Hypatia. or New Foes with an Old Face

‘Don’t commit yourself to rash promises, my dear lady. If I am bored with poverty, I can but borrow a few gold pieces of a rabbi, and turn pedler. I really do not trust you to pay me back, so I shall not be disappointed if you do not. Why should I?’

‘Because—because—O God! No—never mind! You shall have all back. Spirit of Elias! where is the black agate? Why is it not among these?—The broken half of the black agate talisman!’

Raphael turned pale. ‘How did you know that I have a black agate?’

‘How did I? How did I not?’ cried she, clutching him by the arm. ‘Where is it? All depends on that! Fool!’ she went on, throwing him off from her at arm’s length, as a sudden suspicion stung her—‘you have not given it to the heathen woman?’

‘By the soul of my fathers, then, you mysterious old witch, who seem to know everything, that is exactly what I have done.’

Miriam clapped her hands together wildly. ‘Lost! lost! lost! Not I will have it, if I tear it out of her heart! I will be avenged of her—the strange woman who flatters with her words, to whom the simple go in, and know not that the dead are there, and that her guests are in the depths of hell! God do so to me, and more also, if she and her sorceries be on earth a twelvemonth hence!’

‘Silence, Jezebel! Heathen or none, she is as pure as the sunlight! I only gave it her because she fancied the talisman upon it.’

‘To enchant you with it, to your ruin!’

‘Brute of a slave-dealer! you fancy every one as base as the poor wretches whom you buy and sell to shame, that you may make them as much the children of hell, if that be possible, as yourself!’

Miriam looked at him, her large black eyes widening and kindling. For an instant she felt for her poniard—and then burst into an agony of tears, hid her face in her withered hands, and rushed from the room, as a crash and shout below announced the bursting of the door.

‘There she goes with my jewels. And here come my guests, with the young monk at their head.—One rising when the other sets. A worthy pair of Dioscuri! Come, Bran!…Boys! Slaves! Where are you? Steal every one what he can lay his hands on, and run for your lives through the back gate.’

The slaves had obeyed him already. He walked smiling downstairs through utter solitude, and in the front passage met face to face the mob of monks, costermongers and dock-workers, fishwives and beggars, who were thronging up the narrow entry, and bursting into the doors right and left; and at their head, alas! the young monk who had just trampled the necklace into the mud…no other, in fact, than Philammon.

‘Welcome, my worthy guests! Enter, I beseech you, and fulfil, in your own peculiar way, the precepts which bid you not be over anxious for the good things of this life..For eating and drinking, my kitchen and cellar are at your service. For clothing, if any illustrious personage will do me the honour to change his holy rags with me, here are an Indian shawl-pelisse and a pair of silk trousers at his service. Perhaps you will accommodate me, my handsome young captain, choragus of this new school of the prophets?’

Philammon, who was the person addressed, tried to push by him contemptuously.

‘Allow me, sir. I lead the way. This dagger is poisoned,-a scratch and you are dead. This dog is of the true British breed; if she seizes you, red-hot iron will not loose her, till she hears the bone crack. If any one will change clothes with me, all I have is at your service. If not, the first that stirs is a dead man.’

There was no mistaking the quiet, high-bred determination of the speaker. Had he raged and blustered, Philammon could have met him on his own ground: but there was an easy self-possessed disdain about him, which utterly abashed the young monk, and abashed, too, the whole crowd of rascals at his heels.

‘I’ll change clothes with you, you Jewish dog!’ roared a dirty fellow out of the mob.

‘I am your eternal debtor. Let us step into this side room. Walk upstairs, my friends. Take care there, sir!—That porcelain, whole, is worth three thousand gold pieces: broken, it is not worth three pence. I leave it to your good sense to treat it accordingly. Now then, my friend!’ And in the midst of the raging vortex of plunderers, who were snatching up everything which they could carry away, and breaking everything which they could not, lie quietly divested himself of his finery, and put on the ragged cotton tunic, and battered straw hat, which the fellow handed over to him.

Philammon, who had had from the first no mind to plunder, stood watching Raphael with dumb wonder; and a shudder of regret, he knew not why, passed through him, as he Saw the mob tearing down pictures, and dashing statues to the ground. Heathen they were, doubtless; but still, the Nymphs and Venuses looked too lovely to be so brutally destroyed… There was something almost humanly pitiful in their poor broken arms and legs, as they lay about upon the pavement.... He laughed at himself for the notion; but he could not laugh it away.

