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S. Rappoport - History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)

S >> S. Rappoport >> History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12)




The pagan philosophers under Constantine had but few pupils and met
with but little encouragement. Alypius of Alexandria and his friend
Iamblichus, however, still taught the philosophy of Ammonius
and Plotinus. The only writings by Alypius now remaining are his
_Introduction to Music_; in which he explains the notation of the
fifteen modes or tones in their respective kinds of diatonic, chromatic,
and enharmonic. His signs are said to be Pythagorean. They are in pairs,
of which one is thought to represent the note struck on the lyre, and
the other the tone of the voice to be sung thereto. They thus imply
accord or harmony. The same signs are found in some manuscripts written
over the syllables of ancient poems; and thereby scholars, learned at
once in the Greek language, in the art of deciphering signs, and in the
science of music, now chant the odes of Pindar in strains not dissimilar
to modern cathedral psalmody.

Sopator succeeded Iamblichus as professor of platonism in Alexandria,
with the proud title of successor to Plato, For some time he enjoyed the
friendship of Constantine; but, when religion made a quarrel between
the friends, the philosopher was put to death by the emperor. The pagan
account of the quarrel was that, when Constantine had killed his son, he
applied to Sopator to be purified from his guilt; and when the platonist
answered that he knew of no ceremony that could absolve a man from such
a crime, the emperor applied to the Christians for baptism. This
story may not be true, and the ecclesiastical historian remarks that
Constantine had professed Christianity several years before the murder
of his son; but then, as after his conversion he had got Sopator to
consecrate his new city with a variety of pagan ceremonies, he may in
the same way have asked him to absolve him from the guilt of murder.

On the death of Constantine, in 337, his three sons, without entirely
dismembering the empire, divided the provinces of the Roman world into
three shares. Constantine II., the eldest son, who succeeded to the
throne of his father in Constantinople, and Constans, the youngest,
who dwelt in Rome, divided Europe between them; while Constantius,
the second son, held Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Egypt, of which
possessions Antioch on the Orontes was at that time the capital. Thus
Alexandria was doomed to a further fall. When governed by Rome it had
still been the first of Greek cities; afterwards, when the seat of the
empire was fixed at Constantinople, it became the second; but on this
division of the Roman world, when the seat of government came still
nearer to Egypt, and Antioch rose as the capital of the East, Alexandria
fell to be the third among Greek cities. Egypt quietly received its
political orders from Antioch. Its opinions also in some cases followed
those of the capital, and it is curious to remark that the Alexandrian
writers, when dating by the era of the creation, were now willing to
consider the world ten years less old than they used, because it was so
thought at Antioch. But it was not so with their religious opinions,
and as long as Antioch and its emperor undertook to govern the Egyptian
church there was little peace in the province.

The three emperors did not take the same side in the quarrel which under
the name of religion was then unsettling the obedience of the Egyptians,
and even in some degree troubling the rest of the empire. Constantius
held the Arian opinions of Syria; but Constantine II. and Constans
openly gave their countenance to the party of the rebellious Athanasius,
who under their favour ventured to return to Alexandria, where, after
an absence of two years and four months, he was received in the warmest
manner by his admiring flock. But on the death of Constantine II.,
who was shortly afterwards killed in battle by his brother Constans,
Constantius felt himself more master of his own kingdom; he deposed
Athanasius, and summoned a council of bishops at Antioch to elect a new
patriarch of Alexandria. Christian bishops, though they had latterly
owed their ordination to the authority of their equals, had always
received their bishoprics by the choice of their presbyters or of their
flocks; and though they were glad to receive the support of the emperor,
they were not willing to acknowledge him as their head. Hence, when the
council at Antioch first elected Eusebius of AEmisa into the bishopric of
Alexandria, he chose to refuse the honour which they had only a doubtful
right to bestow, rather than to venture into the city in the face of his
popular rival. The council then elected Gregory, whose greater courage
and ambition led him to accept the office.

