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THE

CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW. NO XLVI. JANUARY 1887.

EGYPTIAN

ART. I.-EGYPTIAN CHRISTIANITY.

1. The Ancient Coptic Churches of Egypt. By ALFRED J. BUTLER, M.A., F.S.A., Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884.)

2. The Art of the Saracens in Egypt. By STANLEY LANEPOOLE, B.A., M.R.A.S. (London, 1886.)

3. The Hibbert Lectures: on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of Ancient Egypt, delivered in May and June 1879. By P. LE PAGE RENOUF. Second Edition. (London, 1884.)

4. Itinéraire de la Haute Égypte. Par AUGUSTE MARIETTEPACHA. Troisième Édition. (Paris, 1880.)

NEARLY three years have elapsed since an article on 'Christianity in Egypt' appeared in this Review,' with the object of placing before our readers some account of the enterprising effort for promoting it by a Society which had then been recently formed. These years have been fruitful in great events which will still be fresh in the memory of our readers, and on which it is not our present purpose to dwell. Without making any considerable advance, the Society to which we drew attention has persevered in the quiet and useful enterprise which it proposed in the first instance to attempt. And incidentally it has done a piece of good work in leading Mr. Butler to make that second visit to the valley of the Nile which has led to the publication of the interesting work the title of which stands first at the head of this paper, and which we ought to have noticed some time since.

The perusal of Mr. Butler's book suggests that, like everything else in Oxford, the Clarendon Press has undergone great

1 Church Quarterly Review, vol. xviii. No. 35, April, 1884.

VOL. XXIII.-NO. XLVI.

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changes in recent years. Some of our readers will recall the Press of forty years ago, when it was understood to be much under the control of Dean Gaisford. Its publications were limited to Bibles and Prayer-books, a narrow selection of English divines, and some works of real, if of ponderous and out-of-the-way, learning, which no private publisher would be likely to undertake. The Press has changed with the University. If we except the admirable works of Professor Bright, it produces little that constitutes an addition to our theology; while its efforts to compete with private publishers as a purveyor of cheap school-books, and its publication, not of the original texts, which might be useful to advanced scholars, but of translations of the authoritative documents of sundry false Oriental religions, are among the notes of a new departure on the part of its conductors which we think matter for regret. The Bibles and Prayer-books, of course, at present remain; nor will we deny that in the field of history, the Clarendon publications of recent years do honour to the University and the country. Now and then, too, a book appears, which, by its merits and its defects, illustrates the spirit of the new policy. Such a book is Mr. Butler's. The quaintness of its undeniable learning, its offhandedness and lack of symmetry and method, its buoyant enthusiasms, its trivialities hovering on the verge of great and solemn questions, are all characteristic of the Oxford of our day; while we are more than willing to believe that the true underlying purpose of its author is generally higher than that which commonly prevails in Oxford. Dean Gaisford would certainly have been disturbed by the appearance of such a book under the auspices of the University. We may doubt whether he would have been more impressed by Mr. Butler's learning, or repelled by some of the topics and inquiries which it is employed to illustrate.

By the Ancient Coptic Churches in Egypt,' Mr. Butler does not mean the spiritual societies which may be so described, but the fabrics which the Egyptian Church has built, mainly in days long past. In dealing with such a subject he cannot, indeed, altogether escape from theology or ecclesiastical history. But he is before all things an artist; and he only deals with history or theology so far as they bear upon one particular department of ancient Christian Art. He modestly describes his book as amounting to no more than a 'systematic beginning' upon its proposed subject; and in apologizing for its 'shortcomings' he gives us an account of the circumstances of its composition which fully

warrants us in congratulating him on the success he has achieved.

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The most interesting part of Mr. Butler's book is his patient and elaborate description of the churches of Old Cairo. If we except Abu Sargah, these monuments are rarely or never visited by the ordinary English traveller. Indeed, Mr. Butler almost loses his temper with the few tourists who are annually haled' to Abu Sargah 'by their exceedingly ignorant dragomans.' They had better content themselves, we suppose, with the Pyramids, and the Petrified Forest, and the drive to Heliopolis, and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan, and leave the Christian antiquities of Old Cairo to students who can do them some sort of justice. However, we are sincerely obliged to Mr. Butler for drawing attention to them. If we have any fault to find with this part of his work, it is that he does it too thoroughly. He discusses a screen, or a door, or a tank, or a second-rate picture, with a minuteness which may threaten the proportions of his work, but of which his readers who are interested in the subject have no reason to complain. His style seems to be at any rate to a certain extent, modelled on that of Mr Pater he so enjoys the process of description as sometimes to outrun the capacity of readers who have never seen the objects of his enthusiasm. Still, this is a fault on the right side; and that he can be at once clear and minute the subjoined account of the choir screen in the church of Abus-Sifain will sufficiently show.

