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Books: Hypatia

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Hypatia




'Justice?' cried Cyril. 'Justice? If it be just that Peter should
die, sir, see first whether it was not just that Hypatia should die.
Not that I compassed it. As I live, I would have given my own right
hand that this had not happened! But now that it is done--let those
who talk of justice look first in which scale of the balance it
lies! Do you fancy, sir, that the people do not know their enemies
from their friends? Do you fancy that they are to sit with folded
hands, while a pedant makes common cause with a profligate, to drag
them back again into the very black gulf of outer darkness,
ignorance, brutal lust, grinding slavery, from which the Son of God
died to free them, from which they are painfully and slowly
struggling upward to the light of day? You, sir, if you be a
Christian catechumen, should know for yourself what would have been
the fate of Alexandria had the devil's plot of two days since
succeeded. What if the people struck too fiercely? They struck in
the right place. What if they have given the reins to passions fit
only for heathens? Recollect the centuries of heathendom which bred
those passions in them, and blame not my teaching, but the teaching
of their forefathers. That very Peter .... What if he have for
once given place to the devil, and avenged where he should have
forgiven? Has he no memories which may excuse him for fancying, in
a just paroxysm of dread, that idolatry and falsehood must be
crushed at any risk?--He who counts back for now three hundred
years, in persecution after persecution, martyrs, sir! martyrs--if
you know what that word implies--of his own blood and kin; who, when
he was but a seven years' boy, saw his own father made a sightless
cripple to this day, and his elder sister, a consecrated nun,
devoured alive by swine in the open streets, at the hands of those
who supported the very philosophy, the very gods, which Hypatia
attempted yesterday to restore. God shall judge such a man; not I,
nor you!'

'Let God judge him, then, by delivering him to God's minister.'

'God's minister? That heathen and apostate Prefect? When he has
expiated his apostasy by penance, and returned publicly to the bosom
of the Church, it will be time enough to obey him: till then he is
the minister of none but the devil. And no ecclesiastic shall
suffer at the tribunal of an infidel. Holy Writ forbids us to go to
law before the unjust.--Let the world say of me what it will. I
defy it and its rulers. I have to establish the kingdom of God in
this city, and do it I will, knowing that other foundation can no
man lay than that which is laid, which is Christ.'

'Wherefore you proceed to lay it afresh. A curious method of
proving that it is laid already.'

'What do you mean?' asked Cyril angrily.

'Simply that God's kingdom, if it exist at all, must be a sort of
kingdom, considering Who is The King of it, which would have
established itself without your help some time since; probably,
indeed, if the Scriptures of my Jewish forefathers are to be
believed, before the foundation of the world; and that your business
was to believe that God was King of Alexandria, and had put the
Roman law there to crucify all murderers, ecclesiastics included,
and that crucified they must be accordingly, as high as Haman
himself.'

'I will hear no more of this, sir! I am responsible to God alone,
and not to you: let it he enough that by virtue of the authority
committed to me, I shall cut off these men from the Church of God,
by solemn excommunication, for three years to come.'

'They are not cut off, then, it seems, as yet?'

'I tell you, sir, that I shall cut them off! Do you come here to
doubt my word?'

'Not in the least, most august sir. But I should have fancied that,
according to my carnal notions of God's Kingdom and The Church, they
had cut off themselves most effectually already, from the moment
when they cast away the Spirit of God, and took to themselves the
spirit of murder and cruelty; and that all which your most just and
laudable excommunication could effect, would be to inform the public
of that fact. However, farewell! My money shall be forthcoming in
due time; and that is the most important matter between us at this
moment. As for your client Peter and his fellows, perhaps the most
fearful punishment which can befall them, is to go on as they have
begun. I only hope that you will not follow in the same direction.'

'I?' cried Cyril, trembling with rage.

'Really I wish your Holiness well when I say so. If my notions seem
to you somewhat secular, yours--forgive me--seem to the somewhat
atheistic; and I advise you honestly to take care lest while you are
busy trying to establish God's kingdom, you forget what it is like,
by shutting your eyes to those of its laws which are established
already. I have no doubt that with your Holiness's great powers you
will succeed in establishing something. My only dread is, that when
it is established, you should discover to your horror that it is the
devil's kingdom and not God's.'