Raphael seemed to think that he ought not to laugh it away; for he pointed to the fragments, and with a quaint look at the young monk—

‘Our nurses used to tell us, ‘“If you can’t make it, You ought not to break it.”’

‘I had no nurse,’ said Philammon.

‘Ah!—that accounts—for this and other things. Well,’ he went on, with the most provoking good-nature, ‘you are in a fair road, my handsome youth; I wish you joy of your fellow-workmen, and of your apprenticeship in the noble art of monkery. Riot and pillage, shrieking women and houseless children in your twentieth summer, are the sure path to a Saint-ship, such as Paul of Tarsus, who, with all his eccentricities, was a gentleman, certainly never contemplated. I have heard of Phoebus Apollo under many disguises, but this is the first time I ever saw him in the wolf’s hide.’

‘Or in the lion’s,’ said Philammon, trying in his shame to make a fine speech.

‘Like the Ass in the Fable. Farewell! Stand out of the way, friends! ‘Ware teeth and poison!’

And he disappeared among the crowd, who made way respectfully enough for his dagger and his brindled companion.

CHAPTER VII: THOSE BY WHOM OFFENCES COME

Philammon’s heart smote him all that day, whenever he thought of his morning’s work. Till then all Christians, monks above all, had been infallible in his eyes: all Jews and heathens insane and accursed. Moreover, meekness under insult, fortitude in calamity, the contempt of worldly comfort, the worship of poverty as a noble estate, were virtues which the Church Catholic boasted as her peculiar heritage: on which side had the balance of those qualities inclined that morning? The figure of Raphael, stalking out ragged and penniless into the wide world, haunted him, with its quiet self-assured smile. And there haunted him, too, another peculiarity in the man, which he had never before remarked in any one but Arsenius—that ease and grace, that courtesy and self-restraint, which made Raphael’s rebukes rankle all the more keenly, because he felt that the rebuker was in some mysterious way superior to him, and saw through him, and could have won him Over, Or crushed him in argument, or in intrigue—or in anything, perhaps, except mere brute force. Strange—that Raphael, of all men, should in those few moments have reminded him so much of Arsenius; and that the very same qualities which gave a peculiar charm to the latter should give a peculiar unloveliness to the former, and yet be, without a doubt, the same. What was it? Was it rank which gave it Arsenius had been a great man, he knew—the companion of kings. And Raphael seemed rich. He had heard the mob crying out against the prefect for favouring him. Was it then familiarity with the great ones of the world which produced this manner and tone? It was a real strength, whether in Arsenius or in Raphael. He felt humbled before it—envied it. If it made Arsenius a more complete and more captivating person, why should it not do the same for him? Why should not he, too, have his share of it?

Bringing with it such thoughts as these, the time ran on till noon, and the mid-day meal, and the afternoon’s work, to which Philammon looked forward joyfully, as a refuge from his own thoughts.

He was sitting on his sheepskin upon a step, basking, like a true son of the desert, in a blaze of fiery sunshine, which made the black stone-work too hot to touch with the bare hand, watching the swallows, as they threaded the columns of the Serapeium, and thinking how often he had delighted in their air-dance, as they turned and hawked up and down the dear old glen at Scetis. A crowd of citizens with causes, appeals, and petitions, were passing in and out from the patriarch’s audience-room. Peter and the archdeacon were waiting in the shade close by for the gathering of the parabolani, and talking over the morning’s work in an earnest whisper, in which the names of Hypatia and Orestes were now and then audible.

An old priest came up, and bowing reverently enough to the archdeacon, requested the help of one of the parabolani. He had a sailor’s family, all fever-stricken, who must be removed to the hospital at once.

The archdeacon looked at him, answered an off-hand ‘Very well,’ and went on with his talk.

The priest, bowing lower than before, re-presented the immediate necessity for help.

‘It is very odd,’ said Peter to the swallows in the Serapeium, ‘that some people cannot obtain influence enough in their own parishes to get the simplest good works performed without tormenting his holiness the patriarch.’

The old priest mumbled some sort of excuse, and the archdeacon, without deigning a second look at him, said—‘Find him a man, brother Peter. Anybody will do. What is that boy—Philammon—doing there? Let him go with Master Hieracas.’

Peter seemed not to receive the proposition favourably, and whispered something to the archdeacon....

‘No. I can spare none of the rest. Importunate persons must take their chance of being well served. Come—here are our brethren; we will all go together.’

‘The farther together the better for the boy’s sake,’ grumbled Peter, loud enough for Philammon—perhaps for the old priest—to overhear him.

