CHAPTER IV. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA, EPHRAEM SYRUS, AND WE come now to another level, more within the ordinary horizon of sacred song-to hymns whose range has been less extended, and of whose writers we can form a more definite picture. The singers, as well as the songs, become perceptible; although, in some instances, the songs seem more familiar to us, less estranged by the foreign garb of distant lands and ages than the singers. The truths of the hymns come home to our hearts, whilst the mode of life and thought of the writers often seems difficult to understand. Of all the cities on that great inland sea which once washed the shores of every civilised state in the world, perhaps none serve better as a tide-mark to shew how far the centre of the social world has glided westward than Alexandria. Rome is still imperial, and it is the nature rather than the locality of her empire which has changed; Constantinople is still the centre of its own system, feeble and ruinous as both centre and system are; Jerusalem, as of old, is the holy city of faith; but Alexandria, still indeed busy and flourishing, is busy and flourishing only as the channel of traffic from western regions, which were backwoods and copper-diggings when her palaces first rose. White palaces and quays still gleam across the blue Mediterranean, breaking the sandy glow of the flat Egyptian shores; the streets are thronged with eager motley crowds, and luxurious villas, with their gardens, fringe the suburbs; but the motion is galvanic, communicated by impulse from without, not flowing from life within; English and French merchants are her princes, the city is but a great inn on the overland route, and if the great Oriental traffic could find other channels, Alexandria might soon sink into a silent, ruinous, dreamy Turkish village, like Tyre or Sidon. Sixteen hundred years ago it was indeed different, and to understand, in any measure, any life which was lived there then, we must clothe the skeleton, we must transform the dry dead names in the ancient atlas into pictures. About the close of the second century, when Clement was called to be the head of the catechetical school at Alexandria, he was called to a centre of thought and life from which the slightest touch vibrated in a thousand directions. His own intellectual history illustrates strongly the contrast between the past and the present. He seems to have been a merchantman seeking goodly pearls, until he found, at length, the pearl of great price. He wandered restlessly from school to school, seeking, it seems, not to become learned, but to find truth; not content, as an intellectual curiosity-hunter, to hoard up treasures of information, he wanted some living truth to live upon. His search was long. One of his teachers came from Ionia, the old birthplace of Greek science and poetry, fires not yet quite burnt into ashes. Clement seems, however, chiefly to have drawn from Oriental sources. His two next teachers were a Colo-Syrian and an Assyrian-names that recall associations too ancient and shadowy to picture, histories whose skeleton is scarcely left to us, but only the dry embalmed mummy, which passes into dust as you open the tomb, before you can tell what you have seen. Did thoughtful and educated men, indeed, then live on the Colo-Syrian plain, and converse beneath the grand porticoes of the temples at Baalbec? Were animated philosophical debates held under the shadow of those magnificent columns which now stand so solitary and obsolete, scarcely able to tell us their own history? And at night, when the glorious Syrian moon silvered the snows of Lebanon, and threw the gigantic shadows of those temples across the great spaces of their courts, did men watch there, whom all this beauty led to question what lay beneath and beyond? Many centuries have passed, indeed, since men have looked for intellectual light, as Clement did, from Asia Minor, Assyria, and the Lebanon plains. The heavy black pall of Mohammedanism has fallen over them all, yet surely not before the life had fled. Clement had one other teacher, a Jew from Palestine. The great Light which shone for a time in bodily presence on the shores of the Sea of Galilee had been rejected, and had withdrawn itself; the sentence of death had fallen on the cities of Galilee, but it was not yet executed to the full. Tiberias was the seat of a school of Jewish rabbis, and on the shores of the Sea of Galilee Clement could still listen to the voices of Scribes and Pharisees, himself yet ignorant of the Voice which had silenced their lifeless commentaries, of the beneficent footsteps which had once trod those shores and those waves, bringing health to the sick and suffering there. But it was at Alexandria that Clement first learned the Divine word which could solve the riddles of philosophers and rabbis. Here, at length, he found what he had unconsciously sought, redemption and spiritual strength in a living Redeemer, and here his wanderings ended. Pantænus, the catechetical Christian teacher from whom he learned Christianity, after a time went as a missionary into India, and Clement took his place. He had found a truth it was worth while to spend life in communicating. For such a mission no more central spot existed than Alexandria. A mart, as now, of eastern and western traffic, merchants resorted thither from all quarters; to the south stretched the great Egyptian granary of Rome; along the coasts of Syria, and Asia Minor, and Northern Africa were rich cultivated lands, and a busy manufacturing population; the seas all around were specked with countless sails of vessels, trading, in short voyages, from island to island and city to city. With their merchandise these vessels, like the Alexandrian corn-ship wrecked at Melita, carried the heralds of the new doctrine. The commercial cities where the Jews had planted their synagogues, became everywhere the sites of infant churches. At Alexandria was the great mint and exchange for Oriental and European thought. Mystical and undefined Oriental visions, acute and comprehensive Greek theories, narrow and imperious rabbinical dogmas met here, and were exchanged or re-coined. In the midst of all these Clement taught, not so much in the pulpit of a lecture-room, or a church, as in the philoso pher's cloak, pacing up and down the shady porticoes. To him these varied phases of thought were no mere theories known as to a critic from outside. He had learned them by trying them. Many of these streams had flowed in succession through his own mind, and he knew what they could give and what they could not give. They had formed part, not merely of the catalogue of his acquirements, but of the experience of his heart. In these respects he had some of the qualifications of St Paul. But the flood of Christian truth had not rushed with such force through his mind as entirely to sweep away all remains of falsehood, leaving, as with St Paul, only the sympathy of memory with those in error. His eyes do not seem always to have been clear to see the grandeur of simple truth above the high-sounding theories of his time. He did not always perceive how much deeper the simplest faith which brings into communion with God is, than the most profound reasoning about the things of God. The fashion of this world, and, therefore, the doom of this world, seems to have been on much of his teaching, and so far it has "passed away." Yet many words are quoted from his writings, immortal because really living. Although we know absolutely nothing of Clement, except of his intellectual or spiritual history; although his home (if he had one) is altogether hidden from us, and he is to us rather a voice than a man; yet we must own some familiar communion of the heart from which flowed such words as these : "Prayer, if I may speak so boldly, is intercourse with God. Even if we do but lisp, even though we silently |
