Hypatia - Charles Kingsley (best books to read for students txt) 📗

not. And so it befell that he had not just then time to believe in Christianity. He recollected at times its existence; but even then he neither affirmed nor denied it. When he had solved the great questions—those which Hypatia set forth as the roots of all knowledge—how the world was made, and what was the origin of evil, and what his own personality was, and—that being settled—whether he had one, with a few other preliminary matters, then it would be time to return, with his enlarged light, to the study of Christianity; and if, of course, Christianity should be found to be at variance with that enlarged light, as Hypatia seemed to think …. Why, then—What then? .... He would not think about such disagreeable possibilities. Sufficient for the day was the evil thereof.

Possibilities? It was impossible …. Philosophy could not mislead. Had not Hypatia defined it, as man’s search after the unseen? And if he found the unseen by it, did it not come to just the same thing as if the unseen had revealed itself to him? And he must find it—for logic and mathematics could not err. If every step was correct, the conclusion must be correct also; so he must end, after all, in the right path—that is, of course, supposing Christianity to be the right path—and return to fight the Church’s battles, with the sword which he had wrested from Goliath the Philistine….But he had not won the sword yet.; and in the meanwhile, learning was weary work; and sufficient for the day was the good, as well as the evil, thereof.

So, enabled by his gold coin each month to devote himself entirely to study, he became very much what Peter would have coarsely termed a heathen. At first, indeed, he slipped into the Christian churches, from a habit of conscience. But habits soon grow sleepy; the fear of discovery and recapture made his attendance more and more of a labour. And keeping himself apart as much as possible from the congregation, as a lonely and secret worshipper, he soon found himself as separate from them in heart as in daily life. He felt that they, and even more than they, those flowery and bombastic pulpit rhetoricians, who were paid for their sermons by the clapping and cheering of the congregation, were not thinking of, longing after, the same things as himself. Besides, he never spoke to a Christian; for the negress at his lodgings seemed to avoid him— whether from modesty or terror, be could not tell; and cut off thus from the outward ‘communion of saints,’ he found himself fast parting away from the inward one. So he went no more to church, and looked the other way, he hardly knew why, whenever he passed the Caesareum; and Cyril, and all his mighty organisation, became to him another world, with which he had even less to do than with those planets over his head, whose mysterious movements, and symbolisms, and influences Hypatia’s lectures on astronomy were just opening before his bewildered imagination.

Hypatia watched all this with growing self-satisfaction, and fed herself with the dream that through Philammon she might see her wildest hopes realised. After the manner of women, she crowned him, in her own imagination, with all powers and excellences which she would have wished him to possess, as well as with those which he actually manifested, till Philammon would have been as much astonished as self-glorified could he have seen the idealised caricature of himself which the sweet enthusiast had painted for her private enjoyment. They were blissful months those to poor Hypatia. Orestes, for some reason or other, had neglected to urge his suit, and the Iphigenia-sacrifice had retired mercifully into the background. Perhaps she should be able now to accomplish all without it. And yet—it was so long to wait! Years might pass before Philammon’s education was matured, and with them golden opportunities which might never recur again.

‘Ah!’ she sighed at times, ‘that Julian had lived a generation later! That I could have brought all my hard-earned treasures to the feet of the Poet of the Sun, and cried, “Take me!—Hero, warrior, statesman, sage, priest of the God of Light! Take thy slave! Command her—send her—to martyrdom, if thou wilt!” A pretty price would that have been wherewith to buy the honour of being the meanest of thy apostles, the fellow-labourer of Iamblichus, Maximus, Libanius, and the choir of sages who upheld the throne of the last true Caesar!’

CHAPTER XV: NEPHELOCOCCUGIA

Hypatia had always avoided carefully discussing with Philammon any of those points on which she differed from his former faith. She was content to let the divine light of philosophy penetrate by its own power, and educe its own conclusions. But one day, at the very time at which this history reopens, she was tempted to speak more openly to her pupil than she yet had done. Her father had introduced him, a few days before, to a new work of hers on Mathematics; and the delighted and adoring look with which the boy welcomed her, as he met her in the Museum Gardens, pardonably tempted her curiosity to inquire what miracles her own wisdom might have already worked. She stopped in her walk, and motioned her father to begin a conversation with Philammon.

‘Well!’ asked the old man, with an encouraging smile, ‘and how does our pupil like his new—’

‘You mean my conic sections, father? It is hardly fair to expect an unbiassed answer in my presence.’

‘Why so?’ said Philammon. ‘Why should I not tell you, as well as all the world, the fresh and wonderful field of thought which they have opened to me in a few short hours?’

‘What then?’ asked Hypatia, smiling, as if she knew what the answer would be. ‘In what does my commentary differ from the original text of Apollonius, on which I have so faithfully based it?’