So Philammon went out with them, and as he went questioned his companions meekly enough as to who Raphael was.

‘A friend of Hypatia!’—that name, too, haunted him; and he began, as stealthily and indirectly as he could, to obtain information about her. There was no need for his caution; for the very mention of her name roused the whole party into a fury of execration.

‘May God confound her, siren, enchantress, dealer in spells and sorceress! She is the strange woman of whom Solomon prophesied.’

‘It is my opinion,’ said another, ‘that she is the forerunner of Antichrist.’

‘Perhaps the virgin of whom it is prophesied that he will be born,’ suggested another.

‘Not that, I’ll warrant her,’ said Peter, with a savage sneer.

‘And is Raphael Aben-Ezra her pupil in philosophy?’ asked Philammon.

‘Her pupil in whatsoever she can find where-with to delude men’s souls,’ said the old priest.

‘The reality of philosophy has died long ago, but the great ones find it still worth their while to worship its shadow.’

‘Some of them worship more than a shadow, when they haunt her house,’ said Peter. ‘Do you think Orestes goes thither only for philosophy?’

‘We must not judge harsh judgments,’ said the old priest; ‘Synesius of Cyrene is a holy man, and yet he loves Hypatia well.’

‘He a holy man?—and keeps a wife! One who had the insolence to tell the blessed Theophilus himself that he would not be made bishop unless he were allowed to remain with her; and despised the gift of the Holy Ghost in comparison of the carnal joys of wedlock, not knowing the Scriptures, which saith that those who are in the flesh cannot please God! Well said Siricius of Rome of such men—“Can the Holy Spirit of God dwell in other than holy bodies?” No wonder that such a one as Synesius grovels at the feet of Orestes’ mistress!’

‘Then she is profligate?’ asked Philammon.

‘She must be. Has a heathen faith and grace? And without faith and grace, are not all our righteousnesses as filthy rags? What says St. Paul?—That God has given them over to a reprobate mind, full of all injustice, uncleanness, covetousness, maliciousness, you know the catalogue—why do you ask me?’

‘Alas! and is she this?’

‘Alas! And why alas? How would the Gospel be glorified if heathens were holier than Christians? It ought to be so, therefore it is so. If she seems to have virtues, they, being done without the grace of Christ, are only bedizened vices, cunning shams, the devil transformed into an angel of light. And as for chastity, the flower and crown of all virtues—whosoever says that she, being yet a heathen, has that, blasphemes the Holy Spirit, whose peculiar and highest gift it is, and is anathema maranatha for ever! Amen!’ And Peter, devoutly crossing himself, turned angrily and contemptuously away from his young companion.

Philammon was quite shrewd enough to see that assertion was not identical with proof. But Peter’s argument of ‘it ought to be, therefore it is,’ is one which saves a great deal of trouble…and no doubt he had very good sources of information. So Philammon walked on, sad, he knew not why, at the new notion which he had formed of Hypatia, as a sort of awful sorceress—Messalina, whose den was foul with magic rites and ruined souls of men. And yet if that was all she had to teach, whence had her pupil Raphael learned that fortitude of his? If philosophy had, as they said, utterly died out, then what was Raphael?

Just then, Peter and the rest turned up a side street, and Philammon and Hieracas were left to go on their joint errand together. They paced on for some way in silence, up one street and down another, till Philammon, for want of anything better to say, asked where they were going.

‘Where I choose, at all events. No, young man! If I, a priest, am to be insulted by archdeacons and readers, I won’t be insulted by you.’

‘I assure you I meant no harm.’

‘Of course not; you all learn the same trick, and the young ones catch it of the old ones fast enough. Words smoother than butter, yet very swords.’

‘You do not mean to complain of the archdeacon and his companions?’ said Philammon, who of course was boiling over with pugnacious respect for the body to which he belonged.

No answer.

‘Why, sir, are they not among the most holy and devoted of men?’

‘Ah—yes,’ said his companion, in a tone which sounded very like ‘Ah—no.’

‘You do not think so?’ asked Philammon bluntly.

‘You are young, you are young. Wait a while till you have seen as much as I have. A degenerate age this, my son; not like the good old times, when men dare suffer and die for the faith. We are too prosperous nowadays; and fine ladies walk about with Magdalens embroidered on their silks, and gospels hanging round their necks. When I was young they died for that with which they now bedizen themselves.’

‘But I was speaking of the parabolani.’

