Charlotte Bronte - "Jane Eyre"

Georges Ohnet - "Serge Panine, v4"

Edgar Rice Burroughs - "Princess of Mars"

Anonymous - "The Royal Game of the Ombre"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Hypatia

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Hypatia



Produced by P. J. Riddick





HYPATIA

OR

NEW FOES WITH AN OLD FACE

by Charles Kingsley





PREFACE


A picture of life in the fifth century must needs contain much which
will be painful to any reader, and which the young and innocent will
do well to leave altogether unread. It has to represent a very
hideous, though a very great, age; one of those critical and
cardinal eras in the history of the human race, in which virtues and
vices manifest themselves side by side--even, at times, in the same
person--with the most startling openness and power. One who writes
of such an era labours under a troublesome disadvantage. He dare
not tell how evil people were; he will not be believed if he tells
how good they were. In the present case that disadvantage is
doubled; for while the sins of the Church, however heinous, were
still such as admit of being expressed in words, the sins of the
heathen world, against which she fought, were utterly indescribable;
and the Christian apologist is thus compelled, for the sake of
decency, to state the Church's case far more weakly than the facts
deserve.

Not, be it ever remembered, that the slightest suspicion of
immorality attaches either to the heroine of this book, or to the
leading philosophers of her school, for several centuries.
Howsoever base and profligate their disciples, or the Manichees, may
have been, the great Neo-Platonists were, as Manes himself was,
persons of the most rigid and ascetic virtue.

For a time had arrived, in which no teacher who did not put forth
the most lofty pretensions to righteousness could expect a hearing.
That Divine Word, who is 'The Light who lighteth every man which
cometh into the world,' had awakened in the heart of mankind a moral
craving never before felt in any strength, except by a few isolated
philosophers or prophets. The Spirit had been poured out on all
flesh; and from one end of the Empire to the other, from the slave
in the mill to the emperor on his throne, all hearts were either
hungering and thirsting after righteousness, or learning to do
homage to those who did so. And He who excited the craving, was
also furnishing that which would satisfy it; and was teaching
mankind, by a long and painful education, to distinguish the truth
from its innumerable counterfeits, and to find, for the first time
in the world's life, a good news not merely for the select few, but
for all mankind without respect of rank or race.

For somewhat more than four hundred years, the Roman Empire and the
Christian Church, born into the world almost at the same moment, had
been developing themselves side by side as two great rival powers,
in deadly struggle for the possession of the human race. The
weapons of the Empire had been not merely an overwhelming physical
force, and a ruthless lust of aggressive conquest: but, even more
powerful still, an unequalled genius for organisation, and an
uniform system of external law and order. This was generally a real
boon to conquered nations, because it substituted a fixed and
regular spoliation for the fortuitous and arbitrary miseries of
savage warfare: but it arrayed, meanwhile, on the side of the Empire
the wealthier citizens of every province, by allowing them their
share in the plunder of the labouring masses below them. These, in
the country districts, were utterly enslaved; while in the cities,
nominal freedom was of little use to masses kept from starvation by
the alms of the government, and drugged into brutish good humour by
a vast system of public spectacles, in which the realms of nature
and of art were ransacked to glut the wonder, lust, and ferocity of
a degraded populace.

Against this vast organisation the Church had been fighting for now
four hundred years, armed only with its own mighty and all-embracing
message, and with the manifestation of a spirit of purity and
virtue, of love and self-sacrifice, which had proved itself mightier
to melt and weld together the hearts of men, than all the force and
terror, all the mechanical organisation, all the sensual baits with
which the Empire had been contending against that Gospel in which it
had recognised instinctively and at first sight, its internecine
foe.

And now the Church had conquered. The weak things of this world had
confounded the strong. In spite of the devilish cruelties of
persecutors; in spite of the contaminating atmosphere of sin which
surrounded her; in spite of having to form herself, not out of a
race of pure and separate creatures, but by a most literal 'new
birth' out of those very fallen masses who insulted and persecuted
her; in spite of having to endure within herself continual outbursts
of the evil passions in which her members had once indulged without
cheek; in spite of a thousand counterfeits which sprang up around
her and within her, claiming to be parts of her, and alluring men to
themselves by that very exclusiveness and party arrogance which
disproved their claim; in spite of all, she had conquered. The very
emperors had arrayed themselves on her side. Julian's last attempt
to restore paganism by imperial influence had only proved that the
old faith had lost all hold upon the hearts of the masses; at his
death the great tide-wave of new opinion rolled on unchecked, and
the rulers of earth were fain to swim with the stream; to accept, in
words at least, the Church's laws as theirs; to acknowledge a King
of kings to whom even they owed homage and obedience; and to call
their own slaves their 'poorer brethren,' and often, too, their
'spiritual superiors.'

