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

father, too, whom it knows not? Hector, he who is without—unconfined, unconditioned by Nature, yet its husband?—the all-pervading, plastic Soul, informing, organising, whom men call Zeus the lawgiver, Aether the fire, Osiris the lifegiver; whom here the poet has set forth as the defender of the mystic city, the defender of harmony, and order, and beauty throughout the universe? Apart sits his great father—Priam, the first of existences, father of many sons, the Absolute Reason; unseen, tremendous, immovable, in distant glory; yet himself amenable to that abysmal unity which Homer calls Fate, the source of all which is, yet in Itself Nothing, without predicate, unnameable.

‘From It and for It the universal Soul thrills through the whole Creation, doing the behests of that Reason from which it overflowed, unwillingly, into the storm and crowd of material appearances; warring with the brute forces of gross matter, crushing all which is foul and dissonant to itself, and clasping to its bosom the beautiful, and all wherein it discovers its own reflex; impressing on it its signature, reproducing from it its own likeness, whether star, or daemon, or soul of the elect:—and yet, as the poet hints in anthropomorphic language, haunted all the while by a sadness—weighed down amid all its labours by the sense of a fate—by the thought of that First One from whom the Soul is originally descended; from whom it, and its Father the Reason before it, parted themselves when they dared to think and act, and assert their own free will.

‘And in the meanwhile, alas! Hector, the father, fights around, while his children sleep and feed; and he is away in the wars, and they know him not-know not that they the individuals are but parts of him the universal. And yet at moments—oh! thrice blessed they whose celestial parentage has made such moments part of their appointed destiny—at moments flashes on the human child the intuition of the unutterable secret. In the spangled glory of the summer night—in the roar of the Nile-flood, sweeping down fertility in every wave—in the awful depths of the temple-shrine—in the wild melodies of old Orphic singers, or before the images of those gods of whose perfect beauty the divine theosophists of Greece caught a fleeting shadow, and with the sudden might of artistic ecstasy smote it, as by an enchanter’s wand, into an eternal sleep of snowy stone—in these there flashes on the inner eye a vision beautiful and terrible, of a force, an energy, a soul, an idea, one and yet million-fold, rushing through all created things, like the wind across a lyre, thrilling the strings into celestial harmony—one life-blood through the million veins of the universe, from one great unseen heart, whose thunderous pulses the mind hears far away, beating for ever in the abysmal solitude, beyond the heavens and the galaxies, beyond the spaces and the times, themselves but veins and runnels from its all-teeming sea.

‘Happy, thrice happy! they who once have dared, even though breathless, blinded with tears of awful joy, struck down upon their knees in utter helplessness, as they feel themselves but dead leaves in the wind which sweeps the universe—happy they who have dared to gaze, if but for an instant, on the terror of that glorious pageant; who have not, like the young Astyanax, clung shrieking to the breast of mother Nature, scared by the heaven-wide flash of Hector’s arms, and the glitter of his rainbow crest! Happy, thrice happy,! even though their eyeballs, blasted by excess of light, wither to ashes in their sockets!—Were it not a noble end to have seen Zeus, and die like Semele, burnt up by his glory? Happy, thrice happy! though their mind reel from the divine intoxication, and the hogs of Circe call them henceforth madmen and enthusiasts. Enthusiasts they are; for Deity is in them, and they in It. For the time, this burden of individuality vanishes, and recognising themselves as portions of the universal Soul, they rise upward, through and beyond that Reason from whence the soul proceeds, to the fount of all—the ineffable and Supreme One—and seeing It, become by that act portions of Its essence. They speak no more, but It speaks in them, and their whole being, transmuted by that glorious sunlight into whose rays they have dared, like the eagle, to gaze without shrinking, becomes an harmonious vehicle for the words of Deity, and passive itself, utters the secrets of the immortal gods! What wonder if to the brute mass they seem as dreamers? Be it so.... Smile if you will. But ask me not to teach you things unspeakable, above all sciences, which the word-battle of dialectic, the discursive struggles of reason, can never reach, but which must be seen only, and when seen confessed to be unspeakable. Hence, thou disputer of the Academy!—hence, thou sneering Cynic!—hence, thou sense-worshipping Stoic, who fanciest that the soul is to derive her knowledge from those material appearances which she herself creates!.... hence—; and yet no: stay and sneer if you will. It is but a little time—a few days longer in this prison-house of our degradation, and each thing shall return to its own fountain; the blood-drop to the abysmal heart, and the water to the river, and the river to the shining sea; and the dew-drop which fell from heaven shall rise to heaven again, shaking off the dust-grains which weighed it down, thawed from the earth-frost which chained it here to herb and sward, upward and upward ever through stars and suns, through gods, and through the parents of the gods, purer and purer through successive lives, till it enters The Nothing, which is The All, and finds its home at last.’....

And the speaker stopped suddenly, her eyes glistening with tears, her whole figure trembling and dilating with rapture. She remained for a moment motionless, gazing earnestly at her audience, as if in hopes of exciting in them some kindred glow; and then recovering herself, added in a more tender tone, not quite unmixed with sadness—

‘Go now, my pupils. Hypatia has no more for you to-day. Go now, and spare her at least—woman as she is after all—the shame of finding that she has given you too much, and lifted the veil of Isis before eyes which are not enough purified to behold the glory of the goddess.—Farewell!’

She ended: and Philammon, the moment that the spell of her voice was taken off him, sprang up, and hurried out through the corridor into the street....

So beautiful! So calm and merciful to him So enthusiastic towards all which was noble! Had not she too spoken of the unseen world, of the hope of immortality, of the conquest of the spirit over the flesh, just as a Christian might have done? Was the gulf between them so infinite? If so, why had her aspirations awakened echoes in his own heart—echoes too, just such as the prayers and lessons of the Laura used to awaken? If the fruit was so like, must not the root be like also?.... Could that be a counterfeit? That a minister of Satan in the robes of an angel of light? Light, at least, it was purity, simplicity, courage, earnestness, tenderness, flashed out from eye, lip, gesture.... A heathen, who disbelieved? .... What was the meaning of it all?

But the finishing stroke yet remained which was to complete the utter confusion of his mind. For before he had gone fifty yards up the street, his little friend of the fruit-basket, whom he had not seen since he vanished under the feet of the mob in the gateway of the theatre, clutched him by the arm, and burst forth, breathless with running—

‘The—gods—heap their favours—on those who—who least deserve them! Rash and insolent rustic! And this is the reward of thy madness!’

‘Off with you!’ said Philammon, who had no mind at the moment to renew his acquaintance with the little porter. But the guardian of parasols kept a firm hold on his sheepskin.