And without waiting for an answer, Raphael bowed himself out of the
august presence, and sailing for Berenice that very day, with
Eudaimon and his negro wife, went to his own place; there to labour
and to succour, a sad and stern, and yet a loving and a much-loved
man, for many a year to come.

And now we will leave Alexandria also, and taking a forward leap of
some twenty years, see how all other persons mentioned in this
history went, likewise, each to his own place.
...............

A little more than twenty years after, the wisest and holiest man in
the East was writing of Cyril, just deceased--

'His death made those who survived him joyful; but it grieved most
probably the dead; and there is cause to fear, lest, finding his
presence too troublesome, they should send him back to us .... May
it come to pass, by your prayers, that he may obtain mercy and
forgiveness, that the immeasurable grace of God may prevail over his
wickedness! ....'

So wrote Theodoret in days when men had not yet intercalated into
Holy Writ that line of an obscure modern hymn, which proclaims to
man the good news that 'There is no repentance in the grave.' Let
that be as it may, Cyril has gone to his own place. What that place
is in history is but too well known. What it is in the sight of Him
unto whom all live for ever, is no concern of ours. May He whose
mercy is over all His works, have mercy upon all, whether orthodox
or unorthodox, Papist or Protestant, who, like Cyril, begin by lying
for the cause of truth; and setting off upon that evil road, arrive
surely, with the Scribes and Pharisees of old, sooner or later at
their own place!

True, he and his monks had conquered; but Hypatia did not die
unavenged. In the hour of that unrighteous victory, the Church of
Alexandria received a deadly wound. It had admitted and sanctioned
those habits of doing evil that good may come, of pious intrigue,
and at last of open persecution, which are certain to creep in
wheresoever men attempt to set up a merely religious empire,
independent of human relationships and civil laws; to 'establish,'
in short, a 'theocracy,' and by that very act confess their secret
disbelief that God is ruling already. And the Egyptian Church grew,
year by year, more lawless and inhuman. Freed from enemies without,
and from the union which fear compels, it turned its ferocity
inward, to prey on its own vitals, and to tear itself in pieces by a
voluntary suicide, with mutual anathemas and exclusions, till it
ended as a mere chaos of idolatrous sects, persecuting each other
for metaphysical propositions, which, true or false, were equally
heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as watch-
words of division. Orthodox or unorthodox, they knew not God, for
they knew neither righteousness, nor love, nor peace .... They
'hated their brethren, and walked on still in darkness, not knowing
whither they were going' .... till Amrou and his Mohammedans
appeared; and whether they discovered the fact or not, they went to
their own place....

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding
small;
Though He stands and waits with patience, with exactness grinds
He all--

And so found, in due time, the philosophers as well as the
ecclesiastics of Alexandria.

Twenty years after Hypatia's death, philosophy was flickering down
to the very socket. Hypatia's murder was its death-blow. In
language tremendous and unmistakable, philosophers had been informed
that mankind had done with them; that they had been weighed in the
balances, and found wanting; that if they had no better Gospel than
that to preach, they must make way for those who had. And they did
make way. We hear little or nothing of them or their wisdom
henceforth, except at Athens, where Proclus, Marinus, Isidore, and
others kept up 'the golden chain of the Platonic succession,' and
descended deeper and deeper, one after the other, into the realms of
confusion--confusion of the material with the spiritual, of the
subject with the object, the moral with the intellectual; self-
consistent in one thing only,--namely, in their exclusive Pharisaism
utterly unable to proclaim any good news for man as man, or even to
conceive of the possibility of such, and gradually looking with more
and more complacency on all superstitious which did not involve that
one idea, which alone they stated,--namely, the Incarnation; craving
after signs and wonders, dabbling in magic, astrology, and barbarian
fetichisms; bemoaning the fallen age, and barking querulously at
every form of human thought except their own; writing pompous
biographies, full of bad Greek, worse taste, and still worse
miracles....

--That last drear mood
Of envious sloth, and proud decrepitude;
No faith, no art, no king, no priest, no God;
While round the freezing founts of life in snarling ring,
Crouch'd on the bareworn sod,
Babbling about the unreturning spring,
And whining for dead gods, who cannot save,
The toothless systems shiver to their grave.

