The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (35 page)

Celsus was also making a mistake if he thought that Christianity was something new in Alexandria, or just another passing craze. Eusebius, the Greek bishop and ecclesiastical historian, claims that the religion’s roots in Alexandria go right back to the apostles. According to him, Saint Mark came to Egypt preaching the gospel around 41-44 and created a center for discipleship and education in the city, becoming the city’s first patriarch. In truth, reconstructing the life of Mark is fraught with difficulty, and the fact that writers like Origen make no mention of him in connection with the city might suggest that placing him there is a later tradition. Even the nature of his death is uncertain. The Acts of Mark claims that the saint was gloriously martyred at Easter in 68 by an angry Alexandrian mob that dragged him to death through the city streets in reprisal for his attempts to turn them away from paganism. This story does not emerge before the fourth century, however, and may simply serve to provide the city with a major martyr. Though these stories may not be contemporary with Mark, they do demonstrate how quickly Christianity gained a foot-hold in the city and how even early on its church fathers could associate themselves with a character as powerful as one of the apostles. They also contain a veiled warning of events to come.

Whether Christianity was established in Alexandria by Saint Mark or by a later disciple, it was certainly firmly rooted by the time of Celsus’s denunciation; indeed, it was about to move out of the marketplace and into its own educational establishment. The dean of this institution, Pantaenus, was a brilliant Christian scholar, and the establishment he would preside over, the Didascalia, would go down in history as the first school of Christian religion in the world and the home of the first translation of the New Testament from Aramaic and Greek into Coptic, the language of the Christian Egyptians. Founded around 180, this school was intended to take on the Platonists at their own game. According to one ancient source, Pantaenus was originally a Stoic philosopher himself, and therefore well used to the classical form of education available in the city. This he now applied to the teaching of Christianity, forming a “catechetical” school, where his faith and other subjects were taught orally by repetition or by question and answer.

Pantaenus was a Sicilian, and his greatest pupil, and later friend and successor, was Clement of Alexandria. Clement was probably born and educated in Athens—his Greek is very proper—and so received a full classical education before he converted. After his conversion he set about finding the greatest Christian teacher in the world, someone who could not just inspire the people of the marketplace, but defend his religion against the relentless logic of the professional philosophers. Eventually, he found Pantaenus, in perhaps the only city that could have produced such a man—a classically educated convert who could bring Christianity into the same regard as the museum at which he himself had trained. Clement immediately knew his search was over: “Having tracked him out concealed in Egypt, I found rest. He, the true, the Sicilian bee, gathering the spoil of the flowers of the prophetic and apostolic meadow, engendered in the souls of his hearers a deathless element of knowledge” (Clement of Alexandria,
Stromata,
1.1).

Clement stayed with Pantaenus until 189, when the dean was selected to go on a mission to India (in fact probably southern Arabia), and Clement took his place in the Didascalia. According to Clement, Pantaenus eventually returned from “India” bearing the copy of the Gospel of Matthew, in Hebrew, which had originally been carried there by Saint Bartholomew and which was now the treasured possession of the Alexandrian church. Pantaenus was not well rewarded for his trouble, however, and was apparently martyred in 216 in one of the anti-Christian pogroms which would become a feature of the pagan Roman Empire in that period.

The Didascalia had originally been conceived as a specifically Christian school, designed to educate converts to a point where they were ready for baptism, but it was set up in typical Alexandrian style. The school was open to anyone who wanted to learn, not just Christians. Subjects taught there included all the classical greats, not scripture alone, but science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, and music. Classes were open to all comers, and non-Christians were encouraged to attend the introductory classes in Christianity. Catechumens (converts who had not yet been baptized) studied alongside students of Greek philosophy as well as ordained priests. Many of the students came from abroad, especially from Rome, and graduates from the school held prominent positions throughout the empire. Classes were held in Greek and the more everyday language of Coptic, and by the fourth century even blind students could study there using a system of raised writing on wooden boards, which predated Braille by fifteen centuries.

So education at the Didascalia under Clement’s tutelage was truly eclectic, which fitted precisely with his own highly educated and open-minded personality and philosophy. The philosophy he taught was not to be “the Stoic, nor the Platonic, nor the Epicurean, nor that of Aristotle; but whatever any of these sects had said that was fit and just, that taught righteousness with a divine and religious knowledge, this I call mixed philosophy” (Clement of Alexandria,
Stromata,
1.7).

Like Celsus, Clement was a universalist: He believed that all humanity could be united under one religion and thus all would be saved from damnation. But unlike Celsus, for Clement that universal religion would be Christianity, not Platonism. Under his guidance Alexandrian Christians brought intellectual rigor to its doctrines and adapted it to all classes of people, and in so doing they attempted to proclaim a world philosophy capable of being understood by all and sundry, from the highest to the lowest, from kings and emperors to slaves, women, and children. It was Clement’s great genius, and a mark of his devout Christian faith, that in the face of Celsus’s withering attack he “turned the other cheek” and sought to incorporate all that seemed good and of value in Celsus’s Hellenistic philosophy into his own Christian doctrine.