‘Ah, there are a great many among them who have not much business where they are. Don’t say I said so. But many a rich man puts his name on the list of the guild just to get his exemption from taxes, and leaves the work to poor men like you. Rotten, rotten! my son, and you will find it out. The preachers, now—people used to say—I know Abbot Isidore did—that I had as good a gift for expounding as any man in Pelusium; but since I came here, eleven years since, if you will believe it, I have never been asked to preach in my own parish church.’

‘You surely jest!’

‘True, as I am a christened man. I know why—I know why: they are afraid of Isidore’s men here.... Perhaps they may have caught the holy man’s trick of plain speaking—and ears are dainty in Alexandria. And there are some in these parts, too, that have never forgiven him the part he took about those three villains, Marc, Zosimus, and Martinian, and a certain letter that came of it; or another letter either, which we know of, about taking alms for the church from the gains of robbers and usurers. “Cyril never forgets.” So he says to every one who does him a good turn.... And so he does to every one who he fancies has done him a bad one. So here am I slaving away, a subordinate priest, while such fellows as Peter the Reader look down on me as their slave. But it’s always so. There never was a bishop yet, except the blessed Augustine—would to Heaven I had taken my abbot’s advice, and gone to him at Hippo!—who had not his flatterers and his tale-bearers, and generally the archdeacon at the head of them, ready to step into the bishop’s place when he dies, over the heads of hard-working parish priests. But that is the way of the world. The sleekest and the oiliest, and the noisiest; the man who can bring in most money to the charities, never mind whence or how; the man who will take most of the bishop’s work off his hands, and agree with him in everything he wants, and save him, by spying and eavesdropping, the trouble of using his own eyes; that is the man to succeed in Alexandria, or Constantinople, or Rome itself. Look now; there are but seven deacons to this great city, and all its priests; and they and the archdeacon are the masters of it and us. They and that Peter manage Cyril’s work for him, and when Cyril makes the archdeacon a bishop, he will make Peter archdeacon....They have their reward, they have their reward; and so has Cyril, for that matter.’

‘How?’

‘Why, don’t say I said it. But what do I care? I have nothing to lose, I’m sure. But they do say that there are two ways of promotion in Alexandria: one by deserving it, the other by paying for it. That’s all.’

‘Impossible!’

‘Oh, of course, quite impossible. But all I know is just this, that when that fellow Martinian got back again into Pelusium, after being turned out by the late bishop for a rogue and hypocrite as he was, and got the ear of this present bishop, and was appointed his steward, and ordained priest—I’d as soon have ordained that street-dog—and plundered him and brought him to disgrace—for I don’t believe this bishop is a bad man, but those who use rogues must expect to be called rogues—and ground the poor to the earth, and tyrannised over the whole city so that no man’s property, or reputation, scarcely their lives, were safe; and after all, had the impudence, when he was called on for his accounts, to bring the church in as owing him money; I just know this, that he added to all his other shamelessness this, that he offered the patriarch a large sum of money to buy a bishopric of him.... And what do you think the patriarch answered?’

‘Excommunicated the sacrilegious wretch, of course!’

‘Sent him a letter to say that if he dared to do such a thing again he should really be forced to expose him! So the fellow, taking courage, brought his money himself the next time; and all the world says that Cyril would have made him a bishop after all, if Abbot Isidore had not written to remonstrate.’

‘He could not have known the man’s character,’ said poor Philammon, hunting for an excuse.

‘The whole Delta was ringing with it. Isidore had written to him again and again.’

‘Surely then his wish was to prevent scandal, and preserve the unity of the church in the eyes of the heathen.’

The old man laughed bitterly.

‘Ah, the old story—of preventing scandals by retaining them, and fancying that sin is a less evil than a little noise; as if the worst of all scandals was not the being discovered in hushing up a scandal. And as for unity, if you want that, you must go back to the good old times of Dioclesian and Decius.’

‘The persecutors?’

‘Ay, boy—to the times of persecution, when Christians died like brothers, because they lived like brothers. You will see very little of that now, except in some little remote county bishopric, which no one ever hears of from year’s end to year’s end. But in the cities it is all one great fight for place and power. Every one is jealous of his neighbour. The priests are jealous of the deacons, and good cause they have. The county bishops are jealous of the metropolitan, and he is jealous of the North African bishops, and quite right he is. What business have they to set up for themselves, as if they were infallible? It’s a schism, I say—a complete schism. They are just as bad as their own Donatists. Did not the Council of Nice settle that the Metropolitan of Alexandria should have authority over Libya and Pentapolis, according to the ancient custom?’

