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Books: Hypatia

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Hypatia




A thunder-clap of applause, surely as pardonable as any an
Alexandrian church ever heard, followed this dexterous, and yet most
righteous, turn of the patriarch's oratory: but Philammon raised
himself slowly and fearfully to his knees, and blushing scarlet
endured the gaze of ten thousand eyes.

Suddenly, from beside the pulpit, an old man sprang forward, and
clasped him round the neck. It was Arsenius.

'My son! my son!' sobbed he, almost aloud.

'Slave, as well as son, if you will!' whispered Philammon. 'One boon
from the patriarch; and then home to the Laura for ever!'

'Oh, twice-blest night,' rolled on above the deep rich voice of
Cyril, 'which beholds at once the coronation of a martyr and the
conversion of a sinner; which increases at the same time the ranks
of the church triumphant, and of the church militant; and pierces
celestial essences with a twofold rapture of thanksgiving, as they
welcome on high a victorious, and on earth a repentant, brother!'

And at a sign from Cyril, Peter the Reader stepped forward, and led
away, gently enough, the two weepers, who were welcomed as they
passed by the blessings, and prayers, and tears even of those fierce
fanatics of Nitria. Nay, Peter himself, as he turned to leave them
together in the sacristy, held out his hand to Philammon.

'I ask your forgiveness,' said the poor boy, who plunged eagerly and
with a sort of delight into any and every self-abasement.

'And I accord it,' quoth Peter; and returned to the church, looking,
and probably feeling, in a far more pleasant mood than usual.



CHAPTER XXVII: THE PRODIGAL'S RETURN


About ten o'clock the next morning, as Hypatia, worn out with
sleepless sorrow, was trying to arrange her thoughts for the
farewell lecture, her favourite maid announced that a messenger from
Synesius waited below. A letter from Synesius? A gleam of hope
flashed across her mind. From him, surely, might come something of
comfort, of advice. Ah! if he only knew how sorely she was bested!

'Let him send up his letter.'

'He refuses to deliver it to any one but yourself. And I think,'--
added the damsel, who had, to tell the truth, at that moment in her
purse a substantial reason for so thinking--'I think it might be
worth your ladyship's while to see him.'

Hypatia shook her head impatiently.

'He seems to know you well, madam, though he refuses to tell his
name: but he bade me put you in mind of a black agate--I cannot tell
what he meant--of a black agate, and a spirit which was to appear
when you rubbed it.'

Hypatia turned pale as death. Was it Philammon again? She felt for
the talisman--it was gone! She must have lost it last night in
Miriam's chamber. Now she saw the true purpose of the old hag's
plot--....deceived, tricked, doubly tricked! And what new plot was
this?

'Tell him to leave the letter, and begone .... My father? What?
Who is this? Who are you bringing to me at such a moment?'

And as she spoke, Theon ushered into the chamber no other than
Raphael Aben-Ezra, and then retired.

He advanced slowly towards her, and falling on one knee, placed in
her hand Synesius's letter.

Hypatia trembled from head to foot at the unexpected apparition ....
Well; at least he could know nothing of last night and its disgrace.
But not daring to look him in the face, she took the letter and
opened it .... If she had hoped for comfort from it, her hope was
not realised.

'Synesius to the Philosopher:

'Even if Fortune cannot take from me all things, yet what she can
take she will. And yet of two things, at least, she shall not rob
me--to prefer that which is best, and to succour the oppressed.
Heaven forbid that she should overpower my judgment, as well as the
rest of me! Therefore I do hate injustice; for that I can do: and
my will is to stop it; but the power to do so is among the things of
which she has bereaved me-before, too, she bereaved me of my
children....

'"Once, in old times, Milesian men were strong."

And there was a time when I, too, was a comfort to my friends, and
when you used to call me a blessing to every one except myself, as I
squandered for the benefit of others the favour with which the great
regarded me .... My hands they were--then .... But now I am left
desolate of all: unless you have any power. For you and virtue I
count among those good things, of which none can deprive me. But
you always have power, and will have it, surely, now--using it as
nobly as you do.

'As for Nicaeus and Philolaus, two noble youths, and kinsmen of my
own, let it be the business of all who honour you, both private men
and magistrates, to see that they return possessors of their just
rights.' [Footnote: An authentic letter of Synesius to Hypatia.]

'Of all who honour me!' said she, with a bitter sigh: and then
looked up quickly at Raphael, as if fearful of having betrayed
herself. She turned deadly pale. In his eyes was a look of solemn
pity, which told her that he knew--not all?--surely not all?

