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)

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The monks borrowed many of their customs from the old Egyptian priests,
such as shaving the head; and Athanasius in his charge to them orders
them not to adopt the tonsure on the head, nor to shave the beard. He
forbids their employing magic or incantations to assist their prayers.
He endeavours to stop their emulation in fasting, and orders those whose
strength of body enabled them to fast longest not to boast of it. But he
orders them not even to speak to a woman, and wishes them not to bathe,
as being an immodest act. The early Christians, as being a sect of Jews,
had followed many Jewish customs, such as observing the Sabbath as well
as the Lord's day; but latterly the line between the two religions had
been growing wider, and Athanasius orders the monks not to keep holy the
Jewish Sabbath. After a few years their religious duties were clearly
laid down for them in several well-drawn codes.

One of the earliest of these ascetics was Amnion, who on the morning of
his marriage is said to have persuaded his young wife of the superior
holiness of a single life, and to have agreed with her that they should
devote themselves apart to the honour of God in the desert. But, in thus
avoiding the pleasures, the duties, and the temptations of the world,
Amnion lost many of the virtues and even the decencies of society; he
never washed himself, or changed his garments, because he thought it
wrong for a religious man even to see himself undressed; and when he had
occasion to cross a canal, his biographer tells us that attendant angels
carried him over the water in their arms, lest, while keeping his vows,
he should be troubled by wet clothes.

In the religious controversies, whether pagan or Christian, Rome had
often looked to Egypt for its opinions; Constans, when wanting copies
of the Greek Scriptures for Rome, had lately sent to Alexandria, and
had received the approved text from Athanasius. The two countries held
nearly the same opinions and had the same dislike of the Greeks; so
when Jerome visited Egypt he found the Church holding, he said, the true
Roman faith as taught by the apostles. Under Didymus, who was then the
head of the catechetical school, Jerome pursued his studies, having
the same religious opinions with the Egyptian, and the same dislike
to Arianism. But no dread of heresy stopped Jerome in his search for
knowledge and for books. He obtained copies of the whole of Origen's
works, and read them with the greatest admiration. It is true that he
finds fault with many of his opinions; but no admirer of Origen could
speak in higher terms of praise of his virtues and his learning, of
the qualities of his head and of his heart, than Jerome uses while he
timidly pretends to think that he has done wrong in reading his works.

At this time--the end of the eleventh century after the building of the
city--the emperor himself did not refuse to mark on his Roman coins the
_happy renewal of the years_ by the old Egyptian astrological fable of
the return of the phoenix.

From the treatise of Julius Fermicus against the pagan superstitions, it
would seem that the sacred animals of the Egyptians were no longer kept
in the several cities in which they used to be worshipped, and that many
of the old gods had been gradually dropped from the mythology, which was
then chiefly confined to the worship of Isis and Osiris. The great week
of the year was the feast of Isis, when the priests joined the goddess
in her grief for the loss of the good Osiris, who had been killed
through jealousy by the wicked Typhon. The priests shaved their heads,
beat their breasts, tore the skin off their arms, and opened up the old
wounds of former years, in grief for the death of Osiris, and in honour
of the widowed Isis. The river Nile was also still worshipped for the
blessings which it scatters along its banks, but we hear no more of
Amon-Ra, Chem, Horus, Aroeris, and the other gods of the Thebaid, whose
worship ceased with the fall of that part of the country.

[Illustration: 220.jpg COIN OF CONSTANTIUS]

But great changes often take place with very little improvement; the
fall of idolatry only made way for the rise of magic and astrology.
Abydos in Upper Egypt had latterly gained great renown for the temple of
Bisu, whose oracle was much consulted, not only by the Egyptians but by
Greek strangers, and by others who sent their questions in writing.
Some of these letters on parchment had been taken from the temple by
informers, and carried to the emperor, whose ears were never deaf to a
charge against the pagans. On this accusation numbers of all ranks were
dragged out of Egypt, to be tried and punished in Syria, with torture
and forfeiture of goods. Such indeed was the nation's belief in these
oracles and prophecies that it gave to the priests a greater power than
it was safe to trust them with. By prophesying that a man was to be an
emperor, they could make him a traitor, and perhaps raise a village in
rebellion. As the devotedness of their followers made it dangerous for
the magistrates to punish the mischief-makers, they had no choice but to
punish those who consulted them. Without forbidding the divine oracle to
answer, they forbade anybody to question it. Parnasius, who had been
a prefect of Egypt, a man of spotless character, was banished for thus
illegally seeking a knowledge of the future; and Demetrius Cythras, an
aged philosopher, was put to the rack on a charge of having sacrificed
to the god, and only released because he persisted through his tortures
in asserting that he sacrificed in gratitude and not from a wish thus to
learn his future fate.

