LECTURE III--NEOPLATONISM



We now approach the period in which Alexandria began to have a
philosophy of its own--to be, indeed, the leader of human thought for
several centuries.

I shall enter on this branch of my subject with some fear and trembling;
not only on account of my own ignorance, but on account of the great
difficulty of handling it without trenching on certain controversial
subjects which are rightly and wisely forbidden here. For there was not
one school of Metaphysic at Alexandria: there were two; which, during
the whole period of their existence, were in internecine struggle with
each other, and yet mutually borrowing from each other; the Heathen,
namely, and the Christian. And you cannot contemplate, still less can
you understand, the one without the other. Some of late years have
become all but unaware of the existence of that Christian school; and
the word Philosophy, on the authority of Gibbon, who, however excellent
an authority for facts, knew nothing about Philosophy, and cared less,
has been used exclusively to express heathen thought; a misnomer which
in Alexandria would have astonished Plotinus or Hypatia as much as it
would Clement or Origen. I do not say that there is, or ought to be, a
Christian Metaphysic. I am speaking, as you know, merely as a
historian, dealing with facts; and I say that there was one; as
profound, as scientific, as severe, as that of the Pagan Neoplatonists;
starting indeed, as I shall show hereafter, on many points from common
ground with theirs. One can hardly doubt, I should fancy, that many
parts of St. John's Gospel and Epistles, whatever view we may take of
them, if they are to be called anything, are to be called metaphysic and