Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face, Charles Kingsley [thriller novels to read TXT] 📗

He was sitting on his sheepskin upon a step, basking, like a true son of the desert, in a blaze of fiery sunshine, which made the black stone-work too hot to touch with the bare hand, watching the swallows, as they threaded the columns of the Serapeium, and thinking how often he had delighted in their air-dance, as they turned and hawked up and down the dear old glen at Scetis. A crowd of citizens with causes, appeals, and petitions, were passing in and out from the patriarch’s audience-room. Peter and the archdeacon were waiting in the shade close by for the gathering of the parabolani, and talking over the morning’s work in an earnest whisper, in which the names of Hypatia and Orestes were now and then audible.

An old priest came up, and bowing reverently enough to the archdeacon, requested the help of one of the parabolani. He had a sailor’s family, all fever-stricken, who must be removed to the hospital at once.

The archdeacon looked at him, answered an off-hand ‘Very well,’ and went on with his talk.

The priest, bowing lower than before, re-presented the immediate necessity for help.

‘It is very odd,’ said Peter to the swallows in the Serapeium, ‘that some people cannot obtain influence enough in their own parishes to get the simplest good works performed without tormenting his holiness the patriarch.’

The old priest mumbled some sort of excuse, and the archdeacon, without deigning a second look at him, said—‘Find him a man, brother Peter. Anybody will do. What is that boy—Philammon—doing there? Let him go with Master Hieracas.’

Peter seemed not to receive the proposition favourably, and whispered something to the archdeacon....

‘No. I can spare none of the rest. Importunate persons must take their chance of being well served. Come—here are our brethren; we will all go together.’

‘The farther together the better for the boy’s sake,’ grumbled Peter, loud enough for Philammon—perhaps for the old priest—to overhear him.

So Philammon went out with them, and as he went questioned his companions meekly enough as to who Raphael was.

‘A friend of Hypatia!’—that name, too, haunted him; and he began, as stealthily and indirectly as he could, to obtain information about her. There was no need for his caution; for the very mention of her name roused the whole party into a fury of execration.

‘May God confound her, siren, enchantress, dealer in spells and sorceress! She is the strange woman of whom Solomon prophesied.’

‘It is my opinion,’ said another, ‘that she is the forerunner of Antichrist.’

‘Perhaps the virgin of whom it is prophesied that he will be born,’ suggested another.

‘Not that, I’ll warrant her,’ said Peter, with a savage sneer.

‘And is Raphael Aben-Ezra her pupil in philosophy?’ asked Philammon.

‘Her pupil in whatsoever she can find where-with to delude men’s souls,’ said the old priest.

‘The reality of philosophy has died long ago, but the great ones find it still worth their while to worship its shadow.’

‘Some of them worship more than a shadow, when they haunt her house,’ said Peter. ‘Do you think Orestes goes thither only for philosophy?’

‘We must not judge harsh judgments,’ said the old priest; ‘Synesius of Cyrene is a holy man, and yet he loves Hypatia well.’

‘He a holy man?—and keeps a wife! One who had the insolence to tell the blessed Theophilus himself that he would not be made bishop unless he were allowed to remain with her; and despised the gift of the Holy Ghost in comparison of the carnal joys of wedlock, not knowing the Scriptures, which saith that those who are in the flesh cannot please God! Well said Siricius of Rome of such men—“Can the Holy Spirit of God dwell in other than holy bodies?” No wonder that such a one as Synesius grovels at the feet of Orestes’ mistress!’

‘Then she is profligate?’ asked Philammon.

‘She must be. Has a heathen faith and grace? And without faith and grace, are not all our righteousnesses as filthy rags? What says St. Paul?—That God has given them over to a reprobate mind, full of all injustice, uncleanness, covetousness, maliciousness, you know the catalogue—why do you ask me?’

‘Alas! and is she this?’

‘Alas! And why alas? How would the Gospel be glorified if heathens were holier than Christians? It ought to be so, therefore it is so. If she seems to have virtues, they, being done without the grace of Christ, are only bedizened vices, cunning shams, the devil transformed into an angel of light. And as for chastity, the flower and crown of all virtues—whosoever says that she, being yet a heathen, has that, blasphemes the Holy Spirit, whose peculiar and highest gift it is, and is anathema maranatha for ever! Amen!’ And Peter, devoutly crossing himself, turned angrily and contemptuously away from his young companion.

Philammon was quite shrewd enough to see that assertion was not identical with proof. But Peter’s argument of ‘it ought to be, therefore it is,’ is one which saves a great deal of trouble...and no doubt he had very good sources of information. So Philammon walked on, sad, he knew not why, at the new notion which he had formed of Hypatia, as a sort of awful sorceress—Messalina, whose den was foul with magic rites and ruined souls of men. And yet if that was all she had to teach, whence had her pupil Raphael learned that fortitude of his? If philosophy had, as they said, utterly died out, then what was Raphael?

Just then, Peter and the rest turned up a side street, and Philammon and Hieracas were left to go on their joint errand together. They paced on for some way in silence, up one street and down another, till Philammon, for want of anything better to say, asked where they were going.

‘Where I choose, at all events. No, young man! If I, a priest, am to be insulted by archdeacons and readers, I won’t be insulted by you.’

‘I assure you I meant no harm.’

‘Of course not; you all learn the same trick, and the young ones catch it of the old ones fast enough. Words smoother than butter, yet very swords.’

‘You do not mean to complain of the archdeacon and his companions?’ said Philammon, who of course was boiling over with pugnacious respect for the body to which he belonged.

No answer.

‘Why, sir, are they not among the most holy and devoted of men?’

‘Ah—yes,’ said his companion, in a tone which sounded very like ‘Ah—no.’

‘You do not think so?’ asked Philammon bluntly.

‘You are young, you are young. Wait a while till you have seen as much as I have. A degenerate age this, my son; not like the good old times, when men dare suffer and die for the faith. We are too prosperous nowadays; and fine ladies walk about with Magdalens embroidered on their