Scotsman of Protestant temperament, would like to have the sixteen
Patriarchs buried decently and, if he could, spend three days in each of
the monasteries tidying up. “It’s not showing due respect to the dead,”
said he, “nor is it sanitary, nor decent. I’ve nothing to say against
the monks; they are simple and kind and hospitable. But they’re just
_wasting_ their lives. They’re doing nothing, making nothing.”
The manager would show the monks how they ought to keep house. But
better still, he would clear them all out. They are very good, very
kind, there is nothing against them, but what are they _doing_, he asks.
Their lives are pure waste. They don’t produce caustic soda.
* * * * *
I go to my room to sleep, and then at midnight come out again to see the
full moon flooding the vast plain of sand with light, and to realise
once more the breathless and perfect stillness of the desert.
IV
THE WORLD
From the Desert back to the town, to “the world,” to the hurly-burly of
Cairo and the flesh-pots of Egypt! It is war-time, the summer of 1915,
the Turks are being fought on the Peninsula of Gallipoli. The city is
full of soldiers, sunburned Australians and New Zealanders who have not
yet been in action but are being kept lest the Arabs should come out of
the Desert and strive to efface the English and French civilisation of
the banks of the lower Nile and so add more ruins to the ruins of Egypt.
The city is majestical with its broad streets, white stone palaces and
stately mansions, its wondrous river and its mighty bridges. The
dryness, cleanness, and whiteness of a city that knows no rain; the city
gleams in a vast supply of sunshine. The wind blows all the time from
the Desert, and wafts heat in the face as from a furnace. A city of life
and gay energy. The fountain of life plays rapidly and brilliantly all
the time, throwing up all colours, forms, faces. There is a sense of
resplendent and tremendous gaiety. No one comes to Cairo to be an
ascetic and mortify the flesh. But every building, every sight and
sound, says, “Life, life, life.” All around is death—the Desert which is
death itself, the Pyramids which are tombs, the old cities and ruins
which are the bodies of ancient civilisations passed away. But every
sight and sound in the oasis of the great city says—Live, be gay, let
the pulse beat fast, let the heart go and be glad, let the eyes sparkle
and burn, let the lips form words of passion and pleasure.
There is a sense of an immense antiquity which in contrast with the
little second of the present moment makes the latter less important,
less holy. There is a subtle smell in the air, an odour that makes the
head a little dizzy and the hands a little feverish as you walk; it is
the actual odour of antiquity, a finest dust in suspension in the wind,
the dust of decay from past ages. All that dies in Egypt becomes dry,
and only after centuries turns to dust and loses form. That which rots
away in a year in our northern clime keeps its semblance for a thousand
years in Egypt. The stones of the houses of native Cairo were many of
them quarried by the ancients; the wooden beams and joists have lasted
from the days of the Pharaohs, and only now are gently crumbling. Here
the very stones can be used to manure the fields. Subtly, secretly, the
seventh foundation is always crumbling away and passing in dust into the
Desert air. The smell in the air is partly the fine dust of mummies, of
the bodies that were once erect and nervous and vivid, gay and
felicitous and moving, the mysterious flocking humans of thousands of
years ago.
The streets roll forward with flocking crowds—dark faces, brown faces,
sallow faces; red caps and straw hats and little turbans and smocks and
burnous; negroes, Copts, Arabs, women in white veils, women with dark
veils; Europeans, soldiers, hawkers, mendicants, post-card sellers,
newspaper vendors. Along the centre of the broad sun-swept roadways
crash the electric trams; the rubber-tyred cabs and wide-hooded
victorias follow pleasantly; the motor-cars proceed; the military
auto-cycles pant; and the heavy ox and buffalo carts of the natives
blunder along at the sides. There is doing everywhere, happening, being.
Voluminous and promiscuous action floods and surges through the city
with the traffic. It is life everywhere. And yet mingled with life there
is death. There is plague in Cairo, and every now and then the eyes rest
on a native funeral procession, one procession, two processions, five
processions, ten processions all following one another. They are in
every street, and they go past with their strange pomp of death, with
the body and the mourners and the keeners and professional howlers. The
brightly living crowd on the footways each side of the road pause a
moment and think, “Some one has died,” and pass on, oblivious, intent on
life.
