Hypatia — or New Foes with an Old Face Read online

  Produced by P. J. Riddick

  HYPATIA

  or

  NEW FOES WITH AN OLD FACE

  By Charles Kingsley

  PREFACE

  A picture of life in the fifth century must needs contain much whichwill be painful to any reader, and which the young and innocent willdo well to leave altogether unread. It has to represent a very hideous,though a very great, age; one of those critical and cardinal eras inthe history of the human race, in which virtues and vices manifestthemselves side by side--even, at times, in the same person--with themost startling openness and power. One who writes of such an era laboursunder a troublesome disadvantage. He dare not tell how evil people were;he will not be believed if he tells how good they were. In the presentcase that disadvantage is doubled; for while the sins of the Church,however heinous, were still such as admit of being expressed in words,the sins of the heathen world, against which she fought, were utterlyindescribable; and the Christian apologist is thus compelled, for thesake of decency, to state the Church's case far more weakly than thefacts deserve.

  Not, be it ever remembered, that the slightest suspicion of immoralityattaches either to the heroine of this book, or to the leadingphilosophers of her school, for several centuries. Howsoever base andprofligate their disciples, or the Manichees, may have been, the greatNeo-Platonists were, as Manes himself was, persons of the most rigid andascetic virtue.

  For a time had arrived, in which no teacher who did not put forth themost lofty pretensions to righteousness could expect a hearing. ThatDivine Word, who is 'The Light who lighteth every man which cometh intothe world,' had awakened in the heart of mankind a moral craving neverbefore felt in any strength, except by a few isolated philosophers orprophets. The Spirit had been poured out on all flesh; and from one endof the Empire to the other, from the slave in the mill to the emperoron his throne, all hearts were either hungering and thirsting afterrighteousness, or learning to do homage to those who did so. And He whoexcited the craving, was also furnishing that which would satisfyit; and was teaching mankind, by a long and painful education, todistinguish the truth from its innumerable counterfeits, and to find,for the first time in the world's life, a good news not merely for theselect few, but for all mankind without respect of rank or race.

  For somewhat more than four hundred years, the Roman Empire and theChristian Church, born into the world almost at the same moment, hadbeen developing themselves side by side as two great rival powers, indeadly struggle for the possession of the human race. The weapons ofthe Empire had been not merely an overwhelming physical force, and aruthless lust of aggressive conquest: but, even more powerful still, anunequalled genius for organisation, and an uniform system of externallaw and order. This was generally a real boon to conquered nations,because it substituted a fixed and regular spoliation for the fortuitousand arbitrary miseries of savage warfare: but it arrayed, meanwhile,on the side of the Empire the wealthier citizens of every province, byallowing them their share in the plunder of the labouring masses belowthem. These, in the country districts, were utterly enslaved; whilein the cities, nominal freedom was of little use to masses kept fromstarvation by the alms of the government, and drugged into brutish goodhumour by a vast system of public spectacles, in which the realms ofnature and of art were ransacked to glut the wonder, lust, and ferocityof a degraded populace.

  Against this vast organisation the Church had been fighting for now fourhundred years, armed only with its own mighty and all-embracing message,and with the manifestation of a spirit of purity and virtue, of loveand self-sacrifice, which had proved itself mightier to melt and weldtogether the hearts of men, than all the force and terror, all themechanical organisation, all the sensual baits with which the Empirehad been contending against that Gospel in which it had recognisedinstinctively and at first sight, its internecine foe.

  And now the Church had conquered. The weak things of this worldhad confounded the strong. In spite of the devilish cruelties ofpersecutors; in spite of the contaminating atmosphere of sin whichsurrounded her; in spite of having to form herself, not out of a raceof pure and separate creatures, but by a most literal 'new birth' outof those very fallen masses who insulted and persecuted her; in spite ofhaving to endure within herself continual outbursts of the evil passionsin which her members had once indulged without cheek; in spite ofa thousand counterfeits which sprang up around her and within her,claiming to be parts of her, and alluring men to themselves by that veryexclusiveness and party arrogance which disproved their claim; in spiteof all, she had conquered. The very emperors had arrayed themselveson her side. Julian's last attempt to restore paganism by imperialinfluence had only proved that the old faith had lost all hold upon thehearts of the masses; at his death the great tide-wave of new opinionrolled on unchecked, and the rulers of earth were fain to swim with thestream; to accept, in words at least, the Church's laws as theirs; toacknowledge a King of kings to whom even they owed homage and obedience;and to call their own slaves their 'poorer brethren,' and often, too,their 'spiritual superiors.'