The last scene of their tragedy was not without a touch of pathos
.... In the year 629, Justinian finally closed, by imperial edict,
the schools of Athens. They had nothing more to tell the world, but
what the world had yawned over a thousand times before: why should
they break the blessed silence by any more such noises? The
philosophers felt so themselves. They had no mind to be martyrs,
for they had nothing for which to testify. They had no message for
mankind, and mankind no interest for them. All that was left for
them was to take care of their own souls; and fancying that they saw
something like Plato's ideal republic in the pure monotheism of the
Guebres, their philosophic emperor the Khozroo, and his holy caste
of magi, seven of them set off to Persia, to forget the hateful
existence of Christianity in that realised ideal. Alas for the
facts! The purest monotheism, they discovered, was perfectly
compatible with bigotry and ferocity, luxury and tyranny, serails
and bowstrings, incestuous marriages and corpses exposed to the
beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; and in reasonable fear
for their own necks, the last seven Sages of Greece returned home
weary-hearted, into the Christian Empire from which they had fled,
fully contented with the permission, which the Khozroo had obtained
for them from Justinian, to hold their peace, and die among decent
people. So among decent people they died, leaving behind them, as
their last legacy to mankind, Simplicius's Commentaries on
Epictetus's _Enchiridion_, an essay on the art of egotism, by
obeying which, whosoever list may become as perfect a Pharisee as
ever darkened the earth of God. Peace he to their ashes! .... They
are gone to their own place.
...............

Wulf, too, had gone to his own place, wheresoever that may be. He
died in Spain, full of years and honours, at the court of Adolf and
Placidia, having resigned his sovereignty into the hands of his
lawful chieftain, and having lived long enough to see Goderic and
his younger companions in arms settled with their Alexandrian brides
upon the sunny slopes from which they had expelled the Vandals and
the Suevi, to be the ancestors of 'bluest-blooded' Castilian nobles.
Wulf died, as he had lived, a heathen. Placidia, who loved him
well, as she loved all righteous and noble souls, had succeeded once
in persuading him to accept baptism. Adolf himself acted as one of
his sponsors; and the old warrior was in the act of stepping into
the font, when he turned suddenly to the bishop, and asked where
were the souls of his heathen ancestors? 'In hell,' replied the
worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from the font, and threw his
bearskin cloak around him .... 'He would prefer, if Adolf had no
objection, to go to his own people.' [Footnote: A fact.] And so he
died unbaptized, and went to his own place.

Victoria was still alive and busy: but Augustine's warning had come
true-she had found trouble in the flesh. The day of the Lord had
come, and Vandal tyrants were now the masters of the fair corn-lands
of Africa. Her father and brother were lying by the side of Raphael
Aben-Ezra, beneath the ruined walls of Hippo, slain, long years
before, in the vain attempt to deliver their country from the
invading swarms. But they had died the death of heroes: and
Victoria was content. And it was whispered, among the down-trodden
Catholics, who clung to her as an angel of mercy, that she, too, had
endured strange misery and disgrace; that her delicate limbs bore
the scars of fearful tortures; that a room in her house, into which
none ever entered but herself, contained a young boy's grave; and
that she passed long nights of prayer upon the spot, where lay her
only child, martyred by the hands of Arian persecutors. Nay, some
of the few who, having dared to face that fearful storm, had
survived its fury, asserted that she herself, amid her own shame and
agony, had cheered the shrinking boy on to his glorious death. But
though she had found trouble in the flesh, her spirit knew none.
Clear-eyed and joyful as when she walked by her father's side on the
field of Ostia, she went to and fro among the victims of Vandal
rapine and persecution, spending upon the maimed, the sick, the
ruined, the small remnants of her former wealth, and winning, by her
purity and her piety, the reverence and favour even of the barbarian
conquerors. She had her work to do, and she did it, and was
content; and, in good time, she also went to her own place.

