Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face by Charles Kingsley (e book reader TXT) 📗

‘they are matters unknown among as; for where there is no king there can be no rebellion. Whosoever will help us against Ausurians is loyal in our eyes. And as for our political creed, it is simple enough—namely, that the emperor never dies, and that his name is Agamemnon, who fought at Troy; which any of my grooms will prove to you syllogistically enough to satisfy Augustine himself. As thus—

‘Agamemnon was the greatest and the best of kings.

‘The emperor is the greatest and the best of kings.

‘Therefore, Agamemnon is the emperor, and conversely.’

‘It had been well,’ said Augustine, with a grave smile, ‘if some of our friends had held the same doctrine, even at the expense of their logic.’

‘Or if,’ answered Synesius, ‘they believed with us, that the emperor’s chamberlain is a clever old man, with a bald head like my own, Ulysses by name, who was rewarded with the prefecture of all lands north of the Mediterranean, for putting out the Cyclop’s eye two years ago. However, enough of this. But you see, you are not in any extreme danger of informers and intriguers.... The real difficulty is, how you will be able to obey Augustine, by being content with your wages. For,’ lowering his voice, ‘you will get literally none.’

‘It will be as much as we deserve,’ said the young Tribune: ‘but my fellows have a trick of eating—’

‘They are welcome, then, to all deer and ostriches which they can catch. But I am not only penniless, but reduced myself to live, like the Laestrygons, on meat and nothing else; all crops and stocks for miles round being either burnt or carried off.’

‘E nihilo nihil!’ said Augustine, having nothing else to say. But here Raphael woke up on a sudden with—

‘Did the Pentapolitan wheat-ships go to Rome?’

‘No; Orestes stopped them when he stopped the Alexandrian convoy.’

‘Then the Jews have the wheat, trust them for it; and what they have I have. There are certain moneys of mine lying at interest in the seaports, which will set that matter to rights for a month or two. Do you find an escort to-morrow, and I will find wheat.’

‘But; most generous of friends, I can neither repay you interest nor principal.’

‘Be it so. I have spent so much money during the last thirty years in doing nothing but evil, that it is hard if I may not at last spend a little in doing good.—Unless his Holiness of Hippo thinks it wrong for you to accept the goodwill of an infidel?’

‘Which of these three,’ said Augustine, ‘was neighbour to him who fell among thieves, but he who had mercy on him? Verily, my friend Raphael Aben-Ezra, thou art not far from the kingdom of God.’

‘Of which God?’ asked Raphael slyly.

‘Of the God of thy forefather Abraham, whom thou shalt hear us worship this evening, if He will. Synesius, have you a church wherein I can perform the evening service, and give a word of exhortation to these my children?’

Synesius sighed. ‘There is a ruin, which was last month a church.’

‘And is one still. Man did not place there the presence of God, and man cannot expel it.’

And so, sending out hunting-parties right and left in chase of everything which had animal life, and picking up before nightfall a tolerably abundant supply of game, they went homewards, where Victoria was entrusted to the care of Synesius’s old stewardess, and the soldiery were marched straight into the church; while Synesius’s servants, to whom the Latin service would have been unintelligible, busied themselves in cooking the still warm game.

Strangely enough it sounded to Raphael that evening to hear, among those smoke-grimed pillars and fallen rafters, the grand old Hebrew psalms of his nation ring aloft, to the very chants, too, which were said by the rabbi to have been used in the Temple-worship of Jerusalem.... They, and the invocations, thanksgivings, blessings, the very outward ceremonial itself, were all Hebraic, redolent of the thoughts, the words of his own ancestors. That lesson from the book of Proverbs, which Augustine’s deacon was reading in Latin—the blood of the man who wrote these words was flowing in Aben-Ezra’s veins.... Was it a mistake, an hypocrisy? or were they indeed worshipping, as they fancied, the Ancient One who spoke face to face with his forefathers, the Archetype of man, the friend of Abraham and of Israel?

And now the sermon began; and as Augustine stood for a moment in prayer in front of the ruined altar, every furrow in his worn face lit up by a ray of moonlight which streamed in through the broken roof, Raphael waited impatiently for his speech. What would he, the refined dialectician, the ancient teacher of heathen rhetoric, the courtly and learned student, the ascetic celibate and theosopher, have to say to those coarse war-worn soldiers, Thracians and Markmen, Gauls and Belgians, who sat watching there, with those sad earnest faces? What one thought or feeling in common could there be between Augustine and his congregation?

At last, after signing himself with the cross, he began. The subject was one of the psalms which had just been read—a battle psalm, concerning Moab and Amalek, and the old border wars of Palestine. What would he make of that?

He seemed to start lamely enough, in spite of the exquisite grace of his voice, and manner, and language, and the epigrammatic terseness of every sentence. He spent some minutes over the inscription of the psalm—allegorised it—made it mean something which it never did mean in the writer’s mind, and which it, as Raphael well knew, never could mean, for his interpretation was founded on a sheer mis-translation. He punned on the Latin version—derived the meaning of Hebrew words from Latin etymologies.... And as he went on with the psalm itself, the common sense of David seemed to evaporate in mysticism. The most fantastic and far-fetched illustrations, drawn from the commonest objects, alternated with mysterious theosophic dogma. Where was that learning for which he was so famed? Where was that reverence for the old Hebrew Scriptures which he professed? He was treating David as ill as Hypatia used to treat Homer—worse even than old Philo did, when in the home life of the old Patriarchs, and in the mighty acts of Moses and Joshua, he could find nothing but spiritual allegories wherewith to pamper the private experiences of the secluded theosophist. And Raphael felt very much inclined to get up and go away, and still more inclined to say, with a smile, in his haste, ‘All men are liars.’....

And yet, what an illustration that last one was! No mere fancy, but a real deep glance into the working of the material universe, as symbolic of the spiritual and unseen one. And not drawn, as Hypatia’s were, exclusively from some sublime or portentous phenomenon, but from some dog, or kettle, or fishwife, with a homely insight worthy of old Socrates himself. How personal he was becoming, too!... No long bursts of declamation, but dramatic dialogue and interrogation, by-hints, and unexpected hits at one and the other most commonplace soldier’s failing.... And yet each pithy rebuke was put in a universal, comprehensive form, which made Raphael himself wince—which might, he thought, have made any man, or woman either, wince in