Produced by P. J. Riddick
HYPATIA
or
NEW FOES WITH AN OLD FACE
By Charles Kingsley
PREFACE
A picture of life in the fifth century must needs contain much which
will be painful to any reader, and which the young and innocent will
do well to leave altogether unread. It has to represent a very hideous,
though a very great, age; one of those critical and cardinal eras in
the history of the human race, in which virtues and vices manifest
themselves side by side--even, at times, in the same person--with the
most startling openness and power. One who writes of such an era labours
under a troublesome disadvantage. He dare not tell how evil people were;
he will not be believed if he tells how good they were. In the present
case that disadvantage is doubled; for while the sins of the Church,
however heinous, were still such as admit of being expressed in words,
the sins of the heathen world, against which she fought, were utterly
indescribable; and the Christian apologist is thus compelled, for the
sake of decency, to state the Church’s case far more weakly than the
facts deserve.
Not, be it ever remembered, that the slightest suspicion of immorality
attaches either to the heroine of this book, or to the leading
philosophers of her school, for several centuries. Howsoever base and
profligate their disciples, or the Manichees, may have been, the great
Neo-Platonists were, as Manes himself was, persons of the most rigid and
ascetic virtue.
For a time had arrived, in which no teacher who did not put forth the
most lofty pretensions to righteousness could expect a hearing. That
Divine Word, who is ‘The Light who lighteth every man which cometh into
the world,’ had awakened in the heart of mankind a moral craving never
before felt in any strength, except by a few isolated philosophers or
prophets. The Spirit had been poured out on all flesh; and from one end
of the Empire to the other, from the slave in the mill to the emperor
on his throne, all hearts were either hungering and thirsting after
righteousness, or learning to do homage to those who did so. And He who
excited the craving, was also furnishing that which would satisfy
it; and was teaching mankind, by a long and painful education, to
distinguish the truth from its innumerable counterfeits, and to find,
for the first time in the world’s life, a good news not merely for the
select few, but for all mankind without respect of rank or race.
For somewhat more than four hundred years, the Roman Empire and the
Christian Church, born into the world almost at the same moment, had
been developing themselves side by side as two great rival powers, in
deadly struggle for the possession of the human race. The weapons of
the Empire had been not merely an overwhelming physical force, and a
ruthless lust of aggressive conquest: but, even more powerful still, an
unequalled genius for organisation, and an uniform system of external
law and order. This was generally a real boon to conquered nations,
because it substituted a fixed and regular spoliation for the fortuitous
and arbitrary miseries of savage warfare: but it arrayed, meanwhile,
on the side of the Empire the wealthier citizens of every province, by
allowing them their share in the plunder of the labouring masses below
them. These, in the country districts, were utterly enslaved; while
in the cities, nominal freedom was of little use to masses kept from
starvation by the alms of the government, and drugged into brutish good
humour by a vast system of public spectacles, in which the realms of
nature and of art were ransacked to glut the wonder, lust, and ferocity
of a degraded populace.
Against this vast organisation the Church had been fighting for now four
hundred years, armed only with its own mighty and all-embracing message,
and with the manifestation of a spirit of purity and virtue, of love
and self-sacrifice, which had proved itself mightier to melt and weld
together the hearts of men, than all the force and terror, all the
mechanical organisation, all the sensual baits with which the Empire
had been contending against that Gospel in which it had recognised
instinctively and at first sight, its internecine foe.
And now the Church had conquered. The weak things of this world
had confounded the strong. In spite of the devilish cruelties of
persecutors; in spite of the contaminating atmosphere of sin which
surrounded her; in spite of having to form herself, not out of a race
of pure and separate creatures, but by a most literal ‘new birth’ out
of those very fallen masses who insulted and persecuted her; in spite of
having to endure within herself continual outbursts of the evil passions
in which her members had once indulged without cheek; in spite of
a thousand counterfeits which sprang up around her and within her,
claiming to be parts of her, and alluring men to themselves by that very
exclusiveness and party arrogance which disproved their claim; in spite
of all, she had conquered. The very emperors had arrayed themselves
on her side. Julian’s last attempt to restore paganism by imperial
influence had only proved that the old faith had lost all hold upon the
hearts of the masses; at his death the great tide-wave of new opinion
rolled on unchecked, and the rulers of earth were fain to swim with the
stream; to accept, in words at least, the Church’s laws as theirs; to
acknowledge a King of kings to whom even they owed homage and obedience;
and to call their own slaves their ‘poorer brethren,’ and often, too,
their ‘spiritual superiors.’
