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

marriage,’ said Raphael, somewhat proudly, ‘I care little. I went to him to tell me, not about the relation of the sexes, on which point I am probably as good a judge as he—but about God and on that subject he told me enough to bring me back to Alexandria, that I might undo, if possible, somewhat of the wrong which I have done to Hypatia.’

‘What wrong have you done me? .... You are silent? Be sure, at least, that whatsoever it may be, you will not wipe it out by trying to make a proselyte of me!’

‘Be not too sure of that. I have found too great a treasure not to wish to share it with Theon’s daughter.’

‘A treasure?’ said she, half scornfully.

‘Yes, indeed. You recollect my last words, when we parted there below a few months ago?’

Hypatia was silent. One terrible possibility at which he had hinted flashed across her memory for the first time since; .... but she spurned proudly from her the heaven-sent warning.

‘I told you that, like Diogenes, I went forth to seek a man. Did I not promise you, that when I had found one you should be the first to hear of him? And I have found a man.’

Hypatia waved her beautiful hand. ‘I know whom you would say …. that crucified one. Be it so. I want not a man, but a god.’

‘What sort of a god, Hypatia? A god made up of our own intellectual notions, or rather of negations of them—of infinity and eternity, and invisibility, and impassibility—and why not of immortality, too, Hypatia? For I recollect we used to agree that it was a carnal degrading of the Supreme One to predicate of Him so merely human a thing as virtue.’

Hypatia was silent.

‘Now I have always had a sort of fancy that what we wanted, as the first predicate of our Absolute One, was that He was to be not merely an infinite God—whatever that meant, which I suspect we did not always see quite clearly—or an eternal one—or an omnipotent one—or even merely a one God at all; none of which predicates, I fear, did we understand more clearly than the first: but that he must be a righteous God:—or rather, as we used sometimes to say that He was to have no predicate—Righteousness itself. And all along, I could not help remembering that my old sacred Hebrew books told me of such a one; and feeling that they might have something to tell me which—’

‘Which I did not tell you! And this, then, caused your air of reserve, and of sly superiority over the woman whom you mocked by calling her your pupil! I little suspected you of so truly Jewish a jealousy! Why, oh why, did you not tell me this?’

‘Because I was a beast, Hypatia; and had all but forgotten what this righteousness was like; and was afraid to find out lest it should condemn me. Because I was a devil, Hypatia; and hated righteousness, and neither wished to see you righteous, nor God righteous either, because then you would both have been unlike myself. God be merciful to me a sinner!’

She looked up in his face. The man was changed as if by miracle— and yet not changed. There was the same gallant consciousness of power, the same subtle and humorous twinkle in those strong ripe Jewish features and those glittering eyes; and yet every line in his face was softened, sweetened; the mask of sneering faineance was gone—imploring tenderness and earnestness beamed from his whole countenance. The chrysalis case had fallen off, and disclosed the butterfly within. She sat looking at him, and passed her hand across her eyes, as if to try whether the apparition would not vanish. He, the subtle!—he, the mocker!—he, the Lucian of Alexandria!—he whose depth and power had awed her, even in his most polluted days …. And this was the end of him….

‘It is a freak of cowardly superstition …. Those Christians have been frightening him about his sins and their Tartarus.’

She looked again into his bright, clear, fearless face, and was ashamed of her own calumny. And this was the end of him—of Synesius—of Augustine—of learned and unlearned, Goth and Roman …. The great flood would have its way, then …. Could she alone fight against it?

She could! Would she submit?—She? Her will should stand firm, her reason free, to the last—to the death if need be …. And yet last night!—last night!

At last she spoke, without looking up.

‘And what if you have found a man in that crucified one? Have you found in him a God also?’

‘Does Hypatia recollect Glaucon’s definition of the perfectly righteous man? .... How, without being guilty of one unrighteous act, he must labour his life long under the imputation of being utterly unrighteous, in order that his disinterestedness may be thoroughly tested, and by proceeding in such a course, arrive inevitably, as Glaucon says, not only in Athens of old, or in Judaea of old, but, as you yourself will agree, in Christian Alexandria at this moment, at—do you remember, Hypatia?—bonds, and the scourge, and lastly, at the cross itself …. If Plato’s idea of the righteous man be a crucified one, why may not mine also? If, as we both—and old Bishop Clemens, too—as good a Platonist as we, remember—and Augustine himself, would agree, Plato in speaking those strange words, spoke not of himself, but by the Spirit of God, why should not others have spoken by the same Spirit when they spoke the same words?’

‘A crucified man …. Yes. But a crucified God, Raphael! I shudder at the blasphemy.’