Abbot Pambo, as well as Arsenius, had been dead several years; the
abbot's place was filled, by his own dying command, by a hermit from
the neighbouring deserts, who had made himself famous for many miles
round, by his extraordinary austerities, his ceaseless prayers, his
loving wisdom, and, it was rumoured, by various cures which could
only be attributed to miraculous powers. While still in the prime
of his manhood, he was dragged, against his own entreaties, from a
lofty cranny of the cliffs to reside over the Laura of Scetis, and
ordained a deacon at the advice of Pambo, by the bishop of the
diocese, who, three years afterwards, took on himself to command him
to enter the priesthood. The elder monks considered it an indignity
to be ruled by so young a man: but the monastery throve and grew
rapidly under his government. His sweetness, patience, and
humility, and above all, his marvellous understanding of the doubts
and temptations of his own generation, soon drew around him all
whose sensitiveness or waywardness had made them unmanageable in the
neighbouring monasteries. As to David in the mountains, so to him,
every one who was discontented, and every one who was oppressed,
gathered themselves. The neighbouring abbots were at first inclined
to shrink from him, as one who ate and drank with publicans and
sinners: but they held their peace, when they saw those whom they
had driven out as reprobates labouring peacefully and cheerfully
under Philammon. The elder generation of Scetis, too, saw, with
some horror, the new influx of sinners: but their abbot had but one
answer to their remonstrances--'Those who are whole need not a
physician, but those who are sick.'

Never was the young abbot heard to speak harshly of any human being.
'When thou halt tried in vain for seven years,' he used to say, 'to
convert a sinner, then only wilt thou have a right to suspect him of
being a worse man than thyself.' That there is a seed of good in
all men, a Divine Word and Spirit striving with all men, a gospel
and good news which would turn the hearts of all men, if abbots and
priests could but preach it aright, was his favourite doctrine, and
one which he used to defend, when, at rare intervals, he allowed
himself to discuss any subject from the writings of his favourite
theologian, Clement of Alexandria. Above all, he stopped, by stern
rebuke, any attempt to revile either heretics or heathens. 'On the
Catholic Church alone,' he used to say, 'lies the blame of all
heresy and unbelief: for if she were but for one day that which she
ought to be, the world would be converted before nightfall.' To one
class of sins, indeed, he was inexorable--all but ferocious; to the
sins, namely, of religious persons. In proportion to any man's
reputation for orthodoxy and sanctity, Philammon's judgment of him
was stern and pitiless. More than once events proved him to have
been unjust: when he saw himself to be so, none could confess his
mistake more frankly, or humiliate himself for it more bitterly: but
from his rule he never swerved; and the Pharisees of the Nile
dreaded and avoided him, as much as the publicans and sinners loved
and followed him.

One thing only in his conduct gave some handle for scandal, among
the just persons who needed no repentance. It was well known that
in his most solemn devotions, on those long nights of unceasing
prayer and self-discipline, which won him a reputation for
superhuman sanctity, there mingled always with his prayers the names
of two women. And, when some worthy elder, taking courage from his
years, dared to hint kindly to him that such conduct caused some
scandal to the weaker brethren, 'It is true,' answered he; 'tell my
brethren that I pray nightly for two women both of them young; both
of them beautiful; both of them beloved by me more than I love my
own soul; and tell them, moreover, that one of the two was a harlot,
and the other a heathen.' The old monk laid his hand on his mouth,
and retired.

The remainder of his history it seems better to extract from an
unpublished fragment of the _Hagiologia Nilotica_ of
Graidiocolosyrtus Tabenniticus, the greater part of which valuable
work was destroyed at the taking of Alexandria under Amrou, A. D.
640.

'Now when the said abbot had ruled the monastery of Scetis seven
years with uncommon prudence, resplendent in virtue and in miracles,
it befell that one morning he was late for the Divine office.
Whereon a certain ancient brother, who was also a deacon, being sent
to ascertain the cause of so unwonted a defection, found the holy
man extended upon the floor of his cell, like Balaam in the flesh,
though far differing from him in the spirit, having fallen into a
trance, but having his eyes open. Who, not daring to arouse him,
sat by him until the hour of noon, judging rightly that something
from heaven had befallen him. And at that hour, the saint arising
without astonishment, said, "Brother, make ready for me the divine
elements, that I may consecrate them." And he asking the reason
wherefore, the saint replied, "That I may partake thereof with all
my brethren, ere I depart hence. For know assuredly that, within
the seventh day, I shall migrate to the celestial mansions. For
this night stood by me in a dream, those two women, whom I love, and
for whom I pray; the one clothed in a white, the other in a ruby-
coloured garment, and holding each other by the hand; who said to
me, 'That life after death is not such a one as you fancy; come,
therefore, and behold with us what it is like.'" Troubled at which
words, the deacon went forth yet on account not only of holy
obedience, but also of the sanctity of the blessed abbot, did not
hesitate to prepare according to his command the divine elements:
which the abbot having consecrated, distributed among his brethren,
reserving only a portion of the most holy bread and wine; and then,
having bestowed on them all the kiss of peace, he took the paten and
chalice in his hands, and went forth from the monastery towards the
desert; whom the whole fraternity followed weeping, as knowing that
they should see his face no more. But he, having arrived at the
foot of a certain mountain, stopped, and blessing them, commanded
them that they should follow him no farther, and dismissed them with
these words: "As ye have been loved, so love. As ye have been
judged, so judge. As ye have been forgiven, so forgive." And so
ascending, was taken away from their eyes. Now they, returning
astonished, watched three days with prayer and fasting: but at last
the eldest brother, being ashamed, like Elisha before the entreaties
of Elijah's disciples, sent two of the young men to seek their
master.