  But if the emperors had become Christian, the Empire had not. Here andthere an abuse was lopped off; or an edict was passed for the visitationof prisons and for the welfare of prisoners; or a Theodosius wasrecalled to justice and humanity for a while by the stern rebukes ofan Ambrose. But the Empire was still the same: still a great tyranny,enslaving the masses, crushing national life, fattening itself and itsofficials on a system of world-wide robbery; and while it was paramount,there could be no hope for the human race. Nay, there were even thoseamong the Christians who saw, like Dante afterwards, in the 'fatal giftof Constantine,' and the truce between the Church and the Empire, freshand more deadly danger. Was not the Empire trying to extend over theChurch itself that upas shadow with which it had withered up everyother form of human existence; to make her, too, its stipendiaryslave-official, to be pampered when obedient, and scourged whenever shedare assert a free will of her own, a law beyond that of her tyrants; tothrow on her, by a refined hypocrisy, the care and support of the masseson whose lifeblood it was feeding? So thought many then, and, as Ibelieve, not unwisely.

  But if the social condition of the civilised world was anomalous at thebeginning of the fifth century, its spiritual state was still more so.The universal fusion of races, languages, and customs, which had goneon for four centuries under the Roman rule, had produced a correspondingfusion of creeds, an universal fermentation of human thought and faith.All honest belief in the old local superstitions of paganism hadbeen long dying out before the more palpable and material idolatry ofEmperor-worship; and the gods of the nations, unable to deliver thosewho had trusted in them, became one by one the vassals of the 'DivusCaesar,' neglected by the philosophic rich, and only worshipped bythe lower classes, where the old rites still pandered to their grosserappetites, or subserved the wealth and importance of some particularlocality.

  In the meanwhile, the minds of men, cut adrift from their ancientmoorings, wandered wildly over pathless seas of speculative doubt, andespecially in the more metaphysical and contemplative East, attempted tosolve for themselves the questions of man's relation to the unseen bythose thousand schisms, heresies, and theosophies (it is a disgrace tothe word philosophy to call them by it), on the records of which thestudent now gazes bewildered, unable alike to count or to explain theirfantasies.

  Yet even these, like every outburst of free human thought, had their useand their fruit. They brought before the minds of churchmen a thousandnew questions which must be solved, unless the Church was to relinquishfor ever her claims as the great teacher and satisfier of the humansoul. To study these bubbles, as they formed and burst on every wave o
fhuman life; to feel, too often by sad experience, as Augustine felt,the charm of their allurements; to divide the truths at which they aimedfrom the falsehood which they offered as its substitute; to exhibit theCatholic Church as possessing, in the great facts which she proclaimed,full satisfaction, even for the most subtle metaphysical cravings of adiseased age;--that was the work of the time; and men were sent to doit, and aided in their labour by the very causes which had produced theintellectual revolution. The general intermixture of ideas, creeds,and races, even the mere physical facilities for intercourse betweendifferent parts of the Empire, helped to give the great Christianfathers of the fourth and fifth centuries a breadth of observation,a depth of thought, a large-hearted and large-minded patience andtolerance, such as, we may say boldly, the Church has since beheld butrarely, and the world never; at least, if we are to judge those greatmen by what they had, and not by what they had not, and to believe, aswe are bound, that had they lived now, and not then, they would havetowered as far above the heads of this generation as they did above theheads of their own. And thus an age, which, to the shallow insight ofa sneerer like Gibbon, seems only a rotting and aimless chaos ofsensuality and anarchy, fanaticism and hypocrisy, produced a Clement andan Athanase, a Chrysostom and an Augustine; absorbed into the sphere ofChristianity all which was most valuable in the philosophies of Greeceand Egypt, and in the social organisation of Rome, as an heirloom fornations yet unborn; and laid in foreign lands, by unconscious agents,the foundations of all European thought and Ethics.

  But the health of a Church depends, not merely on the creed whichit professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few greatecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members.The _mens sana_ must have a _corpus sanum_ to inhabit. And even for theWestern Church, the lofty future which was in store for it would havebeen impossible, without some infusion of new and healthier blood intothe veins of a world drained and tainted by the influence of Rome.