‘So do my poor dear fellow-countrymen. Are they the more righteous in their daily doings, Hypatia, on account of their fancied reverence for the glory of One who probably knows best how to preserve and manifest His own glory? But you assent to the definition? Take care!’ said he, with one of his arch smiles, ‘I have been fighting with Augustine, and have become of late a terrible dialectician. Do you assent to it?’

‘Of course—it is Plato’s.’

‘But do you assent merely because it is written in the book called Plato’s, or because your reason tells you that it is true? .... You will not tell me. Tell me this, then, at least. Is not the perfectly righteous man the highest specimen of men?’

‘Surely,’ said she half carelessly: but not unwilling, like a philosopher and a Greek, as a matter of course, to embark in anything like a word-battle, and to shut out sadder thoughts for a moment.

‘Then must not the Autanthropos, the archetypal and ideal man, who is more perfect than any individual specimen, be perfectly righteous also?’

‘Yes.’

‘Suppose, then, for the sake of one of those pleasant old games of ours, an argument, that he wished to manifest his righteousness to the world …. The only method for him, according to Plato, would be Glaucon’s, of calumny and persecution, the scourge and the cross?’

‘What words are these, Raphael? Material scourges and crosses for an eternal and spiritual idea?’

‘Did you ever yet, Hypatia, consider at leisure what the archetype of man might be like?’

Hypatia started, as at a new thought, and confessed—as every Neo— Platonist would have done—that she had never done so.

‘And yet our master, Plato, bade us believe that there was a substantial archetype of each thing, from a flower to a nation, eternal in the heavens. Perhaps we have not been faithful Platonists enough heretofore, my dearest tutor. Perhaps, being philosophers, and somewhat of Pharisees to boot, we began all our lucubrations as we did our prayers, by thanking God that we were not as other men were; and so misread another passage in the Republic, which we used in pleasant old days to be fond of quoting.’

‘What was that?’ asked Hypatia, who became more and more interested every moment.

‘That philosophers were men.’

‘Are you mocking me? Plato defines the philosopher as the man who seeks after the objects of knowledge, while others seek after those of opinion.’

‘And most truly. But what if, in our eagerness to assert that wherein the philosopher differed from other men, we had overlooked that in which he resembled other men; and so forgot that, after all, man was a genus whereof the philosopher was only a species?’

Hypatia sighed.

‘Do you not think, then, that as the greater contains the less, and the archetype of the genus that of the species, we should have been wiser if we had speculated a little more on the archetype of man as man, before we meddled with a part of that archetype,—the archetype of the philosopher? .... Certainly it would have been the easier course, for there are more men than philosophers, Hypatia; and every man is a real man, and a fair subject for examination, while every philosopher is not a real philosopher—our friends the Academics, for instance, and even a Neo-Platonist or two whom we know? You seem impatient. Shall I cease?’

‘You mistook the cause of my impatience,’ answered she, looking up at him with her great sad eyes. ‘Go on.’

‘Now—for I am going to be terribly scholastic—is it not the very definition of man, that he is, alone of all known things, a spirit temporarily united to an animal body?’

‘Enchanted in it, as in a dungeon, rather,’ said she sighing.

‘Be it so if you will. But—must we not say that the archetype—the very man—that if he is the archetype, he too will be, or must have been, once at least, temporarily enchanted into an animal body? .... You are silent. I will not press you …. Only ask you to consider at your leisure whether Plato may not justify somewhat from the charge of absurdity the fisherman of Galilee, where he said that He in whose image man is made was made flesh, and dwelt with him bodily there by the lake-side at Tiberias, and that he beheld His Glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father.’

‘That last question is a very different one. God made flesh! My reason revolts at it.’

‘Old Homer’s reason did not.’

Hypatia started, for she recollected her yesterday’s cravings after those old, palpable, and human deities. And—‘Go on,’ she cried eagerly.

‘Tell me, then—This archetype of man, if it exists anywhere, it must exist eternally in the mind of God? At least, Plato would have so said?’

‘Yes.’

‘And derive its existence immediately from Him?’

‘Yes.’

‘But a man is one willing person, unlike to all others.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then this archetype must be such.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘But possessing the faculties and properties of all men in their highest perfection.’

‘Of course.’

‘How sweetly and obediently my late teacher becomes my pupil!’

Hypatia looked at him with her eyes full of tears.

‘I never taught you anything, Raphael.’

‘You taught me most, beloved lady, when you least thought of it. But tell me one thing more. Is it not the property of every man to be a son? For you can conceive of a man as not being a father, but not as not being a son.’

‘Be it so.’

‘Then this archetype must be a son also.’

‘Whose son, Raphael?’

‘Why not of “Zeus, father of gods and men”? For we agreed that it— we will call it he, now, having agreed that it is a person—could owe