In luxurious hotels gentle and beautiful Nubians are handing out
delicate fare, rich dishes cooked and served in that sought-out and
magnificent style that Egypt has inherited from ages of epicurism. And a
wonderful assembly of officers and ladies, rich pleasure-seekers and
tourists from the Mediterranean shores, invalids, receives—sitting at
flower-decked tables in great halls. Many restless souls fall into the
rhythm of Egypt and feel themselves part of a great and satisfying
grandeur. It is borne in upon the mind that the rich have always lived
in a certain way in Egypt, and that the grandeur of Pharaoh and of
Antony and Cleopatra are one and the same with the grandeur of to-day. A
living thread of crimson and gold runs through the centuries of Egypt
and is caught to-day, unbroken. Cairo is the capital of the Desert, and
yet I do not know. It seems to me even at midday, when the sun glares
over the stones, that somehow the Desert does not exist, or that it is
in profound darkness, and that Cairo is a city all lamps, an island of
effulgent light encompassed on all sides with darkness. It is barely
credible that the sun of Cairo is the terrible sun of the Sahara, the
sun whose monstrous arms clasp thousands of miles of scorched sand and
wasted world, that the sun may not even notice Cairo as it looks on the
Desert. But those who live in the cities of Egypt are enough unto
themselves.
A strange impression, in the afternoon, to go down side streets and
observe the throngs of young men, unsteady on their feet but bright-eyed
and thirsty-lipped, greedy, eager; the strong-limbed sun-burnt Colonial
soldiers dancing with Arab girls, the café-chantants, shooting-saloons,
bars, bad houses, the barrel-organs, the smell of the air.
One can spare a questioning thought as to the homes of the soldiers.
They come to Egypt from a fresh Colonial country, from good homes, pure
women who are their mothers, gentle and innocent girls who are their
brides. They nobly offer themselves to fight for their race against a
false idea and a predatory nation. Tears fall at their departure.
Prayers accompany them. But though bound for France and England they
suddenly find their destination changed to Turkey, and they are put
down, for convenience, in Egypt. They are dumped upon this mysterious
and astonishing country as if one bit of dry land were just the same as
any other, and without any notion of the spiritual significance of being
stranded here. No blame to any one. Providence directs the destinies of
men and women.
The first army that came were the wildest, boldest, and they plunged
right away into the sin and gaiety and dangerous pleasures of the city,
conducted by the money-grubbing but ingenious and smiling Arabs to the
gambling dens, dancing-houses, and strange parlours of the back streets.
They were cheated, swindled, robbed whilst drunk, robbed whilst asleep,
but they saw strange sights and tasted unusual pleasures, sating the new
eyes and lips which Egypt had given them. At last, the time drawing nigh
for their departure for the Dardanelles, they resolved to get back part
of what they had lost in the back streets of the city—certain things
they could never get back—and they went down in force and sacked the
houses and rushed the Arabs and Arab women to the streets and took back
what they could find. There was a great riot. The native police were
called out, and they fired at the screaming mob. Such scenes were
enacted in the city that brought to mind the continuous street-rioting
in Alexandria in the old early-Christian days. But what is most
significant in the sight of these fine young men in the city is the
realisation of the impure strain they take back with them from Egypt to
the women and the children of Australia and New Zealand.
* * * * *
Night comes over the stately city, and the Europeans in their white
clothes come in greater numbers into the streets. The great remote
staring moon stands over the broad highway and arched bridges. Heat
seems to be generated through the haze in the sky, but a light dry
breeze is ever blowing, and the pungent sweetish odour of the city is in
the nostrils. In the contrast of darkness and night silence the clangour
of Eastern music is more stirring. It stirs the body, not the soul, and
is like the sensuous music of Nebuchadnezzar, the music of cornet,
flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer. Dark women with gold
ornaments hang out from curtainless windows or lurk just inside doorways
and dark passages, ready to coil snake-like upon a prey. In the roadways
a shouting, calling crowd. In the taverns they are singing “Tipperary”
and “We won’t go home till morning”; some men are standing on the
tables, others are trying to put gawky Arab girls through the steps of a
tango. The music jangles. The whole street has a collective voice, a
strange tinkling and murmuring uproar.