But if the emperors had become Christian, the Empire had not. Here and
there an abuse was lopped off; or an edict was passed for the visitation
of prisons and for the welfare of prisoners; or a Theodosius was
recalled to justice and humanity for a while by the stern rebukes of
an Ambrose. But the Empire was still the same: still a great tyranny,
enslaving the masses, crushing national life, fattening itself and its
officials on a system of world-wide robbery; and while it was paramount,
there could be no hope for the human race. Nay, there were even those
among the Christians who saw, like Dante afterwards, in the ‘fatal gift
of Constantine,’ and the truce between the Church and the Empire, fresh
and more deadly danger. Was not the Empire trying to extend over the
Church itself that upas shadow with which it had withered up every
other form of human existence; to make her, too, its stipendiary
slave-official, to be pampered when obedient, and scourged whenever she
dare assert a free will of her own, a law beyond that of her tyrants; to
throw on her, by a refined hypocrisy, the care and support of the masses
on whose lifeblood it was feeding? So thought many then, and, as I
believe, not unwisely.
But if the social condition of the civilised world was anomalous at the
beginning of the fifth century, its spiritual state was still more so.
The universal fusion of races, languages, and customs, which had gone
on for four centuries under the Roman rule, had produced a corresponding
fusion of creeds, an universal fermentation of human thought and faith.
All honest belief in the old local superstitions of paganism had
been long dying out before the more palpable and material idolatry of
Emperor-worship; and the gods of the nations, unable to deliver those
who had trusted in them, became one by one the vassals of the ‘Divus
Caesar,’ neglected by the philosophic rich, and only worshipped by
the lower classes, where the old rites still pandered to their grosser
appetites, or subserved the wealth and importance of some particular
locality.
In the meanwhile, the minds of men, cut adrift from their ancient
moorings, wandered wildly over pathless seas of speculative doubt, and
especially in the more metaphysical and contemplative East, attempted to
solve for themselves the questions of man’s relation to the unseen by
those thousand schisms, heresies, and theosophies (it is a disgrace to
the word philosophy to call them by it), on the records of which the
student now gazes bewildered, unable alike to count or to explain their
fantasies.
Yet even these, like every outburst of free human thought, had their use
and their fruit. They brought before the minds of churchmen a thousand
new questions which must be solved, unless the Church was to relinquish
for ever her claims as the great teacher and satisfier of the human
soul. To study these bubbles, as they formed and burst on every wave of
human life; to feel, too often by sad experience, as Augustine felt,
the charm of their allurements; to divide the truths at which they aimed
from the falsehood which they offered as its substitute; to exhibit the
Catholic Church as possessing, in the great facts which she proclaimed,
full satisfaction, even for the most subtle metaphysical cravings of a
diseased age;--that was the work of the time; and men were sent to do
it, and aided in their labour by the very causes which had produced the
intellectual revolution. The general intermixture of ideas, creeds,
and races, even the mere physical facilities for intercourse between
different parts of the Empire, helped to give the great Christian
fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries a breadth of observation,
a depth of thought, a large-hearted and large-minded patience and
tolerance, such as, we may say boldly, the Church has since beheld but
rarely, and the world never; at least, if we are to judge those great
men by what they had, and not by what they had not, and to believe, as
we are bound, that had they lived now, and not then, they would have
towered as far above the heads of this generation as they did above the
heads of their own. And thus an age, which, to the shallow insight of
a sneerer like Gibbon, seems only a rotting and aimless chaos of
sensuality and anarchy, fanaticism and hypocrisy, produced a Clement and
an Athanase, a Chrysostom and an Augustine; absorbed into the sphere of
Christianity all which was most valuable in the philosophies of Greece
and Egypt, and in the social organisation of Rome, as an heirloom for
nations yet unborn; and laid in foreign lands, by unconscious agents,
the foundations of all European thought and Ethics.
But the health of a Church depends, not merely on the creed which
it professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great
ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members.
The _mens sana_ must have a _corpus sanum_ to inhabit. And even for the
Western Church, the lofty future which was in store for it would have
been impossible, without some infusion of new and healthier blood into
the veins of a world drained and tainted by the influence of Rome.
And the new blood, at the era of this story, was at hand. The great tide
of those Gothic nations, of which the Norwegian and the German are the
purest remaining types, though every nation of Europe, from Gibraltar to
St. Petersburg, owes to them the most precious elements of strength,
was sweeping onward, wave over wave, in a steady south-western current,
across the whole Roman territory, and only stopping and recoiling when
it reached the shores of the Mediterranean. Those wild tribes were
bringing with them into the magic circle of the Western Church’s
influence the very materials which she required for the building up of
a future Christendom, and which she could find as little in the Western
Empire as in the Eastern; comparative purity of morals; sacred respect
for woman, for family life, law, equal justice, individual freedom, and,
above all, for honesty in word and deed; bodies untainted by hereditary
effeminacy, hearts earnest though genial, and blessed with a strange
willingness to learn, even from those whom they despised; a brain equal
to that of the Roman in practical power, and not too far behind that of
the Eastern in imaginative and speculative acuteness.