'The choir screen,' he says, 'is worth a journey to Egypt to see. It is a massive partition of ebony, divided into three large panels— doorway and two side panels-which are framed in masonry. At each side of the doorway is a square pillar, plastered and painted. On the left is pourtrayed the Crucifixion, and over it the sun shining full. On the right the Taking down from the Cross, and over it the sun eclipsed. Each of the three panels is about six feet wide and eight high. In the centre a double door, opening choirwards, is covered with elaborate mouldings, enclosing ivory crosses carved in high relief. All round the framing of the doors tablets of solid ivory, chased with arabesques, are inlet, and the topmost part of each panel is marked off for an even richer display of chased tablets and crosses. Each of the side panels of the screen is one mass of superbly cut crosses of ivory, inlaid in even lines, so as to form a kind of broken trellis-work in the ebony background. The spaces between the crosses are filled with little squares, pentagons, hexagons, and other figures of ivory, variously designed, and chiselled with exquisite skill. This order is only broken in the centre of the panel,

1 Ancient Coptic Churches, i. 181.

where a small sliding window, fourteen inches square, is fitted; on the slide a single large cross is inlaid, above and below which is an ivory tablet, containing an Arabic inscription interlaced with scrollwork. In these ivories there is no through carving; the block is first shaped in the form required-cross, square, or the like; next the design is chased in high relief, retaining the ivory ground and a raised border; and the piece is then set in the woodwork, and framed round with mouldings of ebony, or ebony and ivory alternately. It is difficult to give any idea of the extraordinary richness and delicacy of the details, or the splendour of the whole effect. The priest told me that this screen was 953 years old, i.e. dates from 927 A.D., which seems to be the year of the Church's foundation. The tradition is doubtless right.' 1

Such a description might enable a competent person to reproduce the screen, or at least to paint it with tolerable accuracy; and this is only a fair specimen of the patient and conscientious accuracy with which Mr. Butler describes what he has seen. Indeed, our readers will be prepared to discover that Mr. Butler himself is a very good draughtsman; his volumes are enriched by admirable engravings, many of which are based upon drawings of his own. Our readers will thank us for calling their attention to the pictures of blocks of ivory carved in relief from the choir screen at Abu-s-Sifain,2 of the ivory-inlaid doorway of the Haikal, at the same church,3 as well as others too numerous to specify. Nor must we forget to mention the plans of churchesseveral of which in Upper Egypt are contributed by Sir Arthur Gordon—and of the Roman Fortress of Babylon, by Mr. Butler himself. Of these, the majority are published for the first time, and give the work a unique value, which it may be expected to retain, at any rate for the present.

If, as we hope, Mr. Butler reaches a second edition, he will be able to recast certain portions of his book with advantage. The churches of Old Cairo are buildings of very high interest; but they take up more room than is their due in a work of the dimensions and aim of that before us; nor is the claim of the rest of Christian Egypt satisfied by Mr. Butler's very interesting account of his visit to the Desert Monasteries of the Natrun Valley. He himself would feel that until the White and Red Monasteries have been described on a very different scale from that which he attempts, his work is seriously incomplete. These splendid remains of the fourth century, although they have suffered all but utter ruin from time, and from Moslem

1 Ancient Coptic Churches, i. 86-87.
2 Ibid. 88.
3 Ibid. 100.

4 Ibid. 351-358.

and French desecrations, do still give a much more adequate impression of the Imperial Age of the Egyptian Church than anything at Old Cairo. If we except Al-Mu'allakah, or at any rate the little church on the floor of the Roman bastion attached to it, and the crypt of Abu Sargah, the Cairene Churches belong to a period subsequent to the Moslem Conquest. Even Abu Sargah must be placed in the succeeding century. In the White and Red Monasteries, no less than at Dayr al Malâk, near Negadah, at the underground brick church at Bellianah, at Dayr Abu Honnes, and still more at the very ancient church near the summit of the hill behind it, at the Orthodox church of S. George at Bibbeh, at the Coptic church of Amba Musās, near Abydos, and at the monastery on the edge of the Desert near Esneh, we are face to face with the work of the fourth or, at latest, the fifth century—work upon some of which S. Athanasius might have cast his eyes, and which was all in existence when the great S. Cyril reigned at Alexandria. Of the churches we have named some would not particularly interest an artist like Mr. Butler; but he would almost add another chapter to his work in order to describe the inspiring effect which the Red Monastery presents as we approach it on its desert plateau from the rich plain of the Nile, or the transepts and sanctuary of the White Monastery-where a Christ in Majesty' still beams out from the begrimed apse upon the truncated church with a dignity which belongs to an age that had already ended before Islâm was permitted to wrest Egypt from the Christian Empire.

Although Mr. Butler explains that he has 'candidly striven to write in an "unsectarian" spirit,'' the drift and temper of his book is, in the main, accordant with the convictions and feelings of sound Churchmen. His second volume, however passionless a statement it may be of facts connected with the Egyptian Worship and Ritual, could hardly have been written by anyone whose sympathies were not with antiquity as against modern innovations. Indeed, now and then, while apparently discussing a purely archæological question, he appears to keep matters of recent controversy in view, and with good effect. Thus in a chapter on 'Ecclesiastical Vestments' he shows at great length that, among the Copts, the chasuble, the original Eucharistic vestment, has practically disappeared, through being gradually transformed into a cope. This transformation he believes to have taken place in consequence of the later Coptic custom of elevating 1 Ancient Coptic Churches, pref. xi.

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