ALEXANDRIA, THE INTELLECTUAL METROPOLIS OF THE WORLD.—A PRODIGIOUS STIMULUS GIVEN TO LEARNING.—THE SEPTUAGINT.—DEVELOPMENT OF GRECIAN PHILOSOPHY INTO ARISTOTLIANISM.—THIS ENGRAFTED ON JEWISH THEOLOGY.—OPPOSITION OF CHRISTIANITY TO ARISTOTLIANISM.—AVERROES.—MOSES MAIMONIDES.—OPPOSITION UNSUCCESSFUL.

We must devote some little space and time to a review of the place the Moors and the Jews held in philosophy during their stay in Spain from the eighth to the fifteenth century. The purpose of this work makes this review necessary. Not that we shall see any wonderful advance in this department of learning, nor that we need show the glaring contrast between the sophistical cobwebs of the cotemporaneous scholastics and the rational researches of the Moorish and Jewish philosophers, but that we may see what a debt of gratitude modern philosophy owes the Jew and Moor, for taking up the thread of philosophical research where Greek intelligence had been forced to leave it, and for carrying it forward sufficiently for modern philosophy to build upon it, as a superstructure, the theories and systems of to-day.

To fully understand their place in philosophy it is necessary for us to retrace our steps in history some 2,000 years, and enter the city of Alexandria. Here Alexander the Great had established his seat of government. It became the intellectual metropolis of the world. Thither the conqueror brought the wealth and learning of the globe. Into that city the people streamed, or were brought as prisoners, from the remotest corners of the known world, from the Danube to the Nile, and from the Nile to the Ganges. For the first time in the world's history, there could be found in one city, men who could speak learnedly of the Borean blasts of the countries beyond the Black Sea, and of the simoons of the Oriental deserts, of pyramids and obelisks and sphinxes and hieroglyphics, of the Persian and Assyrian and Babylonian wonders, of the Chaldean astronomers, of hanging gardens, aqueducts, hydraulic machinery, tunnels under the river-bed, or of the Assyrian method of printing, on plastic clay. For the first time in the world's history seekers after knowledge could listen, in the Serapion of Alexandria, to learned discussions between Jewish monotheists and Persian dualists and Grecian polytheists and Egyptian mysticists and Indian Brahmanists and Buddhists, and between the Ionics and Pythagoreans, and Eleatics and the Atomists and Anaxagoreans, and the Socratists, and Platonists and Aristotelians and Stoics and Epicureans and Neo-Platonists. No age or city had ever furnished better opportunities for intellectual pursuits. No city could ever before this, point to kings more enthusiastic for the promotion of learning than were her Ptolemys, nor could all antiquity boast of a library equal to hers, or of a museum as justly celebrated for its botanical gardens and astronomical observatories and anatomical college and chemical laboratory.

A prodigious stimulus was thus given to learning, and it has left its impress upon the world's civilization. Here Euclid wrote the theorems which are still studied by the college students of to day. Here Archimedes studied mathematics under Conon. Here Eratosthones made astronomy a science. Here Ptolemy wrote his "Syntaxes." Here Ctesibius and Hero invented the steam engine. Here true philosophy flourished, and for the first time, too, in the world's history. The people of the Orient had dabbled in speculative thought before this, but the results achieved showed that the Oriental mind is not adapted to abstract reasoning. The luxurious habits and voluptuous surroundings and tropical climate of the Orient tend more toward poetry, music and love and languor than toward psychical contemplations. The awe-awakening phenomena of nature, which confront the Oriental everywhere, naturally lead him to accept as a priori principles what the philosophers of the Occident make the subject of endless, and for the most part, incomprehensible and unsatisfactory systems of philosophy.

