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)

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

[Illustration: 237.jpg REMAINS OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE TEMPLE OF
LUXOR]

The monastic institutions of Egypt had already reached their
full growth. They were acknowledged by the laws of the empire as
ecclesiastical corporations, and allowed to hold property; and by a new
law of this reign, if a monk or nun died without a will or any known
kindred, the property went to the monastery as heir at law. One of the
most celebrated of these monasteries was on Tabenna, where Pachomius
had gathered round him thirteen hundred followers, who owned him as the
founder of their order, and gave him credit for the gift of prophecy.
His disciples in the other monasteries of Upper Egypt amounted to six
thousand more. Anuph was at the head of another order of monks, and he
boasted that he could by prayer obtain from heaven whatever he wished.
Hor was at the head of another monastery, where, though wholly unable
to read or write, he spent his life in singing psalms, and, as his
followers and perhaps he himself believed, in working miracles.
Sera-pion was at the head of a thousand monks in the Ar-sinoite nome,
who raised their food by their own labour, and shared it with their
poorer neighbours. Near Nitria, a place in the Mareotic nome which gave
its name to the nitre springs, there were as many as fifty cells; but
those who aimed at greater solitude and severer mortification withdrew
farther into the desert, to Scetis in the same nome, a spot already
sanctified by the trials and triumphs of St. Anthony. Here, in a
monastery surrounded by the sands, by the side of a lake whose waters
are Salter than the brine of the ocean, with no grass or trees to rest
the aching eye, where the dazzling sky is seldom relieved with a
cloud, where the breezes are too often laden with dry dust, these monks
cultivated a gloomy religion, with hearts painfully attuned to the
scenery around them. Here dwelt Moses, who in his youth had been a
remarkable sinner, and in his old age became even more remarkable as a
saint. It was said that for six years he spent every night in prayer,
without once closing his eyes in sleep; and that one night, when his
cell was attacked by four robbers, he carried them all off at once on
his back to the neighbouring monastery to be punished, because he would
himself hurt no man. Benjamin also dwelt at Scetis; he consecrated oil
to heal the diseases of those who washed with it, and during the eight
months that he was himself dying of a dropsy, he touched for their
diseases all who came to the door of his cell to be healed. Hellas
carried fire in his bosom without burning his clothes. Elias spent
seventy years in solitude on the borders of the Arabian desert near
Antinoopolis. Apelles was a blacksmith near Achoris; he was tempted
by the devil in the form of a beautiful woman, but he scorched the
tempter's face with a red-hot iron. Dorotheus, who though a Theban had
settled near Alexandria, mortified his flesh by trying to live without
sleep. He never willingly lay down to rest, nor indeed ever slept till
the weakness of the body sunk under the efforts of the spirit. Paul,
who dwelt at Pherma, repeated three hundred prayers every day, and kept
three hundred pebbles in a bag to help him in his reckoning. He was the
friend of Anthony, and when dying begged to be wrapt in the cloak given
him by that holy monk, who had himself received it as a present from
Athanasius. His friends and admirers claimed for Paul the honour of
being the first Christian hermit, and they maintained their improbable
opinion by asserting that he had been a monk for ninety-seven years, and
that he had retired to the desert at the age of sixteen, when the Church
was persecuted in the reign of Valerian. All Egypt believed that the
monks were the especial favourites of Heaven, that they worked miracles,
and that divine wisdom flowed from their lips without the help or
hindrance of human learning. They were all Homoousians, believing
that the Son was of one substance with the Father; some as trinitarians
holding the opinions of Athanasius; some as Sabellians believing that
Jesus was the creator of the world, and that his body therefore was not
liable to corruption; some as anthropomorphites believing God was of
human form like Jesus; but all warmly attached to the Mcene creed,
denying the two natures of Christ, and hating the Arian Greeks of
Alexandria and the other cities. Gregory of Nazianzum remarks that Egypt
was the most Christ-loving of countries, and adds with true simplicity
that, wonderful to say, after having so lately worshipped bulls, goats,
and crocodiles, it was now teaching the world the worship of the Trinity
in the truest form.