The council of Antioch then made some changes in the creed. A few years
later, a second council met in the same place, and drew up a creed more
near to what we now call the Athanasian; but it was firmly rejected by
the Egyptian and Roman churches. Gregory was no sooner elected to the
bishopric than he issued his commands as bishop, though, if he had
the courage, he had not at the time the power to enter Alexandria.
But Syrianus, the general of the Egyptian troops, was soon afterwards
ordered by the emperor to place him on his episcopal throne; and he led
him into the city, surrounded by the spears of five thousand soldiers,
and followed by the small body of Alexandrians that after this invasion
of their acknowledged rights still called themselves Arians. Gregory
entered Alexandria in the evening, meaning to take his seat in the
church on the next day; but the people in their zeal did not wait
quietly for the dreaded morning. They ran at once to the church, and
passed the night there with Athanasius in the greatest anxiety. In
the morning, when Gregory arrived at the church, accompanied with the
troops, he found the doors barricaded and the building full of men and
women, denouncing the sacrilege, and threatening resistance. But the
general gave orders that the church should be stormed, and the new
bishop carried in by force of arms; and Athanasius, seeing that all
resistance was useless, ordered the deacons to give out a psalm, and
they all marched out at the opposite door singing. After these acts of
violence on the part of the troops, and of resistance on the part of the
people, the whole city was thrown into an uproar, and the prefect was
hardly strong enough to carry on the government; the regular supply of
grain for the poor citizens of Alexandria, and for Constantinople, was
stopped; and the blame of the whole thrown upon Athanasius. He was a
second time obliged to leave Egypt, and he fled to Rome, where he was
warmly received by the Emperor Constans and the Roman bishop. But the
zeal of the Athanasian party would not allow Gregory to keep possession
of the church which he had gained only by force; they soon afterwards
set fire to it and burned it to the ground, choosing that there should
be no church at all rather than that it should be in the hands of the
Arians; and the Arian clergy and bishops, though supported by the favour
of the emperor and the troops of the prefect, were everywhere throughout
Egypt driven from their churches and monasteries. During this quarrel it
seems to have been felt by both parties that the choice of the people,
or at least of the clergy, was necessary to make a bishop, and that
Gregory had very little claim to that rank in Alexandria. Julius, the
Bishop of Rome, warmly espoused the cause of Athanasius, and he wrote a
letter to the Alexandrian church, praising their zeal for their bishop,
and ordering them to re-admit him to his former rank, from which he
had been deposed by the council of Antioch, but to which he had been
restored by the Western bishops. Athanasius was also warmly supported
by Constans, the emperor of the West, who at the same time wrote to his
brother Constantius, begging him to replace the Alexandrian bishop,
and making the additional threat that if he would not reinstate him he
should be made to do so by force of arms.

Constantius, after taking the advice of his own bishops, thought it
wisest to yield to the wishes or rather the commands of his brother
Constans, and he wrote to Athanasius, calling him into his presence
in Constantinople. But the rebellious bishop was not willing to trust
himself within the reach of his offended sovereign; and it was not till
after a second and a third letter, pressing him to come and promising
him his safety, that he ventured within the limits of the Eastern
empire. Strong in his high character for learning, firmness, and
political skill, carrying with him the allegiance of the Egyptian
nation, which was yielded to him much rather than to the emperor, and
backed by the threats of Constans, Athanasius was at least a match
for Constantius. At Constantinople the emperor and his subject, the
Alexandrian bishop, made a formal treaty, by which it was agreed
that, if Constantius would allow the Homoousian clergy throughout his
dominions to return to their churches, Athanasius would in the same
way throughout Egypt restore the Arian clergy; and upon this agreement
Athanasius himself returned to Alexandria.

Among the followers of Athanasius was that important mixed race with
whom the Egyptian civilisation chiefly rested, a race that may be called
Koptic, but half Greek and half Egyptian in their language and religion
as in their forefathers. But in feelings they were wholly opposed to the
Greeks of Alexandria. Never since the last Nectanebo was conquered by
the Persians, eight hundred years earlier, did the Egyptians seem so
near to throwing off the foreign yoke and rising again as an independent
nation. But the Greeks, who had taught them so much, had not taught them
the arts of war; and the nation remained enslaved to those who could
wield the sword. The return of Athanasius, however, was only the signal
for a fresh uproar, and the Arians complained that Egypt was kept in a
constant turmoil by his zealous activity. Nor were the Arians his only
enemies. He had offended many others of his clergy by his overbearing
manners, and more particularly by his following in the steps of
Alexander, the late bishop, in claiming new and higher powers for
the office of patriarch than had ever been yielded to the bishops of
Alexandria before their spiritual rank had been changed into civil rank
by the emperor's adoption of their religion. Meletius headed a strong
party of bishops, priests, and deacons in opposing the new claims of the
archiepiscopal see of Alexandria. His followers differed in no point of
doctrine from the Athanasian party, but as they sided with the Arians
they were usually called heretics.

