They were clothed with hair garments, they knew not good from evil, and made no distinction between that which was lawful and unlawful.  Such was our state; but God in his mercy has sent us, by a holy prophet, a sacred volume, which teaches us the true faith.”

These words, I think, show us the secret of Islam.  They are a just comment on that short and rugged chapter of the Koran which is said to have been Mohammed’s first attempt either at prophecy or writing; when, after long fasting and meditation among the desert hills, under the glorious eastern stars, he came down and told his good Kadijah that he had found a great thing, and that she must help him to write it down.  And what was this which seemed to the unlettered camel-driver so priceless a treasure?  Not merely that God was one God—vast as that discovery was—but that he was a God “who showeth to man the thing which he knew not;” a “most merciful God;” a God, in a word, who could be trusted; a God who would teach and strengthen; a God, as he said, who would give him courage to set his face like a flint, and would put an answer in his mouth when his idolatrous countrymen cavilled and sneered at his message to them, to turn from their idols of wood and stone, and become righteous men, as Abraham their forefather was righteous.

“A God who showeth to man the thing which he knew not.”  That idea gave might to Islam, because it was a real idea, an eternal fact; the result of a true insight into the character of God.  And that idea alone, believe me, will give conquering might either to creed, philosophy, or heart of man.  Each will be strong, each will endure, in proportion as it believes that God is one who shows to man the thing which he knew not: as it believes, in short, in that Logos of which Saint John wrote, that He was the light who lightens every man who comes into the world.

In a word, the wild Koreish had discovered, more or less clearly, that end and object of all metaphysic whereof I have already spoken so often; that external and imperishable beauty for which Plato sought of old; and had seen that its name was righteousness, and that it dwelt absolutely in an absolutely righteous person; and moreover, that this person was no careless self-contented epicurean deity; but that He was, as they loved to call Him, the most merciful God; that He cared for men; that He desired to make men righteous.  Of that they could not doubt.  The fact was palpable, historic, present.  To them the degraded Koreish of the desert, who as they believed, and I think believed rightly, had fallen from the old Monotheism of their forefathers Abraham and Ismael, into the lowest fetishism, and with that into the lowest brutality and wretchedness—to them, while they were making idols of wood and stone; eating dead carcases; and burying their daughters alive; careless of chastity, of justice, of property; sunk in unnatural crimes, dead in trespasses and sins; hateful and hating one another—a man, one of their own people had come, saying: “I have a message from the one righteous God.  His curse is on all this, for it is unlike Himself.  He will have you righteous men, after the pattern of your forefather Abraham.  Be that, and arise, body, soul, and spirit, out of your savagery and brutishness.  Then you shall be able to trample under font the profligate idolaters, to sweep the Greek tyrants from the land which they have been oppressing for centuries, and to recover the East for its rightful heirs, the children of Abraham.”  Was this not, in every sense, a message from God?  I must deny the philosophy of Clement and Augustine, I must deny my own conscience, my own reason, I must outrage my own moral sense, and confess that I have no immutable standard of right, that I know no eternal source of right, if I deny it to have been one; if I deny what seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those wild Koreish had in them a reason and a conscience, which could awaken to that message, and perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless importance, and that they did accept that message, and lived by it in proportion as they received it fully, such lives as no men in those times, and few in after times, have been able to live.  If I feel, as I do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men than I am, I must throw away all that Philo—all that a Higher authority—has taught me: or I must attribute their lofty virtues to the one source of all in man which is not selfishness, and fancy, and fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish.

