The time is the middle of the fourth century A.D. The top of the
Crest-Wave is in India, now the greatest country in the world.
The young Samudragupta, about thirty years old now, has been
filling the whole peninsula with his renown as warrior, poet,
conqueror, patron of arts and letters, musician. The Hindus are
a busy and efficient people, masterly in this material world.
Their colonies are spread over Java, Sumatra, and the other
islands; Formosa (think where it lies) has a Sanskrit, but not
yet (so far as we know) a Chinese, name; all those seas are
filled with Indian shipping.--And with Arab shipping, too, by the
way; or are coming to be so; and spray of the Wave (in the
shape of Indian and Arab ships) is falling in the port of Canton.
But China as a whole is in a deep trough of sea: an intriguing,
ceremonious, ultra-elegant, and wily-weak court and dynasty have
lately been expelled from precarious sovereignty at Changan in
the North to Nankin south of the Yangtse; there to abide a
little while un-overturned, looking down in lofty impotent
contempt on the uncouth Wether Huns, Tunguses, and Tibetans
who are sharing and quarreling over the ancient seats of the
Black-haired People in the Hoangho basin, after driving this same
precious House of Tsin into the south.--Persia is on the back of
the Wave, something lower than the Crest: Sapor II, a dozen or
so years older than Samudragupta, has been on the throne since
some months before his (Sapor's) birth; and has now grown up
into a particularly vigorous monarch; conquering here and there;
persecuting the Christians with renewed energy since Constantine
took them into favor;--and of late years unmercifully banging
about Constantius son of Constantine in the open field, and
besieging and sometimes taking his fortresses. This, you may
say, with one hand: with the other he has been very busy with
his neighbors in the north-east, the nomads; he has been
punishing them a little; and incidentally founding, as a
protection against their in roads, the city of New Sapor in
Khorassan,--famed later as Nai-shapur, and the birthplace of a
certain Tent-maker of song-rich memory. In Armenia an Arsacid--
that is, Parthian--house has survived and holds sovereignty: and
Armenia is a sort of weak Belgium between Persia and Rome;
inclining to the latter, of course, because ruled by Arsacids,
who are the natural dynastic enemies of the Sassanids of Persia.
Rome has turned Christian; so, to cement his alliance with Rome
and insure Roman aid against powerful Persia, the Armenian king
has had himself coverted likewise, and his people follow suit
with great piety;--which sends Shah Sapor, King of the kings of
Iran and Turan, Brother of the Sun and Moon, to it with a
missionary as well as a dynastic zeal; and a war that is to be
of nearly thirty years' duration has been in process along the
frontier since 336. Persia, better called a kingdom, perhaps,
than an empire, commands about forty millions of subjects; as
against imperial Rome's--who can say? The population there must
have gone down by many millions since the days of the Antonines,
with all the civil wars, plagues, pestilences, and famines that
have harrowed the years between.
The sons of Constantine have succeeded to the throne of their
father; and the portions of Constantine II, the eldest of the
three, and Constans, the youngest, have at last fallen into
the hands, or the web, of Constantius,--a sort of cross between
a spider, an octopus, and an elderly maiden aunt,--and in
general about as unpleasant a creature as ever sat on a throne.
Constantine the Great, indeed, had willed the succession into the
hands of a much larger number of his relatives; but this
Constantius, his father once decently buried, had taken time by
the forelock, and insured things to his two brothers and himself
by killing out two of his uncles and seven of their sons; so
that now, Constantine II and Constans being dead, no male scions
of the house of Constantius Chlorus remain as possible rivals to
him, except two boys who had been at the time of the massacre,
the one too young, and the other too sickly, to count. We shall
come to them by and by.
Christianity is well established; though Constantius, followed
his father's wise example, is deferring his baptism until the
last possible moment: he partly knows the weakness of his
nature, and desires to have license for a little pleasant sinning
until the end, with the certainty of a glorious resurrection to
follow in despite of it.--Dismiss your kindly apprehensions; God
was good to Constantius; no untimely accident cut him off
unbaptized; his plan worked excellently, and providing an Arian
heretic may go to heaven, in heaven he is to this day, singing
his Alleluias with the best of them,--and perhaps between whiles
arguing it out with the various uncles and cousins he murdered.
Meanwhile, however, priests and bishops are the great men of his
empire; and they enjoy immunities from duties and taxation to an
extent that throws the whole rational order of government out of
gear. Thus, for example, the upkeep of the great roads and posts
system,--the lines of communication,--falls upon a certain class
called the Decurions, who in each district at their own expense
have to maintain all in order. But churchmen,--an enormous class
now,--are immune from the decurionship; and are allowed further
the use of the post-horses and inns free of cost;--with the
result that, practically speaking, no one else can use them at
all. Because these churchmen are forever hurrying hither and
thither to conference, council, or synod; there each sect,--
Arian and Athanasian chiefly,--to damn to eternal perdition (and
temporal excommunication when possible) the vile heretics of the
other: Homoiousian to thunder against Homoousian, Homoousian
against Homoiousian: _Arius contra Athanasium,_ and _Athanasius
contra mundum:_--till the air of the whole Roman world is thick
with the fumes of brimstone and the stench of the Nether Pit.