‘Oh, as much as a living body differs from a dead one. Instead of mere dry disquisitions on the properties of lines and curves, I found a mine of poetry and theology. Every dull mathematical formula seemed transfigured, as if by a miracle, into the symbol of some deep and noble principle of the unseen world.’

‘And do you think that he of Perga did not see as much? or that we can pretend to surpass, in depth of insight, the sages of the elder world? Be sure that they, like the poets, meant only spiritual things, even when they seem to talk only of physical ones, and concealed heaven under an earthly garb, only to hide it from the eyes of the profane; while we, in these degenerate days, must interpret and display each detail to the dull ears of men.’

‘Do you think, my young friend,’ asked Theon, ‘that mathematics can be valuable to the philosopher otherwise than as vehicles of spiritual truth? Are we to study numbers merely that we may be able to keep accounts; or as Pythagoras did, in order to deduce from their laws the ideas by which the universe, man, Divinity itself, consists?’

‘That seems to me certainly to be the nobler purpose.’

‘Or conic sections, that we may know better how to construct machinery; or rather to devise from them symbols of the relations of Deity to its various emanations?’

‘You use your dialectic like Socrates himself, my father,’ said Hypatia.

‘If I do, it is only for a temporary purpose. I should be sorry to accustom Philammon to suppose that the essence of philosophy was to be found in those minute investigations of words and analyses of notions, which seem to constitute Plato’s chief power in the eyes of those who, like the Christian sophist Augustine, worship his letter while they neglect his spirit; not seeing that those dialogues, which they fancy the shrine itself, are but vestibules—’

‘Say rather, veils, father.’

‘Veils, indeed, which were intended to baffle the rude gaze of the carnal-minded; but still vestibules, through which the enlightened soul might be led up to the inner sanctuary, to the Hesperid gardens and golden fruit of the Timaeus and the oracles …. And for myself, were but those two books left, I care not whether every other writing in the world perished to-morrow.’[Footnote: This astounding speech is usually attributed to Proclus, Hypatia’s ‘great’ successor.]

‘You must except Homer, father.’

‘Yes, for the herd …. But of what use would he be to them without some spiritual commentary?’

‘He would tell them as little, perhaps, as the circle tells to the carpenter who draws one with his compasses.’

‘And what is the meaning of the circle?’ asked Philammon.

‘It may have infinite meanings, like every other natural phenomenon; and deeper meanings in proportion to the exaltation of the soul which beholds it. But, consider, is it not, as the one perfect figure, the very symbol of the totality of the spiritual world; which, like it, is invisible, except at its circumference, where it is limited by the dead gross phenomena of sensuous matter! and even as the circle takes its origin from one centre, itself unseen,—a point, as Euclid defines it, whereof neither parts nor magnitude can be predicated,—does not the world of spirits revolve round one abysmal being, unseen and undefinable—in itself, as I have so often preached, nothing, for it is conceivable only by the negation of all properties, even of those of reason, virtue, force; and yet, like the centre of the circle, the cause of all other existences?’

‘I see,’ said Philammon; for the moment, certainly, the said abysmal Deity struck him as a somewhat chill and barren notion …. but that might be caused only by the dulness of his own spiritual perceptions. At all events, if it was a logical conclusion, it must be right.

‘Let that be enough for the present. Hereafter you may be—I fancy that I know you well enough to prophesy that you will be—able to recognise in the equilateral triangle inscribed within the circle, and touching it only with its angles, the three supra-sensual principles of existence, which are contained in Deity as it manifests itself in the physical universe, coinciding with its utmost limits, and yet, like it, dependent on that unseen central One which none dare name.’

‘Ah!’ said poor Philammon, blushing scarlet at the sense of his own dulness, ‘I am, indeed, not worthy to have such wisdom wasted upon my imperfect apprehension …. But, if I may dare to ask …. does not Apollonius regard the circle, like all other curves, as not depending primarily on its own centre for its existence, but as generated by the section of any cone by a plane at right angles to its axis?’

‘But must we not draw, or at least conceive a circle, in order to produce that cone? And is not the axis of that cone determined by the centre of that circle?’

Philammon stood rebuked.

‘Do not be ashamed; you have only, unwittingly, laid open another, and perhaps, as deep a symbol. Can you guess what it is?’

Philammon puzzled in vain.

‘Does it not show you this? That, as every conceivable right section of the cone discloses the circle, so in all which is fair and symmetric you will discover Deity, if you but analyse it in a right and symmetric direction?’

‘Beautiful!’ said Philammon, while the old man added—

‘And does it not show us, too, how the one perfect and original philosophy may be discovered in all great writers, if we have but that scientific knowledge which will enable us to extract it?’

‘True, my father: but just now,