A tall, lank, loose-jawed, genial Copt would show you the haunts of
evil, and offers his services to procure you pleasure. You have said
“No” to him; he stands there where you left him on the pavement in his
long cotton rags, smiling gently and cogitatively—the same type as stood
in the city of the Pharaohs in the old days of the Israelitish bondage.
It is strange to reflect that they find in the mummies of those who
lived so many thousands of years ago the marks of “the city’s disease,”
and the sign of the impure strain. There is a community of sin. What was
in ancient Egypt is in the world to-day and was not invented in any
recent time but has been carried on from one human being to another, to
many others, and from them to others still.
I look at the mummies of Egypt, at the bright pictures of the people,
fresh as if painted yesterday. These paintings on the coffin-lids live,
they are the real people. You know that the brown, dry bodies wrapped in
thick folds of linen did once walk, and were the beautiful society of
some era five or six thousand years ago. There is in Cairo the unwrapped
mummy of the majestical Pharaoh who would not let the children of Israel
go. As you look at his face time is bridged over, and you see how brief
a space is our vaunted history of man and what parochial dwellers in
time we are, rolling our eyes and hushing our accents when we speak of a
hundred or a thousand years, as if those seconds of being were of vast
extent, tiring the angels to get over them. There lies old Pharaoh,
brown, but still in the flesh. He has a Roman nose, distinguished
features, the face of a man of learning; there is a look of Dante about
him. His neck has shrunk to the size of a bird’s neck and his head
rather dangles on it, but it is an actual head and an actual face.
Pharaoh is unwrapped, but beside him stands an unopened pupa case; the
linen is fresh as when new, and daintily folded and tied as on the day
of burial five thousand years ago. A lotus flower lies in the coffin; it
looks as if it had been picked last month and had wilted a little, and
yet it may have been picked by the princess herself, and she was a
daughter of one of the Pharaohs—perchance even of her who found and
cherished the baby Moses.
When you read of Jacob in the Old Testament, that—
... the physicians embalmed him. And forty days were fulfilled for
him; for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed: and
the Egyptians mourned for him threescore and ten days. And when the
days of his mourning were past ... Joseph went up to bury his
father: and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders
of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt ...
you realise that there is perhaps somewhere a mummy of Jacob, and a
modern might see him face to face.
Time flies. But the distance is near. I would like to imagine one night
in ancient Egypt. The faces on the coffins, as I look at them, lid after
lid, are quite realisable, those broad cheeks and bright eyes.... I
suppose one could find five thousand mummies who in their lifetime were
contemporaries, and one night they are all thinking about much the same
thing. Something is toward at the Court; their chairs or carriages or
chariots come for them; they are decked out, they have their jewels in
their hair, their fine garb, their vanities, spites, triumphs,
vexations, loves, ambitions. They dwell in their present moment, eyes
burn, hearts beat faster, lips frame vain words. The same moon is on
high, the same odour in the air. They bend their gaze towards the
throne, they flock towards the throne as if the touch of it were
miraculous. Vanity of vanities! The Israelites had to go out to the
Desert to find the ten commandments and the Mosaic laws. Vanity of
vanities—and is it not _all_ vanity? Is not the life of the ascetics in
the Desert vanity also? No, for they have denied the world. They have
said _No_ to Egypt and gone into the wilderness to seek a promised land.
In their shrunken pearly faces is written a different allegiance from
that of Pharaoh. They deny that this world is our world, that our life
is our true life, that death is really death.
But we do not condemn the gay crowd that imagination has summoned from
the linen wrappings of the tombs, nor the glimmering of khaki and
burnous in the purlieus of Cairo in that moment we call 1915. Mankind is
one and indivisible.
* * * * *
Outside the city stand the three triangles and the woman’s head, signs
written in the sand which might cause all people to know that there was
some mystery about Cairo.
The dead are sleeping and you cannot wake them. There are crowns on
their heads, and they sleep that fixed, unearthly, steady sleep,
undisturbed, untouched, uncorrupted. Egypt that was is dreaming Egypt
that is. Out in the Desert sits the Sphinx with an I-am-that-I-am
expression on its face.
V
ST. SOPHIA
... new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven ... as a bride
adorned for her husband.