The pagans, who were now no longer able to worship publicly as they
chose, took care to proclaim their opinions indirectly in such ways as
the law could not reach. In the hippodrome, which was the noisiest of
the places where the people met in public, they made a profession of
their faith by the choice of which horses they bet on; and Christians
and pagans alike showed their zeal for religion by hooting and clapping
of hands. Prayers and superstitious ceremonies were used on both
sides to add to the horses' speed; and the monk Hilarion, the pupil of
Anthony, gained no little credit for sprinkling holy water on the horses
of his party, and thus enabling Christianity to outrun paganism in the
hippodrome at Gaza.

During these reigns of weakness and misgovernment, it was no doubt a
cruel policy rather than humanity that led the tax-gatherers to collect
the tribute in kind. More could be squeezed out of a ruined people by
taking what they had to give than by requiring it to be paid in copper
coin. Hence Valons made a law that no tribute throughout the empire
should be taken in money; and he laid a new land-tax upon Egypt, to the
amount of a soldier's clothing for every thirty acres.

The Saracens* had for some time past been encroaching on the Eastern
frontiers of the empire, and had only been kept back by treaties which
proved the weakness of the Romans, as the armies of Constantinople were
still called, and which encouraged the barbarians in their attacks.

* The name _Saraceni_ was given by the Greeks and Romans to
the nomadic Arabs who lived on the borders of the desert.
During the Middle Ages, the Muhammedans, coming from
apparently the same localities, were also called Saracens.

On the death of their king, the command over the Saracens fell to
their Queen Masvia, who broke the last treaty, laid waste Palestine and
Phoenicia with her armies, conquered or gained over the Arabs of Petra,
and pressed upon the Egyptians at the head of the Red Sea. On this,
Valens renewed the truce, but on terms still more favourable to the
invaders. Many of the Saracens were Christians, and by an article of the
treaty they were to have a bishop granted them for their church, and
for this purpose they sent Moses to Alexandria to be ordained. But
the Saracens sided with the Egyptians, in religion as well as policy,
against the Arian Greeks. Hence Moses refused to be ordained by Lucius,
the patriarch of Alexandria, and chose rather to receive his appointment
from some of the Homoousian bishops who were living in banishment in the
Thebaid. After this advance of the barbarians the interesting city
of Petra, which since the time of Trajan had been in the power or the
friendship of Rome or Constantinople, was lost to the civilised world.
This rocky fastness, which was ornamented with temples, a triumphal
arch, and a theatre, and had been a bishop's see, was henceforth
closed against all travellers; it had no place in the map till it was
discovered by Burckhardt in our own days without a human being dwelling
in it, with oleanders and tamarisks choking up its entrance through
the cliff, and with brambles trailing their branches over the rock-hewn
temples.

[Illustration: 243.jpg TEMPLE COURTYARD, MEDINET ABU]

The reign of Theodosius, which extended from 379 to 395, is remarkable
for the blow then given to paganism. The old religion had been sinking
even before Christianity had become the religion of the emperors; it had
been discouraged by Constantine, who had closed many of the temples; but
Theodosius made a law in the first year of his reign that the whole
of the empire should be Christian, and should receive the trinitarian
faith. He soon afterwards ordered that Sunday should be kept holy, and
forbade all work and law-proceedings on that day; and he sent Cynegius,
the prefect of the palace, into Egypt, to see these laws carried into
effect in that province.

The wishes of the emperor were ably followed up by Theophilus, Bishop of
Alexandria. He cleansed the temple of Mithra, and overthrew the statues
in the celebrated temple of Serapis, which seemed the very citadel of
paganism. He also exposed to public ridicule the mystic ornaments and
statues which a large part of his fellow-citizens still regarded as
sacred. It was not, however, to be supposed that this could be peaceably
borne by a people so irritable as the Alexandrians. The students in the
schools of philosophy put themselves at the head of the mob to stop the
work of destruction, and to revenge themselves upon their assailants,
and several battles were fought in the streets between the pagans
and the Christians, in which both parties lost many lives; but as the
Christians were supported by the power of the prefect, the pagans were
routed, and many whose rank would have made them objects of punishment
were forced to fly from Alexandria.