In the falling state of the empire the towns and villages of Egypt found
their rulers too weak either to guard them or to tyrannise over them,
and they sometimes formed themselves into small societies, and took
means for their own defence. The law had so far allowed this as in some
cases to grant a corporate constitution to a city. But in other cases a
city kept in its pay a courtier or government servant powerful enough to
guard it against the extortions of the provincial tax-gatherer, or would
put itself under the patronage of a neighbour rich enough and strong
enough to guard it. This, however, could not be allowed, even if not
used as the means of throwing off the authority of the provincial
government; and accordingly at this time we begin to find laws against
the new crime of _patronage_. These associations gave a place of refuge
to criminals, they stopped the worshipper in his way to the temple, and
the tax-gatherer in collecting the tribute. But new laws have little
weight when there is no power to enforce them, and the orders from
Constantinople were little heeded in Upper Egypt.

But this _patronage_ which the emperor wished to put down was weak
compared to that of the bishops and clergy, which the law allowed and
even upheld, and which was the great check to the tyranny of the civil
governor. While the emperor at a distance gave orders through his
prefect, the people looked up to the bishop as their head; and hence the
power of each was checked by the other. The emperors had not yet made
the terrors of religion a tool in the hands of the magistrate; nor had
they yet learned from the pontifex and augurs of pagan Rome the secret
that civil power is never so strong as when based on that of the
Church.

On the death of Constantius, in 361, Julian was at once acknowledged as
emperor, and the Roman world was again, but for the last time, governed
by a pagan. The Christians had been in power for fifty-five years under
Constantine and his sons, during which time the pagans had been made
to feel that their enemies had got the upper hand of them. But on the
accession of Julian their places were again changed; and the Egyptians
among others crowded to Constantinople to complain of injustice done by
the Christian prefect and bishop, and to pray for a redress of wrongs.
They were, however, sadly disappointed in their emperor; he put them off
with an unfeeling joke; he ordered them to meet him at Chalcedon on the
other side of the straits of Constantinople, and, instead of following
them according to his promise, he gave orders that no vessel should
bring an Egyptian from Chalcedon to the capital; and the Egyptians,
after wasting their time and money, returned home in despair. But though
their complaints were laughed at, they were not overlooked, and the
author of their grievances was punished; Artemius, the prefect of Egypt,
was summoned to Chalcedon, and not being able to disprove the crimes
laid to his charge by the Alexandrians, he paid his life as the forfeit
for his mis-government during the last reign.

While Artemius was on his trial the pagans of Alexandria remained quiet,
and in daily fear of his return to power, for after their treatment
at Chalcedon they by no means felt sure of what would be the emperor's
policy in matters of religion; but they no sooner heard of the death of
Artemius than they took it as a sign that they had full leave to revenge
themselves on the Christians. The mob rose first against the Bishop
George, who had lately been careless or wanton enough publicly to
declare his regret that any of their temples should be allowed to stand;
and they seized him in the streets and trampled him to death. They next
slew Dracontius, the prefect of the Alexandrian mint, whom they accused
of overturning a pagan altar within that building. Their anger was then
turned against Diodorus, who was employed in building a church on a
waste spot of ground that had once been sacred to the worship of Mithra,
but had since been given by the Emperor Constantius to the Christians.
In clearing the ground, the workmen had turned up a number of human
bones that had been buried there in former ages, and these had been
brought forward by the Christians in reproach against the pagans as so
many proofs of human sacrifices. In his Christian zeal, Diodorus also
had wounded at the same time their pride and superstition by cutting off
the single lock from the heads of the young Egyptians. This lock had
in the time of Ramses been the mark of youthful royalty; under the
Ptolemies the mark of high rank; but was now common to all. Diodorus
treated it as an offence against his religion. For this he was attacked
and killed, with George and Dracontius. The mob carried the bodies of
the three murdered men upon camels to the side of the lake, and there
burned them, and threw the ashes into the water, for fear, as they said,
that a church should be built over their remains, as had been sometimes
done, even at that early date, over the bodies of martyrs.