  And the new blood, at the era of this story, was at hand. The great tideof those Gothic nations, of which the Norwegian and the German are thepurest remaining types, though every nation of Europe, from Gibraltar toSt. Petersburg, owes to them the most precious elements of strength,was sweeping onward, wave over wave, in a steady south-western current,across the whole Roman territory, and only stopping and recoiling whenit reached the shores of the Mediterranean. Those wild tribes werebringing with them into the magic circle of the Western Church'sinfluence the very materials which she required for the building up ofa future Christendom, and which she could find as little in the WesternEmpire as in the Eastern; comparative purity of morals; sacred respectfor woman, for family life, law, equal justice, individual freedom, and,above all, for honesty in word and deed; bodies untainted by hereditaryeffeminacy, hearts earnest though genial, and blessed with a strangewillingness to learn, even from those whom they despised; a brain equalto that of the Roman in practical power, and not too far behind that ofthe Eastern in imaginative and speculative acuteness.

  And their strength was felt at once. Their vanguard, confined withdifficulty for three centuries beyond the Eastern Alps, at the expenseof sanguinary wars, had been adopted wherever it was practicable, intothe service of the Empire; and the heart's core of the Roman legionwas composed of Gothic officers and soldiers. But now the main body hadarrived. Tribe after tribe was crowding down to the Alps, and tramplingupon each other on the frontiers of the Empire. The Huns, singly theirinferiors, pressed them from behind with the irresistible weight ofnumbers; Italy, with her rich cities and fertile lowlands, beckoned themon to plunder; as auxiliaries, they had learned their own strength andRoman weakness; a _casus belli_ was soon found. How iniquitous was theconduct of the sons of Theodosius, in refusing the usual bounty, bywhich the Goths were bribed not to attack the Empire!--The whole pent-updeluge burst over the plains of Italy, and the Western Empire becamefrom that day forth a dying idiot, while the new invaders divided Europeamong themselves. The fifteen years before the time of this tale haddecided the fate of Greece; the last four that of Rome itself. Thecountless treasures which five centuries of rapine had accumulatedround the Capitol had become the prey of men clothed in sheepskins andhorse-hide; and the sister of an emperor had found her beauty, virtue,and pride of race worthily matched by those of the hard-handed Northernhero who led her away from Italy as his captive and his bride, to foundnew kingdoms in South France and Spain, and to drive the newly-arrivedVandals across the Straits of Gibraltar into the then bloomingcoast-land of Northern Africa. Everywhere the mangled limbs of the OldWorld were seething in the Medea's caldron, to come forth whole, andyoung, and strong. The Longbeards, noblest of their race, had found atemporary resting-place upon the Austrian frontier, after long southwardwanderings from the Swedish mountains, soon to be dispossessed again bythe advancing Huns, and, crossing the Alps, to give their name for everto the plains of Lombardy. A few more tumultuous years, and the Frankswould find themselves lords of the Lower Rhineland; and before the hairsof Hypatia's scholars had grown gray, the mythic Hengist and Horsa wouldhave landed on the shores of Kent, and an English nation have begun itsworld-wide life.

  But some great Providence forbade to our race, triumphant in every otherquarter, a footing beyond the Mediterranean, or even in Constantinople,which to this day preserves in Europe the faith and manners of Asia. TheEastern World seemed barred, by some stern doom, from the only influencewhich could have regenerated it. Every attempt of the Gothic races toestablish themselves beyond the sea, whether in the form of an organisedkingdom, as the Vandals attempted in Africa; or of a mere band ofbrigands, as did the Goths in Asia Minor, under Gainas; or of apraetorian guard, as did the Varangens of the middle age; or asreligious invaders, as did the Crusaders, ended only in the corruptionand disappearance of the colonists. That extraordinary reform inmorals, which, according to Salvian and his contemporaries, the Vandalconquerors worked in North Africa, availed them nothing; they lost morethan they gave. Climate, bad example, and the luxury of power degradedthem in one century into a race of helpless and debauched slave-holders,doomed to utter extermination before the semi-Gothic armies ofBelisarius; and with them vanished the last chance that the Gothicraces would exercise on the Eastern World the same stern yet wholesomediscipline under which the Western had been restored to life.