By this time the statesmen and magistrates had gained a clear view of
the change which had come over the political state of the empire, first
by the spread of Christianity, and secondly by the emperor's embracing
it. By supporting Christianity the emperors gave rank in the state to
an organised and well-trained body, which immediately found itself in
possession of all the civil power. A bishopric, which a few years before
was a post of danger, was now a place of great profit, and secured to
its possessor every worldly advantage of wealth, honour, and power.
An archbishop in the capital, obeyed by a bishop in every city, with
numerous priests and deacons under them, was usually of more weight than
the prefect. While Athanasius was at the height of his popularity
in Egypt, and was supported by the Emperor of the West, the Emperor
Constantius was very far from being his master. But on the death of
Constans, when Constantius became sovereign of the whole empire, he once
more tried to make Alexandria and the Egyptian church obedient to
his wishes. He was, however, still doubtful how far it was prudent to
measure his strength against that of the bishop, and he chose rather
to begin privately with threats before using his power openly. He first
wrote word to Athanasius, as if in answer to a request from the bishop,
that he was at liberty, if he wished, to visit Italy; but he sent the
letter by the hands of the notary Diogenes, who added, by word of
mouth, that the permission was meant for a command, and that it was the
emperor's pleasure that he should immediately quit his bishopric and the
province. But this underhand conduct of the emperor only showed his own
weakness. Athanasius steadily refused to obey any unwritten orders, and
held his bishopric for upwards of two years longer, before Constantius
felt strong enough to enforce his wishes. Towards the end of that time,
Syrianus, the general of the Egyptian army, to whom this delicate task
was entrusted, gathered together from other parts of the province a
body of five thousand chosen men, and with these he marched quietly into
Alexandria, to overawe, if possible, the rebellious bishop. He gave
out no reason for his conduct; but the Arians, who were in the secret,
openly boasted that it would soon be their turn to possess the churches.
Syrianus then sent for Athanasius, and in the presence of Maximus the
prefect again delivered to him the command of Constantius, that he
should quit Egypt and retire into banishment, and he threatened to carry
this command into execution by the help of the troops if he met with any
resistance. Athanasius, without refusing to obey, begged to be shown the
emperor's orders in writing; but this reasonable request was refused. He
then entreated them even to give him, in their own handwriting, an order
for his banishment; but this was also refused, and the citizens,
who were made acquainted with the emperor's wishes and the bishop's
firmness, waited in dreadful anxiety to see whether the prefect and the
general would venture to enforce their orders. The presbytery of the
church and the corporation of the city went up to Syrianus in solemn
procession to beg him either to show a written authority for the
banishment of their bishop, or to write to Constantinople to learn the
emperor's pleasure. To this request Syrianus at last yielded, and gave
his word to the friends of Athanasius that he would take no further
steps till the return of the messengers which he then sent to
Constantinople.

But Syrianus had before received his orders, which were, if possible, to
frighten Athanasius into obedience, and, if that could not be done, then
to employ force, but not to expose the emperor's written commands to the
danger of being successfully resisted. He therefore only waited for an
opportunity of carrying them into effect; and at midnight, on the ninth
of February, A.D. 356, twenty-three days after the promise had been
given, Syrianus, at the head of his troops, armed for the assault,
surrounded the church where Athanasius and a crowded assembly were at
prayers. The doors were forcibly and suddenly broken open, the armed
soldiers rushed forward to seize the bishop, and numbers of his faithful
friends were slain in their efforts to save him. Athanasius, however,
escaped in the tumult; but though the general was unsuccessful, the
bodies of the slain and the arms of the soldiers found scattered through
the church in the morning were full proofs of his unholy attempt. The
friends of the bishop drew up and signed a public declaration describing
the outrage, and Syrianus sent to Constantinople a counter-protest
declaring that there had been no disturbance in the city.

Athanasius, with nearly the whole of the nation for his friends, easily
escaped the vengeance of the emperor; and, withdrawing for a third time
from public life, he passed the remainder of this reign in concealment.
He did not, however, neglect the interests of his flock. He encouraged
them with his letters, and even privately visited his friends in
Alexandria. As the greater part of the population was eager to befriend
him, he was there able to hide himself for six years. Disregarding
the scandal that might arise from it, he lived in the house of a young
woman, who concealed him in her chamber, and waited on him with untiring
zeal. She was then in the flower of her youth, only twenty years of age;
and fifty years afterwards, in the reign of Theodosius II., when the
name of the archbishop ranked with those of the apostles, this woman
used to boast among the monks of Alexandria that in her youth she had
for six years concealed the great Athanasius.