‘Of course he ought,’ said Philammon, jealous for the honour of his own patriarchate.

‘And the patriarchs of Rome and Constantinople are jealous of our patriarch.’

‘Of Cyril?’

‘Of course, because he won’t be at their beck and nod, and let them be lords and masters of Africa.’

‘But surely these things can be settled by councils?’

‘Councils? Wait till you have been at one. The blessed Abbot Isidore used to say, that if he ever was a bishop—which he never will be—he is far too honest for that—he would never go near one of them; for he never had seen one which did not call out every evil passion in men’s hearts, and leave the question more confounded with words than they found it, even if the whole matter was not settled beforehand by some chamberlain, or eunuch, or cook sent from court, as if he were an anointed vessel of the Spirit, to settle the dogmas of the Holy Catholic Church.’

‘Cook?’

‘Why, Valens sent his chief cook to stop Basil of Caesarea from opposing the Court doctrine.... I tell you, the great battle in these cases is to get votes from courts, or to get to court yourself. When I was young, the Council of Antioch had to make a law to keep bishops from running off to Constantinople to intrigue, under pretence of pleading the cause of the orphan and widow. But what’s the use of that, when every noisy and ambitious man shifts and shifts, from one see to another, till he settles himself close to Rome or Byzantium, and gets the emperor’s ear, and plays into the hands of his courtiers?’

‘Is it not written, “Speak not evil of dignities”? ‘said Philammon, in his most sanctimonious tone.

‘Well, what of that? I don’t speak evil of dignities, when I complain of the men who fill them badly, do I?’

‘I never heard that interpretation of the text before.’

‘Very likely not. That’s no reason why it should not be true and orthodox. You will soon hear a good many more things, which are true enough—though whether they are orthodox or not, the court cooks must settle. Of course, I am a disappointed, irreverent old grumbler. Of course, and of course, too, young men must needs buy their own experience, instead of taking old folks’ at a gift. There—use your own eyes, and judge for yourself. There you may see what sort of saints are bred by this plan of managing the Catholic Church. There comes one of them. Now! I say no more!’

As he spoke, two tall negroes came up to them, and set down before the steps of a large church which they were passing an object new to Philammon—a sedan-chair, the poles of which were inlaid with ivory and silver, and the upper part enclosed in rose-coloured silk curtains.

‘What is inside that cage?’ asked he of the old priest, as the negroes stood wiping the perspiration from their foreheads, and a smart slave-girl stepped forward, with a parasol and slippers in her hand, and reverently lifted the lower edge of the curtain.

‘A saint, I tell you!’

An embroidered shoe, with a large gold cross on the instep, was put forth delicately from beneath the curtain, and the kneeling maid put on the slipper over it.

‘There!’ whispered the old grumbler. ‘Not enough, you see, to use Christian men as beasts of burden—Abbot Isidore used to say—ay, and told Iron, the pleader, to his face, that he could not conceive how a man who loved Christ, and knew the grace which has made all men free, could keep a slave.’

‘Nor can I,’ said Philammon.

‘But we think otherwise, you see, in Alexandria here. We can’t even walk up the steps of God’s temple without an additional protection to our delicate feet.’

‘I had thought it was written, “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place where thou standest is holy ground.”’

‘Ah! there are a good many more things written which we do not find it convenient to recollect.—Look! There is one of the pillars of the church-the richest and most pious lady in Alexandria.’

And forth stepped a figure, at which Philammon’s eyes opened wider than they had done even at the sight of Pelagia. Whatever thoughts the rich and careless grace of her attire might have raised in his mind, it had certainly not given his innate Greek good taste the inclination to laugh and weep at once, which he felt at this specimen of the tasteless fashion of an artificial and decaying civilisation. Her gown was stuffed out behind in a fashion which provoked from the dirty boys who lay about the steps, gambling for pistachios on their fingers, the same comments with which St. Clement had upbraided from the pulpit the Alexandrian ladies of his day. The said gown of white silk was bedizened, from waist to ankle, with certain mysterious red and green figures at least a foot long, which Philammon gradually discovered to be a representation, in the very lowest and ugliest style of fallen art, of Dives and Lazarus; while down her back hung, upon a bright blue shawl, edged with embroidered crosses, Job sitting, potsherd in hand, surrounded by his three friends—a memorial, the old priest whispered, of a pilgrimage which she had taken a year or two before, to Arabia, to see and kiss the identical dunghill on which the patriarch had sat.