  The Egyptian and Syrian Churches, therefore, were destined to labour notfor themselves, but for us. The signs of disease and decrepitudewere already but too manifest in them. That very peculiar turn of theGraeco-Eastern mind, which made them the great thinkers of the thenworld, had the effect of drawing them away from practice to speculation;and the races of Egypt and Syria were effeminate, over-civilised,exhausted by centuries during which no infusion of fresh blood hadcome to renew the stock. Morbid, self-conscious, physically indolent,incapable then, as now, of personal or political freedom, they affordedmaterial out of which fanatics might easily be made, but not citizens ofthe kingdom of God. The very ideas of family and national life-those twodivine roots of the Church, severed from which she is certain to witheraway into that most godless and most cruel of spectres, a religiousworld-had perished in the East from the evil influence of the universalpractice of slaveholding, as well as from the degradation of that Jewishnation whichhad been for ages the great witness for those ideas; andall classes, like their forefather Adam--like, indeed, 'the old Adam'in every man and in every age--were shifting the blame of sin from theirown consciences to human relationships and duties--and therein, to theGod who had appointed them; and saying as of old, '_The woman whom thougavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat._' Thepassionate Eastern character, like all weak ones, found total abstinenceeasier than temperance, religious thought more pleasant than godlyaction; and a monastic world grew up all over the East, of such vastnessthat in Egypt it was said to rival in numbers the lay population,producing, with an enormous decrease in the actual amount of moralevil, an equally great enervation and decrease of the population. Sucha peop
le could offer no resistance to the steadily-increasing tyranny ofthe Eastern Empire. In vain did such men as Chrysostom and Basil opposetheir personal influence to the hideous intrigues and villainies of theByzantine court; the ever-downward career of Eastern Christianity wenton unchecked for two more miserable centuries, side by side with theupward development of the Western Church; and, while the successorsof the great Saint Gregory were converting and civilising a new-bornEurope, the Churches of the East were vanishing before Mohammedaninvaders, strong by living trust in that living God, whom theChristians, while they hated and persecuted each other for argumentsabout Him, were denying and blaspheming in every action of their lives.

  But at the period whereof this story treats, the Graeco-Eastern mindwas still in the middle of its great work. That wonderful metaphysicsubtlety, which, in phrases and definitions too often unmeaning toour grosser intellect, saw the symbols of the most important spiritualrealities, and felt that on the distinction between homoousios andhomoiousios might hang the solution of the whole problem of humanity,was set to battle in Alexandria, the ancient stronghold of Greekphilosophy, with the effete remains of the very scientific thought towhich it owed its extraordinary culture. Monastic isolation from familyand national duties especially fitted the fathers of that period for thetask, by giving them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions witha lifelong earnestness impossible to the more social and practicalNorthern mind. Our duty is, instead of sneering at them as pedanticdreamers, to thank Heaven that men were found, just at the time whenthey were wanted, to do for us what we could never have done forourselves; to leave to us, as a precious heirloom, bought most trulywith the lifeblood of their race, a metaphysic at once Christian andscientific, every attempt to improve on which has hitherto been found afailure; and to battle victoriously with that strange brood of theoreticmonsters begotten by effete Greek philosophy upon Egyptian symbolism,Chaldee astrology, Parsee dualism, Brahminic spiritualism-graceful andgorgeous phantoms, whereof somewhat more will be said in the comingchapters.

  I have, in my sketch of Hypatia and her fate, closely followed authentichistory, especially Socrates' account of the closing scene, as givenin Book vii. Para 15, of his _Ecclesiastical History_. I am inclined,however, for various historical reasons, to date her death two yearsearlier than he does. The tradition that she was the wife of Isidore,the philosopher, I reject with Gibbon, as a palpable anachronism of atleast fifty years (Isidore's master, Proclus, not having been born tillthe year before Hypatia's death), contradicted, moreover, by the veryauthor of it, Photius, who says distinctly, after comparing Hypatia andIsidore, that Isidore married a certain 'Domna.' No hint, moreover, ofher having been married appears in any contemporary authors; and thename of Isidore nowhere occurs among those of the many mutual friendsto whom Synesius sends messages in his letters to Hypatia, in which,if anywhere, we should find mention of a husband, had one existed. ToSynesius's most charming letters, as well as to those of Isidore, thegood Abbot of Pelusium, I beg leave to refer those readers who wish forfurther information about the private life of the fifth century.

  I cannot hope that these pages will be altogether free from anachronismsand errors. I can only say that I have laboured honestly andindustriously to discover the truth, even in its minutest details,and to sketch the age, its manners and its literature, as I foundthem-altogether artificial, slipshod, effete, resembling far more thetimes of Louis Quinze than those of Sophocles and Plato. And so Isend forth this little sketch, ready to give my hearty thanks to anyreviewer, who, by exposing my mistakes, shall teach me and the publicsomewhat more about the last struggle between the Young Church and theOld World.