No sooner had the troops under the command of the prefect put down the
pagan opposition than the work of destruction was again carried forward
by the zeal of the bishop. The temples were broken open, their ornaments
destroyed, and the statues of the gods melted for the use of the
Alexandrian church. One statue of an Egyptian god was alone saved from
the wreck, and was set up in mockery of those who had worshipped it;
and this ridicule of their religion was a cause of greater anger to the
pagans than even the destruction of the other statues. The great statue
of Serapis, which was made of wood covered with plates of metal, was
knocked to pieces by the axes of the soldiers. The head and limbs were
broken off, and the wooden trunk was burnt in the amphitheatre amid
the shouts and jeers of the bystanders. A conjectured fragment of this
statue is now in the British Museum.

In the plunder of the temple of Serapis, the great library of more
than seven hundred thousand volumes was wholly broken up and scattered.
Orosius, the Spaniard, who visited Alexandria in the next reign, may be
trusted when he says that he saw in the temple the empty shelves, which,
within the memory of men then living, had been plundered of the books
that had formerly been got together after the library of the Bruchium
was burnt by Julius Caesar. In a work of such lawless plunder, carried
on by ignorant zealots, many of these monuments of pagan genius and
learning must have been wilfully or accidentally destroyed, though the
larger number may have been carried off by the Christians for the other
public and private libraries of the city. How many other libraries this
city of science may have possessed we are not told, but there were no
doubt many. Had Alexandria during the next two centuries given birth to
poets and orators, their works, the offspring of native genius, might
perhaps have been written without the help of libraries; but the labours
of the mathematicians and grammarians prove that the city was still well
furnished with books, beside those on the Christian controversies.

When the Christians were persecuted by the pagans, none but men of
unblemished lives and unusual strength of mind stood to their religion
in the day of trial, and suffered the penalties of the law; the weak,
the ignorant, and the vicious readily joined in the superstitions
required of them, and, embracing the religion of the stronger party,
easily escaped punishment. So it was when the pagans of Alexandria were
persecuted by Theophilus; the chief sufferers were the men of learning,
in whose minds paganism was a pure deism, and who saw nothing but
ignorance and superstition on the side of their oppressors; who thought
their worship of the Trinity only a new form of polytheism, and jokingly
declared that they were not arithmeticians enough to understand it.
Olympius, who was the priest of Serapis when the temple was sacked, and
as such the head of the pagans of Alexandria, was a man in every
respect the opposite of the Bishop Theophilus. He was of a frank, open
countenance and agreeable manners; and though his age might have allowed
him to speak among his followers in the tone of command, he chose rather
in his moral lessons to use the mild persuasion of an equal; and few
hearts were so hardened as not to be led into the paths of duty by his
exhortations. Whereas the furious monks, says the indignant pagan, were
men only in form, but swine in manners. Whoever put on a black coat, and
was not ashamed to be seen with dirty linen, gained a tyrannical power
over the minds of the mob, from their belief in his holiness; and these
men attacked the temples of the gods as a propitiation for their own
enormous sins. Thus each party reproached the other, and often unjustly.
Among other religious frauds and pretended miracles of which the pagan
priests were accused, was that of having an iron statue of Serapis
hanging in the air in a chamber of the temple, by means of a loadstone
fixed in the ceiling. The natural difficulties shield them from this
charge, but other accusations are not so easily rebutted.

After this attack upon the pagans, their religion was no longer openly
taught in Alexandria. Some of the more zealous professors withdrew
from the capital to Canopus, about ten miles distant, where the ancient
priestly learning was still taught, unpersecuted because unnoticed; and
there, under the pretence of studying hieroglyphics, a school was opened
for teaching magic and other forbidden rites. When the pagan worship
ceased throughout Egypt, the temples were very much used as churches,
and in some cases received in their ample courtyard a smaller church of
Greek architecture, as in that of Medinet Abu. In other cases Christian
ornaments were added to the old walls, as in the rock temple of Kneph,
opposite to Abu Simbel, where the figure of the Saviour with a glory
round his head has been painted on the ceiling. The Christians, in order
to remove from before their eyes the memorials of the old superstition,
covered up the sculpture on the walls with mud from the Nile and white
plaster. This coating we now take away, at a time when the idolatrous
figures are no longer dangerous to religion, and we find the sculpture
and painting fresh as when covered up fourteen hundred years ago.