And their strength was felt at once. Their vanguard, confined with
difficulty for three centuries beyond the Eastern Alps, at the expense
of sanguinary wars, had been adopted wherever it was practicable, into
the service of the Empire; and the heart’s core of the Roman legion
was composed of Gothic officers and soldiers. But now the main body had
arrived. Tribe after tribe was crowding down to the Alps, and trampling
upon each other on the frontiers of the Empire. The Huns, singly their
inferiors, pressed them from behind with the irresistible weight of
numbers; Italy, with her rich cities and fertile lowlands, beckoned them
on to plunder; as auxiliaries, they had learned their own strength and
Roman weakness; a _casus belli_ was soon found. How iniquitous was the
conduct of the sons of Theodosius, in refusing the usual bounty, by
which the Goths were bribed not to attack the Empire!--The whole pent-up
deluge burst over the plains of Italy, and the Western Empire became
from that day forth a dying idiot, while the new invaders divided Europe
among themselves. The fifteen years before the time of this tale had
decided the fate of Greece; the last four that of Rome itself. The
countless treasures which five centuries of rapine had accumulated
round the Capitol had become the prey of men clothed in sheepskins and
horse-hide; and the sister of an emperor had found her beauty, virtue,
and pride of race worthily matched by those of the hard-handed Northern
hero who led her away from Italy as his captive and his bride, to found
new kingdoms in South France and Spain, and to drive the newly-arrived
Vandals across the Straits of Gibraltar into the then blooming
coast-land of Northern Africa. Everywhere the mangled limbs of the Old
World were seething in the Medea’s caldron, to come forth whole, and
young, and strong. The Longbeards, noblest of their race, had found a
temporary resting-place upon the Austrian frontier, after long southward
wanderings from the Swedish mountains, soon to be dispossessed again by
the advancing Huns, and, crossing the Alps, to give their name for ever
to the plains of Lombardy. A few more tumultuous years, and the Franks
would find themselves lords of the Lower Rhineland; and before the hairs
of Hypatia’s scholars had grown gray, the mythic Hengist and Horsa would
have landed on the shores of Kent, and an English nation have begun its
world-wide life.
But some great Providence forbade to our race, triumphant in every other
quarter, a footing beyond the Mediterranean, or even in Constantinople,
which to this day preserves in Europe the faith and manners of Asia. The
Eastern World seemed barred, by some stern doom, from the only influence
which could have regenerated it. Every attempt of the Gothic races to
establish themselves beyond the sea, whether in the form of an organised
kingdom, as the Vandals attempted in Africa; or of a mere band of
brigands, as did the Goths in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of a
praetorian guard, as did the Varangens of the middle age; or as
religious invaders, as did the Crusaders, ended only in the corruption
and disappearance of the colonists. That extraordinary reform in
morals, which, according to Salvian and his contemporaries, the Vandal
conquerors worked in North Africa, availed them nothing; they lost more
than they gave. Climate, bad example, and the luxury of power degraded
them in one century into a race of helpless and debauched slave-holders,
doomed to utter extermination before the semi-Gothic armies of
Belisarius; and with them vanished the last chance that the Gothic
races would exercise on the Eastern World the same stern yet wholesome
discipline under which the Western had been restored to life.
The Egyptian and Syrian Churches, therefore, were destined to labour not
for themselves, but for us. The signs of disease and decrepitude
were already but too manifest in them. That very peculiar turn of the
Graeco-Eastern mind, which made them the great thinkers of the then
world, had the effect of drawing them away from practice to speculation;
and the races of Egypt and Syria were effeminate, over-civilised,
exhausted by centuries during which no infusion of fresh blood had
come to renew the stock. Morbid, self-conscious, physically indolent,
incapable then, as now, of personal or political freedom, they afforded
material out of which fanatics might easily be made, but not citizens of
the kingdom of God. The very ideas of family and national life-those two
divine roots of the Church, severed from which she is certain to wither
away into that most godless and most cruel of spectres, a religious
world-had perished in the East from the evil influence of the universal
practice of slaveholding, as well as from the degradation of that Jewish
nation whichhad been for ages the great witness for those ideas; and
all classes, like their forefather Adam--like, indeed, ‘the old Adam’
in every man and in every age--were shifting the blame of sin from their
own consciences to human relationships and duties--and therein, to the
God who had appointed them; and saying as of old, ‘_The woman whom thou
gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat._’ The
passionate Eastern character, like all weak ones, found total abstinence
easier than temperance, religious thought more pleasant than godly
action; and a monastic world grew up all over the East, of such vastness
that in Egypt it was said to rival in numbers the lay population,
producing, with an enormous decrease in the actual amount of moral
evil, an equally great enervation and decrease of the population. Such
a people could offer no resistance to the steadily-increasing tyranny of
the Eastern Empire. In vain did such men as Chrysostom and Basil oppose
their personal influence to the hideous intrigues and villainies of the
Byzantine court; the ever-downward career of Eastern Christianity went
on unchecked for two more miserable centuries, side by side with the
upward development of the Western Church; and, while the successors
of the great Saint Gregory were converting and civilising a new-born
Europe, the Churches of the East were vanishing before Mohammedan
invaders, strong by living trust in that living God, whom the
Christians, while they hated and persecuted each other for arguments
about Him, were denying and blaspheming in every action of their lives.