Kingsley remarks that though Cyril thought he was establishing the
kingdom of God upon earth, he was in reality establishing a sort of
devil’s kingdom. The kingdom of God was independent of Cyril. And yet,
of course, a great deal of the material success of Christianity was due
to Cyril—if Christianity can really have such a thing as material
success. Cyril was a sort of Cæsar to whom must be rendered the things
that are Cæsar’s. And in his day imperial Cæsar himself had become
Christian, and kings were to arise who would claim as a divine right,
not only the things that are Cæsar’s but also the things that are God’s.
They were in their day accounted great, and there was noise about them
and lights, and throngs of those who flock to noise and light. But
though some were mighty instruments of the Divine Will, the spiritual
power did not proceed from them but from the silences and the
obscurities and privacies of life. But for the holy men in the desert
Cyril could no more have gloried and lasted than could a blossom without
root. And on the other hand, Cyril and his like, and what they stood
for, were in one sense the blossom and fruit of the seed sown by the
hermits. It was the hermits who gave the spiritual impulse to
Alexandria. Alexandria in turn gave new hermits to the desert—as new
seeds fall from flowers in autumn. Such is the unity of the Church.
It seems at first as if the rude cave or cell of the hermit cannot be
reconciled with the splendour of the churches of their time, with, for
instance, the wondrous cathedral of St. Sophia, as if the wretched cave
or hole in the earth were a contradiction of the great marble temple,
painted and gilded and set with all manner of gold ornament and precious
stone—and yet there is this obvious reconciliation, that the one is the
seed, the other the blossom; the one the prayer in secret, the other the
reward made openly; one the white light, the other the rainbow of
Creation.
The first centuries of Christianity were a wild time. Many religions and
philosophies were in the throes of glorious death, exchanging their
mortality for Christian immortality. The music of change streams upward
in wild, rapturous, sensuous, and agonising melody. Ten thousand
passions and tragedies of conflicting import ravish the senses, and the
heart leaps and the blood dances in the veins at the spectacle of death
becoming life, or the heart sinks and the face pales at the dread of
life turning to death. Only the calm soul sees the myriad colours blend
at last and become reconciled in the whiteness of Christ.
And that whiteness into which the other creeds must merge is the Holy
Wisdom, the Sancta Sophia, with the name of which the early Eastern
Church identified itself, representing the Bride of Christ as a new
Athene, Sophia, the Christian Wisdom.
The Holy Wisdom distilled from Isis and Athene and thousands of other
goddesses and conceptions that died to become Christian, the water of
life distilled from all the magical fluids of antiquity. The wild waste
of passion and colour, the almost barbarous pageantry of the early
Church, is the pageantry of autumn; the reds and browns and yellows, the
flame-colours and death-colours, that go before the whiteness of
Christmas.
The cathedral of St. Sophia itself, the beautiful symbol of the Bride of
Christ, is the representation of the death of thousands of creeds to
become immortal in the new Christian conception. There is not an idea
that is being transmuted that does not find its counterpart in the
sacred edifice.
A mystic wrote: “St. Sophia was not born or created, but was built.” A
relic, the dust or bones of those who had died for the faith, was built
between every tenth stone in the walls of the cathedral. The walls were
of granite and marble; the pillars of porphyry, malachite, and
glimmering alabaster; the floor of polished marble; the doors of cedar
inlaid with ivory and amber. Its height was as the height of heaven, its
breadth as that of the earth. They brought the glory and honour of the
nations into it. Trees of silver with lights for fruit sprang from the
floor, like the tree of life in the midst of the City. Silver boats with
oil and floating wicks hung from the domes. The stone canopy above the
ambo bore a great cross inlaid with diamonds and pearls. Above the
screen which shut off the choir were twelve columns overlaid with
silver, and between them representations of the Jewish prophets, the
Holy Family, and the four Evangelists—the past, the present, and the
future of Christianity. The altar was raised upon a throne of gold, and
was formed of thousands of precious stones and gems and pearls that had
been crushed to dust and diffused in molten gold—as if of the pure lives
and passions of all men a wine had been pressed into a precious chalice.
On all the walls and on many of the pillars were painted the pageant of
the Church, the prophets walking with God, the Saviour revealing God,
the saints and martyrs and champions living and dying for the truth.