'Have you seen the--Miriam?' gasped she, rushing desperately at that
which she most dreaded.

'Not yet. I arrived but one hour ago; and Hypatia's welfare is
still more important to me than my own.'

'My welfare? It is gone!'

'So much the better. I never found mine till I lost it.'

'What do you mean?'

Raphael lingered, yet without withdrawing his gaze, as if he had
something of importance to say, which he longed and yet feared to
utter. At last--

'At least, you will confess that I am better drest than when we met
last. I have returned, you see, like a certain demoniac of Gadara,
about whom we used to argue, clothed--and perhaps also in my right
mind .... God knows!'

'Raphael! are you come here to mock me? You know--you cannot have
been here an hour without knowing--that but yesterday I dreamed of
being'--and she drooped her eyes--'an empress; that to-day I am
ruined; to-morrow, perhaps, proscribed. Have you no speech for me
but your old sarcasms and ambiguities?'

Raphael stood silent and motionless.

'Why do you not speak? What is the meaning of this sad, earnest
look, so different from your former self? .... You have something
strange to tell me!'

'I have,' said he, speaking very slowly. 'What--what would Hypatia
answer if, after all, Aben-Ezra said like the dying Julian, "The
Galilean has conquered"?'

'Julian never said it! It is a monkish calumny.'

'But I say it.'

'Impossible!'

'I say it!'

'As your dying speech? The true Raphael Aben-Ezra, then, lives no
more!'

'But he may be born again.'

'And die to philosophy, that he may be born again into barbaric
superstition! Oh worthy metempsychosis! Farewell, sir!' And she
rose to go.

'Hear me!--hear me patiently this once, noble, beloved Hypatia! One
more sneer of yours, and I may become again the same case-hardened
fiend which you knew me of old--to all, at least, but you. Oh, do
not think me ungrateful, forgetful! What do I not owe to you, whose
pure and lofty words alone kept smouldering in me the dim
remembrance that there was a Right, a Truth, an unseen world of
spirits, after whose pattern man should aspire to live?'

She paused, and listened in wonder. What faith had she of her own?
She would at least hear what he had found....

'Hypatia, I am older than you--wiser than you, if wisdom be the
fruit of the tree of knowledge. You know but one side of the medal,
Hypatia, and the fairer; I have seen its reverse as well as its
obverse. Through every form of human thought, of human action, of
human sin and folly, have I been wandering for years, and found no
rest--as little in wisdom as in folly, in spiritual dreams as in
sensual brutality. I could not rest in your Platonism--I will tell
you why hereafter. I went on to Stoicism, Epicurism, Cynicism,
Scepticism, and in that lowest deep I found a lower depth, when I
became sceptical of Scepticism itself.'

'There is a lower deep still,' thought Hypatia to herself, as she
recollected last night's magic; but she did not speak.

'Then in utter abasement, I confessed myself lower than the brutes,
who had a law, and obeyed it, while I was my own lawless God, devil,
harpy, whirlwind .... I needed even my own dog to awaken in me the
brute consciousness of my own existence, or of anything without
myself. I took her, the dog, for my teacher, and obeyed her, for
she was wiser than I. And she led me back--the poor dumb beast--
like a God-sent and God-obeying angel, to human nature, to mercy, to
self-sacrifice, to belief, to worship--to pure and wedded love.'

Hypatia started .... And in the struggle to hide her own
bewilderment, answered almost without knowing it--

'Wedded love? .... Wedded love? Is that, then, the paltry bait by
which Raphael Aben-Ezra has been tempted to desert philosophy?'

'Thank Heaven!' said Raphael to himself. 'She does not care for me,
then! If she had, pride would have kept her from that sneer.' Yes,
my dear lady,' answered he aloud, 'to desert philosophy, to search
after wisdom; because wisdom itself had sought for me, and found me.
But, indeed, I had hoped that you would have approved of my
following your example for once in my life, and resolving, like you,
to enter into the estate of wedlock.'

'Do not sneer at me!' cried she, in her turn, looking up at him with
shame and horror, which made him repent of uttering the words. 'If
you do not know--you will soon, too soon! Never mention that
hateful dream to me, if you wish to have speech of me more!'

A pang of remorse shot through Raphael's heart. Who but he himself
had plotted that evil marriage? But she gave him no opportunity of
answering her, and went on hurriedly--

'Speak to me rather about yourself. What is this strange and sudden
betrothal? What has it to do with Christianity? I had thought that
it was rather by the glories of celibacy--gross and superstitious as
their notions of it are--that the Galileans tempted their converts.'