Taxation, on those left to tax, falls an intolerable burden;
--we have seen how Shah Sapor is dealing with one end of the
empire;--at the other end, in Gaul, one Magnentius rose against
Constantius, and the latter thoughtfully invited in the Germans
to put him down and help themselves to what they found handy;--
and a certain Chnodomar, a king in those trans-Rhenish regions,
has taken him much at his word. Result: a strip forty miles
wide along the left bank of the Rhine from source to mouth has
been conquered and annexed; three times as much this side is a
perfectly desolate No-man's land; forty-five important cities,
including Cologne and Strasbourg, have been reduced to ashes,
with innumerable smaller towns and villages; all open towns in
north-eastern Gaul have been abandoned; the people of the walled
cities are starving on what corn they can grow on vacant corner
lots and in their own back-gardens; hundreds of thousands have
been killed out, or carried off into slavery in Germany; and
King Chnodomar has every reason to think that God is behaving
in a very reasonable manner.--As for the rest of the empire,
whatever may be its population in human bodies, there is a
plentiful lack of human souls to inhabit them; the Roman world
has fallen on evil years, truly, but is by no means unchanged;--
and the one thing you can prophesy with any decent security is
that affairs cannot go on in this way much longer. Rome has
conducted a number of funerals in her day, of this nation and
that conquered and put an end to; not much intuition is required
now, to foresee that the next funeral will be her own.--(Though
indeed, I doubt you should have found half-a-dozen in the Roman
world who could foresee it.)
Now there is a Way, narrow and most difficult to find,--a Way of
conducting the affairs of this life and this world, in balance,
in equilibrium; in that fine I condition through which alone the
life-renewing forces from the vaster worlds within may flow down,
and keep existence here in harmony, and forefend decay. This
was, of course, the essence of Chinese thought, Confucian and
Taoist. You maintained the inner harmony, and the forces of
heaven might use you as their channel. You found Tao (the Way),
and grew never old; you succeeded in all enterprises; walked
through life unruffled,--duty flowing, beautifully accomplished,
at every moment from your hands. You met with no snags or
adjusted yourself always to conditions as they arose, and
over-rode them in quietest triumph.--They said that, possessing Tao,
one might live on many times the common threescore years and ten;
very likely there is some truth in it; it seems as if it were
true at any rate, of the life of nations. China caught glimpses,
and lived on and on; grew old, and reviewed her youth time and
again. But normally, what do we find with these un-Taoist
nations of the West?--They go easily for some period; then it
becomes harder and harder for them to adjust theniselves to
conditions. They become clogged with the detritus of old thought
and action. What is the meaning of the incessant need we see for
reform? Under whatever form of government a nation may be, it
arises perpetually; it carries us around the ring of the-archies
and-cracies, and there is no finality anywhere.--No; there is no
straight line of political progress; but round in a ring you go!
You turn out your kings, because they are tyrannical: which
means that their government is no longer efficient, and cannot
cope with affairs; there is a lack of adjustment between the
inner and the outer, between the needs and the provision made to
meet them. The monarchy, which was at first representative and
the true expression of the nation,--because it, or anything else,
when there was no detritus, but things were new and the inner
air uncluttered, gave freedom to the national aspirations to pour
themselves out in action,--gives such freedom no longer; it
irks; it misfits; you feel it chafing everywhere. And yet it
has not ceased by any means to be representative: it represents
now a nation which has lost its adjustment to the inner things
and is clogged up by the detritus of old thought and action, and
it is that detritus that irks and misfits and chafes you. So you
rise and smash an astral mold or two; turn out your kings;
shout freedom and liberty, and are very glorious for a time under
a totally free and independent republic;--which means, at once or
after a while, government by a class. And this succeeds just as
well and badly as its predecessor; neither has found Tao, the
Way,--following which, your detritus should be consumed as it
goes, and life lifted above the sway of Karma. So once more the
detritus accumulates, and blocks the channels; and the life of
the nation labors and is oppressed. Need arises for reforms;
and the reforms are difficultly carried through; the franchise
is extended, and there is loud talk about political growth and
what not; we see the millennium at hand, and ourselves its
predestined enjoyers. And the old process repeats itself, till
you have a very full-fledged democracy:--you make all the men
vote, and all the women; and presently no doubt all the
children; but even when you have all adult dogs and cats and
cows voting as well,--you will not find that that order is Tao,
the Way, any more than the others were. The presence of a cow or
two, or an ass or two, more or less, in your parliament will not
really insure efficiency of administration. The detritus grows
again, under the most democratic of democracies; and weighs
things down;--and you cast about for new methods of reform.
