The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

by Justin Pollard

  The first of these is Thought or Intellect (Nous). Intellect is the home of all of Plato’s forms, the repository of the cognitive identity of all things and the way we recognize things to be as they are, by perceiving them in ideal type. Intellect thus provides the principle or essence of all things. And from Intellect emanates the Soul.

  Soul is related by analogy to Intellect in the same way that Intellect is related to the One; that is, put crudely, Intellect is the sum of all the Souls in existence. Beneath Soul is mere matter, the stuff of the universe, including our own bodies, which Plotinus so despised.

  With respect to Soul, Plotinus departs from Plato by splitting it in two. His view is that in all things, and especially people, there is an upper Soul, which remains pure, divine, and untarnished eternally; and there is a lower Soul, which, though it is actually divine, may become tarnished and forget its divine origin as it provides the motivation for material beings (in our own cases our bodies) to find their way through the trials of a conscious life. In Plotinus’s view the way to discover our upper Soul and restore our tarnished lower Soul is through ethics. The keys to human salvation are thus the cultivation of Virtue, which refreshes the Soul with divine Beauty; the practice of “dialectics” (debate), which reveals the true nature of Souls; and finally through Contemplation, which is the proper occupation of the purified Soul.

  Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky, it is the maker of the sun, itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion, and it is a principle distinct from all these to which it gives law and movement and life, and it must of necessity be more honorable than they, for they gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being.

  Plotinus, Enneads, 5, 2.1

  The legacy of these ideas was enormous, not just in the last days of the pagan ancient world but throughout later history. In the later classical world the theological traditions of Christianity (most particularly in the work of Saint Augustine), Islam, and Judaism all looked to Platonic philosophy, as described by Plotinus, as a method for formulating and articulating their own theologies. After the obscurity of the medieval period, the Enneads reemerged in 1492 as one of the driving forces behind the writings of the Italian Renaissance philosophers and in the works of humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More.

  Plotinus’s influence further continued into the seventeenth century in the works of the Cambridge Platonists, and by the eighteenth century Plotinus was recognized as one of the formative influences on Western Christianity, as the classicist Lemprière noted:

  He was the favourite of all the Romans, and while he charmed the populace by the force of his eloquence, and the Senate by his doctrines, the emperor Galienus courted him, and admired the extent of his learning. . . . He was a great mystic, and his Neoplatonism had a profound effect upon the theology and philosophy of the Christian Church.

  Lemprière, Classical Dictionary Writ Large, pp. 500-501

  The German idealists of the following century, especially Hegel, considered Plotinus’s work the basis for their opposition to the growing schools of scientific philosophy, and his influence can even be traced in the twentieth-century Christian imaginative literature in England, spearheaded by C. S. Lewis. Few philosophies have lasted so long, appealing to so many peoples of different nations and from different times, all of whom have in their own ways tried to live up to Plotinus’s last injunction, as recorded by his student and personal physician, Eustochius of Alexandria, as the master lay on his deathbed: “Strive to give back the Divine in yourselves to the Divine in the All” (Eustochius of Alexandria, Letter to Porphyry).

  Only one other philosophy has lasted as many centuries as that of Plotinus, and it was championed by his own fellow student in the secret lectures of Ammonius Saccas. He was about twenty years older than Plotinus and of the other great emerging school of thought in Alexandria: Christianity.

  Origen, or more properly Origenes Adamantius, was born and brought up in Alexandria as a Christian by his father, Leonides, a Greek teacher, and his mother, who was Jewish and taught him to sing the psalms in Hebrew. His father gave him an excellent education, and as an adolescent he attended the lectures of both Clement at the catechetical school and those of Ammonius in his school of philosophy. His precocious brilliance attracted such attention, it is said, that by the time he was seventeen his father was known as “Leonides, father of Origen.”

  But in that year (202) the emperor Septimius Severus ordered another of the periodic persecutions of Christians, and Leonides was dragged from his house by Roman soldiers. Origen, the oldest of seven children, insisted upon accompanying his father, but, according to the story, his mother hid his shoes or his clothes. Still, he followed his father to the Caesareum, where he saw him executed, his head thrown onto a pile of heads, his body cast aside.

  As was the practice in those days, all of the Christian Leonides’ property was confiscated by the state, and Origen, his mother, and his six brothers were left destitute. Origen was forced to provide for his family by teaching and copying manuscripts until a new opportunity was presented to him by the bishop of Alexandria. The pogrom which had taken his father’s life was the one that led Bishop Clement of Alexandria to abandon the catechetical school and seek refuge in Palestine, so the next year Bishop Demetrius appointed Origen as the new dean of the school, at just eighteen years old.