It is for this reason that the great religions of the world sprang from Oriental soil, while the great philosophical systems took roots in Western lands. Yet, up to this period, not even the West, with all its labors, had sounded the depths of true philosophy. The entire pre-Socratic philosophy wasted its energies upon the futile effort to find some principle for the explanation of nature, which to the Hebrew mind had been solved thousands of years before in the opening verse of the Bible. One thought it to be water; another, air; and a third an original chaotic matter. The Pythagoreans declared that number is the essence of all things, and the Eleatics believed they were nearer the truth by negating all division in space and time. The Atomists endowed each atom with gravity and motion, and accounted thus for the origin of all physical existences and states. Socrates and Plato both came much nearer to the solution of the problem; the former postulated self-knowledge as the starting point of all philosophy, and the latter combined all preceding systems into one scheme, with an infinitely wise and just and powerful spirit as its guiding principle, but idealistically only. The additional realistic view of things had not yet been reached, and could not be reached, for that depends upon universal and exact and scientific knowledge, which prior to the great age of Alexandrian learning, to which all ages and climes and nations contributed their experiences and observation and knowledge, had never yet existed. Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander, and the friend of Ptolemy, thus found through Alexandrian influence, opportunities for philosophical reasoning, which necessarily gave his system an almost inestimable advantage over his predecessors. From the study of particulars he rose to a knowledge of universals, advancing to them by induction. This inductive method was grounded upon facts of his own experience and observation, as well as those of others, whom the intellectual metropolis had sent into Greece. He became the first and best absolute empiricist. His system acquired an encyclopedic character. He became the father of logic, natural history, empirical psychology and the science of rights. Aristotelian philosophy became the intellectual corner stone on which the Museum rested, and is to-day, through Jewish and Moorish influence, as we shall presently see, the corner stone of modern philosophy.

The Jewish community of Alexandria was very large. When Alexander founded this city and gave it his name, he wished to secure for it permanent success, and so he brought them thither by the thousands. Ptolemy brought 100,000 more, after his siege of Jerusalem, and Philadelphus, his successor, redeemed from slavery 198,000 Jews, "paying their Egyptian owners a just money equivalent for each." Alexander's expectations were realized; the city of his name led the world in commerce and intellect. With an enthusiasm almost bordering on passion the Hebrews devoted themselves to philosophy, especially to Aristotelian philosophy. They ingrafted it upon their own theology and philosophic speculations, some going even so far as to believe that Aristotle must have been a Jew himself.

Henceforth Aristotelian philosophy is Jewish philosophy. The occasional acceptance of the Neo-Platonic mysticism, theosophy and theurgy, was unable to obliterate it.

During seven centuries learning flourished in the city of Alexandria, zealously fostered by native Egyptian, Greek and Jew. A new power arose—Christianity. At once it recognized in Aristotelian philosophy an inimical foe, and began its work of suppressing rational research and free thought. The rest we need not relate. We know what happens when Christianity institutes inquisitors of faith instead of inquirers of learning. We know what happens when Christianity uses power instead of argument. That day, when the beautiful and young Hypatia, perhaps, the most accomplished woman that has ever lived, the popular lecturer of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy at the Museum, where her lecture room was crowded daily, with the wealth and intellect of Alexandria; that day, when this most noble of women was assaulted by Bishop Cyril's fanatical and blood-thirsty monks, when she was dragged by the followers of the "religion of love," from her chariot, stripped naked in the street, pulled into the church, where she was cut to pieces—where her flesh was scraped from the bones with a shell and the remnants cast into fire; that day marked the extinction of Alexandrian learning—it marked the extinction of Athenian learning. Science, so successful, died the death of strangulation, and the expounders of Aristotelian philosophy were silenced, and their literature condemned to the pyre.

But Aristotelian philosophy was not yet dead. The Jews still lived, and with them the works of Aristotle. They had succeeded in concealing translations and original copies of his works from the fanatical champions of ignorance. They had absorbed it into their system of thought. They had used it in their commentaries upon their Scriptures. They had saturated their very prayers with it. They had sought to reconcile Jewish theology with refined heathen philosophy. Whither they wandered, it wandered, and where they were permitted to study there also was Aristotelian philosophy studied. What they had long wished was granted them at last. They became the restorers of philosophy in Europe. Moorish and Spanish prosperity afforded them the opportunities for an uninterrupted study and development of the Aristotelian philosophy. Soon the Moor shared their enthusiasm. The caliphs sent special messengers to secure whatever of Aristotelian philosophy had escaped the mob of "St. Cyril."[32]