Democratic government, somehow, does nothing of what was expected
of it; is not the panacea;--you see that, to bring the chaos of
affairs into order, you must stop all this jabber and tinkering,
and set up some undivided council,--some Man, for God's sake!--a
Dictator who can keep his own and other people's mouths shut and
hands busy, and get things done unimpeded. So you make one more
grand reform for the sake of efficiency, and set up your
Imperator, and have peace, and decent government; and you have,
wittingly or not, started up old bugbear Monarchy again; and
things go well for a time. But, bless you, you have not found
the Way; you know nothing about Tao, which is not to be
discovered in the fields of politics, and has nothing whatever to
do with forms of government. So you go in search once more for a
political method of dealing with that one and only oppressing
thing, the detritus,--your karma;--and away you go squirreling
round the changes again; and all this you call political
evolution, as I dare say the squirrel does his own gyrations in
his cage;--whereas if you found Tao,--if you lived balancedly,--
if you kept open the channels between this and the God-world,--
there would be no political evolution at all--no squirreling,--
but only calm, untrammeled beautiful life. All the claptrap
about Western Superiority to the Orient, and the growth of
freedom in the West, in contrast with Eastern political immobility,
simply means that the Orient is less fond of squirreling than
we are; taking its aces by and large, there has been a little
more Tao with them than with us: more consuming the detritus
as they went; more balanced living, and thus more keeping
the channels open.--At least, I imagine so.
Now Rome was very old; and, since Augustus' day, the detritus
had grown and grown. Diocletian had devoted a political sagacity
amounting in some respects to genius to setting things right, and
had accomplished something. He had moved out of Rome itself,
where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly encumbered; had
gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer;
had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with
the definite insignia of imperial state: wore a tiara, was to be
kneeled to, addressed as _Dominus,_ and so forth:--all outward
expedients, and Brummagem substitutes for that inner adjustment
which Laotse called Tao: the Way that you are to seek by
retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not
by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone,
nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress,
self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone;
but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who
desire to enter it. Diocletian knew nothing of this; so, great
statesman as he was, his methods were effective only while he sat
on the throne; in his old age and retirement he had to watch,
from his palace at Spalato, the empire he had piloted banging
about in a thousand storms again; and to plead in vain to those
to whom he had given their thrones for the safety and life of his
own wife and daughter;--the total failure of his life and labors
thus miserably brought home to him before he died.
"Where there is no vision the people perish," said that learned
Hebrew of old, King Solomon; and by that one saying proclaimed
his right to his title of 'the Wise.' Look into it, and you have
almost the whole philosophy of history. The incessant need of
humanity is this thing _Vision:_ men and nations go mad for lack
of it: they seek in hell the joys of heaven which should be
theirs, and which they cannot see. It means vision of the Inner
Worlds, of the heaven that lies around us. Oh, nothing spooky or
foolish; one is far from meaning the Astral Light. People who
go burrowing into that are again seeking a substitute for
Vision, and a very poisonous one.--If I may speak of a personal
experience: coming to Point Loma from London was like coming
from the bottom of the sea into the upper ether. There, in the
heart of that old civilization, the air is thick with detritus;
here--if only because a long pralaya and fallow time have made
the land new,--the detritus is negligible; perhaps it is not
even forming, but consumed as we go; because at least we have
glimpses of the Way. Result: the mental outlook that extended
there, in visionary moments, to some six inches, before one's
nose, here has broadened out to take in some seas and mountains;
in comparison, it runs to far horizons. I take it that this is
the experience of us all. So this is what that wise Solomon
meant: "When the detritus has accumulated to the point where,
like a thick fog, it shuts away all vision of the True, then the
nation must go into abeyance; it must fall."--Rome was very near
that point.
One wishes one could say something about those Inner Worlds of
Beauty. When the voices of self are silenced, and desires
abashed and at peace,--how they shine through! This outer world,
truly, reflects them; but another and ugly world of our own making.
.....is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers,--
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
Sometimes; not always, thank God! Look again: there are
the mountains, and above them the mournful glories of the
anti-sunset; the mute and golden trumpetings of the dawn;
--there is the sea, and over it the wistfulness and pomp
and pageantry of the setting sun, and the gentleness of heaven
at evening;--there is the whole drama of Day with its tremendous
glories; and the huge mystery of Night-time: Niobe Night,
silent in the heavens,
"Glittering magnificently unperturbed;"
--and there are the flowers in the garden, those _Praelarissimi_
and _Nobilisimi_ in the Court of God, the Pansy, the Blue
Larkspur, the Purple Anemone;--and what are all these things?--
Just symbols; just mirrorings of a beauty in the World of Ideas
within; just places where the Spirit has touched matter, and
matter, at that fiery and creative touch, has flamed up into the
likeness of God, which is Beauty.--What is Vision?--It is to have
luminous forms rising in the imagination, like Wordsworth had,
like Shelley; it is with shut eyes to see the beauty and wonder
of the Gods; it is to have no grayness or dearth or darkness
within; but to have the 'bliss of solitude' crowded with
beautiful squadrons of deities, trembling with the light of
legions on legions of suns. For:
Not all we are here
Where this darkness oppresses us;
Not this oblivion
Of Beauty expresses us.
Gaze not on it,
To be stained with its stain;
The Lonely All-Beautiful
Calls us again.