Why, then, has Islamism become one of the most patent and complete failures upon earth, if the true test of a system’s success be the gradual progress and amelioration of the human beings who are under its influence?  First, I believe, from its allowing polygamy.  I do not judge Mohammed for having allowed it.  He found it one of the ancestral and immemorial customs of his nation.  He found it throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.  He found it in the case of Abraham, his ideal man; and, as he believed, the divinely-inspired ancestor of his race.  It seemed to him that what was right for Abraham, could not be wrong for an Arab.  God shall judge him, not I.  Moreover, the Christians of the East, divided into either monks or profligates; and with far lower and more brutal notions of the married state than were to be found in Arab poetry and legend, were the very last men on earth to make him feel the eternal and divine beauty of that pure wedded love which Christianity has not only proclaimed, but commanded, and thereby emancipated woman from her old slavery to the stronger sex.  And I believe, from his chivalrous faithfulness to his good wife Kadijah, as long as she lived, that Mohammed was a man who could have accepted that great truth in all its fulness, had he but been taught it.  He certainly felt the evil of polyamy so strongly as to restrict it in every possible way, except the only right way—namely, the proclamation of the true ideal of marriage.  But his ignorance, mistake, sin, if you will, was a deflection from the right law, from the true constitution of man, and therefore it avenged itself.  That chivalrous respect for woman, which was so strong in the early Mohammedans, died out.  The women themselves—who, in the first few years of Islamism, rose as the men rose, and became their helpmates, counsellors, and fellow-warriors—degenerated rapidly into mere playthings.  I need not enter into the painful subject of woman’s present position in the East, and the social consequences thereof.  But I firmly believe, not merely as a theory, but as a fact which may be proved by abundant evidence, that to polygamy alone is owing nine-tenths of the present decay and old age of every Mussulman nation; and that till it be utterly abolished, all Western civilisation and capital, and all the civil and religious liberty on earth, will not avail one jot toward their revival.  You must regenerate the family before you can regenerate the nation, and the relation of husband and wife before the family; because, as long as the root is corrupt, the fruit will be corrupt also.

But there is another cause of the failure of Islamism, more intimately connected with those metaphysical questions which we have been hitherto principally considering.

Among the first Mussulmans, as I have said, there was generally the most intense belief in each man that he was personally under a divine guide and teacher.  But their creed contained nothing which could keep up that belief in the minds of succeeding generations.  They had destroyed the good with the evil, and they paid the penalty of their undistinguishing wrath.  In sweeping away the idolatries and fetish worships of the Syrian Catholics, the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which alone can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships—if not outward and material ones, yet the still more subtle, and therefore more dangerous idolatries of the intellect.  For they had swept away the belief in the Logos; in a divine teacher of every human soul, who was, in some mysterious way, the pattern and antitype of human virtue and wisdom.  And more, they had swept away that belief in the incarnation of the Logos, which alone can make man feel that his divine teacher is one who can enter into the human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human spirit.  And, therefore, when Mohammed and his personal friends were dead, the belief in a present divine teacher, on the whole, died with them; and the Mussulmans began to put the Koran in the place of Him of whom the Koran spoke.  They began to worship the book—which after all is not a book, but only an irregular collection of Mohammed’s meditations, and notes for sermons—with the most slavish and ridiculous idolatry.  They fell into a cabbalism, and a superstitious reverence for the mere letters and words of the Koran, to which the cabbalism of the old Rabbis was moderate and rational.  They surrounded it, and the history of Mohammed, with all ridiculous myths, and prodigies, and lying wonders, whereof the book itself contained not a word; and which Mohammed, during his existence, had denied and repudiated, saying that he worked no miracles, and that none were needed; because only reason was required to show a man the hand of a good God in all human affairs.  Nevertheless, these later Mussulmans found the miracles necessary to confirm their faith: and why?  Because they had lost the sense of a present God, a God of order; and therefore hankered, as men in such a mood always will, after prodigious and unnatural proofs of His having been once present with their founder Mohammed.

And in the meanwhile that absolute and omnipotent Being whom Mohammed, arising out of his great darkness, had so nobly preached to the Koreish, receded in the minds of their descendants to an unapproachable and abysmal distance.  For they had lost the sense of His present guidance, His personal care.  They had lost all which could connect Him with the working of their own souls, with their human duties and struggles, with the belief that His mercy and love were counterparts of human mercy and human love; in plain English, that He was loving and merciful at all.  The change came very gradually, thank God; you may read of noble sayings and deeds here and there, for many centuries after Mohammed: but it came; and then their belief in God’s omnipotence and absoluteness dwindled into the most dark, and slavish, and benumbing fatalism.  His unchangeableness became in their minds not an unchangeable purpose to teach, forgive, and deliver men—as it seemed to Mohammed to have been—but a mere brute necessity, an unchangeable purpose to have His own way, whatsoever that way might be.  That dark fatalism, also, has helped toward the decay of the Mohammedan nations.  It has made them careless of self-improvement; faithless of the possibility of progress; and has kept, and will keep, the Mohammedan nations, in all intellectual matters, whole ages behind the Christian nations of the West.

