Part 3 (2/2)

Yet he asks for light: perhaps he had settled already for hiht he chose to have: but still the eye is turned upward to the sun, not inward in conceited fancy that self is its own illuht to be had for asking That prayer certainly was not answered in the letter: it may have been ere now in the spirit And yet it is a sad prayer enough Poor old man, and poor old philosophy!

This he and his teachers had gained by despising the simpler and yet far profounder doctrine of the Christian schools, that the Logos, the Divine Teacher in whom both Christians and Heathens believed, was the very archetype ofht behold His glory, full of grace and truth, and see that it was at once the perfection of man and the perfection of God: that that which was most divine was most human, and that which was most human, most divine That was the outcome of their metaphysic, that they had found the Absolute One; because One existed in whoonism between that which is eternally and that which becomes in time, between the ideal and the actual, between the spiritual and the material, in a word, between God and man, was explained and reconciled for ever

And Proclus's prayer, on the other hand, was the outcome of the Neoplatonists' metaphysic, the end of all their search after the One, the Indivisible, the Absolute, this cry to all hosts of traditions, neither things nor persons, but thoughts, to give the philosopher each so to the nature of each Not that he very clearly defines what each is to give his, and it is as well to have as many friends at court as possible-- Noetic Gods, Noeric Gods, rulers, angels, daemons, heroes--to enable him to do what? To understand Plato'sspeculations The Eternal Nous, the Intellectual Teacher has vanished further and further off; further off still some dim vision of a supreh the mist of the abyss a Primaeval One But even that has a predicate, for it is one; it is not pure essence Must there not be soain, which is not even one, but is nameless, inconceivable, absolute? What an abyss! How shall the hu whereon to rest, in the vast nowhere between it and the object of its search? The search after the One issues in a wail to the innuels, and heroes, not huh to satisfy at least the iination, step in to fill the void, as they have done since, and ain; and so, as Mr Carlyle has it, ”the botto

Are we then to say, that Neoplatonis four centuries of profound and earnest thought, added nothing?

Heaven forbid that we should say so of a philosophy which has exercised on European thought, at the crisis of its noblest life and action, an influence as great as did the Aristotelian syste the two centuries which commence with the fall of Constantinople, and end with our civil wars, not reat thinkers, but courtiers, statesmen, warriors, poets, were rated into Italy, brought with theorgeous reveries elco in the free thought of youthful manhood And yet the Alexandrian impotence for any practical and social purposes was to be manifested, as utterly as it was in Alexandria or in Athens of old Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola worked no deliverance, either for Italian morals or polity, at a tih Neoplatonisant play of the cultivated fancy, which could do their real power, their practical syste, while reading the lione, in his admirable book ”The Courtier,” puts into the ate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to dilettantisland, during Elizabeth's reign, the practical weakness of Neoplatonism was compensated by the noble practical life whichhold which they had of the ideas of family and national life, of law and personal faith

And I cannot but believe it to have been a h, and Spenser, that they had drunk, however slightly, of the wells of Proclus and Plotinus One cannot read Spenser's ”Fairy Queen,” above all his Garden of Adonis, and his cantos on Mutability, without feeling that his Neoplatonisical superstition, lish ether a freer andconception, if not a consistent or accurate one, of the wondrous hary between the physical and the spiritual, which alone makes poetry (and I had alht him to behold alike in suns and planets, in flowers and insects, in lorious order of love and wisdo them all to Hiht, e, exhausted by its own fertility, gave place to the Caroline, Neoplatonisood for us, after all, that the plain strength of the Puritans, unphilosophical as they were, swept it away One feels in reading the later Neoplatonists, Henry More, Smith, even Cudworth (valuable as he is), that the old accursed distinction between the philosopher, the scholar, the illuain very fast The school froio Medici” issued was not likely to ood, or any foolishto quote poor old Proclus as an irrefragable authority, and believing that he, forsooth, represented the sense of Plato, the new-born Baconian philosophy had but little chance in the world Bacon had been right in his dislike of Platonish he was unjust to Plato hi; Proclus as Plato's coot into the ass's skin, and was treated accordingly The true Platonic radually abandoned, reland and in Germany; and I am much mistaken, if, when fairly used, it be not found the ally, not the enemy, of the Baconian philosophy; in fact, the inductive method applied to words, as the expressions of Metaphysic Laws, instead of to natural phenomena, as the expressions of Physical ones If you wish to see the highest instances of this method, read Plato himself, not Proclus If you wish to see how the same method can be applied to Christian truth, read the dialectic passages in Augustine's ”Confessions” Whether or not you shall agree with their conclusions, you will not be likely, if you have a truly scientific habit of mind, to complain that they want either profundity, severity, or simplicity