In galleried palaces,
Turquoise blue,
With the sweetness of many suns
Filtering through,--
In the Suns's own garden,
Where galaxies flame
For lilac and daffodil,
Each on his stem,--
Where apple-bloom Capricorn
Hangs from his tree,
Glittering dim o'er
The dim blue sea,--
And billowing dim o'er
The dim blue lawns
Of heaven come the nebular
Sunsets and dawns,--
We too have the regallest
Part of our being,
Far beyond dreaming of,
Hearing of, seeing.
And the Lonely All-Beautiful
Calls to us here:--
"My knights, my commissioned,
My children dear!
"The hell where affrighted,
Enchanted, ye roam,--
Ye set forth to make it
A heaven for my home!"
--And it is Vision, not to mistake mankind for less or other than
Deific Essence cruelly encumbered over with oblivion; it is to
see the flame of Eternal Beauty and valiant Godhood in all men;
and not to rest or sit content without doing something to uncover
that Beauty, to rescue that Godhood.--You go into the slums
of a great city; and you do not wonder that the God-essence,
inmingling and involved in the clay which is (the lower) man,
goes there quite distraught and unrecognizable; where life is so
far from the great reflexion of the Worlds of Beauty; where the
Sun is no bright brother and confidential friend, but a breeder
up of pestilences; where the sky is shut away and there are no
flowers to bloom;--whether we like it or no, these things, the
unperverted manifestations of the formative pressure of the
Spirit, are needed to keep men sane. Beauty you must have, to
nourish the Divine within you; alas for him that thinks he may
attain to the Good or the True, and in a thin meager or Puritan
spirit, strives to shut out their divine sister from his needs
and aspirations!--But there, in our hideous modern conditions,
there is no vision, without or within; so men go mad with
fearful lusts and despairs; and it is the van of the Battle, in
one sense, between Godhood and Chaos; and reeks with the
slaughter and bloodshed and the madness of that conflict; there
too the Holy Spirit of Man is incarnate; there the Host of
Souls;--but in the shock and din and the carnage, there on the
slippery brink of yet unconquered hell,--all the divine descent
and ancient glory of the Host is forgotten:--_there is no Vision,
and the people perish._
(It may seem I go a long way round to come to him; but in
reality I am already trying to draw you a character-sketch of the
subject of this evening's lecture: to present you the permanent
part and significance of a strange incarnation of Vision that
appeared in Rome's dark and dying days: the man to whom Saint
Gregory Nazianzen, in his grand attack, applied that ringing
triplet of epithets I have taken for the title of the lecture:
"The Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind." Know him first in
his impersonality thus: a great white flame of Vision; a
tremendous Poet of the Gods in action;--and then, when you
come to his personality, with what it might have retained of
personality, of hereditary impairments, perhaps, that should have
vanished had he lived past his young manhood, these will not
hinder you from understanding the greatness and beauty and
tragedy of that life apparently wasted. But we shall come to him
in our time.)
Back in the sixth century B. C., when all those Great Teachers
came: when the forces that until then had been pent up in the
Mysteries were suddenly let loose upon the world,--and the more
vehement for their having been so pent up, and their now being so
let loose;--what a flood of vision they brought with them! In
Greece, to rouse up almost at once that wonderful wave of
artistic creation; in Persia, to create quickly a splendid and
chivalrous empire; in India, (so far as we know) to pervade as
an ethical illumination the life of the people for some centuries
before manifesting in art or empire; in China, to work in a
twofold current, on one side upon the imagination, on the other
upon the moral conceptions of the race, until the Chinese
manvantara began. Its effect in each case was according to the
cyclic position of the country at the time: those, seemingly,
being the most fortunate, that had to wait longest for the full
fruition. Thus it struck China in the midst of pralaya, and lay
in the soil fructifying until the pralaya had passed; then,
appearing and re-appearing according to cyclic law, was a saving
health in the nation for fifteen centuries at least;--India, I
imagine, when the manvantara there some five centuries old, and
under a minor shadow; which shadow once passed, it produced its
splendors in the Maurya time; and was in all effective for a
thousand years. But it came to Persia in the autumn of the great
cycle, when the forces it brought had to ripen quickly, and
descend at once on to the military (the lowest) plane;--and to
Greece just at noon or early summer,--just before the most
intellectual moment,--and so there, too, had no time to ripen,
but must burst out at once in artistic creation without ever a
chance first to work in and affect the moral life of the race.
This last is what Pythagoras at Croton had in mind to do: had
Croton endured, there would have been a stable moral basis for
the intellectual spendors.--I believe that you have here the very
archeus and central clue to history. In China, it was enough for
Laotse to float his magical ideas, and for confucius to give out
his extremely simple (but highly efficient) philosophy, and to
provide his grand Example; in India it was enough for the Lord
Buddha to teach his wisdom and to found his Order; he might
trust the future to them;--For Persia, one cannot say: the facts
as to Zoroaster are not enough known; there might seem to have
been some failure there too;--but in Greece, it was imperative
that Pythagoras should establish his Lomaland; nothing else
could save the forces from squandering themselves at once, in
that momentous time, on the intellectual and artistic planes, and
leaving life unredeemed and unaffected.
