Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face by Charles Kingsley (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📖

I should have fancied that, according to my carnal notions of God’s Kingdom and The Church, they had cut off themselves most effectually already, from the moment when they cast away the Spirit of God, and took to themselves the spirit of murder and cruelty; and that all which your most just and laudable excommunication could effect, would be to inform the public of that fact. However, farewell! My money shall be forthcoming in due time; and that is the most important matter between us at this moment. As for your client Peter and his fellows, perhaps the most fearful punishment which can befall them, is to go on as they have begun. I only hope that you will not follow in the same direction.’

‘I?’ cried Cyril, trembling with rage.

‘Really I wish your Holiness well when I say so. If my notions seem to you somewhat secular, yours—forgive me—seem to the somewhat atheistic; and I advise you honestly to take care lest while you are busy trying to establish God’s kingdom, you forget what it is like, by shutting your eyes to those of its laws which are established already. I have no doubt that with your Holiness’s great powers you will succeed in establishing something. My only dread is, that when it is established, you should discover to your horror that it is the devil’s kingdom and not God’s.’

And without waiting for an answer, Raphael bowed himself out of the august presence, and sailing for Berenice that very day, with Eudaimon and his negro wife, went to his own place; there to labour and to succour, a sad and stern, and yet a loving and a much-loved man, for many a year to come.

And now we will leave Alexandria also, and taking a forward leap of some twenty years, see how all other persons mentioned in this history went, likewise, each to his own place. ...............

A little more than twenty years after, the wisest and holiest man in the East was writing of Cyril, just deceased—

‘His death made those who survived him joyful; but it grieved most probably the dead; and there is cause to fear, lest, finding his presence too troublesome, they should send him back to us.... May it come to pass, by your prayers, that he may obtain mercy and forgiveness, that the immeasurable grace of God may prevail over his wickedness!....’

So wrote Theodoret in days when men had not yet intercalated into Holy Writ that line of an obscure modern hymn, which proclaims to man the good news that ‘There is no repentance in the grave.’ Let that be as it may, Cyril has gone to his own place. What that place is in history is but too well known. What it is in the sight of Him unto whom all live for ever, is no concern of ours. May He whose mercy is over all His works, have mercy upon all, whether orthodox or unorthodox, Papist or Protestant, who, like Cyril, begin by lying for the cause of truth; and setting off upon that evil road, arrive surely, with the Scribes and Pharisees of old, sooner or later at their own place!

True, he and his monks had conquered; but Hypatia did not die unavenged. In the hour of that unrighteous victory, the Church of Alexandria received a deadly wound. It had admitted and sanctioned those habits of doing evil that good may come, of pious intrigue, and at last of open persecution, which are certain to creep in wheresoever men attempt to set up a merely religious empire, independent of human relationships and civil laws; to ‘establish,’ in short, a ‘theocracy,’ and by that very act confess their secret disbelief that God is ruling already. And the Egyptian Church grew, year by year, more lawless and inhuman. Freed from enemies without, and from the union which fear compels, it turned its ferocity inward, to prey on its own vitals, and to tear itself in pieces by a voluntary suicide, with mutual anathemas and exclusions, till it ended as a mere chaos of idolatrous sects, persecuting each other for metaphysical propositions, which, true or false, were equally heretical in their mouths, because they used them only as watch-words of division. Orthodox or unorthodox, they knew not God, for they knew neither righteousness, nor love, nor peace.... They ‘hated their brethren, and walked on still in darkness, not knowing whither they were going’.... till Amrou and his Mohammedans appeared; and whether they discovered the fact or not, they went to their own place....

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though He stands and waits with patience, with exactness grinds He all—

And so found, in due time, the philosophers as well as the ecclesiastics of Alexandria.

Twenty years after Hypatia’s death, philosophy was flickering down to the very socket. Hypatia’s murder was its death-blow. In language tremendous and unmistakable, philosophers had been informed that mankind had done with them; that they had been weighed in the balances, and found wanting; that if they had no better Gospel than that to preach, they must make way for those who had. And they did make way. We hear little or nothing of them or their wisdom henceforth, except at Athens, where Proclus, Marinus, Isidore, and others kept up ‘the golden chain of the Platonic succession,’ and descended deeper and deeper, one after the other, into the realms of confusion—confusion of the material with the spiritual, of the subject with the object, the moral with the intellectual; self-consistent in one thing only,—namely, in their exclusive Pharisaism utterly unable to proclaim any good news for man as man, or even to conceive of the possibility of such, and gradually looking with more and more complacency on all superstitious which did not involve that one idea, which alone they stated,—namely, the Incarnation; craving after signs and wonders, dabbling in magic, astrology, and barbarian fetichisms; bemoaning the fallen age, and barking querulously at every form of human thought except their own; writing pompous biographies, full of bad Greek, worse taste, and still worse miracles....

—That last drear mood Of envious sloth, and proud decrepitude; No faith, no art, no king, no priest, no God; While round the freezing founts of life in snarling ring, Crouch’d on the bareworn sod, Babbling about the unreturning spring, And whining for dead gods, who cannot save, The toothless systems shiver to their grave.

The last scene of their tragedy was not without a touch of pathos .... In the year 629, Justinian finally closed, by imperial edict, the schools of Athens. They had nothing more to tell the world, but what the world had yawned over a thousand times before: why should they break the blessed silence by any more such noises? The philosophers felt so themselves. They had no mind to be martyrs, for they had nothing for which to testify. They had no message for mankind, and mankind no interest for them. All that was left for them was to take care of their own souls; and fancying that they saw something like Plato’s ideal republic in the pure monotheism of the Guebres, their philosophic emperor the Khozroo, and his holy caste of magi, seven of them set off to Persia, to forget the hateful existence of Christianity in that realised ideal. Alas for the facts! The purest monotheism, they discovered, was perfectly compatible with bigotry and ferocity, luxury and tyranny, serails and bowstrings, incestuous marriages and corpses exposed to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; and in reasonable fear for their own necks, the last seven Sages of Greece returned home weary-hearted, into the Christian Empire from which they had fled, fully contented with the permission, which the Khozroo had obtained for them from Justinian, to hold their peace, and die among decent people. So among decent people they died, leaving behind them, as their last