But though the general was not wholly successful, yet the Athanasian
party was for the time crushed. Sebastianus, the new prefect, was sent
into Egypt with orders to seize Athanasius dead or alive, wherever he
should be found within the province; and under his protection the Arian
party in Alexandria again ventured to meet in public, and proceeded
to choose a bishop. They elected to this high position the celebrated
George of Cappadocia, a man who, while he equalled his more popular
rival in learning and in ambition, fell far behind him in coolness of
judgment, and in that political skill which is as much wanted in the
guidance of a religious party as in the government of an empire.

George was born at Epiphania in Cilicia, and was the son of a clothier,
but his ambition led him into the Church, as being at that time the
fairest field for the display of talent; and he rose from one station
to another till he reached the high post of Bishop of Alexandria. The
fickle, irritable Alexandrians needed no such firebrand to light up the
flames of discontent. George took no pains to conceal the fact that he
held his bishopric by the favour of the emperor and the power of the
army against the wishes of his flock. To support his authority, he
opened his doors to informers of the worst description; anybody who
stood in the way of his grasp at power was accused of being an enemy
to the emperor. He proposed to the emperor to lay a house-tax on
Alexandria, thereby to repay the expense incurred by Alexander the Great
in building the city; and he made the imperial government more unpopular
than it had ever been since Augustus landed in Egypt. He used the army
as the means of terrifying the Homoousians into an acknowledgment of the
Arian opinions. He banished fifteen bishops to the Great Oasis,
besides others of lower rank. He beat, tortured, and put to death; the
persecution was more cruel than any suffered from the pagans, except
perhaps that in the reign of Diocletian; and thirty Egyptian bishops are
said to have lost their lives while George was patriarch of Alexandria.
Most of these accusations, however, are from the pens of his enemies. At
this time the countries at the southern end of the Red Sea were becoming
a little more known to Alexandria. Meropius, travelling in the reign of
Constantine for curiosity and the sake of knowledge, had visited Auxum,
the capital of the Hexumito, in Abyssinia. His companion Frumentius
undertook to convert the people to Christianity and persuade them
to trade with Egypt; and, as he found them willing to listen to his
arguments, he came home to Alexandria to tell of his success and ask
for support. Athanasius readily entered into a plan for spreading the
blessings of Christianity and the power of the Alexandrian church. To
increase the missionary's weight he consecrated him a bishop, and sent
him back to Auxum to continue his good work. His progress, however, was
somewhat checked by sectarian jealousy; for, when Athanasius was deposed
by Constantius, Frumentius was recalled to receive again his orders and
his opinions from the new patriarch. Constantius also sent an embassy to
the Homeritse on the opposite coast of Arabia, under Theophilus, a monk
and deacon in the Church. The Homerito were of Jewish blood though of
gentile faith, and were readily converted, if not to Christianity, at
least to friendship with the emperor. After consecrating their churches,
Theophilus crossed over to the African coast, to the Hexumito, to carry
on the work which Frumentius had begun. There he was equally successful
in the object of his embassy. Both in trade and in religion the
Hexumito, who were also of Jewish blood, were eager to be connected with
the Europeans, from whom they were cut off by Arabs of a wilder race. He
found also a little to the south of Auxum a settlement of Syrians, who
were said to have been placed there by Alexander the Great. These tribes
spoke the language called Ethiopie, a dialect of Arabic which was not
used in the country which we have hitherto called Ethiopia.

[Illustration: 213.jpg TEMPLE OF ABU SIMBEL IN NUBIA]

The Ethiopie version of the Bible was about this time made for their
use. It was translated out of the Greek from the Alexandrian copies,
as the Greek version was held in such value that it was not thought
necessary to look to the Hebrew original of the Old Testament. But these
well-meant efforts did little at the time towards making the Hexumitae
Christians. Distance and the Blemmyes checked their intercourse with
Alexandria. It was not till two hundred years later that they could be
said in the slightest sense to be converted to Christianity.