Which indeed they did; and thence on it Europe we see century by
century vision waning and the world on a downward path, until the
moment comes when a new effort may be made. Augustus calls a
halt then; moves heaven and earth; works like ten Herculeses,
along all lines, to bring about an equilibrium in outer affairs;
and so far succeeds that in his time one or two men may have the
Vision, at any rate:--Virgil may catch more than glimpses of the
Inner Beauty, and leave the outer world a litle less forlorn.
But in place of the rush and fine flow of the Grecian Age, what
painful strivings we find in the Augustan!--When too, Teachers
labor to illumine the vastnesses within; Apollonius; Moderatus;
shall we add, the Nazarene?--So the downward tendency is checked;
in the following centuries we see a slow pushing upward,--in the
heroic effort of the Stoics, not after Vision--that was beyond
their scope and ken,--but after at least that which should bring
it back,--a noble method of life.
And then, at last, a dawn eastward: and the bugles of the
Spirits of the Dawn heard above the Pyramids, heard over the
shadowy plains where Babylon was of old;--and out of that yellow
glow in the sky come, now that the cycle permits them, masters of
the Splendid vision. They come with something of light from the
ancient Mysteries of Egypt; with some shining from Star Plato,
and from Pythagoras; and at their coming light up the dark
worlds and the intense blue deeps of the sky,--wherein you can
see now, under their guidance, immeasurable and beautiful things
to satisfy the highest cravings of your heart: winged Aeons on
Aeons, ring above ring,--mystery emanating mystery, beauty,
beauty, from here up to the Throne of the Lonely All-Beautiful.--
What growth there had been in Roman Europe, to prepare the way
for the spread of Neo-Platonism, I cannot say; but imagine
Gnosticism had something to do with it; and that Gnosticism was
a graft on the parent stem of Christianity set there by some real
Teacher who came later than Jesus. If we knew more of the
realities about Simon Magus on the one hand, and Paul of Tarsus
on the other, we might have clearer light on the whole problem;
at present must be content with saying this much:--that Gnosticism,
with its deep mystical truths, emerges into the light of
well-founded history about neck and neck with orthodox Christianity;
was considered a branch of the same movement, equally Christian;
but was at least tinged with esoteric truth, and deeply Hellenized,
and perhaps Persianized;--whereas the orthodox branch was
the legitimate heir of exoteric Judaism. How much of real
vision there may have been in Gnosticism; how much of mere
speculation, which is but a step towards vision,--I am not
prepared to guess; but have little doubt that Gnostic activities
made ready the ground for Neo-Platonism; so that when the
latter's Manasaputric light incarnated, it found fit rupas
to inhabit.
This was the Lodge's most important effort to sow truth in Europe
since Pythagoras. Says even the _Enyclopaedia Britannica_
(without help from Esotericism):
"Neo-Platonism is in one aspect ... the consummation of ancient
philosophy. Never before in Greek or Roman speculation had the
consciousness of man's dignity and superiority to Nature received
such adequate expression.... From the religious and moral point
of view, it must be admitted that the ethical 'mood' which
Neo-Platonisni endeavored to create and maintain is the highest
and purest ever reached by antiquity.... It is a proof of the
strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of
culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to
end culminated not in materialism but in the highest idealism."
It asserted the Gods, the great stars and luminaries of the Inner
World; it asserted the Divinity of Man,--superior, truly, as the
_Encyclopaedia_ says to (the lower) Nature, but of the Higher,
one part or factor in the whole. It came into Europe trailing
clouds of splendor and opening the heavens of Vision. The huge
menace and perils of the age, the multiplying disasters,
were driving men to seek spiritual refuge of some kind; and
there were, in the main, two camps that offered it:--this of
Neo-Platonism, proclaiming Human Divinity and strong effort
upward in the name of that; and that other which proclaimed
human helplessness, and that man is a poor worm and weakling,
originally sinful, and with nothing to hope from his own
efforts, but all from the grace, help, or mercy of Extracosmic
Intervention. It was a terribly comfortable doctrine, this last,
for a race staggering towards the end of its manvantara under a
fearful load of detritus, a culture old and thoroughly tired. No
wonder Europe chose this path, and not the Neo-Platonist path of
flaming idealism and endeavor. Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry,
Iamblichus,--they had worked wonders; but not the crowning
wonder of that which could save the age and the age to come:
Plotinus had failed of that, because there no tool at hand for
the Gods, but a silly, weak Gallienus.--So now Constantine has
made the great change; and the empire that was Roman is now
Roman no longer: You owe your first allegiance now, not to the
state or to the emperor at its head, but to an _imperium_ within
the state which claims immunity from laws and duties: the
kingdom is divided within itself, and must look for the fate of
divided kingdoms. Zeus on Olympus now weighs the Roman empire in
his scales,--and finds the fate is death, and no help for it:
there are to be thirteen decades of moribundity, and then
Christian burial, with Odoacer and sundry other the like
barbarians to be mourners and heirs; and then,--blackest night
over the western world for God knows how long: night, with
nightmare and horror, and no Vision, no beautiful dreams, no
refreshment, no peace. For the party that Constantine has now
made dominant despises cordially all the ancient light of
Hellenism; Aeschylus, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides,--
everyone you could in any sense a light-bearer that came of old,
to bring mankind even the merest brain-mind culture,--these
people condemn and abhor for heathen, and take pleasure in the
thought that they are now, and have been since they died, and
shall be forever, frizzling in the nether fires: they condemn
the substance of their writings, and will draw no ideas, no
saving grace, from them whatever;--will learn from them nothing
in the world but grammar and eloquence with which to thunder at
them and all their like from barren raucous pulpits. So,
Vision having gone, culture is to go too, and all you can call
civilization; and therewith law and order, and the decencies of
life: all that _soap_ stands symbol for is to be anathema
maranatha; all that the Soul stands symbol for is to be anathema
maranatha;--a pretty prospect! Zeus sighs in heaven, and his
sigh is a doleful thunder prophetic of the gloom that is to
overspread all the western skies for many centuries to come.