'So had I, my dearest lady,' answered he, as, glad to turn the
subject for a moment, and perhaps a little nettled by her
contemptuous tone, he resumed something of his old arch and careless
manner. 'But--there is no accounting for man's agreeable
inconsistencies--one morning I found myself, to my astonishment,
seized by two bishops, and betrothed, whether I chose or not, to a
young lady who but a few days before had been destined for a
nunnery.'

'Two bishops?'

'I speak simple truth. The one was Synesius of course;--that most
incoherent and most benevolent of busybodies chose to betray me
behind my back:-but I will not trouble you with that part of my
story. The real wonder is that the other episcopal match-maker was
Augustine of Hippo himself!'

'Anything to bribe a convert,' said Hypatia contemptuously.

'I assure you, no. He informed me, and her also, openly and
uncivilly enough, that he thought us very much to be pitied for so
great a fall .... But as we neither of us seemed to have any call
for the higher life of celibacy, he could not press it on us ....
We should have trouble in the flesh. But if we married we had not
sinned. To which I answered that my humility was quite content to
sit in the very lowest ranks, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ....
He replied by an encomium on virginity, in which I seemed to hear
again the voice of Hypatia herself.'

'And sneered at it inwardly, as you used to sneer at me.'

'Really I was in no sneering mood at that moment; and whatsoever I
may have felt inclined to reply, he was kind enough to say for me
and himself the next minute.'

'What do you mean?'

'He went on, to my utter astonishment, by such a eulogium on wedlock
as I never heard from Jew or heathen, and ended by advice to young
married folk so thoroughly excellent and to the point, that I could
not help telling him, when he stopped; what a pity I thought it that
he had not himself married, and made some good woman happy by
putting his own recipes into practice .... And at that, Hypatia, I
saw an expression on his face which made me wish for the moment that
I had bitten out this impudent tongue of mine, before I so rashly
touched some deep old wound .... That man has wept bitter tears ere
now, be sure of it .... But he turned the conversation instantly,
like a well-bred gentleman as he is, by saying, with the sweetest
smile, that though he had made it a solemn rule never to be a party
to making up any marriage, yet in our case Heaven had so plainly
pointed us out for each other, etc. etc., that he could not refuse
himself the pleasure .... and ended by a blessing as kindly as ever
came from the lips of man.'

'You seem wonderfully taken with the sophist of Hippo,' said Hypatia
impatiently; 'and forget, perhaps, that his opinions, especially
when, as you confess, they are utterly inconsistent with themselves,
are not quite as important to me as they seem to have become to
you.'

'Whether he be consistent or not about marriage,' said Raphael,
somewhat proudly, 'I care little. I went to him to tell me, not
about the relation of the sexes, on which point I am probably as
good a judge as he--but about God and on that subject he told me
enough to bring me back to Alexandria, that I might undo, if
possible, somewhat of the wrong which I have done to Hypatia.'

'What wrong have you done me? .... You are silent? Be sure, at
least, that whatsoever it may be, you will not wipe it out by trying
to
make a proselyte of me!'

'Be not too sure of that. I have found too great a treasure not to
wish to share it with Theon's daughter.'

'A treasure?' said she, half scornfully.

'Yes, indeed. You recollect my last words, when we parted there
below a few months ago?'

Hypatia was silent. One terrible possibility at which he had hinted
flashed across her memory for the first time since; .... but she
spurned proudly from her the heaven-sent warning.

'I told you that, like Diogenes, I went forth to seek a man. Did I
not promise you, that when I had found one you should be the first
to hear of him? And I have found a man.'

Hypatia waved her beautiful hand. 'I know whom you would say ....
that crucified one. Be it so. I want not a man, but a god.'

'What sort of a god, Hypatia? A god made up of our own intellectual
notions, or rather of negations of them--of infinity and eternity,
and invisibility, and impassibility--and why not of immortality,
too, Hypatia? For I recollect we used to agree that it was a carnal
degrading of the Supreme One to predicate of Him so merely human a
thing as virtue.'

Hypatia was silent.

