At Nicomedia, at Pergamos, and at Smyrna Julian, now nineteen years
old and an enthusiast for Hellenic wisdom, had heard much of the
famous mage and sophist, Iamblicus of Chaldea, a pupil of the
Neo-Platonist, Porphyrius. Men used commonly to call him "the Divine"
Iamblicus. In order to see this master, Julian made a journey to
Ephesus.
Iamblicus was a little thin and wrinkled old man. He liked complaining
of his ailments--gout, rheumatism, nervous headache; he abused
physicians, but was zealous in carrying out their advice, and used to
speak with deep interest of drugs and infusions of herbs. He always
wore, even in summer, a double tunic; never seemed warm enough, and
would sit basking in the sun like a lizard.
From his youth up Iamblicus had broken himself of the habit of
meat-eating, and spoke of it with disgust as a practice beyond his
comprehension. His servant used to prepare for him a special broth,
made of barley-water, warm wine, and honey, he being toothless and
unable to masticate bread.
He was always surrounded by numberless admiring students who had
travelled from Rome, Antioch, Carthagena; from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and
Persia, to become his pupils.
All stoutly believed Iamblicus could work miracles. Iamblicus treated
them like a father irritated at seeing round him so many weaklings.
When they began to discuss and to wrangle, the master would make a
sweeping gesture, followed by a grimace expressive of physical pain.
He spoke gently, and in a low-toned, agreeable voice; the louder other
folk shouted the more subdued his own tone became. He hated all noise,
and quarrelsome voices as much as creaking sandals.
Julian gazed in disappointed perplexity at this chilly, sickly, and
whimsical old man. What power drew towards him the world of
philosophy? He remembered the story of pupils--that one night the
divine master during prayer was upraised by some invisible force to a
height of twelve cubits from earth, wrapped in a golden glory. Another
tale was about a miracle, by which the master had smitten from a rock
two warm springs, Eros and Anteros, the two Dæmons of love--the one
dull-souled, the other joyous. Iamblicus, it was said, had caressed
both, like children, and at a word caused them to disappear.
But in listening to the master Julian never succeeded in discovering
the potency of his words. The meta-physic of the school of Porphyrius
seemed to him dull, dead, and painfully complicated. Iamblicus would,
it is true, emerge a playful victor from the most difficult
dialectical discussions. His teaching about God, about the World,
about the Ideas, was full of profound learning; but in it lay no vital
stimulus. Julian had hoped otherwise, and nevertheless he hung about,
and did not set off again homewards. The eyes of Iamblicus were
strange, green, and deeply-sunk in his bronzed face. Julian was
persuaded that these weird and by no means holy eyes betokened some
hidden wisdom, the occult wisdom of the serpent, concerning which
Iamblicus never spoke to his pupils. But when "the Divine," in his
cracked voice, used to ask why his barley broth was not ready, or
complained of gout, the spell was broken.
On one occasion Iamblicus was sauntering with Julian on the seashore,
outside the town. It was a soft and melancholy evening. Behind the
castle of Panormos in the distance glittered, with their array of
statues, the terraces of the celebrated temple of the Ephesian
Artemis.
The dark reeds along the sandy shore made no rustle. It was the spot
where Latona gave birth to Artemis and Apollo. Smoke of numberless
altars in the sacred Orthegian wood was rising in columns into the
sky. To the south the Samian mountains shone blue on the horizon.
Wavelets fell calmly as the breathings of a child, and pellucid waves
swelled over the rocks. The setting sun, hidden behind vapour, gilded
the edge of enormous cloud-masses.
Iamblicus seated himself upon a boulder, and Julian threw himself on
the ground at his feet. The master caressed the thick black locks of
the pupil.
"Are you sad?"
"Yes."
"I know you are sad. You seek and you do not find. You have not the
strength to say '_He is_,' and you are afraid to say '_He is not_.'"
"How have you guessed this, Master?"
"My poor boy! for fifty years have I not suffered from the same pain?
And I shall suffer from it till I die. Do you imagine that I know Him
better than you--that I have discovered what you have missed? _That_
is the birth-pain that never ceases. Beside it other tortures are as
nothing. People think that they suffer from hunger, from poverty, from
thirst; in reality they suffer only from the thought that perhaps He
has no existence. Who shall dare to say '_He exists not_?' and yet
what superhuman strength one must have to say, '_He is_'!"
"Do you mean to say that you, even you, have never come near Him?"