There was not a religious history nor a Christian life that did not find
its counterpart or emblem in the frescoes of St. Sophia. The cathedral
and the idea of Sophia functionised every true conception and beautiful
life lived in its day. It was “The Word” written in stone, and standing
instead of the ruined and almost illegible tablets of Moses. It was the
white stone in which the new name was written.
* * * * *
The idea of St. Sophia is reduplicated throughout the Eastern Church. It
is a-gleam in millions of ikons, endeavours to paint the _all_ of
Christianity and the living breathing Church itself, the Bride. It is
the inspiration of such a cathedral as that of St. Basil, that
marvellous mediæval passion in stone built by Ivan the Terrible in the
Red Square of Moscow—hence its many colours, its extraordinary diversity
of shapes, its harmonisation of incongruous angles and solecisms of
form, its many chapels and standing places by which the Byzantine
architect endeavoured to suggest that each and every one who entered the
cathedral might find a particular place where it was most fitting he
should stand and praise, a particular chapel where he might kneel in
secret. Astonishing to find the architectural idea coming up again in
such an unlikely place as New York, in the cathedral of St. John, which
will be the largest church in the world, and pre-eminently the cathedral
of the West. Into the walls and body of this new cathedral bits of every
kind of stone existent in America are being built. St. John, built from
the substance of the world, will be the counterpart of St. Sophia, built
of the substance of the other world, and having the dust of martyrs
between each tenth stone—the cathedral of the way of Martha and the West
balancing the cathedral of the way of Mary and the East.
* * * * *
Roman Catholicism was founded on the rock of apostolic succession. St.
Peter’s represents the House built upon a rock, the House that shall
survive all storms and tempests. Eastern Christianity or Orthodoxy was
founded on St. Sophia, the Holy Wisdom; and whereas Catholicism is a
House built on the earth, Orthodoxy is a House vouchsafed from heaven,
the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven ... as a bride
adorned for her husband.
The word is one and the same. But the Roman Catholic is the least free
of individuals, religiously. The rock of apostolic succession is the
rock of infallibility. And whereas a foundation of wisdom implies
freedom of individual thought, a foundation of infallibility implies
intellectual and religious servitude. A Roman Catholic who thinks for
himself in religious matters has already begun to be a heretic and has a
sin to confess to his father confessor.
* * * * *
The service in one of our London churches frequently ends on the
antiphone:
I am the Living Bread,
Which came down from heaven.
Whoso eateth Me shall live for ever.
Even among the least religious people the sitting down together to a
meal makes a certain intimacy. The loaf which is broken for you and me
and another goes to make flesh and blood in each of us. Without any
reflection or thought we know that we are nearer because we have broken
bread together. At the symbolical meal, Communion, we are consciously
nearer. By virtue of the bread that was broken for us we know ourselves
nearer to one another.
Unity is the deepest knowledge. There are moments when one feels one
would with deep emotion offer one’s ego and individuality upon the altar
of unity, when one would cease to be John Brown or Ivan Ivanovitch, and
become one with the human race, giving up one’s rich treasure of
memories and experiences, character, developed intelligence, dear
idiosyncrasies. In the depths of that humility is discovered a new
graciousness and love, a new faith.
Only at death do we pass completely to the unity, though in life at rare
moments we can apprehend it. That unity is not necessarily the unity of
the family, of the human race as a family; it may be the human race is
after all only one human being—Sophia, the Bride of Christ.
VI
FROM EGYPT TO RUSSIA
On the quay at Alexandria flocks of Russian peasant pilgrims with great
bundles on their backs, men and women who had been in Jerusalem when the
Great War broke out, or at Mount Sinai in the desert seeking remote
shrines and holy men. As Smerdyakof said, “No one in these days can move
mountains into the sea by faith, unless perhaps one man in the world, or
at most two, and they most likely saving their souls in secret somewhere
in the Egyptian desert”; and the peasant pilgrim, through the traditions
of his Church, always looks to these deserts for spiritual power.
Besides the Christian pilgrims are hundreds of refugee Jews driven out
of Zion by the belligerent Turk, many of them patriarchal types of great
piety, long-bearded men with multiplex wrinkles on their brows.