Hypatia. or New Foes with an Old Face

Round her neck hung, by one of half a dozen necklaces, a manuscript of the Gospels, gilt-edged and clasped with jewels; the lofty diadem of pearls on the head carried in front a large gold cross; while above and around it her hair, stiffened with pomatum, was frizzled out half a foot from a wilderness of plaits and curls, which must have cost some hapless slave-girl an hour’s work, and perhaps more than one scolding, that very morning.

Meekly, with simpering face and downcast eyes, and now and then a penitent sigh and shake of the head and pressure of her hand on her jewelled bosom, the fair penitent was proceeding up the steps, when she caught sight of the priest and the monk, and turning to them with an obeisance of the deepest humility, entreated to be allowed to kiss the hem of their garments.

‘You had far better, madam,’ said Philammon, bluntly enough, ‘kiss the hem of your own. You carry two lessons there which you do not seem to have learnt yet.’

In an instant her face flashed up into pride and fury. ‘I asked for your blessing, and not for a sermon. I can have that when I like.’

‘And such as you like,’ grumbled the old priest, as she swept up the steps, tossing some small coin to the ragged boys, and murmuring to herself, loud enough for Philammon’s hearing, that she should certainly inform the confessor, and that she would not be insulted in the streets by savage monks.

‘Now she will confess her sins inside—all but those which she has been showing off to us here outside, and beat her breast, and weep like a very Magdalen; and then the worthy man will comfort her with—“What a beautiful chain! And what a shawl—allow me to touch it! How soft and delicate this Indian wool! Ah! if you knew the debts which I have been compelled to incur in the service of the sanctuary!—” And then of course the answer will be, as, indeed, he expects it should, that if it can be of the least use in the service of the Temple, she, of course, will think it only too great an honour.... And he will keep the chain, and perhaps the shawl too. And she will go home, believing that she has fulfilled to the very letter the command to break off her sins by almsgiving, and only sorry that the good priest happened to hit on that particular gewgaw!’

‘What,’ asked Philammon; ‘dare she actually not refuse such importunity?’

‘From a poor priest like me, stoutly enough; but from a popular ecclesiastic like him.... As Jerome says, in a letter of his I once saw, ladies think twice in such cases before they offend the city newsmonger. Have you anything more to say?’

Philammon had nothing to say; and wisely held his peace, while the old grumbler ran on—

‘Ah, boy, you have yet to learn city fashions! When you are a little older, instead of speaking unpleasant truths to a fine lady with a cross on her forehead, you will be ready to run to the Pillars of Hercules at her beck and nod, for the sake of her disinterested help towards a fashionable pulpit, or perhaps a bishopric. The ladies settle that for us here.’

‘The women?’

‘The women, lad. Do you suppose that they heap priests and churches with wealth for nothing? They have their reward. Do you suppose that a preacher gets into the pulpit of that church there, without looking anxiously, at the end of each peculiarly flowery sentence, to see whether her saintship there is clapping or not? She, who has such a delicate sense for orthodoxy, that she can scent out Novatianism or Origenism where no other mortal nose would suspect it. She who meets at her own house weekly all the richest and most pious women of the city, to settle our discipline for us’ as the court cooks do our doctrine. She who has even, it is whispered, the ear of the Augusta Pulcheria herself, and sends monthly letters to her at Constantinople, and might give the patriarch himself some trouble’ if he crossed her holy will!’

‘What! will Cyril truckle to such creatures?’

‘Cyril is a wise man in his generation—too wise, some say, for a child of the light. But at least, he knows there is no use fighting with those whom you cannot conquer; and while he can get money out of these great ladies for his almshouses, and orphan-houses, and lodging-houses, and hospitals, and workshops, and all the rest of it—and in that, I will say for him, there is no man on earth equal to him, but Ambrose of Milan and Basil of Caesarea—why, I don’t quarrel with him for making the best of a bad matter; and a very bad matter it is, boy, and has been ever since emperors and courtiers have given up burning and crucifying us, and taken to patronising and bribing us instead.’