But at the period whereof this story treats, the Graeco-Eastern mind
was still in the middle of its great work. That wonderful metaphysic
subtlety, which, in phrases and definitions too often unmeaning to
our grosser intellect, saw the symbols of the most important spiritual
realities, and felt that on the distinction between homoousios and
homoiousios might hang the solution of the whole problem of humanity,
was set to battle in Alexandria, the ancient stronghold of Greek
philosophy, with the effete remains of the very scientific thought to
which it owed its extraordinary culture. Monastic isolation from family
and national duties especially fitted the fathers of that period for the
task, by giving them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with
a lifelong earnestness impossible to the more social and practical
Northern mind. Our duty is, instead of sneering at them as pedantic
dreamers, to thank Heaven that men were found, just at the time when
they were wanted, to do for us what we could never have done for
ourselves; to leave to us, as a precious heirloom, bought most truly
with the lifeblood of their race, a metaphysic at once Christian and
scientific, every attempt to improve on which has hitherto been found a
failure; and to battle victoriously with that strange brood of theoretic
monsters begotten by effete Greek philosophy upon Egyptian symbolism,
Chaldee astrology, Parsee dualism, Brahminic spiritualism-graceful and
gorgeous phantoms, whereof somewhat more will be said in the coming
chapters.
I have, in my sketch of Hypatia and her fate, closely followed authentic
history, especially Socrates’ account of the closing scene, as given
in Book vii. Para 15, of his _Ecclesiastical History_. I am inclined,
however, for various historical reasons, to date her death two years
earlier than he does. The tradition that she was the wife of Isidore,
the philosopher, I reject with Gibbon, as a palpable anachronism of at
least fifty years (Isidore’s master, Proclus, not having been born till
the year before Hypatia’s death), contradicted, moreover, by the very
author of it, Photius, who says distinctly, after comparing Hypatia and
Isidore, that Isidore married a certain ‘Domna.’ No hint, moreover, of
her having been married appears in any contemporary authors; and the
name of Isidore nowhere occurs among those of the many mutual friends
to whom Synesius sends messages in his letters to Hypatia, in which,
if anywhere, we should find mention of a husband, had one existed. To
Synesius’s most charming letters, as well as to those of Isidore, the
good Abbot of Pelusium, I beg leave to refer those readers who wish for
further information about the private life of the fifth century.
I cannot hope that these pages will be altogether free from anachronisms
and errors. I can only say that I have laboured honestly and
industriously to discover the truth, even in its minutest details,
and to sketch the age, its manners and its literature, as I found
them-altogether artificial, slipshod, effete, resembling far more the
times of Louis Quinze than those of Sophocles and Plato. And so I
send forth this little sketch, ready to give my hearty thanks to any
reviewer, who, by exposing my mistakes, shall teach me and the public
somewhat more about the last struggle between the Young Church and the
Old World.
CHAPTER I: THE LAURA
In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian Era, some three
hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on
the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.
Behind him the desert sand-waste stretched, lifeless, interminable,
reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of the cloudless vault of
blue. At his feet the sand dripped and trickled, in yellow rivulets,
from crack to crack and ledge to ledge, or whirled past him in tiny jets
of yellow smoke, before the fitful summer airs. Here and there, upon the
face of the cliffs which walled in the opposite side of the narrow
glen below, were cavernous tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks
and half-cut pillars, standing as the workmen had left them centuries
before; the sand was slipping down and piling up around them, their
heads were frosted with the arid snow; everywhere was silence,
desolation-the grave of a dead nation, in a dying land. And there he
sat musing above it all, full of life and youth and health and beauty--a
young Apollo of the desert. His only clothing was a ragged sheep-skin,
bound with a leathern girdle. His long black locks, unshorn from
childhood, waved and glistened in the sun; a rich dark down on cheek and
chin showed the spring of healthful manhood; his hard hands and sinewy
sunburnt limbs told of labour and endurance; his flashing eyes and
beetling brow, of daring, fancy, passion, thought, which had no sphere
of action in such a place. What did his glorious young humanity alone
among the tombs?
So perhaps he, too, thought, as he passed his hand across his brow, as
if to sweep away some gathering dream, and sighing, rose and wandered
along the cliffs, peering downward at every point and cranny, in search
of fuel for the monastery from whence he came.
Simple as was the material which he sought, consisting chiefly of the
low arid desert shrubs, with now and then a fragment of wood from some
deserted quarry or ruin, it was becoming scarcer and scarcer round Abbot
Pambo’s Laura at Scetis; and long before Philammon had collected his
daily quantity, he had strayed farther from his home than he had ever
been before.
Suddenly, at a turn of the glen, he came upon a sight new to him....a
temple carved in the sandstone cliff; and in front a smooth platform,
strewn with beams and mouldering tools, and here and there a skull
bleaching among the sand, perhaps of some workman slaughtered at his
labour in one of the thousand wars of old. The abbot, his spiritual
father--indeed, the only father whom he knew, for his earliest
recollections were of the Laura and the old man’s cell-had strictly
forbidden him to enter, even to approach any of those relics of ancient
idolatry: but a broad terrace-road led down to the platform from the
table-land above; the plentiful supply of fuel was too tempting to be
passed by.... He would go down, gather a few sticks, and then return, to
tell the abbot of the treasure which he had found, and consult him as to
the propriety of revisiting it.