[Illustration: 225.jpg A YOUNG EGYPTIAN WEARING THE ROYAL LOCK]

When the news of this outrage against the laws was brought to the
philosophical emperor, he contented himself with threatening by an
imperial edict that if the offence were repeated, he would visit it with
severe punishment. But in every act of Julian we trace the scholar
and the lover of learning. George had employed his wealth in getting
together a large library, rich in historians, rhetoricians, and
philosophers of all sects; and, on the murder of the bishop, Julian
wrote letter after letter to Alexandria, to beg the prefect and
his friend Porphyrius to save these books, and send them to him in
Cappadocia. He promised freedom to the librarian if he gave them up, and
torture if he hid them; and further begged that no books in favour of
Christianity should be destroyed, lest other and better books should be
lost with them.

There is too much reason to believe that the friends of Athanasius
were not displeased at the murder of the Bishop George and their Arian
fellow-Christians; at any rate they made no effort to save them, and the
same mob that had put to death George as an enemy to paganism now joined
his rival, Athanasius, in a triumphal entry into the city, when, with
the other Egyptian bishops, he was allowed to return from banishment.
Athanasius could brook no rival to his power; the civil force of the
city was completely overpowered by his party, and the Arian clergy were
forced to hide themselves, as the only means of saving their lives. But,
while thus in danger from their enemies, the Arians pro-hooded to elect
a successor to their murdered bishop, and they chose Lucius to that post
of honour, but of danger. Athanasius, however, in reality and openly
filled the office of bishop; and he summoned a synod at Alexandria, at
which he re-admitted into the church Lucifer and Eusebius, two bishops
who had been banished to the Thebaid, and he again decreed that the
three persons in the Trinity were of one substance.

Though the Emperor Julian thought that George, the late bishop, had
deserved all that he suffered, as having been zealous in favour of
Christianity, and forward in putting down paganism and in closing
the temples, yet he was still more opposed to Athanasius. That able
churchman held his power as a rebel by the help of the Egyptian mob,
against the wishes of the Greeks of Alexandria and against the orders of
the late emperor; and Julian made an edict, ordering that he should be
driven out of the city within twenty-four hours of the command reaching
Alexandria. The prefect of Egypt was at first unable, or unwilling, to
enforce these orders against the wish of the inhabitants; and Athanasius
was not driven into banishment till Julian wrote word that, if the
rebellious bishop were to be found in any part of Egypt after a day then
named, he would fine the prefect and the officers under him one hundred
pounds weight of gold. Thus Athanasius was for the fourth time banished
from Alexandria.

Though the Christians were out of favour with the emperor, and never
were employed in any office of trust, yet they were too numerous for him
to venture on a persecution. But Julian allowed them to be ill-treated
by his prefects, and took no notice of their complaints. He made a law,
forbidding any Christians being educated in pagan literature, believing
that ignorance would stop the spread of their religion. In the churches
of Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria, this was felt as a heavy grievance;
but it was less thought of in Egypt. Science and learning were less
cultivated by the Christians in Alexandria since the overthrow of the
Arian party; and a little later, to charge a writer with Grascizing was
the same as saying that he wanted orthodoxy.

Julian was a warm friend to learning and philosophy among the pagans.
He recalled to Alexandria the physician Zeno, who in the last reign had
fled from the Georgian faction, as the Christians were then called. He
founded in the same city a college for music, and ordered the Prefect
Ecdicius to look out for some young men of skill in that science,
particularly from among the pupils of Dioscorus; and he allotted them
a maintenance from the treasury, with rewards for the most skilful. At
Canopus, a pagan philosopher, Antoninus, the son of Eustathius, taking
advantage of the turn in public opinion, and copying the Christian monks
of the The-baid, drew round him a crowd of followers by his self-denial
and painful torture of the body. The Alexandrians flocked in crowds to
his dwelling; and such was his character for holiness that his death, in
the beginning of the reign of Theodosius, was thought by the Egyptians
to be the cause of the overthrow of paganism.