Philammon walked on in silence by the old priest’s side, stunned and sickened.... ‘And this is what I have come out to see—reeds shaken in the wind, and men clothed in soft raiment, fit only for kings’ palaces!’ For this he had left the dear old Laura, and the simple joys and friendships of childhood, and cast himself into a roaring whirlpool of labour and temptation! This was the harmonious strength and unity of that Church Catholic, in which, as he had been taught from boyhood, there was but one Lord, one Faith, one Spirit. This was the indivisible body, ‘without spot or wrinkle, which fitly joined together and compacted by that which every member supplied, according to the effectual and proportionate working of every part, increased the body, and enabled it to build itself up in Love!’ He shuddered as the well-known words passed through his memory, and seemed to mock the base and chaotic reality around him. He felt angry with the old man for having broken his dream; he longed to believe that his complaints were only exaggerations of cynic peevishness, of selfish disappointment; and yet, had not Arsenius warned him? Had he not foretold, word for word, what the youth would find-what he had found? Then was Saint Paul’s great idea an empty and an impossible dream? No! God’s word could not fail; the Church could not err. The fault could not be in her, but in her enemies; not, as the old man said, in her too great prosperity, but in her slavery. And then the words which he had heard from Cyril at their first interview rose before him as the true explanation. How could the Church work freely and healthily while she was crushed and fettered by the rulers of this world? And how could they be anything but the tyrants and antichrists they were, while they were menaced and deluded by heathen philosophy, and vain systems of human wisdom? If Orestes was the curse of the Alexandrian Church, then Hypatia was the curse of Orestes. On her head the true blame lay. She was the root of the evil. Who would extirpate it?....

Why should not he? It might be dangerous; yet, successful or unsuccessful, it must be glorious. The course of Christianity wanted great examples. Might he not-and his young heart beat high at the thought—might he not, by some great act of daring, self-sacrifice, divine madness of faith, like David’s of old, when he went out against the giant—awaken selfish and luxurious souls to a noble emulation, and recall to their minds, perhaps to their lives, the patterns of those martyrs who were the pride, the glory, the heirloom of Egypt? And as figure after figure rose before his imagination, of simple men and weak women who had conquered temptation and shame, torture and death, to live for ever on the lips of men, and take their seats among the patricians of the heavenly court, with brows glittering through all eternities with the martyr’s crown, his heart beat thick and fast, and he longed only for an opportunity to dare and die.

And the longing begot the opportunity. For he had hardly rejoined his brother visitors when the absorbing thought took word again, and he began questioning them eagerly for more information about Hypatia.

On that point, indeed, he obtained nothing but fresh invective; but when his companions, after talking of the triumph which the true faith had gained that morning, went on to speak of the great overthrow of Paganism twenty years before, under the patriarch Theophilus; of Olympiodorus and his mob, who held the Serapeium for many days by force of arms against the Christians, making sallies into the city, and torturing and murdering the prisoners whom they took; of the martyrs who, among those very pillars which overhung their heads, had died in torments rather than sacrifice to Serapis; and of the final victory, and the soldier who, in presence of the trembling mob, clove the great jaw of the colossal idol, and snapped for ever the spell of heathenism, Philammon’s heart burned to distinguish himself like that soldier, and to wipe out his qualms of conscience by some more unquestionable deed of Christian prowess. There were no idols now to break but there was philosophy—‘Why not carry war into the heart of the enemy’s camp, and beard Satan in his very den? Why does not some man of God go boldly into the lecture-room of the sorceress, and testify against her to her face?’

‘Do it yourself, if you dare,’ said Peter. ‘We have no wish to get our brains knocked out by all the profligate young gentlemen in the city.’

‘I will do it,’ said Philammon.

‘That is, if his holiness allows you to make such a fool of yourself.’

‘Take care, sir, of your words. You revile the blessed martyrs, from St. Stephen to St. Telemachus, when you call such a deed foolishness.’

‘I shall most certainly inform his holiness of your insolence.’

‘Do so,’ said Philammon, who, possessed with a new idea, wished for nothing more. And there the matter dropped for the time. ...............

‘The presumption of the young in this generation is growing insufferable,’ said Peter to his master that evening.

‘So much the better. They put their elders on their mettle in the race of good works. But who has been presuming to-day?’

‘That mad boy whom Pambo sent up from the deserts dared to offer himself as champion of the faith against Hypatia. He actually proposed to go into her lecture-room and argue with her to her face. What think you of that for a specimen of youthful modesty and self-distrust?’

Cyril was silent a while.

‘What answer am I to have the honour of taking back? A month’s relegation to Nitria on bread and water? You, I am sure, will not allow such things to go unpunished; indeed, if they do, there is an end to all authority and discipline.’