How far the story of Omar’s commanding the baths of Alexandria to be heated with the books from the great library is true, we shall never know.  Some have doubted the story altogether: but so many fresh corroborations of it are said to have been lately discovered, in Arabic writers, that I can hardly doubt that it had some foundation in fact.  One cannot but believe that John Philoponus, the last of the Alexandrian grammarians, when he asked his patron Amrou the gift of the library, took care to save some, at least, of its treasures; and howsoever strongly Omar may have felt or said that all books which agreed with the Koran were useless, and all which disagreed with it only fit to be destroyed, the general feeling of the Mohammedan leaders was very different.  As they settled in the various countries which they conquered, education seems to have been considered by them an important object.  We even find some of them, in the same generation as Mohammed, obeying strictly the Prophet’s command to send all captive children to school—a fact which speaks as well for the Mussulmans’ good sense, as it speaks ill for the state of education among the degraded descendants of the Greek conquerors of the East.  Gradually philosophic Schools arose, first at Bagdad, and then at Cordova; and the Arabs carried on the task of commenting on Aristotle’s Logic, and Ptolemy’s Megiste Syntaxis—which last acquired from them the name of Almagest, by which it was so long known during the Middle Ages.

But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or mystic element in their commentaries.  It seems as if Alexandria was preordained, by its very central position, to be the city of commentators, not of originators.  It is worthy of remark, that Philoponus, who may be considered as the man who first introduced the simple warriors of the Koreish to the treasures of Greek thought, seems to have been the first rebel against the Neoplatonist eclecticism.  He maintained, and truly, that Porphyry, Proclus, and the rest, had entirely misunderstood Aristotle, when they attempted to reconcile him with Plato, or incorporate his philosophy into Platonism.  Aristotle was henceforth the text-book of Arab savants.  It was natural enough.  The Mussulman mind was trained in habits of absolute obedience to the authority of fixed dogmas.  All those attempts to follow out metaphysic to its highest object, theology, would be useless if not wrong in the eyes of a Mussulman, who had already his simple and sharply-defined creed on all matters relating to the unseen world.  With him metaphysic was a study altogether divorced from man’s higher life and aspirations.  So also were physics.  What need had he of Cosmogonies? what need to trace the relations between man and the universe, or the universe and its Maker?  He had his definite material Elysium and Tartarus, as the only ultimate relation between man and the universe; his dogma of an absolute fiat, creating arbitrary and once for all, as the only relation between the universe and its Maker: and further it was not lawful to speculate.  The idea which I believe unites both physic and metaphysic with man’s highest inspirations and widest speculations—the Alexandria idea of the Logos, of the Deity working in time and space by successive thoughts—he had not heard of; for it was dead, as I have said, in Alexandria itself; and if he had heard of it, he would have spurned it as detracting from the absoluteness of that abysmal one Being, of whom he so nobly yet so partially bore witness.  So it was to be; doubtless it was right that it should be so.  Man’s eye is too narrow to see a whole truth, his brain too weak to carry a whole truth.  Better for him, and better for the world, is perhaps the method on which man has been educated in every age, by which to each school, or party, or nation, is given some one great truth, which they are to work out to its highest development, to exemplify in actual life, leaving some happier age—perhaps, alas! only some future state—to reconcile that too favoured dogma with other truths which lie beside it, and without which it is always incomplete, and sometimes altogether barren.