'To whom befell a thing noteworthy and full of miracles. For
ascending the same mountain where they had left the abbot, they met
with a certain Moorish people, not averse to the Christianity, who
declared that certain days before a priest had passed by them,
bearing a paten and chalice, and blessing them in silence, proceeded
across the desert in the direction of the cave of the holy Amma.

'And they inquiring who this Amma might be, the Moors answered that
some twenty years ago there had arrived in those mountains a woman
more beautiful than had ever before been seen in that region,
dressed in rich garments; who, after a short sojourn among their
tribe, having distributed among them the jewels which she wore, had
embraced the eremitic life, and sojourned upon the highest peak of a
neighbouring mountain; till, her garments failing her, she became
invisible to mankind, saving to a few women of the tribe, who went
up from time to time to carry her offerings of fruit and meal, and
to ask the blessing of her prayers. To whom she rarely appeared,
veiled down to her feet in black hair of exceeding length and
splendour.

'Hearing these things, the two brethren doubted for awhile: but at
last, determining to proceed, arrived at sunset upon the summit of
the said mountain.

'Where, behold a great miracle. For above an open grave, freshly
dug in the sand, a cloud of vultures and obscene birds hovered, whom
two lions, fiercely contending, drove away with their talons, as if
from some sacred deposit therein enshrined. Towards whom the two
brethren, fortifying themselves with the sign of the holy cross,
ascended. Whereupon the lions, as having fulfilled the term of
their guardianship, retired; and left to the brethren a sight which
they beheld with astonishment, and not without tears.

'For in the open grave lay the body of Philammon the abbot: and by
his side, wrapped in his cloak, the corpse of a woman of exceeding
beauty, such as the Moors had described. Whom embracing straitly,
as a brother a sister, and joining his lips to hers, he had rendered
up his soul to God; not without bestowing on her, as it seemed, the
most holy sacrament; for by the grave-side stood the paten and the
chalice emptied of their divine contents.

'Having beheld which things awhile in silence, they considered that
the right understanding of such matters pertained to the judgment
seat above, and was unnecessary to be comprehended by men
consecrated to God. Whereon, filling in the grave with all haste,
they returned weeping to the Laura, and declared to them the strange
things which they had beheld, and whereof I the writer, having
collected these facts from sacrosanct and most trustworthy mouths,
can only say that wisdom is justified of all her children.

'Now, before they returned, one of the brethren searching the cave
wherein the holy woman dwelt, found there neither food, furniture,
nor other matters; saving one bracelet of gold, of large size and
strange workmanship, engraven with foreign characters, which no one
could decipher. The which bracelet, being taken home to the Laura
of Scetis, and there dedicated in the chapel to the memory of the
holy Amma, proved beyond all doubt the sanctity of its former
possessor, by the miracles which its virtue worked; the fame whereof
spreading abroad throughout the whole Thebaid, drew innumerable
crowds of suppliants to that holy relic. But it came to pass, after
the Vandalic persecution wherewith Huneric and Genseric the king
devastated Africa, and enriched the Catholic Church with innumerable
martyrs, that certain wandering barbarians of the Vandalic race,
imbued with the Arian pravity, and made insolent by success, boiled
over from the parts of Mauritania into the Thebaid region. Who
plundering and burning all monasteries, and insulting the
consecrated virgins, at last arrived even at the monastery of
Scetis, where they not only, according to their impious custom,
defiled the altar, and carried off the sacred vessels, but also bore
away that most holy relic, the chief glory of the Laura,--namely,
the bracelet of the holy Amma, impiously pretending that it had
belonged to a warrior of their tribe, and thus expounded the writing
thereon engraven--