But if the emperors had become Christian, the Empire had not. Here
and there an abuse was lopped off; or an edict was passed for the
visitation of prisons and for the welfare of prisoners; or a
Theodosius was recalled to justice and humanity for a while by the
stern rebukes of an Ambrose. But the Empire was still the same:
still a great tyranny, enslaving the masses, crushing national life,
fattening itself and its officials on a system of world-wide
robbery; and while it was paramount, there could be no hope for the
human race. Nay, there were even those among the Christians who
saw, like Dante afterwards, in the 'fatal gift of Constantine,' and
the truce between the Church and the Empire, fresh and more deadly
danger. Was not the Empire trying to extend over the Church itself
that upas shadow with which it had withered up every other form of
human existence; to make her, too, its stipendiary slave-official,
to be pampered when obedient, and scourged whenever she dare assert
a free will of her own, a law beyond that of her tyrants; to throw
on her, by a refined hypocrisy, the care and support of the masses
on whose lifeblood it was feeding? So thought many then, and, as I
believe, not unwisely.

But if the social condition of the civilised world was anomalous at
the beginning of the fifth century, its spiritual state was still
more so. The universal fusion of races, languages, and customs,
which had gone on for four centuries under the Roman rule, had
produced a corresponding fusion of creeds, an universal fermentation
of human thought and faith. All honest belief in the old local
superstitions of paganism had been long dying out before the more
palpable and material idolatry of Emperor-worship; and the gods of
the nations, unable to deliver those who had trusted in them, became
one by one the vassals of the 'Divus Caesar,' neglected by the
philosophic rich, and only worshipped by the lower classes, where
the old rites still pandered to their grosser appetites, or
subserved the wealth and importance of some particular locality.

In the meanwhile, the minds of men, cut adrift from their ancient
moorings, wandered wildly over pathless seas of speculative doubt,
and especially in the more metaphysical andcontemplative East,
attempted to solve for themselves the questions of man's relation to
the unseen by those thousand schisms, heresies, and theosophies (it
is a disgrace to the word philosophy to call them by it), on the
records of which the student now gazes bewildered, unable alike to
count or to explain their fantasies.

Yet even these, like every outburst of free human thought, had their
use and their fruit. They brought before the minds of churchmen a
thousand new questions which must be solved, unless the Church was
to relinquish for ever her claims as the great teacher and satisfier
of the human soul. To study these bubbles, as they formed and burst
on every wave of human life; to feel, too often by sad experience,
as Augustine felt, the charm of their allurements; to divide the
truths at which they aimed from the falsehood which they offered as
its substitute; to exhibit the Catholic Church as possessing, in the
great facts which she proclaimed, full satisfaction, even for the
most subtle metaphysical cravings of a diseased age;--that was the
work of the time; and men were sent to do it, and aided in their
labour by the very causes which had produced the intellectual
revolution. The general intermixture of ideas, creeds, and races,
even the mere physical facilities for intercourse between different
parts of the Empire, helped to give the great Christian fathers of
the fourth and fifth centuries a breadth of observation, a depth of
thought, a large-hearted and large-minded patience and tolerance,
such as, we may say boldly, the Church has since beheld but rarely,
and the world never; at least, if we are to judge those great men by
what they had, and not by what they had not, and to believe, as we
are bound, that had they lived now, and not then, they would have
towered as far above the heads of this generation as they did above
the heads of their own. And thus an age, which, to the shallow
insight of a sneerer like Gibbon, seems only a rotting and aimless
chaos of sensuality and anarchy, fanaticism and hypocrisy, produced
a Clement and an Athanase, a Chrysostom and an Augustine; absorbed
into the sphere of Christianity all which was most valuable in the
philosophies of Greece and Egypt, and in the social organisation of
Rome, as an heirloom for nations yet unborn; and laid in foreign
lands, by unconscious agents, the foundations of all European
thought and Ethics.