"Thrice in my life have I borne the ecstacy of feeling myself wholly
at one with Him. Plotinus felt it four times, Porphyrius five times.
But as for me, the moments in my existence in which life was worth
living were precisely three."
"I have questioned your pupils on this subject; they knew nothing."
"Have they the courage to know? The shell of wisdom is enough for
them; the kernel, for almost everybody, is deadly."
"Well, let me die, Master! Give the core to me!"
"Have you courage?"
"Yes; but speak--speak!"
"And what can I tell you? I do not know, ... and need I tell you?
Listen to the calmness of the evening, and the secret will be yours
without words of mine...."
He kept stroking Julian's head; the boy was dreaming, "This, this is
what I waited for," and clasping the knees of Iamblicus he falteringly
entreated--
"Master, have pity!... Reveal it all!... Do not desert me!"
With green and strangely motionless eyes kept steadily on the clouds,
Iamblicus murmured, as if speaking to himself:
"Yes, we have all forgotten the voice of God. Like children estranged
from the cradle from the face of their father, we hear Him, and we do
not recognise Him. To hear His voice, every earthly cry in our souls
must cease. Just so long as reason shines and illumines our souls, we
remain imprisoned in ourselves and see not God. But when reason is put
by, ecstacy falls upon us like the dew of night--that ecstacy which
the evil cannot know. The wise, the good alone can become, of their
own will, lyres vibrating under the hand of God. Whence comes that
beam which falls into the soul? I do not know. It comes unawares, and
when one least expects it. To search for it is useless. God is not
remote from us. One must make ready, with a soul becalmed; and simply
wait, as the eyes await (according to the saying of the poet) _the
rush of the sun from dark ocean_. God does not come, God does not go
away; He is revealed. He is, what the universe is not, the negation of
everything that exists. He is nothing, and He is All."
Iamblicus rose and slowly extended his wasted arms:
"Be still, be still, I tell you! Let all things listen for Him! He is
here! Let the earth and the sea, let even the sky be dumb! Listen!...
It is He who fills the universe, the very atoms sing with His breath;
He who illumines matter and chaos--_at which the gods tremble_--just
as the setting sun illumines that dark cloud."
Julian listened. It seemed to him that the master's calm weak voice
was filling the world, was reaching the heights of the heaven, and the
last confines of the sea. But the boy's sadness was so deep that it
escaped from his bosom in an involuntary sigh.
"Father, forgive me if the question is a folly; but if it is thus with
the world why go on living? Why this eternal interchange of life and
death? Why pain? Why evil? Why the burden of the body? Why doubt? Why
this dark thirst for the impossible?"
Iamblicus looked at him with gentleness, and anew passed his hand over
Julian's head. He answered:
"Ah, my son, that is the very seat of the mystery! there is no evil,
there is no body, there is no universe, if He exists! Think! it is He,
_or_ the universe! The body, evil, the universe, all are a mirage, a
deception of the living senses. All we have once rested together upon
the breast of God in the bosom of invisible light. But there came a
time when we beheld from on high matter in its darkness and deadness,
and each of us saw in matter its own image, as in a mirror. And the
soul mused to itself, 'I can, and I will to, be free! I am like Him!
Why not dare to quit Him and contain all in myself?' So the soul, like
Narcissus gazing into the brook, fell under the spell of its own
image, reflected in its body; and then she fell farther, and desired
to fall for ever, to rend herself from God for ever. She cannot do so.
The feet of mortal man touch earth, but his stature lifts him through
the heavens.
"Upon the Eternal Ladder of births and of death, all souls, all things
existing, are ascending and descending, sometimes towards Him,
sometimes away from Him, seeking to leave the Father, and never
fulfilling their endeavour. Each soul desires to be God. It weeps for
the breast of God, has no rest upon earth, and aspires only to return
to the Absolute. We must return to Him, and then all things will
become God, and God will be in All. Do you imagine that you are alone
in regretting Him! Are you not aware that the whole sum of things is
yearning for Him? Listen!"
The sun had set. The edges of the flaming clouds had sunk into ashes.
The sea had become pale, light, flocculent as the sky; the sky deep
and diaphanous as the sea. Upon the road a cart was passing by; a
young man and woman were in it--two lovers, perhaps. The woman was
singing a melancholy love song. When they had passed all things were
plunged into silence again, and became sadder still. With hastened
strides, the oriental night swept over the earth. Julian murmured:
"How many times have I asked myself why Nature was so sad, and why,
when she is proudest then saddest of all...."