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

room for His own universe, and endure the suffering—for the analogy of all material nature tells us that it is suffering—of a foreign body, like a thorn within the flesh, subsisting within His own substance? Rather believe that His wisdom and splendour, like a subtle and piercing fire, insinuates itself eternally with resistless force through every organised atom, and that were it withdrawn but for an instant from the petal of the meanest flower, gross matter, and the dead chaos from which it was formed, would be all which would remain of its loveliness....

‘Yes’—she went on, after the method of her school, who preferred, like most decaying ones, harangues to dialectic, and synthesis to induction.... ‘Look at yon lotus-flower, rising like Aphrodite from the wave in which it has slept throughout the night, and saluting, with bending swan-neck, that sun which it will follow lovingly around the sky. Is there no more there than brute matter, pipes and fibres, colour and shape, and the meaningless life-in-death which men call vegetation? Those old Egyptian priests knew better, who could see in the number and the form of those ivory petals and golden stamina, in that mysterious daily birth out of the wave, in that nightly baptism, from which it rises each morning re-born to a new life, the signs of some divine idea, some mysterious law, common to the flower itself, to the white-robed priestess who held it in the temple rites, and to the goddess to whom they both were consecrated.... The flower of Isis!.... Ah!—well. Nature has her sad symbols, as well as her fair ones. And in proportion as a misguided nation has forgotten the worship of her to whom they owed their greatness, for novel and barbaric superstitions, so has her sacred flower grown rarer and more rare, till now—fit emblem of the worship over which it used to shed its perfume—it is only to be found in gardens such as these—a curiosity to the vulgar, and, to such as me, a lingering monument of wisdom and of glory past away.’

Philammon, it may be seen, was far advanced by this time; for he bore the allusions to Isis without the slightest shudder. Nay—he dared even to offer consolation to the beautiful mourner.

‘The philosopher,’ he said, ‘will hardly lament the loss of a mere outward idolatry. For if, as you seem to think, there were a root of spiritual truth in the symbolism of nature, that cannot die. And thus the lotus-flower must still retain its meaning, as long as its species exists on earth.’

‘Idolatry!’ answered she, with a smile. ‘My pupil must not repeat to me that worn-out Christian calumny. Into whatsoever low superstitions the pious vulgar may have fallen, it is the Christians now, and not the heathens, who are idolaters. They who ascribe miraculous power to dead men’s bones, who make temples of charnel-houses, and bow before the images of the meanest of mankind, have surely no right to accuse of idolatry the Greek or the Egyptian, who embodies in a form of symbolic beauty ideas beyond the reach of words!

‘Idolatry? Do I worship the Pharos when I gaze at it, as I do for hours, with loving awe, as the token to me of the all-conquering might of Hellas? Do I worship the roll on which Homer’s words are written, when I welcome with delight the celestial truths which it unfolds to me, and even prize and love the material book for the sake of the message which it brings? Do you fancy that any but the vulgar worship the image itself, or dream that it can help or hear them? Does the lover mistake his mistress’s picture for the living, speaking reality? We worship the idea of which the image is a symbol. Will you blame us because we use that symbol to represent the idea to our own affections and emotions instead of leaving it a barren notion, a vague imagination of our own intellect?’

‘Then,’ asked Philammon, with a faltering voice, yet unable to restrain his curiosity, ‘then you do reverence the heathen gods?’

Why Hypatia should have felt this question a sore one, puzzled Philammon; but she evidently did feel it as such, for she answered haughtily enough—

‘If Cyril had asked me that question, I should have disdained to answer. To you I will tell, that before I can answer your question you must learn what those whom you call heathen gods are. The vulgar, or rather those who find it their interest to calumniate the vulgar for the sake of confounding philosophers with them, may fancy them mere human beings, subject like man to the sufferings of pain and love, to the limitations of personality. We, on the other hand, have been taught by the primeval philosophers of Greece, by the priests of ancient Egypt, and the sages of Babylon, to recognise in them the universal powers of nature, those children of the all-quickening spirit, which are but various emanations of the one primeval unity—say rather, various phases of that unity, as it has been variously conceived, according to the differences of climate and race, by the wise of different nations. And thus, in our eyes, he who reverences the many, worships by that very act, with the highest and fullest adoration, the one of whose perfection they are the partial antitypes; perfect each in themselves, but each the image of only one of its perfections.’

‘Why, then,’ said Philammon, much relieved by this explanation, ‘do you so dislike Christianity? may it not be one of the many methods—’

‘Because,’ she answered, interrupting him impatiently, ‘because it denies itself to be one of those many methods, and stakes its existence on the denial; because it arrogates to itself the exclusive revelation of the Divine, and cannot see, in its self-conceit, that its own doctrines disprove that assumption by their similarity to those of all creeds. There is not a dogma of the Galileans which may not be found, under some form or other, in some of those very religions from which it pretends to disdain borrowing.’

‘Except,’ said Theon, ‘its exaltation of all which is human and low-born, illiterate, and levelling.’

‘Except that—. But look! here comes some one whom I cannot—do not choose to meet. Turn this way—quick!’

And Hypatia, turning pale as death, drew her father with unphilosophic haste down a side-walk.

‘Yes,’ she went on to herself, as soon as she had recovered her equanimity. ‘Were this Galilean superstition content to take its place humbly among the other “religiones licitas” of the empire, one might tolerate it well enough, as an anthropomorphic adumbration of divine things fitted for the base and toiling herd; perhaps peculiarly fitted, because peculiarly flattering to them. But now—’

‘There is Miriam again,’ said Philammon, ‘right before us!’

‘Miriam?’ asked Hypatia severely. ‘You know her then? How is that?’

‘She lodges at Eudaimon’s house, as I do,’ answered Philammon frankly. ‘Not that I ever interchanged, or wish to interchange, a word with so base a creature.’

‘Do not! I charge you!’ said Hypatia, almost imploringly. But there was now no way of avoiding her, and perforce Hypatia and her tormentress met face to face.

‘One word! one moment, beautiful lady,’ began the old woman, with a slavish obeisance. ‘Nay, do not push by so cruelly. I have—see what I have for you!’ and she held out with a mysterious air, ‘The Rainbow of Solomon.’

‘Ah! I knew you would stop a moment—not for the ring’s sake, of course,