So down he went, hardly daring to raise his eyes to the alluring
iniquities of the painted imagery which, gaudy in crimson and blue,
still blazed out upon the desolate solitude, uninjured by that rainless
air. But he was young, and youth is curious; and the devil, at least in
the fifth century, busy with young brains. Now Philammon believed most
utterly in the devil, and night and day devoutly prayed to be delivered
from him; so he crossed himself, and ejaculated, honestly enough,
‘Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity!’.... and looked
nevertheless....
And who could have helped looking at those four colossal kings, who sat
there grim and motionless, their huge hands laid upon their knees in
everlasting self-assured repose, seeming to bear up the mountain on
their stately heads? A sense of awe, weakness, all but fear, came over
him. He dare not stoop to take up the wood at his feet, their great
stern eyes watched him so steadily.
Round their knees and round their thrones were mystic characters
engraved, symbol after symbol, line below line--the ancient wisdom of
the Egyptians, wherein Moses the man of God was learned of old--why
should not he know it too? What awful secrets might not be hidden there
about the great world, past, present, and future, of which he knew only
so small a speck? Those kings who sat there, they had known it all;
their sharp lips seem parting, ready to speak to him.... Oh that they
would speak for once!.... and yet that grim sneering smile, that seemed
to look down on him from the heights of their power and wisdom, with
calm contempt.... him, the poor youth, picking up the leaving and rags
of their past majesty .... He dared look at them no more.
So he looked past them into the temple halls; into a lustrous abyss of
cool green shade, deepening on and inward, pillar after pillar, vista
after vista, into deepest night. And dimly through the gloom he could
descry, on every wall and column, gorgeous arabesques, long lines of
pictured story; triumphs and labours; rows of captives in foreign and
fantastic dresses, leading strange animals, bearing the tributes of
unknown lands; rows of ladies at feasts, their heads crowned with
garlands, the fragrant lotus-flower in every hand, while slaves brought
wine and perfumes, and children sat upon their knees, and husbands by
their side; and dancing girls, in transparent robes and golden girdles,
tossed their tawny limbs wildly among the throng.... What was the
meaning of it all? Why had it all been? Why had it gone on thus, the
great world, century after century, millennium after millennium, eating
and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage, and knowing nothing
better.... how could they know anything better? Their forefathers had
lost the light ages and ages before they were born.... And Christ had
not come for ages and ages after they were dead.... How could they
know?.... And yet they were all in hell.... every one of them. Every one
of these ladies who sat there, with her bushy locks, and garlands, and
jewelled collars, and lotus-flowers, and gauzy dress, displaying all her
slender limbs-who, perhaps, when she was alive, smiled so sweetly, and
went so gaily, and had children, and friends, and never once thought of
what was going to happen to her--what must happen to her.... She was in
hell.... Burning for ever, and ever, and ever, there below his feet. He
stared down on the rocky floors. If he could but see through them....
and the eye of faith could see through them.... he should behold her
writhing and twisting among the flickering flame, scorched, glowing....
in everlasting agony, such as the thought of enduring for a moment made
him shudder. He had burnt his hands once, when a palm-leaf but caught
fire.... He recollected what that was like.... She was enduring ten
thousand times more than that for ever. He should hear her shrieking
in vain for a drop of water to cool her tongue.... He had never heard a
human being shriek but once.... a boy bathing on the opposite Nile bank,
whom a crocodile had dragged down.... and that scream, faint and distant
as it came across the mighty tide, had rung intolerable in his ears
for days.... and to think of all which echoed through those vaults of
fire-for ever! Was the thought bearable!--was it possible! Millions
upon millions burning forever for Adam’s fall .... Could God be just in
that?....
It was the temptation of a fiend! He had entered the unhallowed
precincts, where devils still lingered about their ancient shrines; he
had let his eyes devour the abominations of the heathen, and given place
to the devil. He would flee home to confess it all to his father. He
would punish him as he deserved, pray for him, forgive him. And yet
could he tell him all? Could he, dare he confess to him the whole
truth--the insatiable craving to know the mysteries of learning--to see
the great roaring world of men, which had been growing up in him slowly,
month after month, till now it had assumed this fearful shape? He
could stay no longer in the desert. This world which sent all souls to
hell--was it as bad as monks declared it was? It must be, else how could
such be the fruit of it? But it was too awful a thought to be taken on
trust. No; he must go and see.