--And then comes Helios, the Unconquered Sun, and lays a hand on
his arm, and says: "Not so fast!; Never despair yet; look
down--_there!_"
And the Gods look down: to a gloomy castle upon a crag in the
wild mountains of Cappadocia; and they see there a youth, a
captive banished to that desolate grand region: well-attended,
as befits a prince of the royal blood, but lonely and overshadowed;
--not under fear, because fear is no part of his nature; but
yet never knowing when the order for his death may come. They
read all this in his mind, his atmosphere. They see him
deep in his books: a soul burning with earnestness, but
discontented, and waiting for something: all the images of Homer
rising about him beckoning on the one hand, and on the other a
grim something that whispers, These are false; I alone am true!
--"What of him?" says Zeus; "he too is a Christian."--"Watch!"
says Sol Invictus; "I have sent my man to him."--And they watch;
and sure enough, presently they see a man coming into this
youth's presence, and pointing upwards towards themselves; and
they see the youth look up, and the shadow pass from his eyes as
a great blaze of light and splendor breaks before him,--as he
catches sight of them, the Gods, and his eye meets theirs, and he
rises, illumined and smiling;--and they know that in the Roman
world there is this one man with the Grand Vision; this man who
may yet (if they play their cards well) wear the Roman diadem;--
that there is vision in the Roman world again, and it may be the
people shall not perish.
It was Julian, "the Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind"; I
thank thee, Gregory of Nazianzus, for teaching me that word!--and
the one that came to him there in Cappadocia was Maximus of
Smyrna, Iamblichus' disciple. His story has been told and
re-told; I expect you know it fairly well. How he was a son
of Julius Constantius, son of Constantius Chlorus,--and thus a
nephew of Constantine the Great, and a first cousin to the
Octopus-Spider-Maiden Aunt Constantius then on the throne;--how
he because of his infancy, and his half-brother Gallus because of
a delicate constitution which made it seem impossible he should
grow up, were spared when Constantius had the rest of the family
massacred;--how he was banished and confined in that Cappadocian
castle;--of Gallus' short and evil reign that ended, poor
fool that he was, in his being lured into the spider-web of
Constantius and beheaded;--how Julian was called then to the
court at Milan, expecting a like fate;--how he spent seven months
there, spied on at every moment, and looking for each to be his
last;--how he was saved and befriended by the noble Empress
Eusebia (a strangely beautiful figure to find in those sinister
surroundings);--and sent presently to the University of Athens,
there to spend the happiest moments of his life;--then called
back to be made Caesar: he who had never been anything but a
student and a dreamer, called from his books and dreams at
twenty-four, and set to learn (as Caesar) his elementary drill,--
which he found very difficult to learn indeed;--and then sent to
fight the Germans in Gaul. How Constantius tried always to
thwart him while he was there: setting underlings over him with
power to undo or prevent all he might attempt or do;--how in
spite of it all he fought the Germans, and drove them across the
Rhine, and followed them up, and taught them new lessons in their
own remote forests; and took the gorgeous Chnodomar, their king,
prisoner; and sent for him, prepared to greet friendlily one so
great in stature and splendid in bearing; but was disgusted when
the gentleman, on coming into his presence, groveled on the floor
and whined for his life,--whereupon Julian, instead of treating
him like a gentleman as he had intended, packed him off to his
(Chnodomar's) old ally the Maiden Aunt at Milan to see what
they would make of each other;--how he fought three campaigns
victoriously beyond the Rhine; restored the desolated Cisrhenish
No-man's land, and brought in from Britain, in six hundred
corn-ships, an amount Gibbon calculates at 120,000 quarters of
wheat to feed its destitute population.--And this fact is worth
nothing: if Britain could export all that wheat, it surface
was not, as some folks hold, mainly under forest: it was a
well-cultivated country, you may depend, with agriculture
in a very flourishing condition,--as Gibbon does not fail
to point out.