But the health of a Church depends, not merely on the creed which it
professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great
ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual
members. The _mens sana_ must have a _corpus sanum_ to inhabit.
And even for the Western Church, the lofty future which was in store
for it would have been impossible, without some infusion of new and
healthier blood into the veins of a world drained and tainted by the
influence of Rome.

And the new blood, at the era of this story, was at hand. The great
tide of those Gothic nations, of which the Norwegian and the German
are the purest remaining types, though every nation of Europe, from
Gibraltar to St. Petersburg, owes to them the most precious elements
of strength, was sweeping onward, wave over wave, in a steady south-
western current, across the whole Roman territory, and only stopping
and recoiling when it reached the shores of the Mediterranean.
Those wild tribes were bringing with them into the magic circle of
the Western Church's influence the very materials which she required
for the building up of a future Christendom, and which she could
find as little in the Western Empire as in the Eastern; comparative
purity of morals; sacred respect for woman, for family life, law,
equal justice, individual freedom, and, above all, for honesty in
word and deed; bodies untainted by hereditary effeminacy, hearts
earnest though genial, and blessed with a strange willingness to
learn, even from those whom they despised; a brain equal to that of
the Roman in practical power, and not too far behind that of the
Eastern in imaginative and speculative acuteness.

And their strength was felt at once. Their vanguard, confined with
difficulty for three centuries beyond the Eastern Alps, at the
expense of sanguinary wars, had been adopted wherever it was
practicable, into the service of the Empire; and the heart's core of
the Roman legion was composed of Gothic officers and soldiers. But
now the main body had arrived. Tribe after tribe was crowding down
to the Alps, and trampling upon each other on the frontiers of the
Empire. The Huns, singly their inferiors, pressed them from behind
with the irresistible weight of numbers; Italy, with her rich cities
and fertile lowlands, beckoned them on to plunder; as auxiliaries,
they had learned their own strength and Roman weakness; a _casus
belli_ was soon found. How iniquitous was the conduct of the sons
of Theodosius, in refusing the usual bounty, by which the Goths were
bribed not to attack the Empire!--The whole pent-up deluge burst
over the plains of Italy, and the Western Empire became from that
day forth a dying idiot, while the new invaders divided Europe among
themselves. The fifteen years before the time of this tale had
decided the fate of Greece; the last four that of Rome itself. The
countless treasures which five centuries of rapine had accumulated
round the Capitol had become the prey of men clothed in sheepskins
and horse-hide; and the sister of an emperor had found her beauty,
virtue, and pride of race worthily matched by those of the hard-
handed Northern hero who led her away from Italy as his captive and
his bride, to found new kingdoms in South France and Spain, and to
drive the newly-arrived Vandals across the Straits of Gibraltar into
the then blooming coast-land of Northern Africa. Everywhere the
mangled limbs of the Old World were seething in the Medea's caldron,
to come forth whole, and young, and strong. The Longbeards, noblest
of their race, had found a temporary resting-place upon the Austrian
frontier, after long southward wanderings from the Swedish
mountains, soon to be dispossessed again by the advancing Huns, and,
crossing the Alps, to give their name for ever to the plains of
Lombardy. A few more tumultuous years, and the Franks would find
themselves lords of the Lower Rhineland; and before the hairs of
Hypatia's scholars had grown gray, the mythic Hengist and Horsa
would have landed on the shores of Kent, and an English nation have
begun its world-wide life.

But some great Providence forbade to our race, triumphant in every
other quarter, a footing beyond the Mediterranean, or even in
Constantinople, which to this day preserves in Europe the faith and
manners of Asia. The Eastern World seemed barred, by some stern
doom, from the only influence which could have regenerated it.
Every attempt of the Gothic races to establish themselves beyond the
sea, whether in the form of an organised kingdom, as the Vandals
attempted in Africa; or of a mere band of brigands, as did the Goths
in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of a praetorian guard, as did the
Varangens of the middle age; or as religious invaders, as did the
Crusaders, ended only in the corruption and disappearance of the
colonists. That extraordinary reform in morals, which, according to
Salvian and his contemporaries, the Vandal conquerors worked in
North Africa, availed them nothing; they lost more than they gave.
Climate, bad example, and the luxury of power degraded them in one
century into a race of helpless and debauched slave-holders, doomed
to utter extermination before the semi-Gothic armies of Belisarius;
and with them vanished the last chance that the Gothic races would
exercise on the Eastern World the same stern yet wholesome
discipline under which the Western had been restored to life.