Filled with such fearful questionings, half-inarticulate and vague, like
the thoughts of a child, the untutored youth went wandering on, till
he reached the edge of the cliff below which lay his home. It lay
pleasantly enough, that lonely Laura, or lane of rude Cyclopean cells,
under the perpetual shadow of the southern wall of crags, amid its grove
of ancient date-trees. A branching cavern in the cliff supplied the
purposes of a chapel, a storehouse, and a hospital; while on the sunny
slope across the glen lay the common gardens of the brotherhood, green
with millet, maize, and beans, among which a tiny streamlet, husbanded
and guided with the most thrifty care, wandered down from the cliff
foot, and spread perpetual verdure over the little plot which voluntary
and fraternal labour had painfully redeemed from the inroads of the
all-devouring sand. For that garden, like everything else in the Laura,
except each brother’s seven feet of stone sleeping-hut, was the common
property, and therefore the common care and joy of all. For the common
good, as well as for his own, each man had toiled up the glen with his
palm-leaf basket of black mud from the river Nile, over whose broad
sheet of silver the glen’s mouth yawned abrupt. For the common good,
each man had swept the ledges clear of sand, and sown in the scanty
artificial soil, the harvest of which all were to share alike. To
buy clothes, books, and chapel furniture for the common necessities,
education, and worship, each man sat, day after day, week after week,
his mind full of high and heavenly thoughts, weaving the leaves of their
little palm-copse into baskets, which an aged monk exchanged for goods
with the more prosperous and frequented monasteries of the opposite
bank. Thither Philammon rowed the old man over, week by week, in a light
canoe of papyrus, and fished, as he sat waiting for him, for the common
meal. A simple, happy, gentle life was that of the Laura, all portioned
out by rules and methods, which were held hardly less sacred than those
of the Scriptures, on which they were supposed (and not so wrongly
either) to have been framed. Each man had food and raiment, shelter on
earth, friends and counsellors, living trust in the continual care of
Almighty God; and, blazing before his eyes, by day and night, the hope
of everlasting glory beyond all poets’ dreams.... And what more would
man have had in those days? Thither they had fled out of cities,
compared with which Paris is earnest and Gomorrha chaste,--out of a
rotten, infernal, dying world of tyrants and slaves, hypocrites and
wantons,--to ponder undisturbed on duty and on judgment, on death and
eternity, heaven and hell; to find a common creed, a common interest,
a common hope, common duties, pleasures, and sorrows.... True, they had
many of them fled from the post where God had placed them, when they
fled from man into the Thebaid waste.... What sort of post and what
sort of an age they were, from which those old monks fled, we shall see,
perhaps, before this tale is told out.
‘Thou art late, son,’ said the abbot, steadfastly working away at his
palm-basket, as Philammon approached.
‘Fuel is scarce, and I was forced to go far.’
‘A monk should not answer till he is questioned. I did not ask the
reason. Where didst thou find that wood?’
‘Before the temple, far up the glen.’
‘The temple! What didst thou see there?’
No answer. Pambo looked up with his keen black eye.
‘Thou hast entered it, and lusted after its abominations.’
‘I--I did not enter; but I looked--’
‘And what didst thou see? Women?’
Philammon was silent.
‘Have I not bidden you never to look on the face of women? Are they not
the firstfruits of the devil, the authors of all evil, the subtlest of
all Satan’s snares? Are they not accursed for ever, for the deceit of
their first mother, by whom sin entered into the world? A woman first
opened the gates of hell; and, until this day, they are the portresses
thereof. Unhappy boy! What hast thou done?’
‘They were but painted on the walls.’
‘Ah!’ said the abbot, as if suddenly relieved from a heavy burden. ‘But
how knewest thou them to be women, when thou hast never yet, unless thou
liest--which I believe not of thee--seen the face of a daughter of Eve?’
‘Perhaps--perhaps,’ said Philammon, as if suddenly relieved by a new
suggestion--‘perhaps they were only devils. They must have been, I
think, for they were so very beautiful.’
‘Ah! how knowest thou that devils are beautiful?’
‘I was launching the boat, a week ago, with Father Aufugus; and on the
bank,....not very near,....there were two creatures....with long hair,
and striped all over the lower half of their bodies with black, and
red, and yellow....and they were gathering flowers on the shore. Father
Aufugus turned away; but I.... I could not help thinking them the most
beautiful things that I had ever seen....so I asked him why he turned
away; and he said that those were the same sort of devils which tempted
the blessed St. Anthony. Then I recollected having heard it read aloud,
how Satan tempted Anthony in the shape of a beautiful woman.... And
so.... and so.... those figures on the wall were very like.... and I
thought they might be....’
And the poor boy, who considered that he was making confession of a
deadly and shameful sin, blushed scarlet, and stammered, and at last
stopped.
‘And thou thoughtest them beautiful? Oh utter corruption of the
flesh!--oh subtilty of Satan! The Lord forgive thee, as I do, my poor
child; henceforth thou goest not beyond the garden walls.’
‘Not beyond the walls! Impossible! I cannot! If thou wert not my father,
I would say, I will not!--I must have liberty!--I must see for myself--I
must judge for myself, what this world is of which you all talk so
bitterly. I long for no pomps and vanities. I will promise you this
moment, if you will, never to re-enter a heathen temple--to hide my
face in the dust whenever I approach a woman. But I must--I must see
the world; I must see the great mother-church in Alexandria, and the
patriarch, and his clergy. If they can serve God in the city, why not
I? I could do more for God there than here .... Not that I despise this
work--not that I am ungrateful to you--oh, never, never that!--but I
pant for the battle. Let me go! I am not discontented with you, but with
myself. I know that obedience is noble; but danger is nobler still.
