The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (41 page)

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

Goya,
Los Caprichos

 
 
I
f 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.

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:

 
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).

Encouraged by the response from some Christians, Arius traveled to his friend Eusebius of Nicomedia, where he began codifying his ideas in a book that would turn that fire into an inferno. In this book, known as
The Banquet
or, in Greek,
Thalia,
Arius proposed that God the Father was the only God and that Christ was created by him, not an integral part of him. Today this may seem a rather dry and academic point, but in Alexandria it was dynamite. The idea created a sensation and the inns and churches of Alexandria were soon filled with arguments over the true nature of Christ. In the marble colonnades street philosophers argued for and against the idea, while the doctrine rapidly became the talk of Christian society. That Arius had written his work in an easily read, populist style made it even more fashionable.

But the arguments were not confined to the polite exchanges of the museum, or even the soapbox harangues of the street preachers. In an early church, battered and bruised from numerous bloody persecutions, desperately trying to assert its authority, arguments over Arius and his “Arianism” often ended in bloodshed. The doctrine in effect created a turf war between two opposing factions of the church, each of which of course claimed to hold the only true interpretation of the faith. As emperors came and went, so bishops and priests of each camp were excommunicated and exiled, reinstated and returned. The atmosphere was highly inflammatory, with both parties claiming their opponents were responsible for terrible atrocities, most of which probably never happened but all of which served to further enrage the street mobs and radical monks that both camps used to support their campaigns.

In the end the Christian emperor Constantine, who had himself converted to Christianity, at least nominally bringing the Roman Empire with him, decided to intervene. So he wrote to the head of each faction—the patriarch Alexander and Arius—in an attempt to ease passions, suggesting that they differed only on the interpretation of a small and obscure point of doctrine. Remembering the reputation of the city where the fight was raging, he patiently reminded them:

Despite this eminently sensible attempt to pour oil on troubled waters neither the Arians nor their opponents were prepared to listen, nor were they about to do as Constantine had suggested. The religious ideas now coming out of the city may have been created in an atmosphere of tolerance, but having defined their own positions, they would allow no further debate or diversion. This radicalism had been born in Alexandria and grown in Alexandrian soil, and it would poison and eventually kill the city that had nurtured it.

As Alexander would allow no differences in religion, so eventually the whole Christian church was forced to choose, and in 325 a weary Constantine ordered the bishops to gather in council at Nicaea to decide once and for all what the official church did and did not believe. The result was the Nicene Creed, still used in churches today. In it there was no place for Arianism. Patriarch Alexander seemed to have won and Arius was banished.

 
 
Some of the credit for Alexander’s apparent triumph at Nicaea must go to his deacon Athanasius. He was a young and fervent Christian who had accompanied the patriarch to the council as his secretary, having already served at his side for several years. Athanasius was a unique product of his time and a man who could have been produced only by the city of his childhood—Alexandria. Here he had received the education still traditional among the wealthier elements of society, learning grammar and rhetoric before finishing his education in the lecture halls of the philosophers of the museum. He had then thrown himself into the life and controversies of the church, witnessing firsthand both the sophisticated academic arguments in the city for and against Arianism and the stark fundamentalist Christianity of the desert monks who from this date would play an increasing role in his city’s fortunes.

Contemporaries describe him as relatively short and thin but full of energy, his “finely shaped” head crowned with sparse auburn hair. He was said to have a ready wit, be affable in company, pleasant in conversation, and quick to learn. But the passion of his religion betrayed itself in his unyielding and unsparing debating style. If there was an Alexandrian to answer Arius’s criticism it was he, and his rise through the church hierarchy was rapid, until at just thirty-three, on the death of his mentor, he found himself the new patriarch of his home city.

Fourth-century Alexandria was as idiosyncratic and energetic as its new patriarch. The Ptolemaic temple of Serapis still functioned, and pagan philosophers still bowed to the great cult statue there, created centuries before by Bryaxis. Nearby the Jewish synagogues familiar to Philo and perhaps even the writers of the Septuagint still flourished, and in between them Christian churches had now sprung up. In the streets the pagan fortune-tellers still offered glimpses of the future to those with a few coins in their pockets, while populist Neoplatonist and evangelical monks vied for the ears and hearts of passersby. In this multicultural, multilingual milieu the new patriarch began his turbulent career, one that would change the face of his city and his religion forever.

Athanasius inherited one niggling problem from Alexander. Arianism, though condemned at Nicaea, was not dead, despite the death of Arius himself, who—one church father claimed—died when, seized with the realization of his own wickedness, he became so incontinent that he passed his own bowels. Under a series of weak emperors the fortunes of pro-and anti-Arian factions waxed and waned, during which time Athanasius was alternately feted and denounced, expelled and reconciled. During his episcopate he was variously charged with sorcery, corruption, and murder. Somewhere between five and seven times he was driven from his city and forced to take refuge with the desert monks, in western Europe, and once even in his own father’s tomb. But for each reverse there was a restoration, and Athanasius himself recorded in ever more polemical detail his changes of fortune, stoking the political fires in Alexandria. On the occasion of one return the Arians claimed that people complained and even wept at the news of his return and refused to meet with him.

He responded furiously (referring to himself in the third person):

 
Every swing of the Arian pendulum brought a more emphatic, more violent, more fundamentalist response from the protagonists. Athanasius himself was now known as
“Athanasius contra mundum”
—“Athanasius against the world.” Suspicions were stoked, factions formed, sects became mobs, and their cry in the streets was not “think” but simply “choose.”

Perhaps fortunately, Athanasius would not live to see the end results of his church’s radicalization. After an exhausting and turbulent career he died peacefully in his bed, having spent a lifetime fighting for the view of Christianity that he had heard agreed to at Nicaea—a fight which would gain him the titles “Doctor of the Church” and “the Father of Orthodoxy.” On these foundations would be built the medieval Catholic Church, but they would be laid in the ruins of the city he had ruled.

 
 
With the Christian church apparently absorbed with its own internal battles, life for those outside its influence in Alexandria may have seemed little changed. Indeed, on the surface the city was still an eclectic center of learning. Christians found enlightenment at the catechetical schools; Jewish philosophy was taught at the rabbinical school; and the museum and library, whatever the predations of previous centuries, were still filled with scholars. Among this last group, around the middle of the century, lived a little-known member of the museum whose family was also about to have a profound effect on both the life of the city and the fortunes of the world beyond.

Theon first appears in the record as an astronomer and mathematician who in 364 was credited with correctly predicting eclipses of both the sun and the moon. He was in many ways the archetypal member of the museum of this era, a local scholar who never left his city and whose epithets, “Egyptos” and “Alexandreus,” suggest that he traced his lineage back through both Greek and Egyptian roots. Because some of his writings survive we know something of his passions and can gain one of our last glimpses of the great library at work. Theon studied in the Alexandrian way, building his own work around the creation of new editions of the great books in the library and preparing his own commentaries on them. He produced editions of Euclid’s
Elements, Data,
and
Optics,
and wrote commentaries on Claudius Ptolemy’s
Almagest
and
Handy Tables.