--And you know, probably, how Julian loved his Paris, and
governed Gaul thence in civil affairs in such a manner that Paris
and Gaul loved him;--how his own special legions, his pets,
his Tenth, so to say, were the _Celts_ and _Petulants,_ and
after these, the _Herulians_ and _Batavians_ (or shall I say
_Dutchmen?_);--how Constantius tried to deprive him of these,
ordering him to send them off to him for wars with Sapor in the
east;--how Julian sorrowfully bade them go, judging well by
Gallus his brother's experience (whom Constantius had treated in
the same way as a first step towards cutting off his head) what
the next thing should be;--but how they, (bless their Celtic and
Petulant and Herulian and Dutch hearts!) told him very plainly
that that kind of thing would not wash with them: "Come!" said
they; "no nonsense of this sort; be you our emperor, and
_condemn_ that old lady your cousin Constantius!--or we kill you
right now." Into his bed-room in Paris they poured by night with
those terms,--an ultimatum; whether or not with a twinkle in
their eyes when they proposed the alternative, who can say?--What
was a young hero to do, whom the Gods had commissioned to strike
the grand blow for them; and who never should strike it, that
was certain, if Constantius should have leave to take away from
him, first his Celts and Petulants, and then his head? So he
accepts; and writes kindly and respectfully to his Maiden Aunt--
Spidership the Emperor telling him he must manage _without_ the
legions, and _with_ a Co-Augustus to share the empire with him,--
ruling (it was to be hoped in perfect harmony with himself) the
west and leaving the east to Constantius. However, all will not
do: Constantius writes severe and haughtily, Send the men, and
let's hear no more of that presumptuous fooling about the second
Augustus!--So Julian marches east; whither, accompanying him,
the lately rebellious Celts and Petulants are ready enough to go
now; and Constantius might after all have fallen in battle, and
so missed his saving baptism; but his plans had gone agley, and
the whole situation was extremely disturbing; and you never
knew what might happen: and really, when you thought how you
had treated this Julian's father, and his two brothers, and
numberless uncles and cousins, you might fear the very worst;--
and so, good maiden-auntish soul, he fell into a sadness, and
thence into a decline; and while Julian and his Petulants were
yet a long way off, got baptized respectably, and slipped
off to heaven.
And you know, too, probably, how Julian, being now sole emperor,
reigned: working night and day; wearing out relays of secretaries,
but never worn out himself; making the three years of his
reign, as I think Gibbon says, read like thirty; disestablishing
Christianity, and refounding Paganism,--not the Paganism
that had been of old, but a new kind, based upon compassion,
human brotherhood, and Theosophical ethics, and illumined
by his own ever-present vision of the Gods;--how he reformed
the laws; governed; made his life-giving hand felt from
the Scottish Wall to the Nile Cataracts;--instilled new vigor
into everything; forced toleration upon the Christians,
stopping dead their mutual persecutions, and recalling from
banishment those who had been banished by their co-religionists
of other sects;--made them rebuild temples they had torn down,
and disgorge temple properties they had plundered;--and amidst
all this, and much more also, found time in the wee small hours
of the nights to do a good deal of literary work: Theosophical
treatises, correspondence, sketches....--And you will know
of the spotless purity, the asceticism, of his life; and how
he stedfastly refused to persecute;--whereby his opponents
complained that, son of Satan as he was, he denied them the glory
of the martyr's crown;--and of his plan to rebuild the Temple at
Jerusalem, and to re-establish Jews and Judaism in their native
land:--of his letter to the Jewish high priest or chief Rabbi,
beginning "My brother";--of the charitable institutions he
raised, and dedicated to the Lord of Vision, his God the
Unconquered Sun;--of his contests with frivolity and corruption
at Antioch, and his friendship with the philosophers;--and then,
of his Persian expedition, with its rashness,--its brilliant
victories,--its over-rashness and head-strong advance;--of the
burning of the fleet, and march into the desert; and retreat;
and that sudden attack,--the Persian squadrons rising up like
afreets out of the sands, from nowhere; and Julian rushing
unarmed through the thickest of the fight, turning, first here,
then there, confusion into firmness, defeat into victory;--and of
the arrow, Persian or Christian, that cut across his fingers and
pierced his side; and how he fainted as he tried to draw it out;
and recovered, and called for his horse and armor; and fainted
again; and was carried into a tent hastily run up for him:--and
of the scene there in the night, that made those who were with
him think of the last scene in the life of Socrates; Julian
dying, comforting his mourning officers; cheering them; talking
to them quietly about the beauty and dignity of death, and the
divinity of the Soul; then suddenly inquiring why Anatolius was
not present,--and learning that Anatolius had fallen,--and
(strange inconsistency!) the dying man breaking into tears of the
death of his friend.--And you will know of the hopeless march of
the army back under ignominious Jovian, all Shah Sapor's hard
terms accepted;--and the doom of the Roman Empire sealed.