Cyril was still silent; whilst Peter’s brow clouded fast. At last he answered—

‘The cause wants martyrs. Send the boy to me.’

Peter went down with a shrug, and an expression of face which looked but too like envy, and ushered up the trembling youth, who dropped on his knees as soon as he entered.

‘So you wish to go into the heathen woman’s lecture-room, and defy her? Have you courage for it?’

‘God will give it me.’

‘You will be murdered by her pupils.’

‘I can defend myself,’ said Philammon, with a pardonable glance downward at his sinewy limbs. ‘And if not: what death more glorious than martyrdom?’

Cyril smiled genially enough. ‘Promise me two things.’

‘Two thousand, if you will.’

‘Two are quite difficult enough to keep. Youth is rash in promises, and rasher in forgetting them. Promise me that, whatever happens, you will not strike the first blow.’

‘I do.’

‘Promise me again, that you will not argue with her.’

‘What then?’

‘Contradict, denounce, defy. But give no reasons. If you do, you are lost. She is subtler than the serpent, skilled in all the tricks of logic, and you will become a laughing-stock, and run away in shame. Promise me.’

‘I do.’

‘Then go.’

‘When?’

‘The sooner the better. At what hour does the accursed woman lecture to-morrow, Peter?’

‘We saw her going to the Museum at nine this morning.’

‘Then go at nine to-morrow. There is money for you.’

‘What is this for?’ asked Philammon, fingering curiously the first coins which he ever had handled in his life.

‘To pay for your entrance. To the philosopher none enters without money. Not so to the Church of God, open all day long to the beggar and the slave. If you convert her, well. And if not’.... And he added to himself between his teeth, ‘And if not, well also—perhaps better.’

‘Ay!’ said Peter bitterly, as he ushered Philammon out. ‘Go up to Ramoth Gilead, and prosper, young fool! What evil spirit sent you here to feed the noble patriarch’s only weakness?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Philammon, as fiercely as he dare.

‘The fancy that preachings, and protestations, and martyrdoms can drive out the Canaanites, who can only be got rid of with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. His uncle Theophilus knew that well enough. If he had not, Olympiodorus might have been master of Alexandria, and incense burning before Serapis to this day. Ay, go, and let her convert you! Touch the accursed thing, like Achan, and see if you do not end by having it in your tent. Keep company with the daughters of Midian, and see if you do not join yourself to Baal poor, and eat the offerings of the dead!’

And with this encouraging sentence, the two parted for the night.

CHAPTER VIII: THE EAST WIND

As Hypatia went forth the next morning, in all her glory, with a crowd of philosophers and philosophasters, students, and fine gentlemen, following her in reverend admiration across the street to her lecture-room, a ragged beggar-man, accompanied by a huge and villainous-looking dog, planted himself right before her, and extending a dirty hand, whined for an alms.

Hypatia, whose refined taste could never endure the sight, much less the contact, of anything squalid and degraded, recoiled a little, and bade the attendant slave get rid of the man with a coin. Several of the younger gentlemen, however, considered themselves adepts in that noble art of ‘upsetting’ then in vogue in the African universities, to which we all have reason enough to be thankful, seeing that it drove Saint Augustine from Carthage to Rome; and they, in compliance with the usual fashion of tormenting any simple creature who came in their way by mystification and insult, commenced a series of personal witticisms, which the beggar bore stoically enough. The coin was offered him, but he blandly put aside the hand of the giver, and keeping his place on the pavement, seemed inclined to dispute Hypatia’s farther passage.

‘What do you want? Send the wretch and his frightful dog away, gentlemen!’ said the poor philosopher in some trepidation.

‘I know that dog,’ said one of them; ‘it is Aben-Ezra’s. Where did you find it before it was lost, you rascal.’

‘Where your mother found you when she palmed you off upon her goodman, my child—in the slave-market. Fair Sybil, have you already forgotten your humblest pupil, as these young dogs have, who are already trying to upset their master and instructor in the angelic science of bullying?’

And the beggar, lifting his broad straw hat, disclosed the features of Raphael Aben-Ezra. Hypatia recoiled with a shriek of surprise.

‘Ah! you are astonished. At what, I pray?’

‘To see you, sir, thus!’

‘Why, then? You have been preaching to us all a long time the glory of abstraction from the allurements of sense. It augurs ill, surely, for your estimate either of your pupils or of your own eloquence, if you are so struck with consternation because one of them has actually at last obeyed you.’