Though the origin of monastic life has sometimes been claimed for the
Essenes on the shores of the Dead Sea, yet it was in Egypt that it was
framed into a system, and became the model for the Christian world. It
took its rise in the serious and gloomy views of religion which always
formed part of the Egyptian polytheism, and which the Greeks remarked as
very unlike their own gay and tasteful modes of worship, and which were
readily engrafted by the Egyptian converts into their own Christian
belief. In the reigns of Constantine and his sons, hundreds of
Christians, both men and women, quitting the pleasures and trials of
the busy world, withdrew one by one into the Egyptian desert, where the
sands are as boundless as the ocean, where the sunshine is less cheerful
than darkness, to spend their lonely days and watchful nights in
religious meditation and in prayer. They were led by a gloomy view
of their duty towards God, and by a want of fellow-feeling for their
neighbour; and they seemed to think that pain and misery in this world
would save them from punishment hereafter. The lives of many of these
Fathers of the Desert were written by the Christians who lived at the
same time; but a full account of the miracles which were said to have
been worked in their favour, or by their means, would now only call
forth a smile of pity, or perhaps even of ridicule.

"Prosperity and peace," says Gibbon, "introduced the distinction of the
vulgar and the ascetic Christians. The loose and imperfect practice
of religion satisfied the conscience of the multitude. The prince or
magistrate, soldier or merchant, reconciled their fervent zeal, and
implicit faith, with the exercise of their profession, the pursuit of
their interest, and the indulgence of their passions; but the ascetics,
who obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the gospel, were inspired
by the severe enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal and God as
a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and the pleasures of the
age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage, chastised their
body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as
the price of eternal happiness. The ascetics fled from a profane and
degenerate world to perpetual solitude, or religious society. Like the
first Christians of Jerusalem, they resigned the use, or the property,
of their temporal possessions; established regular communities of the
same sex and a similar disposition, and assumed the names of hermits,
monks, or anchorites, expressive of their lonely retreat in a natural
or artificial desert. They soon acquired the respect of the world, which
they despised, and the loudest applause was bestowed on this divine
philosophy, which surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the
laborious virtues of the Grecian schools. The monks might indeed contend
with the Stoics in the contempt of fortune, of pain, and of death;
the Pythagorean silence and submission were revived in their servile
discipline; and they disdained, as firmly as the Cynics themselves,
all the forms and decencies of civil society. But the votaries of this
divine philosophy aspired to imitate a purer and more perfect model.
They trod in the footsteps of the prophets, who had retired to the
desert; and they restored the devout and contemplative life, which
had been instituted by the Essenians, in Palestine and Egypt. The
philosophic eye of Pliny had surveyed with astonishment a solitary
people who dwelt among the palm trees near the Dead Sea; who subsisted
without money, who were propagated without women, and who derived from
the disgust and repentance of mankind a perpetual supply of voluntary
associates. Antony, an illiterate youth of the lower part of The-baid,
distributed his patrimony, deserted his family and native home, and
executed his monastic penance with original and intrepid fanaticism.
After a long and painful novitiate among the tombs and in a ruined
tower, he boldly advanced into the desert three days' journey to the
eastward of the Nile; discovered a lonely spot, which possessed the
advantages of shade and water, and fixed his last residence on Mount
Colzim near the Red Sea, where an ancient monastery still preserves the
name and memory of the saint. The curious devotion of the Christians
pursued him to the desert; and, when he was obliged to appear at
Alexandria, in the face of mankind, he supported his fame with
discretion and dignity. He enjoyed the friendship of Athanasius, whose
doctrine he approved; and the Egyptian peasant respectfully declined
a respectful invitation from the Emperor Constantine. The venerable
patriarch (for Antony attained the age of 105 years) beheld the numerous
progeny which had been formed by his example and his lessons. The
prolific colonies of monks multiplied on the sands of Libya, upon the
rocks of the Thebaid, and in the cities of the Nile. To the south of
Alexandria, the mountain and adjacent desert of Nitria were peopled by
five thousand anchorites; and the traveller may still investigate the
ruins of fifty monasteries, which were planted in that barren soil by
the disciples of Antony. In the Upper Thebaid, the vacant island of
Tabenna was occupied by Pachomius and fourteen hundred of his brethren.
That holy abbot successively founded nine monasteries of men and one
of women; and the festival of Easter sometimes collected fifty thousand
religious persons, who followed his angelic rules of discipline.
The stately and populous city of Oxyrrhynchos, the seat of Christian
orthodoxy, had devoted the temples, the public edifices, and even the
ramparts, to pious and charitable uses, and the bishop, who might preach
in twelve churches, computed ten thousand females and twenty thousand
males of the monastic profession."

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