  Origen’s reformed school was open to all and taught a wide range of subjects besides Christian doctrine. Prayer and fasting were practiced by teacher and pupil alike, and simplicity of lifestyle was encouraged. It was clearly an immensely stimulating environment, and one of Origen’s pupils, Gregory, later known as Thaumaturgus (“Wonder-Worker”), recalled that they were given complete freedom to find their way around the entire world of knowledge, and to investigate anything which took their interest, enjoying any mode of teaching and savoring the sweet pleasures of the intellect:

  To be under the intellectual charge of Origen was like living in a garden where fruits of the mind sprang up without toil to be happy with gladness by the happy occupants. . . . He truly was a paradise to us, after the likeness of the paradise of God . . . and to leave him was to renascent the experience of Adam and the Fall.

  Gregory Thaumaturgus, Address to Origen, 13

  Origen himself is said to have taught all day and studied the Bible for much of each night, leading a life of exemplary asceticism. Perhaps because many of his students were women, and also because at that time he wished to follow the gospel to the letter, one report claims he decided to obey the words of Matthew literally and mutilate himself. The passage from Matthew 19:12 concerns the nature of eunuchs—both those who are born that way and those who decide to take matters into their own hands “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” Matthew ends the discussion with the words “He that is able to receive it, let him receive it,” and this Origen took as a direct order.

  There is some debate as to whether Origen did actually castrate himself, and it has been argued that he put the story about to mask his own homosexuality, though there is no evidence to support what sounds like a slur from his detractors. Later in life he admitted that it was an extreme act and probably beyond the call of his faith.

  For ten years Origen devoted himself to teaching, with only two short breaks—a brief visit to Rome in 211-12 and a journey to Arabia at the request of the prefect of the province in 213 or 214, during which he visited the rose-red city of Petra. On his return he became friendly with Ambrose of Alexandria, a wealthy man whom Origen converted from Valentinian Gnosticism—a heretical Christian sect formed by the original Saint Valentine—to orthodox Christianity. From then on he acted as Origen’s sponsor and promoter.

  When the fury of Caracalla was
unleashed on the city, Origen and Ambrose fled to Caesarea together. Around 218 Ambrose of Alexandria made a formal agreement with Origen to promote his writings, and thereafter all his published works were dedicated to Ambrose. With the help of seven stenographers to take dictation in relays, another seven scribes to prepare longhand copies, and a team of girls to make copies of the copies, Origen’s output was phenomenal. He set to work on a huge commentary on the Bible, two books on the Resurrection, and one of the most important works in early Christian literature, On First Principles, in which he began to lay out a systematic analysis of his vision of the Christian faith.

  Over the following twenty years Origen set about teaching and writing, organizing his textual criticism of the Bible by the Alexandrian method. To do this, he took the unusual and hugely significant step of mastering Hebrew—the language in which the Bible had first arrived in Alexandria. Having mastered the language, he then gathered together all the known versions of the Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek and systematically compared them all.

  Origen accepted the notion of the Holy Trinity, but he gave it a hierarchy. As in Plato, God the Father is the One, the omnipotent, all-encompassing, purely spiritual being. God the Son, however, is a product of the One, equivalent to Logos or Wisdom (Sophia) in Neoplatonism, the first emanation. The Holy Spirit, third element of the Trinity, emanates from the Son and is related to the Son as the Son is to the Father. A passage of Origen’s writing, preserved in the original Greek, explains his position:

  The God and Father, who holds the universe together, is superior to every being that exists, for he imports to each one from his existence that which each one is; the Son, being less than the Father, is superior to rational creatures alone (for he is second to the Father). The Holy Spirit is still less, and dwells within the saints alone. So that in this way the power of the Father is greater than that of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and in turn the power of the Holy Spirit exceeds that of every other holy being.

  Origen, De Principiis [On First Principles], book 1, section 8

  This is a masterful synthesis of classical Platonic and mystical Christian perspectives, but it was this application of Neoplatonic cosmology to the Holy Trinity which would eventually lead to Origen’s expulsion from the Roman Catholic Church several centuries later.

  Origen is quite close to Plotinus in his view of the human soul. Though he doesn’t differentiate the soul into upper and lower parts, he does state that in the first creation human souls were close to and “warmed” by

  God. He sees Jesus as a perfect product of this first creation, his soul still warm and intimately close to God, his father. But “the Fall” led the rest of humanity’s souls to fall away from God and become cool. The job of the faith is to return us to God’s warmth and love.

  An absolutely central tenet of Origen’s theology is the resurrection of all beings, even ultimately the devil, his argument being that God would not create anything, even Satan, if he did not want all of creation to be saved at the end of time.

  The devil, however, did seem to be snapping at Origen’s heels. His work was repeatedly interrupted by persecutions. In 235, it is said, he was forced to hide in a house in Caesarea, where he stayed in hiding for two years. During this period he wrote a book appropriately entitled On Martyrdom which is preserved in a later text, the Exhortation to Martyrdom.