‘What is the meaning of this masquerade, most excellent sir?’ asked Hypatia and a dozen voices beside.

‘Ask Cyril. I am on my way to Italy, in the character of the New Diogenes, to look, like him, for a man. When I have found one, I shall feel great pleasure in returning to acquaint you with the amazing news. Farewell! I wished to look once more at a certain countenance, though I have turned, as you see, Cynic; and intend henceforth to attend no teacher but my dog, who will luckily charge no fees for instruction; if she did, I must go untaught, for my ancestral wealth made itself wings yesterday morning. You are aware, doubtless, of the Plebiscitum against the Jews, which was carried into effect under the auspices of a certain holy tribune of the people?’

‘Infamous!’

‘And dangerous, my dear lady. Success is inspiriting.... and Theon’s house is quite as easily sacked, as the Jews’ quarter.... Beware.’

‘Come, come, Aben-Ezra,’ cried the young men; ‘you are far too good company for us to lose you for that rascally patriarch’s fancy. We will make a subscription for you, eh? And you shall live with each of us, month and month about. We shall quite lose the trick of joking without you.’

‘Thank you, gentlemen. But really you have been my butts far too long for me to think of becoming yours. Madam, one word in private before I go.’

Hypatia leant forward, and speaking in Syriac, whispered hurriedly—

‘Oh, stay, sir, I beseech you: You are the wisest of my pupils—perhaps my only true pupil.... My father will find some concealment for you from these wretches; and if you need money, remember, he is your debtor. We have never repaid you the gold which—’

‘Fairest Muse, that was but my entrance-fee to Parnassus. It is I who am in your debt; and I have brought my arrears, in the form of this opal ring. As for shelter near you,’ he went on, lowering his voice, and speaking like her, in Syriac—‘Hypatia the Gentile is far too lovely for the peace of mind of Raphael the Jew.’ And he drew from his finger Miriam’s ring and offered it.

‘Impossible!’ said Hypatia, blushing scarlet: ‘I cannot accept it.’

‘I beseech you. It is the last earthly burden I have, except this snail’s prison of flesh and blood. My dagger will open a crack through that when it becomes intolerable. But as I do not intend to leave my shell, if I can help it, except just when and how I choose, and as, if I take this ring with me, some of Heraclian’s Circumcellions will assuredly knock my brains out for the sake of it-I must entreat.’

‘Never! Can you not sell the ring, and escape to Synesius? He will give you shelter.’

‘The hospitable hurricane! Shelter, yes; but rest, none. As soon pitch my tent in the crater of Aetna. Why, he will be trying day and night to convert me to that eclectic farrago of his, which he calls philosophic Christianity. Well, if you will not have the ring, it is soon disposed of. We Easterns know how to be magnificent, and vanish as the lords of the world ought.’

And he turned to the philosophic crowd.

‘Here, gentlemen of Alexandria! Does any gay youth wish to pay his debts once and for all?—Behold the Rainbow of Solomon, an opal such as Alexandria never saw before, which would buy any one of you, and his Macedonian papa, and his Macedonian mamma, and his Macedonian sisters, and horses, and parrots, and peacocks, twice over, in any slave-market in the world. Any gentleman who wishes to possess a jewel worth ten thousand gold pieces, will only need to pick it out of the gutter into which I throw it. Scramble for it, you young Phaedrias and Pamphili! There are Laides and Thaides enough about, who will help you to spend it.’

And raising the jewel on high, he was in the act of tossing it into the street, when his arm was seized from behind, and the ring snatched from his hand. He turned, fiercely enough, and saw behind him, her eyes flashing fury and contempt, old Miriam.

Bran sprang at the old woman’s throat in an instant; but recoiled again before the glare of her eye. Raphael called the dog off, and turning quietly to the disappointed spectators—

‘It is all right, my luckless friends. You must raise money for yourselves, after all; which, since the departure of my nation, will be a somewhat more difficult matter than ever. The over-ruling destinies, whom, as you all know so well when you are getting tipsy, not even philosophers can resist, have restored the Rainbow of Solomon to its original possessor. Farewell, Queen of Philosophy! When I find the man, you shall hear of it. Mother, I am coming with you for a friendly word before we part, though’ he went on, laughing, as the two walked away together, ‘it was a scurvy trick of you to balk one of The Nation of the exquisite pleasure of seeing those heathen dogs scrambling in the gutter for his bounty.’