If you have seen the world, why should not I? If you have fled from it
because you found it too evil to live in, why should not I, and return
to you here of my own will, never to leave you? And yet Cyril and his
clergy have not fled from it....’
Desperately and breathlessly did Philammon drive this speech out of his
inmost heart; and then waited, expecting the good abbot to strike him
on the spot. If he had, the young man would have submitted patiently;
so would any man, however venerable, in that monastery. Why not? Duly,
after long companionship, thought, and prayer, they had elected Pambo
for their abbot--Abba--father--the wisest, eldest-hearted and headed of
them--if he was that, it was time that he should be obeyed. And obeyed
he was, with a loyal, reasonable love, and yet with an implicit,
soldier-like obedience, which many a king and conqueror might envy. Were
they cowards and slaves? The Roman legionaries should be good judges on
that point. They used to say that no armed barbarian, Goth or Vandal,
Moor or Spaniard, was so terrible as the unarmed monk of the Thebaid.
Twice the old man lifted his staff to strike; twice he laid it down
again; and then, slowly rising, left Philammon kneeling there, and moved
away deliberately, and with eyes fixed on the ground, to the house of
the brother Aufugus.
Every one in the Laura honoured Aufugus. There was a mystery about him
which heightened the charm of his surpassing sanctity, his childlike
sweetness and humility. It was whispered--when the monks seldom and
cautiously did whisper together in their lonely walks--that he had been
once a great man; that he had come from a great city--perhaps from Rome
itself. And the simple monks were proud to think that they had among
them a man who had seen Rome. At least, Abbot Pambo respected him. He
was never beaten; never even reproved--perhaps he never required it; but
still it was the meed of all; and was not the abbot a little partial?
Yet, certainly, when Theophilus sent up a messenger from Alexandria,
rousing every Laura with the news of the sack of Rome by Alaric, did
not Pambo take him first to the cell of Aufugus, and sit with him there
three whole hours in secret consultation, before he told the awful story
to the rest of the brotherhood? And did not Aufugus himself give letters
to the messenger, written with his own hand, containing, as was said,
deep secrets of worldly policy, known only to himself? So, when the
little lane of holy men, each peering stealthily over his plaiting
work from the doorway of his sandstone cell, saw the abbot, after his
unwonted passion, leave the culprit kneeling, and take his way toward
the sage’s dwelling, they judged that something strange and delicate had
befallen the common weal, and each wished, without envy, that he were as
wise as the man whose counsel was to solve the difficulty.
For an hour or more the abbot remained there, talking earnestly and
low; and then a solemn sound as of the two old men praying with sobs and
tears; and every brother bowed his head, and whispered a hope that He
whom they served might guide them for the good of the Laura, and of His
Church, and of the great heathen world beyond; and still Philammon knelt
motionless, awaiting his sentence; his heart filled-who can tell how?
‘The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not
with its joy.’ So thought he as he knelt; and so think I, too, knowing
that in the pettiest character there are unfathomable depths, which the
poet, all-seeing though he may pretend to be, can never analyse, but
must only dimly guess at, and still more dimly sketch them by the
actions which they beget.
At last Pambo returned, deliberate, still, and slow, as he had gone, and
seating himself within his cell, spoke--
‘And the youngest said, Father, give me the portion of goods that
falleth to my share.... And he took his journey into a far country, and
there wasted his substance with riotous living. Thou shalt go, my son.
But first come after me, and speak with Aufugus.’
Philammon, like everyone else, loved Aufugus; and when the abbot
retired and left the two alone together, he felt no dread or shame about
unburdening his whole heart to him. Long and passionately he spoke, in
answer to the gentle questions of the old man, who, without the rigidity
or pedantic solemnity of the monk, interrupted the youth, and let
himself be interrupted in return, gracefully, genially, almost
playfully. And yet there was a melancholy about his tone as he answered
to the youth’s appeal--
‘Tertullian, Origen, Clement, Cyprian--all these moved in the world;
all these and many more beside, whose names we honour, whose prayers
we invoke, were learned in the wisdom of the heathen, and fought and
laboured, unspotted, in the world; and why not I? Cyril the patriarch
himself, was he not called from the caves of Nitria to sit on the throne
of Alexandria?’
Slowly the old man lifted his band, and putting back the thick locks of
the kneeling youth, gazed, with soft pitying eyes, long and earnestly
into his face.
‘And thou wouldst see the world, poor fool? And thou wouldst see the
world?’
‘I would convert the world!’
‘Thou must know it first. And shall I tell thee what that world is like,
which seems to thee so easy to convert? Here I sit, the poor unknown old
monk, until I die, fasting and praying, if perhaps God will have mercy
on my soul: but little thou knowest how I have seen it. Little thou
knowest, or thou wouldst be well content to rest here till the end. I
was Arsenius.... Ah! vain old man that I am! Thou hast never heard
that name, at which once queens would whisper and grow pale. Vanitas
vanitatum! omnia vanitas! And yet he, at whose frown half the world
trembles, has trembled himself at mine. I was the tutor of Arcadius.’