'Now I have always had a sort of fancy that what we wanted, as the
first predicate of our Absolute One, was that He was to be not
merely an infinite God--whatever that meant, which I suspect we did
not always see quite clearly--or an eternal one--or an omnipotent
one--or even merely a one God at all; none of which predicates, I
fear, did we understand more clearly than the first: but that he
must be a righteous God:--or rather, as we used sometimes to say
that He was to have no predicate--Righteousness itself. And all
along, I could not help remembering that my old sacred Hebrew books
told me of such a one; and feeling that they might have something to
tell me which--'

'Which I did not tell you! And this, then, caused your air of
reserve, and of sly superiority over the woman whom you mocked by
calling her your pupil! I little suspected you of so truly Jewish a
jealousy! Why, oh why, did you not tell me this?'

'Because I was a beast, Hypatia; and had all but forgotten what this
righteousness was like; and was afraid to find out lest it should
condemn me. Because I was a devil, Hypatia; and hated
righteousness, and neither wished to see you righteous, nor God
righteous either, because then you would both have been unlike
myself. God be merciful to me a sinner!'

She looked up in his face. The man was changed as if by miracle--
and yet not changed. There was the same gallant consciousness of
power, the same subtle and humorous twinkle in those strong ripe
Jewish features and those glittering eyes; and yet every line in his
face was softened, sweetened; the mask of sneering faineance was
gone--imploring tenderness and earnestness beamed from his whole
countenance. The chrysalis case had fallen off, and disclosed the
butterfly within. She sat looking at him, and passed her hand
across her eyes, as if to try whether the apparition would not
vanish. He, the subtle!--he, the mocker!--he, the Lucian of
Alexandria!--he whose depth and power had awed her, even in his most
polluted days .... And this was the end of him....

'It is a freak of cowardly superstition .... Those Christians have
been frightening him about his sins and their Tartarus.'

She looked again into his bright, clear, fearless face, and was
ashamed of her own calumny. And this was the end of him--of
Synesius--of Augustine--of learned and unlearned, Goth and Roman
.... The great flood would have its way, then .... Could she alone
fight against it?

She could! Would she submit?--She? Her will should stand firm, her
reason free, to the last--to the death if need be .... And yet last
night!--last night!

At last she spoke, without looking up.

'And what if you have found a man in that crucified one? Have you
found in him a God also?'

'Does Hypatia recollect Glaucon's definition of the perfectly
righteous man? .... How, without being guilty of one unrighteous
act, he must labour his life long under the imputation of being
utterly unrighteous, in order that his disinterestedness may be
thoroughly tested, and by proceeding in such a course, arrive
inevitably, as Glaucon says, not only in Athens of old, or in Judaea
of old, but, as you yourself will agree, in Christian Alexandria at
this moment, at--do you remember, Hypatia?--bonds, and the scourge,
and lastly, at the cross itself .... If Plato's idea of the
righteous man be a crucified one, why may not mine also? If, as we
both--and old Bishop Clemens, too--as good a Platonist as we,
remember--and Augustine himself, would agree, Plato in speaking
those strange words, spoke not of himself, but by the Spirit of God,
why should not others have spoken by the same Spirit when they spoke
the same words?'

'A crucified man .... Yes. But a crucified God, Raphael! I
shudder at the blasphemy.'

'So do my poor dear fellow-countrymen. Are they the more righteous
in their daily doings, Hypatia, on account of their fancied
reverence for the glory of One who probably knows best how to
preserve and manifest His own glory? But you assent to the
definition? Take care!' said he, with one of his arch smiles, 'I
have been fighting with Augustine, and have become of late a
terrible dialectician. Do you assent to it?'

'Of course--it is Plato's.'

'But do you assent merely because it is written in the book called
Plato's, or because your reason tells you that it is true? .... You
will not tell me. Tell me this, then, at least. Is not the
perfectly righteous man the highest specimen of men?'

'Surely,' said she half carelessly: but not unwilling, like a
philosopher and a Greek, as a matter of course, to embark in
anything like a word-battle, and to shut out sadder thoughts for a
moment.

'Then must not the Autanthropos, the archetypal and ideal man, who
is more perfect than any individual specimen, be perfectly righteous
also?'

'Yes.'

'Suppose, then, for the sake of one of those pleasant old games of
ours, an argument, that he wished to manifest his righteousness to
the world .... The only method for him, according to Plato, would
be Glaucon's, of calumny and persecution, the scourge and the
cross?'

'What words are these, Raphael? Material scourges and crosses for
an eternal and spiritual idea?'

'Did you ever yet, Hypatia, consider at leisure what the archetype
of man might be like?'

Hypatia started, as at a new thought, and confessed--as every Neo--
Platonist would have done--that she had never done so.