Hypatia went on to the Museum, utterly bewildered by this strange meeting, and its still stranger end. She took care, nevertheless, to betray no sign of her deep interest till she found herself alone in her little waiting-room adjoining the lecture-hall; and there, throwing herself into a chair, she sat and thought, till she found, to her surprise and anger, the tears trickling down her cheeks. Not that her bosom held one spark of affection for Raphael. If there had ever been any danger of that the wily Jew had himself taken care to ward it off, by the sneering and frivolous tone with which he quashed every approach to deep feeling, either in himself or in others. As for his compliments to her beauty, she was far too much accustomed to such, to be either pleased or displeased by them. But she felt, as she said, that she had lost perhaps her only true pupil; and more—perhaps her only true master. For she saw clearly enough, that under that Silenus’ mask was hidden a nature capable of—perhaps more than she dare think of. She had always felt him her superior in practical cunning; and that morning had proved to her what she had long suspected, that he was possibly also her superior in that moral earnestness and strength of will for which she looked in vain among the enervated Greeks who surrounded her. And even in those matters in which he professed himself her pupil, she had long been alternately delighted by finding that he alone, of all her school, seemed thoroughly and instinctively to comprehend her every word, and chilled by the disagreeable suspicion that he was only playing with her, and her mathematics and geometry, and meta-physic and dialectic, like a fencer practising with foils, while he reserved his real strength for some object more worthy of him. More than once some paradox or question of his had shaken her neatest systems into a thousand cracks, and opened up ugly depths of doubt, even on the most seemingly-palpable certainties; or some half-jesting allusion to those Hebrew Scriptures, the quantity and quality of his faith in which he would never confess, made her indignant at the notion that he considered himself in possession of a reserved ground of knowledge, deeper and surer than her own, in which he did not deign to allow her to share.

And yet she was irresistibly attracted to him. That deliberate and consistent luxury of his, from which she shrank, he had always boasted that he was able to put on and take off at will like a garment: and now he seemed to have proved his words; to be a worthy rival of the great Stoics of old time. Could Zeno himself have asked more from frail humanity? Moreover, Raphael had been of infinite practical use to her. He worked out, unasked, her mathematical problems; he looked out authorities, kept her pupils in order by his bitter tongue, and drew fresh students to her lectures by the attractions of his wit, his arguments, and last, but not least, his unrivalled cook and cellar. Above all he acted the part of a fierce and valiant watch-dog on her behalf, against the knots of clownish and often brutal sophists, the wrecks of the old Cynic, Stoic, and Academic schools, who, with venom increasing, after the wont of parties, with their decrepitude, assailed the beautifully bespangled card-castle of Neo-Platonism, as an empty medley of all Greek philosophies with all Eastern superstitions. All such Philistines had as yet dreaded the pen and tongue of Raphael, even more than those of the chivalrous Bishop of Cyrene, though he certainly, to judge from certain of his letters, hated them as much as he could hate any human being; which was after all not very bitterly.

But the visits of Synesius were few and far between; the distance between Carthage and Alexandria, and the labour of his diocese, and, worse than all, the growing difference in purpose between him and his beautiful teacher, made his protection all but valueless. And now Aben-Ezra was gone too, and with him were gone a thousand plans and hopes. To have converted him at last to a philosophic faith in the old gods! To have made him her instrument for turning back the stream of human error I… How often had that dream crossed her! And now, who would take his place? Athanasius? Synesius in his good-nature might dignify him with the name of brother, but to her he was a powerless pedant, destined to die without having wrought any deliverance on the earth, as indeed the event proved. Plutarch of Athens? He was superannuated. Syrianus? A mere logician, twisting Aristotle to mean what she knew, and he ought to have known, Aristotle never meant. Her father? A man of triangles and conic sections. How paltry they all looked by the side of the unfathomable Jew!—Spinners of charming cobwebs..... But would the flies condescend to be caught in them? Builders of pretty houses..... If people would but enter and live in them! Preachers of superfine morality.... which their admiring pupils never dreamt of practising. Without her, she well knew, philosophy must die in Alexandria. And was it her wisdom—or other and more earthly charms of hers—which enabled her to keep it alive? Sickening thought! Oh, that she were ugly, only to test the power of her doctrines!