But Egyptian paganism, which had slumbered for fifty years under the
Christian emperors, was not again to be awaked to its former life.
Though the wars between the several cities for the honour of their gods,
the bull, the crocodile, or the fish, had never ceased, all reverence
for those gods was dead. The sacred animals, in particular the bulls
Apis and Mnevis, were again waited upon by their priests as of old; but
it was a vain attempt. Not only was the Egyptian religion overthrown,
but the Thebaid, the country of that religion, was fallen too low to
be raised again. The people of Upper Egypt had lost all heart, not more
from the tyranny of the Roman government in the north than from the
attacks and settlement of the Arabs in the south. All changes in the
country, whether for the better or the worse, were laid to the charge
of these latter unwelcome neighbours; and when the inquiring traveller
asked to be shown the crocodile, the river-horse, and the other animals
for which Egypt had once been noted, he was told with a sigh that they
were seldom to be seen in the Delta since the Thebaid had been peopled
with the Blemmyes. Falsehood, the usual vice of slaves, had taken a deep
hold on the Egyptian character. A denial of their wealth was the means
by which they usually tried to save it from the Roman tax-gatherer; and
an Egyptian was ashamed of himself as a coward if he could not show
a back covered with stripes gained in the attempt to save his money.
Peculiarities of character often descend unchanged in a nation for many
centuries; and, after fourteen hundred years of the same slavery, the
same stripes from the lash of the tax-gatherer still used to be the
boast of the Egyptian peasant. Cyrene was already a desert; the only
cities of note in Upper Egypt were Koptos, Hermopolis, and Antinoopolis;
but Alexandria was still the queen of cities, though the large quarter
called the Bruchium had not been rebuilt; and the Serapeum, with its
library of seven hundred thousand volumes, was, after the capitol of
Rome, the chief building in the world.

This temple of Serapis was situated on a rising ground at the west end
of the city, and, though not built like a fortification, was sometimes
called the citadel of Alexandria. It was entered by two roads; that on
one side was a slope for carriages, and on the other a grand flight of a
hundred steps from the street, with each step wider than that below
it. At the top of this flight of steps was a portico, in the form of a
circular roof, upheld by four columns.

[Illustration: 231.jpg AN EGYPTIAN WATER-CARRIER]

Through this was the entrance into the great courtyard, in the middle
of which stood the roofless hall or temple, surrounded by columns and
porticoes, inside and out. In some of the inner porticoes were the
bookcases for the library which made Alexandria the very temple of
science and learning, while other porticoes were dedicated to the
service of the ancient religion. The roofs were ornamented with gilding,
the capitals of the columns were of copper gilt, and the walls were
covered with paintings. In the middle of the inner area stood one lofty
column, which could be seen by all the country round, and even from
ships some distance out at sea. The great statue of Serapis, which had
been made under the Ptolemies, having perhaps marble feet, but for the
rest built of wood, clothed with drapery, and glittering with gold and
silver, stood in one of the covered chambers, which had a small window
so contrived as to let the sun's rays kiss the lips of the statue on the
appointed occasions. This was one of the tricks employed in the sacred
mysteries, to dazzle the worshipper by the sudden blaze of light which
on the proper occasions was let into the dark room. The temple itself,
with its fountain, its two obelisks, and its gilt ornaments, has long
since been destroyed; and the column in the centre, under the name of
Pompey's Pillar, alone remains to mark the spot where it stood, and is
one of the few works of Greek art which in size and strength vie with
the old Egyptian monuments.

The reign of Julian, instead of raising paganism to its former strength,
had only shown that its life was spent; and under Jovian (A.D. 363--364)
the Christians were again brought into power. A Christian emperor,
however, would have been but little welcome to the Egyptians if, like
Constantius, and even Constantine in his latter years, he had leaned
to the Arian party; but Jovian soon showed his attachment to the Nicene
creed, and he re-appointed Athanasius to the bishopric of Alexandria.
But though Athanasius regained his rank, yet the Arian bishop Lucius
was not deposed. Each party in Alexandria had its own bishop; those who
thought that the Son was of the same substance with the Father looked up
to Athanasius, while those who gave to Jesus the lower rank of being of
a similar substance to the Creator obeyed Lucius.