So concludes the history of one of the Alexandrian schools of Metaphysic What was the fate of the other is a subject which I must postpone to my next Lecture

LECTURE IV--THE CROSS AND THE CRESCENT

I tried to point out, in an metaphysic of Alexandria We have now to consider the fate of the Christian school

Youabout the positive dogen, and their disciples; but have only brought out the especial points of departure between the ofold: first, I could not have exaround; next, I am very desirous to excite some of my hearers, at least, to examine these questions for themselves

I entreat them not to listen to the hasty sneer to which iven way, that the Alexandrian divines were mere mystics, who corrupted Christianity by an adht

My own belief is that they expanded and corroborated Christianity, in spite of great errors and defects on certain points, far more than they corrupted it; that they presented it to the minds of cultivated and scientific men in the only form in which it would have satisfied their philosophic aspirations, and yet contrived, onderful wisdoround their philosophy on the very saht to the meanest slaves, and to appeal in the philosophers to the same inward faculty to which they appealed in the slave; namely, to that inward eye, that moral sense and reason, whereby each and every ht” I boldly say that I believe the Alexandrian Christians to have made the best, perhaps the only, attempt yet made by men, to proclaim a true world-philosophy; whereby I mean a philosophy co the whole phenomena of humanity, and not an arbitrarily s understood and appreciated by every huhest to the lowest And when you hear of a syste, a disciplina arcani, of an esoteric and exoteric, an inner and outer school, ahtened at the words, as if they spoke of priestcraft, or an intellectual aristocracy, who kept the kernel of the nut for theave the husks to the mob It was not so with the Christian schools; it was so with the Heathen ones The Heathens were content that the mob, the herd, should have the husks Their avowed intention and as to leave the herd, as they called them, in the mere outward observance of the old idolatries, while they themselves, the cultivated philosophers, had the monopoly of those deeper spiritual truths which were contained under the old superstitions, and were too sacred to be profaned by the vulgar eyes The Christian ar eyes to enter into the very holy of holies, and there gaze on the very deepest root-ideas of their philosophy They owned no ground for their own speculations which was not common to the harlots and the slaves around And this hat enabled thee of deism, the hatred of philosophers, the persecution of princes--that their ground was a round, and not a merely intellectual one; that they started, not fro, but from the inward conscience, that truly pure Reason in which the intellectual and the moral spheres are united, which they believed to exist, however di awakened, purified, and raised up to a noble and heroic life They concealed nothing moral from their disciples: only they forbade them to ular intellectual training The witnesses of reason and conscience were sufficient guides for all ht well stop short The teacher only needed to proceed further, not into a higher region, but into a lower one, na, and there her truths which he held in coround as they

And the consequence of thiswas patent They were enabled to produce, in the lives of eneration, a more immense moral improvement than the world had ever seen before Their disciples did actually becoood men, just in proportion as they were true to the lessons they learnt

They did, for centuries, work a distinct and palpable deliverance on the earth; while all the soleood or true, worked no deliverance whatsoever Plotinus longed at one time to make a practical attempt He asked the Emperor Gallienus, his patron, to rebuild for him a city in Campania; to allow him to call it Platonopolis, and put it into the hands of hiht there realise Plato's ideal republic

Luckily for the reputation of Neoplatonism, the scheme amped by the courtiers of Gallienus, and the earth was saved the sad and ludicrous sight of a realised Laputa; probably a very quarrelsohest practical conception: the foundation of a new society: not the regeneration of society as it existed

That as left for the Christian schools; and up to a certain point they perforood This was the test, which of the schools was in the right: this was the test, which of the two had hold of the eternal roots of metaphysic Cicero says, that he had learnt more philosophy from the Laws of the Twelve Tables than froht have said the same of the Hebrew Ten Coous to the old Roman laws, founded, as they are, on the belief in a Supre, a Jupiter--literally a Heavenly Father--who is the source and the sanction of law; of whose justice ainst e, property, life; on whoreat things with small, there was a truly practical hu; purely ethical and metaphysical, and yet palpable to the si force which the highest efforts of Neoplatonism could never attain

And yet Alexandrian Christianity, notoriously enough, rotted away, and perished hideously Most true But what if the causes of its decay and death were owing to its being untrue to itself?