  Origen is best remembered today for a work that we have already met. In 248 his old friend Ambrose, aware of the growing sophistication of anti-Christian literature, particularly among the Neoplatonists, prevailed upon him to write eight books refuting the damning critique of their religion composed by Celsus. This collection, Against Celsus, became the most celebrated defense of the faith produced by the early church, partly because it inadvertently preserved Celsus’s own work. It also opens a window onto the dangerous religious politics of the day and shows the real fear and danger that lay behind the ethereal arguments of the philosophers. Here we see Origen not as simply the defender of the faith but as a man who knew that Celsus’s clever words were often backed up by the tip of a sword, and that where persuasion failed, the empire was quite happy to force conformity. In dealing with Celsus’s complaint that Christians were secretive whereas other great iconclasts, like Socrates, had been prepared to speak openly, regardless of the risk, when they knew themselves to be right, Origen answered that the situation was now different. Socrates had died for his philosophy and in the process proven the Athenians wrong—this they had quickly realized. Rome, however, had not learned from the deaths of many Christians: “But in the case of the Christians, the Roman Senate, and the princes of the time, and the soldiery, and the people, and the relatives of those who had become converts to the faith, made war upon their doctrine” (Origen, Against Celsus, book 1, chapter 3).

  Prophetic words these turned out to be, as two years later what he termed the “whole world’s conspiracy” against Christianity caught up with Origen himself. In 250 he was captured during yet another pogrom, this time ordered by the emperor Decius. Bound hand and foot for days on end, Origen was repeatedly tortured; but Decius died before him, and the old man was released. Crippled and broken, he died of his wounds shortly afterward.

  By the time of his death Origen had done a thoroughly Alexandrian job on Christianity. In so doing he portrayed his religion for the Hellenistic world as a faith with a philosophy, not simply another localized cult. This was a religion that now offered a whole cosmology, not just the forlorn hope of a better life after death for those whose current life was almost unbearably hard. This was a religion that the scholars of the museum could understand. Origen’s lifework was an act of integration, the conversion of a blind faith into a rationalized set of ideas, a plausible worldview and system of thought and action designed to elevate its practitioners, in this world and the next.

  The two disciples of the Alexandrian porter Ammonius Saccas had accomplished extraordinary feats: the codification of the last great pagan philosophy of the ancient world and of the primary philosophy of the world that would follow. Yet these two ideas were not destined to grow happily side by side, and in Ammonius’s secret lectures had been planted the seeds of Alexandria’s destruction.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE END OF REASON

  The dream of reason produces monsters.

  Goya, Los Caprichos

  If Alexandria was the ideal crucible in which to forge new ideas about God and divinity, it was not prepared for the firestorm those new ideas would unleash. Alexandria was the city that questioned everything—from the shape of the earth to the divinity of the emperors—but not all of its subjects took this academic criticism well. The earth had not complained when Eratosthenes had measured it; triangles, circles, and cones had quietly surrendered their secrets to Euclid. But while a difference of opinion in geometry or astronomy was just that—a difference of opinion—a difference of opinion in religion was heresy. Opinions were met with counteropinions. Heresy was met with persecution and often death. So it was with explosive results that the greatest heresy of the early Christian church emerged in the one city with the pedigree to have created it.

  Arius may not have been born in Alexandria, being of Libyan and Berber descent, but he arrived in the city in the later years of the third century and from that point on he would make it his only home. He had chosen a career in the fledgling church, but his questioning, some would say confrontational, perhaps even “Alexandrian,” nature had made his rise uneven. In particular he had shown a dislike of the dogmatic authorities of the day, represented by Alexander, the patriarch of his home city. In an age when the church was obsessed with schism and heresy, arguing over the exact interpretation of the nature of God, Arius was almost deliberately provocative, backing schismatic causes and twice getting himself excommunicated while still just a presbyter. So it was that from what should have been a simple lecture by the patriarch to his young charges arose the greatest and most damaging heresy in the early church.
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  The church father Socrates Scholasticus tells us that Alexander had chosen to lecture his pupils, including Arius, on a particularly tricky subject. He had decided to speak in detail (too much detail, according to Socrates) about the greatest theological mystery of all: the unity of the Trinity, or how the Godhead was three parts, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, yet also just one part and hence all equal.

  Arius, ever quizzical and ready for an argument, took the bait, according to Socrates simply to annoy his master:

  A certain one of the presbyters under his jurisdiction, whose name was Arius, possessed of no inconsiderable logical acumen . . . , from love of controversy took the opposite opinion . . . and as he thought vigorously responded to what was said by the bishop. “If,” said he, “the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is evident, that there was a time when the Son was not. It therefore necessarily follows, that he had his substance from nothing.”

  Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book 1, chapter 5

  It was a perfectly logical piece of argument, and had this been a debate on logic in the porticoes of the museum, Arius might have expected some applause. But this was not a matter of logic, not a matter which Alexander wished to discuss. This was an article of faith, a matter of belief, and his presbyters were meant to accept it without question.

  Arius would not and, receiving no conclusive answer to his point, began to elaborate his own idea further, acquiring his own adherents; and, as Socrates put it, “thus from a little spark a large fire was kindled” (Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, book 1, chapter 6).