[Illustration: 248.jpg CHRISTIAN PICTURE AT ABU SIMBE]

It would be unreasonable to suppose that the Egyptians, upon embracing
Christianity, at once threw off all of their pagan rites. Among other
customs that they still clung to, was that of making mummies of the
bodies of the dead. St. Anthony had tried to dissuade the Christian
converts from that practice; not because the mummy-cases were covered
with pagan inscriptions, but he boldly asserted, what a very little
reading would have disproved, that every mode of treating a dead body,
beside burial, was forbidden in the Bible. St. Augustine, on the other
hand, well understanding that the immortality of the soul without the
body was little likely to be understood or valued by the ignorant,
praises the Egyptians for that very practice, and says that they were
the only Christians who really believed in the resurrection from the
dead. The tapers burnt before the altars were from the earliest times
used to light up the splendours of the Egyptian altars, in the darkness
of their temples, and had been burnt in still greater numbers in the
yearly festival of the candles. The playful custom of giving away
sugared cakes and sweetmeats on the twenty-fifth day of Tybi, our
twentieth of January, was then changed to be kept fourteen days earlier,
and it still marks the Feast of Epiphany or Twelfth-night. The division
of the people into clergy and laity, which was unknown to Greeks and
Romans, was introduced into Christianity in the fourth century by the
Egyptians. While the rest of Christendom were clothed in woollen, linen,
the common dress of the Egyptians, was universally adopted by the clergy
as more becoming to the purity of their manners. At the same time the
clergy copied the Egyptian priests in the custom of shaving the crown of
the head bald.

The new law in favour of trinitarian Christianity was enforced with as
great strictness against the Arians as against the pagans. The bishops
and priests of that party wrere everywhere turned out of their churches,
which were then given up to the Homoousians. Theodosius summoned a
council of one hundred and fifty bishops at Constantinople, to re-enact
the Nicene creed; and in the future religious rebellions of the
Egyptians they always quoted against the Greeks this council of
Constantinople, with that of Nicasa, as the foundation of their faith.
By this religious policy, Theodosius did much to delay the fall of the
empire. He won the friendship of his Egyptian subjects, as well as of
their Saracen neighbours, all of whom, as far as they were Christian,
held to the Nicene creed. Egypt became the safest of his provinces; and,
when his armies had been recruited with so many barbarians that they
could no longer be trusted, these new levies wrere marched into Egypt
under the command of Hormisdas, and an equal number of Egyptians were
drafted out of the army of Egypt, and led into Thessaly.

When the season came for the overflow of the Nile, in the first summer
after the destruction of the temples, the waters happened to rise more
slowly than usual; and the Egyptians laid the blame upon the Christian
emperor, who had forbidden their sacrificing the usual offerings in
honour of the river-god.

[Illustration: 250.jpg MANFALOOT, SHOWING THE HEIGHT OF THE NILE IN
SUMMER]

The alarm for the loss of their crops carried more weight in the
religious controversy than any arguments that could be brought against
pagan sacrifices; and the anger of the people soon threatened a serious
rebellion. Evagrius the prefect, being disturbed for the peace of the
country, sent to Constantinople for orders; but the emperor remained
firm; he would make no change in the law against paganism, and the fears
of the Egyptians and Alexandrians were soon put an end to by a most
plenteous overflow.

Since the time of Athanasius, and the overthrow of the Arian party in
Alexandria, the learning of that city was wholly in the hands of the
pagans, and was chiefly mathematical. Diophantus of Alexandria is the
earliest writer on algebra whose works are now remaining to us, and has
given his name to the Diophantine problems. Pappus wrote a description
of the world, and a commentary on Ptolemy's _Almagest_, beside a work
on geometry, published under the name of his _Mathematical Collections_.
Theon, a professor in the museum, wrote on the smaller astrolabe--the
instrument then used to measure the star orbits--and on the rise of the
Nile, a subject always of interest to the mathematicians of Egypt, from
its importance to the husbandman. From Theon's astronomical observations
we learn that the Alexandrian astronomers still made use of the old
Egyptian movable year of three hundred and sixty-five days only, and
without a leap-year. Paul the Alexandrian astrologer, on the other hand,
uses the Julian year of three hundred and sixty-five days and a quarter,
and he dates from the era of Diocletian. His rules for telling the day
of the week from the day of the month, and for telling on what day of
the week each year began, teach us that our present mode of dividing
time was used in Egypt. Horapollo, the grammarian, was also then a
teacher in the schools of Alexandria. He wrote in the Koptic language a
work in explanation of the old hieroglyphics, which has gained a notice
far beyond its deserts, because it is the only work on the subject that
has come down to us.