I do not say that they had no excuses for being untrue to their own faith We are not here to judge them That peculiar subtlety of reat thinkers of the then world, had with Christians, as well as Heathens, the effect of alluring them away from practice to speculation The Christian school, as was to be expected froround of their philosophy, yielded to it far more slowly than the Heathen, but they did yield, and especially after they had conquered and expelled the Heathen school Moreover, the long battle with the Heathen school had stirred up in them habits of exclusiveness, of denunciation; the spirit which cannot assert a fact, without dog that fact Their minds assu noeach other, exco to all who differed froht, to clairound of their philosophy Not that they would have refused the Logos to allthe existence of the Logos in everyon his existence in practice, and treating the heretic as one who had that within himatists; that is, et that a truth is meant to be used, and not merely asserted--if, indeed, the fierce assertion of a truth in frail n of some secret doubt of it, and in inverse proportion to his practical living faith in it: just as he who is always telling you that he is a man, is not the most likely to behave like a ot practically that the light proceeded fromas deduced from the notion of His personality: but they were shut up in those notions; they had forgotten that if He was a Person, His eye was on thedom within them; and that if He was a Person, He had a character, and that that character was a righteous and a loving character: and therefore they were not ashamas about Him, to commit acts abhorrent to His character, to lie, to slander, to intrigue, to hate, even to lory: but which was really only their own glory--the glory of their own dogmas; of propositions and conclusions in their own brain, which, true or false, were equally heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as ords of division Orthodox or unorthodox, they lost the knowledge of God, for they lost the knowledge of righteousness, and love, and peace That Divine Logos, and theology as a whole, receded further and further aloft into abyshts, as it beca no practical bearing on their hearts and lives; and then they, as the Neoplatonists had done before thees, base Fetish worshi+ps, which ard them, and I believe justly, as polytheists and idolaters, base as the pagan Arabs of the desert

I cannot but believe the of Clement and his school, in that coarse and materialist admiration of celibacy which ruined Alexandrian society, as their doght The Creed which taught theos, that which was most divine had been proved to be most human, that which was ht surely to have given to theiven to modern Europe, nobler, clearer, simpler views of the true relation of the sexes However, on this matter they did not see their way

Perhaps, in so debased an age, so profligate a world, as that out of which Christianity had risen, it was impossible to see the true beauty and sanctity of those primary bonds of humanity And while the relation of the sexes was looked on in a wrong light, all other social relations were necessarily also misconceived ”The very ideas of family and national life,” as it has been said, ”those two divine roots of the Church, severed from which she is certain to wither away into that ious world, had perished in the East, from the evil influence of the universal practice of slave- holding, as well as froes the great witness for these ideas; and all classes, like their forefather Adam--like, indeed, the Old Adam--the selfish, cowardly, brute nature in everythe blame of sin from their own consciences to human relationshi+ps and duties, and therein, to the God who had appointed theavest to be with ave me of the tree, and I did eat'”

Much as Christianity did, even in Egypt, for wo her moral and spiritual equality with the man, there seems to have been no suspicion that she was the true co hi him; that true manhood can be no more developed without the influence of the woman, than true womanhood without the influence of the yptian celibates of that chivalrous woht with theht round the mediaeval convent life, and warded off for centuries the worst effects of arded the nun, the nun the monk, with dread and aversion; while both looked on the married population of the opposite sex with a coarse conteust which is hardly credible, did not the foul records of it stand written to this day, in Rosweyde's extraordinary ”Vitae Patrum Eremiticorum;” no barren school of h to believe that all phenomena whatsoever of the human mind are worthy ypt 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, aeffect on the lay population; who, told that they were, and believing the by a lower standard, sank down eneration 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 Byzantiuacy 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 cule of Justinian and Theodora, perhaps the two ns, worshi+pped by the most hideous empire of parasites and hypocrites, cowards and wantons, that ever insulted the long-suffering of a righteous God