‘The Emperor of Byzantium?’
‘Even so, my son, even so. There I saw the world which thou wouldst see.
And what saw I? Even what thou wilt see. Eunuchs the tyrants of their
own sovereigns. Bishops kissing the feet of parricides and harlots.
Saints tearing saints in pieces for a word, while sinners cheer them on
to the unnatural fight. Liars thanked for lying, hypocrites taking pride
in their hypocrisy. The many sold and butchered for the malice, the
caprice, the vanity of the few. The plunderers of the poor plundered in
their turn by worse devourers than themselves. Every attempt at reform
the parent of worse scandals; every mercy begetting fresh cruelties;
every persecutor silenced, only to enable others to persecute him in
their turn: every devil who is exorcised, returning with seven others
worsethan himself; falsehood and selfishness, spite and lust, confusion
seven times confounded, Satan casting out Satan everywhere--from the
emperor who wantons on his throne, to the slave who blasphemes beneath
his fetters.’
‘If Satan cast out Satan, his kingdom shall not stand.’
‘In the world to come. But in this world it shall stand and conquer,
even worse and worse, until the end. These are the last days spoken of
by the prophets,--the beginning of woes such as never have been on
the earth before--“On earth distress of nations with perplexity, men’s
hearts failing them for fear, and for the dread of those things which
are coming on the earth.” I have seen it long. Year after year I have
watched them coming nearer and ever nearer in their course like the
whirling sand-storms of the desert, which sweep past the caravan, and
past again, and yet overwhelm it after all--that black flood of the
northern barbarians. I foretold it; I prayed against it; but, like
Cassandra’s of old, my prophecy and my prayers were alike unheard.
My pupil spurned my warnings. The lusts of youth, the intrigues of
courtiers, were stronger than the warning voice of God; then I ceased
to hope; I ceased to pray for the glorious city, for I knew that her
sentence was gone forth; I saw her in the spirit, even as St. John saw
her in the Revelations; her, and her sins, and her ruin. And I fled
secretly at night, and buried myself here in the desert, to await the
end of the world. Night and day I pray the Lord to accomplish His elect,
and to hasten His kingdom. Morning by morning I look up trembling, and
yet in hope, for the sign of the Son of man in heaven, when the sun
shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, and the stars
shall fall from heaven, and the skies pass away like a scroll, and the
fountains of the nether fire burst up around our feet, and the end of
all shall come. And thou wouldst go into the world from which I fled?’
‘If the harvest be at hand, the Lord needs labourers. If the times be
awful, I should be doing awful things in them. Send me, and let that
day find me, where I long to be, in the forefront of the battle of the
Lord.’
‘The Lord’s voice be obeyed! Thou shalt go. Here are letters to Cyril
the patriarch. He will love thee for my sake: and for thine own sake,
too, I trust. Thou goest of our free will as well as thine own. The
abbot and I have watched thee long, knowing that the Lord bad need of
such as thee elsewhere. We did but prove thee, to see by thy readiness
to obey, whether thou wert fit to rule. Go, and God be with thee. Covet
no man’s gold or silver. Neither eat flesh nor drink wine, but live as
thou hast lived--a Nazarite of the Lord. Fear not the face of man; but
look not on the face of woman. In an evil hour came they into the world,
the mothers of all mischiefs which I have seen under the sun. Come; the
abbot waits for us at the gate.’
With tears of surprise, joy, sorrow, almost of dread, Philammon hung
back.
‘Nay--come. Why shouldst thou break thy brethren’s hearts and ours by
many leave-takings! Bring from the storehouse a week’s provision of
dried dates and millet. The papyrus boat lies at the ferry; thou shalt
descend in it. The Lord will replace it for us when we need it. Speak
with no man on the river except the monks of God. When thou hast
gone five days’ journey downward, ask for the mouth of the canal
of Alexandria. Once in the city, any monk will guide thee to the
archbishop. Send us news of thy welfare by some holy mouth. Come.’
Silently they paced together down the glen to the lonely beach of the
great stream. Pambo was there already, his white hair glittering in the
rising moon, as with slow and feeble arms he launched the light canoe.
Philammon flung himself at the old men’s feet, and besought, with many
tears, their forgiveness and their blessing.’We have nothing to forgive.
Follow thou thine inward call. If it be of the flesh, it will avenge
itself; if it be of the Spirit, who are we that we should fight against
God? Farewell.’ A few minutes more, and the youth and his canoe were
lessening down the rapid stream in the golden summer twilight. Again a
minute, and the swift southern night had fallen, and all was dark but
the cold glare of the moon on the river, and on the rock-faces, and on
the two old men, as they knelt upon the beach, and with their heads upon
each other’s shoulders, like two children, sobbed and prayed together
for the lost darling of their age.