APPENDIX. RISE OF THE ALEXANDRIAN PLATONISM. THE history of the Alexandrian school occupies a space of about 300 years,-extending from the beginning of the third century, when it was founded by Ammonius Saccas, to about 530, A. D., when the chairs of philosophy at Athens were suppressed by Justinian, and Isidore of Gaza, with his colleagues, took refuge in Persia. The circumstances which give to it such peculiar interest are chiefly these:— It is, in the first place, the final development, the last act, in the great drama of Greek rationalism; and it is impossible to contemplate the vast influence, which this spirit, as matured in Greece, has exercised on the destinies of man, whether with regard to the formation of mind, or to the propagation of Christianity, without watching, with great curiosity, its whole course, but especially its close, when it seems to have roused itself from a long torpor, and thrown up, as a last effort, one transient but brilliant flame previous to its final extinction. In the second place, it stands in a peculiar relation to the noblest and best portion of Greek philosophy. It was a revival of Platonism, but of Platonism in a new atmosphere and soil; and we may observe in this transition a fact like one of the most interesting phenomena exhibited in botany or zoology, when a plant or animal is enabled to naturalize itself in a strange locality by the extraordinary development of some organ or function originally very subordinate. What in Plato was a religious philosophy, became, in the hands of the Alexandrians, a philosophical religion; and this is the real distinction, important though minute, between the two schools. Thirdly, the new Platonism was the form in which the same spirit of Greek philosophy, even when apparently dead, lay hid, from the end of the fifth century, in the monasteries of the East, from whence it was transferred into the West through the works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite. In this, also, it was revived in the fifteenth century by the exiled Greeks at Florence; and in this introduced into England by some of our own great theologians, in the most flourishing period of English philosophy. John Smith, Cudworth, Norris, and More 1, were Alexandrian, not Athenian Platonists; and no little injustice has been done to Plato by assuming them as fitting interpreters of a writer, whom they scarcely quote, comparatively with Proclus and Plotinus; a writer whose practical views and principles were far removed from the mere abstract speculations, to which men, who know little of his system, have persisted in attaching his name 2. To these may be added Burnett, Widrington, Wilkins, and Theophilus Gale. 2 Of Plotinus himself, and his doctrines, I have no intention to speak minutely. English readers of the present day must have made far greater progress in a deep philosophy, before they will listen, without ridicule, even to a list of his subjects. Questions "of Fate"-" of the Essence of the Soul" "of Intellect, and Ideas, and Being"- "How from the First and the One proceeds that which comes after the One"-" Whether all souls be one"-" of the Good and the One as identical"-"of the three principal Substances, and the two Matters"-" Whether there are Ideas of Individuals "-and "How the soul is something intermediate between a divisible But there is a still more interesting feature in the history of the school of Alexandria-its relation to Christianity. and indivisible essence :"-these are not questions for English ears in the nineteenth century; though no sensible man will join in the abuse lavished by Brucker, and other less respectable critics, on the frivolity and absurdity of the abstract speculations themselves, in which the Alexandrian philosophers indulged, and with which it was impossible for them, as deep inquirers, to dispense, without compromising the very foundation of a rationalistic system. But even the more practical ethics of Plotinus-his inquiries into the nature of man, of virtue, and of the mind-are involved in an obscurity, which will effectually save them, as perhaps he himself intended, from being profaned by vulgar eyes. The first lessons in philosophy, which he had derived, in company with Origen, from Ammonius at Alexandria, he engaged with them not to divulge; and such a resolution was not likely to render the instruction, which he continued to give, very clear and perspicuous*. Writing he did not practise till he was nearly fifty years old t. Even then his tracts (for they are scarcely more) were confined to a few select readers; and as he neglected to inscribe them himself, their titles were not a little confused. His subjects were selected without any order, as accidental questions arose; and they were chiefly addressed as answers to the inquiries of his favourite pupils-pupils, it may be necessary to add, unlike the idle boys to whom the name is now mostly confined; but learned, hard-headed men, who went to school at forty years of age, and stayed there the rest of their lives. When we add that he could not endure to look over his own compositions that his eyesight was too bad to read his own writingthat this writing was far from beautiful-that his words often ran into each other-that his spelling was not the most accurate—οὔτε τῆς ὀρθογραφίας φροντίζων, ἀλλὰ μόνον τοῦ νοῦ Exóuevos that he threw down his thoughts upon paper, as he had arranged them in his mind, as if he was copying from a book, and very often in the midst of some ordinary conversation, and without minding interruptions-and that this to the great surprise of his pupils, ὃ πάντες ἐθαυμάζομεν, was his practice to the last; we shall not be surprised to find, like *Vit. Plotin. c. iii. p. 52. Ibid. c. vii. p. 57. + Ibid. c. iv. p. 53. It was raised up as the last and most formidable antagonist of the Christian faith; most formidable from its elaborate assimilation to the system, which it was designed to combat. Alexandria was the arena, in which the Apostolical doctrine and the spirit of Greek philosophy, not limited to any one sect, but drawn together, and with its whole strength even Longinus himself, 'that with all our anxiety to study the treatises on the Soul and on Being, we are quite unable to get through them *.' One mistake, says Porphyry, Longinus evidently laboured under. He fancied the obscurity of the text was caused by the blunders of the copyist, not knowing that it was the usual style of the philosopher; and that the edition, of which he complained, was, in fact, the most correct extant. Eunapius, another philosopher of the same school, makes a similar confession ‡. From the heavenly elevation of his soul, and the perplexed and enigmatic style of his writings,' Plotinus, he candidly acknowledges, was a tiresome and unpleasant person to listen to,'- Capùç kai dvoKoos. If it had not been for Porphyry himself, who threw his language into shape- -as a French writer has done for the modern philosophy of Mr. Bentham-and, in the language of the Greek biographer, like an electric conductor, brought down his thoughts to the level of mortals' understanding,' they would still have been soaring in a region far above the ken of even a philosophic eye. Probably few readers, in this degenerate day, will assent to the notion, that Porphyry, with all his merits as a polisher and interpreter, has reduced the lucubrations of Plotinus to that perfect facility and clearness-εἰς τὸ εὔγνωστον καὶ Kalapov for which Eunapius gives him credit. If the Alexandrian system is to be studied, it will be chiefly through the commentaries of Proclus, who has imbibed far more of the clearness, and even of the eloquence, of Plato, and relieves the dryness of his metaphysical discussions by occasional bursts of poetry, and at all times by the elaborate ingenuity with which he converts into allegory the most simple words of his text-book. * Epist. Longin. Vit. Plot. c. xviii. Plot. Vit. c. xx. p. 70. Eunap. in Porphyr., p. 9. Edit. Boiss. |