The Egyptian and Syrian Churches, therefore, were destined to labour
not for themselves, but for us. The signs of disease and
decrepitude were already but too manifest in them. That very
peculiar turn of the Graeco-Eastern mind, which made them the great
thinkers of the then world, had the effect of drawing them away from
practice to speculation; and the races of Egypt and Syria were
effeminate, over-civilised, exhausted by centuries during which no
infusion of fresh blood had come to renew the stock. Morbid, self-
conscious, physically indolent, incapable then, as now, of personal
or political freedom, they afforded material out of which fanatics
might easily be made, but not citizens of the kingdom of God. The
very ideas of family and national life-those two divine roots of the
Church, severed from which she is certain to wither away into that
most godless and most cruel of spectres, a religious world-had
perished in the East from the evil influence of the universal
practice of slaveholding, as well as from the degradation of that
Jewish nation whichhad been for ages the great witness for those
ideas; and all classes, like their forefather Adam--like, indeed,
'the old Adam' in every man and in every age--were shifting the
blame of sin from their own consciences to human relationships and
duties--and therein, to the God who had appointed them; and saying
as of old, '_The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me
of the tree, and I did eat._' The passionate Eastern character,
like all weak ones, found total abstinence easier than temperance,
religious thought more pleasant than godly action; and a monastic
world grew up all over the East, of such vastness that in Egypt it
was said to rival in numbers the lay population, producing, with an
enormous decrease in the actual amount of moral evil, an equally
great enervation and decrease of the population. Such a people
could offer no resistance to the steadily-increasing tyranny of the
Eastern Empire. In vain did such men as Chrysostom and Basil oppose
their personal influence to the hideous intrigues and villainies of
the Byzantine court; the ever-downward career of Eastern
Christianity went on unchecked for two more miserable centuries,
side by side with the upward development of the Western Church; and,
while the successors of the great Saint Gregory were converting and
civilising a new-born Europe, the Churches of the East were
vanishing before Mohammedan invaders, strong by living trust in that
living God, whom the Christians, while they hated and persecuted
each other for arguments about Him, were denying and blaspheming in
every action of their lives.

But at the period whereof this story treats, the Graeco-Eastern mind
was still in the middle of its great work. That wonderful
metaphysic subtlety, which, in phrases and definitions too often
unmeaning to our grosser intellect, saw the symbols of the most
important spiritual realities, and felt that on the distinction
between homoousios and homoiousios might hang the solution of the
whole problem of humanity, was set to battle in Alexandria, the
ancient stronghold of Greek philosophy, with the effete remains of
the very scientific thought to which it owed its extraordinary
culture. Monastic isolation from family and national duties
especially fitted the fathers of that period for the task, by giving
them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with a lifelong
earnestness impossible to the more social and practical Northern
mind. Our duty is, instead of sneering at them as pedantic
dreamers, to thank Heaven that men were found, just at the time when
they were wanted, to do for us what we could never have done for
ourselves; to leave to us, as a precious heirloom, bought most truly
with the lifeblood of their race, a metaphysic at once Christian and
scientific, every attempt to improve on which has hitherto been
found a failure; and to battle victoriously with that strange brood
of theoretic monsters begotten by effete Greek philosophy upon
Egyptian symbolism, Chaldee astrology, Parsee dualism, Brahminic
spiritualism-graceful and gorgeous phantoms, whereof somewhat more
will be said in the coming chapters.