This curious metaphysical proposition was not, however, the only cause
of the quarrel which divided Egypt into such angry parties. The creeds
were made use of as the watchwords in a political struggle. Blood,
language, and geographical boundaries divided the parties; and religious
opinions seldom cross these unchanging and inflexible lines.

Every Egyptian believed in the Nicene creed and the incorruptibility
of the body of Jesus, and hated the Alexandrian Greeks; while the more
refined Greeks were as united in explaining away the Nicene creed by
the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, and in despising the ignorant
Egyptians. Christianity, which speaks so forcibly to the poor, the
unlearned, and the slave, had educated the Egyptian population,
had raised them in their own eyes; and, as the popular party gained
strength, the Arians lost ground in Alexandria. At the same time the
Greeks were falling off: in learning and in science, and in all those
arts of civilisation which had given them the superiority. Like other
great political changes, this may not have been understood at the time;
but in less than a hundred years it was found that the Egyptians were no
longer the slaves, nor the Greeks the masters.

On the death of Jovian, when Valentinian divided the Roman empire with
his brother, he took Italy and the West for his own kingdom, and gave to
Valens Egypt and the Eastern provinces, in which Greek was the language
of the government. Each emperor adopted the religion of his capital;
Valentinian held the Nicene faith, and Valens the Arian faith; and
unhappy Egypt was the only part of the empire whose religion differed
from that of its rulers. Had the creeds marked the limits of the
two empires, Egypt would have belonged to Rome; but, as geographical
boundaries and language form yet stronger ties, Egypt was given to
Constantinople, or rather to Antioch, the nearer of the two Eastern
capitals.

By Valens, Athanasius was forced for the fifth time to fly from
Alexandria, to avoid the displeasure which his disobedience again drew
down upon him. But his flock again rose in rebellion in favour of their
popular bishop; and the emperor was either persuaded or frightened
into allowing him to return to his bishopric, where he spent the few
remaining years of his life in peace. Athanasius died at an advanced
age, leaving a name more famous than that of any one of the emperors
under whom he lived. He taught the Christian world that there was a
power greater than that of kings, namely the Church. He was often beaten
in the struggle, but every victory over him was followed by the defeat
of the civil power; he was five times banished, but five times he
returned in triumph. The temporal power of the Church was in its
infancy; it only rose upon the conversion of Constantine, and it was
weak compared to what it became in after ages; but, when the Emperor
of Germany did penance barefoot before Pope Hildebrand, and a king of
England was whipped at Becket's tomb, we only witness the full-grown
strength of the infant power that was being reared by the Bishop of
Alexandria. His writings are numerous and wholly controversial, chiefly
against the Arians. The Athanasian creed seems to have been so named
only because it was thought to contain his opinions, as it is known to
be by a later author.

On the death of Athanasius, the Homoousian party chose Peter as his
successor in the bishopric, overlooking Lucius, the Arian bishop, whose
election had been approved by the emperors Julian, Jovian, and Valens.
But as the Egyptian church had lost its great champion, the emperor
ventured to re-assert his authority. He sent Peter to prison, and
ordered all the churches to be given up to the Arians, threatening with
banishment from Egypt whoever disobeyed his edict. The persecution
which the Homoousian party throughout Upper Egypt then suffered from the
Arians equalled, says the ecclesiastical historian, anything that they
had before suffered from the pagans. Every monastery in Egypt was broken
open by Lucius at the head of an armed force, and the cruelty of
the bishop surpassed that of the soldiers. The breaking open of the
monasteries seems to have been for the purpose of making the inmates
bear their share in the military service of the state, rather than
for any religious reasons. When Constantine embraced Christianity, he
immediately recognised all the religious scruples of its professors;
and not only bishops and presbyters but all laymen who had entered the
monastic orders were freed from the duty of serving in the army. But
under the growing dislike of military service, and the difficulty of
finding soldiers, when to escape from the army many called themselves
Christian monks, this excuse could no longer be listened to, and Valens
made a law that monastic vows should not save a man from enlistment.
But this law was not easily carried into force in the monasteries on
the borders of the desert, which were often well-built and well-guarded
fortresses; and on Mount Nitria, in particular, many monks lost
their lives in their resistance to the troops that were sent to fetch
recruits.

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