Many were they, both Jews and Moors, who devoted themselves to this philosophy, and vast the systems they unfolded. The wonderful advance they had made in the sciences, and in the other branches of learning, enabled them to enlarge upon the teachings of Aristotle. New facts and new experiences and new observations led them to new and advanced inductions. However great the temptations be to enter into some analysis of their philosophical system, we must not yield to them; that is not the object of this review. Our design is to show what influence Moorish and Jewish learning exercised upon European civilization. We have seen its impress upon the sciences and literatures of Europe, and its impress is visible still on modern philosophy.[33] From all parts of the world persons having a taste for philosophy found their way to the Moorish and Jewish sages of Spain. Gerbet himself, later Pope Sylvester II., had repaired to Cordova and Seville to hear Moorish and Jewish philosophers expound the mysteries of wisdom and philosophy, and so illustrious an example soon became the raging fashion among European scholars. As if desirous of dividing the honors equally, both the Moors and the Jews sent at the same time, a representative champion into the philosophical arena who, by their united labors, not only demolished scholasticism but also laid the permanent foundation of modern philosophy. The representative philosopher of the Moors was the great Averroes (Ibn Roshd, 1149-1198) whose name still occupies an honored place upon the pages of history of philosophy, and whose system, bearing his name—Averroism—is still recognized among the philosophical systems of the world. The representative Jewish philosopher was the great Moses Maimonides, (1135-1204) the greatest Jewish philosopher the Jews have ever produced, and one of the greatest the world has seen to this day, whose philosophical system, unfolded in his "More Nebuchim," ("Guide for the Perplexed") still remains truly, grandly immortal.

For several centuries the Moorish and Jewish philosophy was the delight of such men in whom Spanish learning kindled a desire for deeper research and loftier thought than Europe had hitherto offered. Even many of the schoolmen shared this enthusiasm. But this very enthusiasm was the deathblow to scholasticism. Once imbued with Moorish and Jewish empirical philosophy and inductive reasoning, the rational mind could no longer pursue the sophistic teachings which the church held up as the divine wisdom. That philosophy shook the old faith to its very root, produced new predispositions and prepared the way for the coming change. It weaned men from simply believing the church's "say-so" and taught them to think, and when men began to think scholasticism ceased, and the Reformation began, and with it modern thought. No longer would the rational mind believe that legends and miracles can decide such questions as are the starting point of philosophic thought. No longer would they endure the preposterous teaching—the product of ignorance and audacity—that the faith of the church is absolute truth; that faith is greater than knowledge; that a thing may be theologically true even though it be philosophically false. No longer would they disgrace themselves with continuing to waste time and parchment with discussions and treatises such as these, to which the schoolmen of several centuries devoted hundreds of volumes: "How many choirs of angels are there in heaven, how do they sit and upon what instrument do they play?" "To what temperature does the heat rise in hell?" "Wherein lies the difference between 'consubstantiatio and transubstantiato'?" "What kind of feathers had the angel Gabriel in his wings? What kind of a swallow it was that caused Tobias' blindness? Whether Pilate washed his hands with soap before he condemned Jesus? Whether it was an adagio or allegro which David played before Saul? What sort of salve it was which Mary brought to the Lord? Whether the coat for which the soldiers cast lots constituted the entire raiment of the Redeemer? Whether the valley of Jehosophat is large enough for the world's judgment day?" and so on ad nauseam. A schism arose. The indignation of St. Thomas Aquinas, the leader of the Dominicans, knew no bounds when he beheld Christians drinking in, in full draughts, Moorish and Jewish philosophy. The Franciscans opposed him and every effort of his to suppress their writings. The conflict lasted till 1512, when the Lateran council condemned "the abettors of these detestable doctrines to be held as heretics and infidels," and the Dominicans, armed with the weapons of the Inquisition, were not slow to silence Averoism in Europe.

But though silenced it lived in Jewish philosophy, and that, as little as its Talmud and Bible no power on earth has ever been strong enough to silence. Though silenced, with the aid of the Jews it flashed forth to all parts of Europe, where it found its way as readily into the "Opus Majus" of Roger Bacon as into the curriculum of studies of the University of Padua. Though silenced, it permeated the Renaissance. Though silenced, it formed the groundwork of Spinoza's system. Though silenced, with the aid of the Jewish philosophers, who laughed the Inquisition to scorn, it was studied everywhere, and everywhere it assumed those gigantic proportions destined to illumine the intellect of Europe. Though silenced, with the aid of the Jewish philosophy, it ushered in modern philosophy and the civilization of to-day.