I have, in my sketch of Hypatia and her fate, closely followed
authentic history, especially Socrates' account of the closing
scene, as given in Book vii. Para 15, of his _Ecclesiastical
History_. I am inclined, however, for various historical reasons,
to date her death two years earlier than he does. The tradition
that she was the wife of Isidore, the philosopher, I reject with
Gibbon, as a palpable anachronism of at least fifty years (Isidore's
master, Proclus, not having been born till the year before Hypatia's
death), contradicted, moreover, by the very author of it, Photius,
who says distinctly, after comparing Hypatia and Isidore, that
Isidore married a certain 'Domna.' No hint, moreover, of her having
been married appears in any contemporary authors; and the name of
Isidore nowhere occurs among those of the many mutual friends to
whom Synesius sends messages in his letters to Hypatia, in which, if
anywhere, we should find mention of a husband, had one existed. To
Synesius's most charming letters, as well as to those of Isidore,
the good Abbot of Pelusium, I beg leave to refer those readers who
wish for further information about the private life of the fifth
century.

I cannot hope that these pages will be altogether free from
anachronisms and errors. I can only say that I have laboured
honestly and industriously to discover the truth, even in its
minutest details, and to sketch the age, its manners and its
literature, as I found them-altogether artificial, slipshod, effete,
resembling far more the times of Louis Quinze than those of
Sophocles and Plato. And so I send forth this little sketch, ready
to give my hearty thanks to any reviewer, who, by exposing my
mistakes, shall teach me and the public somewhat more about the last
struggle between the Young Church and the Old World.



CHAPTER I: THE LAURA


In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian Era, some
three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was
sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with
drifting sand. Behind him the desert sand-waste stretched,
lifeless, interminable, reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of
the cloudless vault of blue. At his feet the sand dripped and
trickled, in yellow rivulets, from crack to crack and ledge to
ledge, or whirled past him in tiny jets of yellow smoke, before the
fitful summer airs. Here and there, upon the face of the cliffs
which walled in the opposite side of the narrow glen below, were
cavernous tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks and half-cut
pillars, standing as the workmen had left them centuries before; the
sand was slipping down and piling up around them, their heads were
frosted with the arid snow; everywhere was silence, desolation-the
grave of a dead nation, in a dying land. And there he sat musing
above it all, full of life and youth and health and beauty--a young
Apollo of the desert. His only clothing was a ragged sheep-skin,
bound with a leathern girdle. His long black locks, unshorn from
childhood, waved and glistened in the sun; a rich dark down on cheek
and chin showed the spring of healthful manhood; his hard hands and
sinewy sunburnt limbs told of labour and endurance; his flashing
eyes and beetling brow, of daring, fancy, passion, thought, which
had no sphere of action in such a place. What did his glorious
young humanity alone among the tombs?

So perhaps he, too, thought, as he passed his hand across his brow,
as if to sweep away some gathering dream, and sighing, rose and
wandered along the cliffs, peering downward at every point and
cranny, in search of fuel for the monastery from whence he came.

Simple as was the material which he sought, consisting chiefly of
the low arid desert shrubs, with now and then a fragment of wood
from some deserted quarry or ruin, it was becoming scarcer and
scarcer round Abbot Pambo's Laura at Scetis; and long before
Philammon had collected his daily quantity, he had strayed farther
from his home than he had ever been before.

Suddenly, at a turn of the glen, he came upon a sight new to
him....a temple carved in the sandstone cliff; and in front a smooth
platform, strewn with beams and mouldering tools, and here and there
a skull bleaching among the sand, perhaps of some workman
slaughtered at his labour in one of the thousand wars of old. The
abbot, his spiritual father--indeed, the only father whom he knew,
for his earliest recollections were of the Laura and the old man's
cell-had strictly forbidden him to enter, even to approach any of
those relics of ancient idolatry: but a broad terrace-road led down
to the platform from the table-land above; the plentiful supply of
fuel was too tempting to be passed by .... He would go down, gather
a few sticks, and then return, to tell the abbot of the treasure
which he had found, and consult him as to the propriety of
revisiting it.

So down he went, hardly daring to raise his eyes to the alluring
iniquities of the painted imagery which, gaudy in crimson and blue,
still blazed out upon the desolate solitude, uninjured by that
rainless air. But he was young, and youth is curious; and the
devil, at least in the fifth century, busy with young brains. Now
Philammon believed most utterly in the devil, and night and day
devoutly prayed to be delivered from him; so he crossed himself, and
ejaculated, honestly enough, 'Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they
behold vanity!' .... and looked nevertheless....