But such schools of science, founded on such a ground as this, on the mere instinct of curiosity, had little chance of originality or vitality.  All the great schools of the world, the elder Greek philosophy, the Alexandrian, the present Baconian school of physics, have had a deeper motive for their search, a far higher object which they hope to discover.  But indeed, the Mussulmans did not so much wish to discover truth, as to cultivate their own intellects.  For that purpose a sharp and subtle systematist, like Aristotle, was the very man whom they required; and from the destruction of Alexandria may date the rise of the Aristotelian philosophy.  Translations of his works were made into Arabic, first, it is said, from Persian and Syriac translations; the former of which had been made during the sixth and seventh centuries, by the wreck of the Neoplatonist party, during their visit to the philosophic Chozroos.  A century after, they filled Alexandria.  After them Almansoor, Hairoun Alraschid, and their successors, who patronised the Nestorian Christians, obtained from them translations of the philosophic, medical, and astronomical Greek works; while the last of the Omniades, Abdalrahman, had introduced the same literary taste into Spain, where, in the thirteenth century, Averroës and Maimonides rivalled the fame of Avicenna, who had flourished at Bagdad a century before.

But, as I have said already, these Arabs seem to have invented nothing; they only commented.  And yet not only commented; for they preserved for us those works of whose real value they were so little aware.  Averroës, in quality of commentator on Aristotle, became his rival in the minds of the mediæval schoolmen; Avicenna, in quality of commentator on Hippocrates and Galen, was for centuries the text-book of all European physicians; while Albatani and Aboul Wefa, as astronomers, commented on Ptolemy, not however without making a few important additions to his knowledge; for Aboul Wefa discovered a third inequality of the moon’s motion, in addition to the two mentioned by Ptolemy, which he did, according to Professor Whewell, in a truly philosophic manner—an apparently solitary instance, and one which, in its own day, had no effect; for the fact was forgotten, and rediscovered centuries after by Tycho Brahe.  To Albatani, however, we owe two really valuable heirlooms.  The one is the use of the sine, or half-chord of the double arc, instead of the chord of the arc itself, which had been employed by the Greek astronomers; the other, of even more practical benefit, was the introduction of the present decimal arithmetic, instead of the troublesome sexagesimal arithmetic of the Greeks.  These ten digits, however, seem, says Professor Whewell, by the confession of the Arabians themselves, to be of Indian origin, and thus form no exception to the sterility of the Arabian genius in scientific inventions.  Nevertheless we are bound, in all fairness, to set against his condemnation of the Arabs Professor De Morgan’s opinion of the Moslem, in his article on Euclid: “Some writers speak slightingly of this progress, the results of which they are too apt to compare with those of our own time.  They ought rather to place the Saracens by the side of their own Gothic ancestors; and making some allowance for the more advantageous circumstances under which the first started, they should view the second systematically dispersing the remains of Greek civilisation, while the first were concentrating the geometry of Alexandria, the arithmetic and algebra of India, and the astronomy of both, to form a nucleus for the present state of science.”

To this article of Professor De Morgan’s on Euclid,² and to Professor Whewell’s excellent “History of the Inductive Sciences,” from which I, being neither Arabic scholar nor astronomer, have drawn most of my facts about physical science, I must refer those who wish to know more of the early rise of physics, and of their preservation by the Arabs, till a great and unexpected event brought them back again to the quarter of the globe where they had their birth, and where alone they could be regenerated into a new and practical life.

That great event was the Crusades.  We have heard little of Alexandria lately.  Its intellectual glory had departed westward and eastward, to Cordova and to Bagdad; its commercial greatness had left it for Cairo and Damietta.  But Egypt was still the centre of communication between the two great stations of the Moslem power, and indeed, as Mr. Lane has shown in his most valuable translation of the “Arabian Nights,” possessed a peculiar life and character of its own.

It was the rash object of the Crusaders to extinguish that life.  Palestine was their first point of attack: but the later Crusaders seem to have found, like the rest of the world, that the destinies of Palestine could not be separated from those of Egypt; and to Damietta, accordingly, was directed that last disastrous attempt of St. Louis, which all may read so graphically described in the pages of Joinville.