'And yet our master, Plato, bade us believe that there was a
substantial archetype of each thing, from a flower to a nation,
eternal in the heavens. Perhaps we have not been faithful
Platonists enough heretofore, my dearest tutor. Perhaps, being
philosophers, and somewhat of Pharisees to boot, we began all our
lucubrations as we did our prayers, by thanking God that we were not
as other men were; and so misread another passage in the _Republic_,
which we used in pleasant old days to be fond of quoting.'

'What was that?' asked Hypatia, who became more and more interested
every moment.

'That philosophers were men.'

'Are you mocking me? Plato defines the philosopher as the man who
seeks after the objects of knowledge, while others seek after those
of opinion.'

'And most truly. But what if, in our eagerness to assert that
wherein the philosopher differed from other men, we had overlooked
that in which he resembled other men; and so forgot that, after all,
man was a genus whereof the philosopher was only a species?'

Hypatia sighed.

'Do you not think, then, that as the greater contains the less, and
the archetype of the genus that of the species, we should have been
wiser if we had speculated a little more on the archetype of man as
man, before we meddled with a part of that archetype,--the archetype
of the philosopher? .... Certainly it would have been the easier
course, for there are more men than philosophers, Hypatia; and every
man is a real man, and a fair subject for examination, while every
philosopher is not a real philosopher--our friends the Academics,
for instance, and even a Neo-Platonist or two whom we know? You
seem impatient. Shall I cease?'

'You mistook the cause of my impatience,' answered she, looking up
at him with her great sad eyes. 'Go on.'

'Now--for I am going to be terribly scholastic--is it not the very
definition of man, that he is, alone of all known things, a spirit
temporarily united to an animal body?'

'Enchanted in it, as in a dungeon, rather,' said she sighing.

'Be it so if you will. But--must we not say that the archetype--the
very man--that if he is the archetype, he too will be, or must have
been, once at least, temporarily enchanted into an animal body? ....
You are silent. I will not press you .... Only ask you to consider
at your leisure whether Plato may not justify somewhat from the
charge of absurdity the fisherman of Galilee, where he said that He
in whose image man is made was made flesh, and dwelt with him bodily
there by the lake-side at Tiberias, and that he beheld His Glory,
the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father.'

'That last question is a very different one. God made flesh! My
reason revolts at it.'

'Old Homer's reason did not.'

Hypatia started, for she recollected her yesterday's cravings after
those old, palpable, and human deities. And--'Go on,' she cried
eagerly.

'Tell me, then--This archetype of man, if it exists anywhere, it
must exist eternally in the mind of God? At least, Plato would have
so said?'

'Yes.'

'And derive its existence immediately from Him?'

'Yes.'

'But a man is one willing person, unlike to all others.'

'Yes.'

'Then this archetype must be such.'

'I suppose so.'

'But possessing the faculties and properties of all men in their
highest perfection.'

'Of course.'

'How sweetly and obediently my late teacher becomes my pupil!'

Hypatia looked at him with her eyes full of tears.

'I never taught you anything, Raphael.'

'You taught me most, beloved lady, when you least thought of it.
But tell me one thing more. Is it not the property of every man to
be a son? For you can conceive of a man as not being a father, but
not as not being a son.'

'Be it so.'

'Then this archetype must be a son also.'

'Whose son, Raphael?'

'Why not of "Zeus, father of gods and men"? For we agreed that it--
we will call it he, now, having agreed that it is a person--could
owe its existence to none but God Himself.'

'And what then?' said Hypatia, fixing those glorious eyes full on
his face, in an agony of doubt, but yet, as Raphael declared to his
dying day, of hope and joy.

'Well, Hypatia, and must not a son be of the same species as his
father? "Eagles," says the poet, "do not beget doves." Is the word
son anything but an empty and false metaphor, unless the son be the
perfect and equal likeness of his father?'

'Heroes beget sons worse than themselves, says the poet.'

'We are not talking now of men as they are, whom Homer's Zeus calls
the most wretched of all the beasts of the field; we are talking--
are we not?--of a perfect and archetypal Son, and a perfect and
archetypal Father, in a perfect and eternal world, wherein is
neither growth, decay, nor change; and of a perfect and archetypal
generation, of which the only definition can be, that like begets
its perfect like? .... You are silent. Be so, Hypatia .... We
have gone up too far into the abysses....

And so they both were silent for a while. And Raphael thought
solemn thoughts about Victoria, and about ancient signs of Isaiah's,
which were to him none the less prophecies concerning The Man whom
he had found, because he prayed and trusted that the same signs
might be repeated to himself, and a child given to him also, as a
token that, in spite of all his baseness, 'God was with him.'