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

‘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, I wish Philammon, by such thoughts as I have suggested, to rise to that higher and more spiritual insight into nature, which reveals her to us as instinct throughout—all fair and noble forms of her at least—with Deity itself; to make him feel that it is not enough to say, with the Christians, that God has made the world, if we make that very assertion an excuse for believing that His presence has been ever since withdrawn from it.’

‘Christians, I think, would hardly say that,’ said Philammon.

‘Not in words. But, in fact, they regard Deity as the maker of a dead machine, which, once made, will move of itself thenceforth, and repudiate as heretics every philosophic thinker, whether Gnostic or Platonist, who, unsatisfied with so dead, barren, and sordid a conception of the glorious all, wishes to honour the Deity by acknowledging His universal presence, and to believe, honestly, the assertion of their own Scriptures, that He lives and moves, and has His being in the universe.’

Philammon gently suggested that the passage in question was worded somewhat differently in the Scripture.

‘True. But if the one be true, its converse will be true also. If the universe lives and moves, and has its being in Him, must He not necessarily pervade all things?’

‘Why?—Forgive my dulness, and explain.’

‘Because, if He did not pervade all things, those things which He did not pervade would be as it were interstices in His being, and in so far, without Him.’

‘True, but still they would be within His circumference.’

‘Well argued. But yet they would not live in Him, but in themselves. To live in Him they must be pervaded by His life. Do you think it possible—do you think it even reverent to affirm that there can be anything within the infinite glory of Deity which has the power of excluding from the space which it occupies that very being from which it draws its worth, and which must have originally pervaded that thing, in order to bestow on it its organisation and its life? Does He retire after creating, from the spaces which He occupied during creation, reduced to the base necessity of making