The only Christian writings of this time, that we know of, are the
paschal letters of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, which were much
praised by Jerome, and by him translated into Latin. They are full of
bitter reproaches against Origen and his writings, and they charge him
with having treated Jesus more cruelly than Pilate or the Jews had done.
John, the famous monk of the Thebaid, was no writer, though believed to
have the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold the victory
of Theodosius over the rebel Maximus; and, when the emperor had got
together his troops to march against Eugenius, another rebel who
had seized the passes of the Julian Alps, he sent his trusty eunuch
Eutropius to fetch the holy Egyptian, or at least to learn from him what
would be the event of the war. John refused to go to Europe, but he
told the messenger that Theodosius would conquer the rebel, and soon
afterwards die; both of which came to pass as might easily have been
guessed.

On the death of Theodosius, in 395, the Roman empire was again divided.
Arcadius, his elder son, ruled Egypt and the East, while Honorius, the
younger, held the West; and the reins of government at once passed
from the ablest to the weakest hands. But the change was little felt
in Egypt, which continued to be governed by the patriarch Theophilus,
without the name but with very nearly the power of a prefect. He was
a bold and wicked man, but as his religious opinions were for the
Homoousians as against the Arians, and his political feelings were for
the Egyptians as against the Greeks, he rallied to his government the
chief strength of the province. As the pagans and Arians of Alexandria
were no longer worthy of his enmity, he fanned into a flame a new
quarrel which was then breaking out in the Egyptian church. The monks
of Upper Egypt, who were mostly ignorant and unlettered men, were
anthropomorphites, or believers that God was in outward shape like a
man. They quoted from the Jewish Scriptures that he made man in his own
image, in support of their opinion. They held that he was of a strictly
human form, like Jesus, which to them seemed fully asserted in the
Nicene creed. In this opinion they were opposed by those who were better
educated, and it suited the policy of Theophilus to side with the more
ignorant and larger party. He branded with the name of Origenists those
who argued that God was without form, and who quoted the writings of
Origen in support of their opinion. This naturally led to a dispute
about Origen's orthodoxy; and that admirable writer, who had been
praised by all parties for two hundred years, and who had been quoted as
authority as much by Athanasius as by the Arians, was declared to be a
heretic by a council of bishops. The writings of Origen were accordingly
forbidden to be read, because they contradicted the anthropomorphite
opinions.

The quarrel between the Origenists and the anthropomorphites did not end
in words. A proposition in theology, or a doubt in metaphysics, was no
better cause of civil war than the old quarrels about the bull Apis or
the crocodile; but a change of religion had not changed the national
character. The patriarch, finding his party the stronger, attacked the
enemy in their own monasteries; he marched to Mount Nitria at the head
of a strong body of soldiers, and, enrolling under his banners the
anthropomorphite monks, attacked Dioscorus and the Origenists, set fire
to their monasteries, and laid waste the place.

Theophilus next quarrelled with Peter, the chief of the Alexandrian
presbyters, whom he accused of admitting to the sacraments of the
church a woman who had not renounced the Manichean heresy; and he then
quarrelled with Isidorus, who had the charge of the poor of the church,
because he bore witness that Peter had the orders of Theophilus himself
for what he did.

In this century there was a general digging up of the bodies of the
most celebrated Christians of former ages, to heal the diseases and
strengthen the faith of the living; and Constantinople, which as the
capital of the empire had been ornamented by the spoils of its subject
provinces, had latterly been enriching its churches with the remains of
numerous Christian saints. The tombs of Egypt, crowded with mummies that
had lain there for centuries, could of course furnish relics more easily
than most countries, and in this reign Constantinople received from
Alexandria a quantity of bones which were supposed to be those of the
martyrs slain in the pagan persecutions. The archbishop John Chrysostom
received them gratefully, and, though himself smarting under the
reproach that he was not orthodox enough for the superstitious
Egyptians, he thanks God that Egypt, which sent forth its grain to feed
its hungry neighbours, could also send the bodies of so many martyrs to
sanctify their churches.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22