That was the Man: that is the record, outwardly, of a Soul fed
upon the immensities of Vision. Vision is the keynote of him:
the intense reality to him of the ever-beautiful compassionate
Gods.... It is true there was a personality attached; and all
his defenders since have found much in it that they wished had
not been there. A lack of dignity, it is said; a certain
self-consciousness... Well; he was very young; he died a very
boy at thirty-two; he never attained to years of discretion:--in
a sense we may allow that much. You say, he might very well have
followd the reaonable conventions of life; and condescended,
when emperor, not to dress as a philosopher of the schools. So
he might. They laughed at his ways, at his garb, at his beard;--
and he went the length of sitting up one night to write the
_Misopogon,_ a skit upon his personality. Only philosophers wore
beards in those days; it was thought most unsuitable in an
emperor. I do not know what the men of Antioch said about
it; but he speaks of it as unkempt and,--in the Gibbonistic
euphemism,--_populous;_ indeed, names the loathsome cootie
outright, which Gibbon was much too Gibbonish to do. In the
nature of things, this was a libel.
I read lately an article, I think by an Irish writer, on the
eccentricities of youthful genius. It often happens that a soul
of really fine caliber, with a great work to do in the world,
will waste a portion of his forces, at the outset, in fighting
the harmless conventions. But as his real self grows into
mastery, all this disappears, and he comes to see where his
battle truly lies. Julian died before he had had time quite to
outgow the eccentricities; but for all that, not before he had
shown the world what the Soul in action is like.
Every great soul, incarnating, has still this labor to carry
through as prolog to his life's work:--he must conquer the new
personality, with all its hereditary tendencies; he must mold it
difficultly to the perfect expression of the glory and dignity of
himself. Julian had to take up a body in which on the one side
ran the warrior blood of Claudius Gothicus and Constantius
Chlorus, on the other, the refinement and culture of the
senatorial house of the Anicii. Two such streams, coming
together, might well need some harmonizing: might well produce,
for example, an acute self-consciousness,--to be mastered. What
he got from them, for world-service, was on the one hand his
superb military leadership and mastery of affairs; on the other,
his intense devotion to learning and culture. Thus the two
streams of heredity appeared, dominated by his own quality of
Vision. The paternal stream, by his generation, had grown much
vitiated: it was pure warriorism in Claudius Gothicus, and even
in Constantius Chlorus; it was warriorism refined with subtlety
and cruelty in Constantine I; it was mere fussy treacherous
cruelty in the Spider-Octopus,--and sensual brutality in Julian's
brother Gallus. The vices of the latter may indicate how great a
self-conqueror the unstained Julian was.
He was a Keats in imperial affairs, dying when he had given no
more than a promise of what he should become. He laws, his
valor, his victories, his writings, are no more than _juvenilia:_
they are equal to the grand performance, not the promise, of many
who are counted great. He came out from his overshadowment and
long seclusion, from him books and dreams; was thrown into
conditions that would have been difficult for an experienced
statesman, and won through them all triumphantly; was set to
conduct a war that would have taxed the genius of a Caesar, a
Tiberius, or an Aurelius,--and swept through to as signal
victories as any of theirs. He learnt the elements of drill, and
was straight sent to conquer the conquering Germans; and did it
brilliantly. He came to a Gaul as broken and hopeless as Joan of
Arc's France; and found within himself every quality needed to
heal it and make it whole.
Joan conquered with her Vision; Julian conquered with his. He
set out with this before his eyes and in his soul:--The Gods are
there; the beautiful Gods; uttermost splendor of divinity is at
the heart of things. The glory of the Gods and of their world
filled his eyes; and the determination filled his soul to make
this outer world conform to the beauty of his vision. The thing
he did not care about,--did not notice, except in a humourous
way,--was that queer thing of a personality that had been
allotted to himself. How could he have succeeded, in the world
that then was?--And yet even a Christian poet was constrained to
say,--and to rise, says Gibbon, above his customary mediocrity in
saying it,--that though Julian was hateful to God, he was
altogether beneficent to mankind.
I do not know how to explain the Persian expedition. He himself
said, when dying, that he had loved and sought peace, and had but
gone to war when driven to it. We cannot see now what were the
driving factors. Did he go to reap glory that he might have
used, or thought he might have used, in his grand design? Did he
go to break a way into India, perhaps there to find a light
beyond any that was in Rome? ... Or was it the supreme mistake of
his life.... one would say the only mistake?
It failed, and he died, and his grand designs came to nothing;
and Rome went out in utter darkness. And men sneered at him
then, and have been sneering at him ever since, for his failure.
Perhaps we must call it that; it was a forlorn hope at the best
of times. But you cannot understand him, unless you think of him
as a Lord of Vision lonely in a world wholly bereft of it: a man
for whom all skies were transparent, and the solid earth without
opacity, but with the luminous worlds shining through wherein
Apollo walks, and all the Masters of Light and Beauty;--unless
you think of him as a Lord of Vision moving in an outer world, a
phase of civilization, old, tired, dying, dull as ditch-water,
without imagination, with no little vestige of poetry, no gleam
of aspiration,--with wit enough to sneer at him, and no more; by
no means with wit enough to allow him to save it from itself and
from ruin.