The key to Clement’s plans for the Didascalia was the same as the key to the Platonists’ museum: writing. As Clement himself noted, he became a Christian at a time when most Christian teaching and thought was oral, handed down from the apostles to their followers and their followers’ children. Yet Clement was a highly literate scholar in the true Alexandrian tradition, and felt it was his duty to attempt to make a written record of the original, oral tradition. By this time most of the New Testament had been written down, but nobody had employed the Alexandrian approach to Christianity: that is, to collect everything ever written on the relevant subject, refine it, subject it to “scientific” analysis, and finally incorporate it into a way of living and being—a Christian form of Celsus’s “right living.” This is what Clement determined to do to: beat the Alexandrian philosophers at their own game, as it were.

 
 
Clement divided his great work into three parts. Some scholars equate this with the three degrees of the Neoplatonic mysteries: purification, initiation, and vision. Others see it more directly as a graduated initiation into Christian life as belief, discipline, and knowledge, or perhaps even more sublimely as reflecting the Holy Trinity of Son, Father, and Holy Ghost. More overtly, the first set of books, titled
The Exhortation to the Heathen
or more briefly the
Protrepticus
or
Exhortation,
aims to win pagans to the Christian faith; the second set, the
Paedagogus
or
Instructor,
sets out to teach the convert how to live a proper Christian life; the third part’s full title is
Titus Flavius Clement’s Miscellaneous Collection of Speculative (Gnostic) Notes Bearing Upon the True Philosophy.
It has come to be known as the
Stromata,
or
Tapestries,
and aims to provide the raw materials from a huge range of sources from which the trained disciple can gain a higher knowledge of the Christian mystery. It is perhaps the boldest literary undertaking in the history of the church and certainly the largest and most valuable record of early Christian thought to have come down to us. Together then, these form their own curriculum—a Christian version of Philo’s encyclia.

So what would the young catechumen, or pagan philosopher, have heard in the halls of the Didascalia? In the first book, the
Exhortation,
Clement invites the reader to listen, not to the pagan legends of the gods, but to the “new song” of the Logos, the Word of God, the creator of the world. He points to the folly of idolatry and pagan mysticism and the horrors of pagan sacrifice. He also identifies what he sees as the weakness of pagan philosophy, which has only guessed at the real truth, while the divine Logos, as personified by Christ, has revealed the nature of truth, the living Word of God, in person, requiring only that his teaching be followed in order to awaken all that is good in the human soul and lead it toward immortality.

In the second book, the
Instructor
, Clement establishes Christ as the Divine Instructor and sets out in painstaking detail exactly how a Christian, one who has been rescued from the darkness and pollutions of heathenism, should live a good and virtuous life. In this book, divided into twelve chapters, he addresses the minutiae of conduct under the following headings: “On Eating,” “On Drinking,” “On Costly Vessels,” “How to Conduct Ourselves at Feasts,” “On Laughter,” “On Filthy Speaking,” “Directions for Those Who Live Together,” “On the Use of Ointments and Crowns,” “On Sleep,” “On Clothes,” “On Shoes,” “Against Excessive Fondness for Jewels and Gold Ornaments.” Each one of these chapters runs to several pages, giving a complete history of the usage of the subject under discussion as well as the views expressed both in the scriptures and in secular and philosophical writing, as well as Clement’s own advice on how a good Christian should treat the subject. On drinking, for example, such as he would have witnessed in the festivals of Dionysus and the private banqueting clubs once frequented by Philo, he sounds a note of caution:

 
He does not condemn drinking alcohol outright, however. He takes the opportunity to explain the Holy Communion, in which Christians drank wine mixed with water in imitation of the Last Supper, when Christ told the apostles that it was his “blood” and they should drink in remembrance of him:

This is followed by a long discussion of the merits of wine as well as the demerits of excess. “Moderation in all things” is a major part of Clement’s message. Typically of Clement, however, much of his message would have appealed just as much to Celsus as it did to his Christian converts. For him there was a place for the educated Alexandrian philosopher in Christianity, just as there was for the street peddler, and he appealed to their Platonic belief in “right living” to attract them. On the subject of choosing a bed, for instance, he uses language that could have come from any of those pagan or Jewish intellectuals trained in the encyclia:

 
Of course Clement was considerably more ambitious than proponents of the Great Chain of Being in believing that there was a place for everyone in his philosophy. While Philo considered that a woman’s place was in the home, and even secluded within that, Clement suggested that women too could be a part of his great project, provided that they also turned away from the more material aspects of Alexandrian life and adorned themselves not with gold but with the Word of God.

Having exhorted the heathen to turn to Christ and set out how they should live, Clement then moved on to his third work. The
Stromata,
or
Tapestries,
is aimed at the mature Christian believer, who by studying the work will be able to perfect his or her Christian life by initiation into complete knowledge of both man and God. It means to give an account of the Christian faith which will answer the questions of all men, even the pagan cynics who inhabit the museum in Alexandria, not through logical arguments but rather by building up a “tapestry” of spiritually nourishing thoughts of his own, drawn from the scriptures and, indeed, even from the pagan world around him. He had no intention of sticking to an ordered plan for the work, declaring that his intention was to create a work like a meadow where all varieties of flowers grow at random, or like a hillside planted with every possible variety of tree. In this way Clement aimed to reveal the innermost realities of his beliefs. His original intention was to do this in one book, but it steadily mushroomed into seven, or possibly eight, books, though if the eighth book ever existed it is now lost. Eusebius’s speculation that the final book was composed solely of extracts taken from pagan philosophers might explain why it has not survived.