Hypatia — Ch 21: The Squire-Bishop, pt 1 (4094 words)

In a small and ill-furnished upper room of a fortified country house, sat Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene.

A goblet of wine stood beside him, on the table, but it was untasted.

Slowly and sadly, by the light of a tiny lamp, he went on writing a verse or two, and then burying his face in his hand, while hot tears dropped between his fingers on the paper; till a servant entering, announced Raphael Aben-Ezra.

Synesius rose, with a gesture of surprise, and hurried towards the door.

‘No, ask him to come hither to me.

To pass through those deserted rooms at night is more than I can bear.

’ And he waited for his guest at the chamber door, and as he entered, caught both his hands in his, and tried to speak; but his voice was choked within him.

‘Do not speak,’ said Raphael gently, leading him to his chair again.

‘I know all.

’ ‘You know all?

And are you, then, so unlike the rest of the world, that you alone have come to visit the bereaved and the deserted in his misery?

’ ‘I am like the rest of the world, after all; for I came to you on my own selfish errand, to seek comfort.

Would that I could give it instead!

But the servants told me all, below.

’ ‘And yet you persisted in seeing me, as if I could help you?

Alas!

I can help no one now.

Here I am at last, utterly alone, utterly helpless.

As I came from my mother’s womb, so shall I return again.

My last child--my last and fairest--gone after the rest!

--Thank God, that I have had even a day’s peace wherein to lay him by his mother and his brothers; though He alone knows how long the beloved graves may remain unrifled.

Let it have been shame enough to sit here in my lonely tower and watch the ashes of my Spartan ancestors, the sons of Hercules himself, my glory and my pride, sinful fool that I was!

cast to the winds by barbarian plunderers....

When wilt thou make an end, O Lord, and slay me?

’ ‘And how did the poor boy die?

’ asked Raphael, in hope of soothing sorrow by enticing it to vent itself in words.

‘The pestilence.

--What other fate can we expect, who breathe an air tainted with corpses, and sit under a sky darkened with carrion birds?

But I could endure even that, if I could work, if I could help.

But to sit here, imprisoned now for months between these hateful towers; night after night to watch the sky, red with burning homesteads; day after day to have my ears ring with the shrieks of the dying and the captives--for they have begun now to murder every male down to the baby at the breast--and to feel myself utterly fettered, impotent, sitting here like some palsied idiot, waiting for my end!

I long to rush out, and fall fighting, sword in hand: but I am their last, their only hope.

The governors care nothing for our supplications.

In vain have I memorialised Gennadius and Innocent, with what little eloquence my misery has not stunned in me.

But there is no resolution, no unanimity left in the land.

The soldiery are scattered in small garrisons, employed entirely in protecting the private property of their officers.

The Ausurians defeat them piecemeal, and, armed with their spoils, actually have begun to beleaguer fortified towns; and now there is nothing left for us, but to pray that, like Ulysses, we may be devoured the last.

What am I doing?

I am selfishly pouring out my own sorrows, instead of listening to yours.

’ ‘Nay, friend, you are talking of the sorrows of your country, not of your own.

As for me, I have no sorrow--only a despair: which, being irremediable, may well wait.

But you--oh, you must not stay here.

Why not escape to Alexandria?

’ ‘I will die at my post as I have lived, the father of my people.

When the last ruin comes, and Cyrene itself is besieged, I shall return thither from my present outpost, and the conquerors shall find the bishop in his place before the altar.

There I have offered for years the unbloody sacrifice to Him, who will perhaps require of me a bloody one, that so the sight of an altar polluted by the murder of His priest, may end the sum of Pentapolitan woe, and arouse Him to avenge His slaughtered sheep!

There, we will talk no more of it.

This, at least, I have left in my power, to make you welcome.

And after supper you shall tell me what brings you hither.

’ And the good bishop, calling his servant, set to work to show his guest such hospitality as the invaders had left in his power.

Raphael’s usual insight had not deserted him when, in his utter perplexity, he went, almost instinctively, straight to Synesius.

The Bishop of Cyrene, to judge from the charming private letters which he has left, was one of those many-sided, volatile, restless men, who taste joy and sorrow, if not deeply or permanently, yet abundantly and passionately.

He lived, as Raphael had told Orestes, in a whirlwind of good deeds, meddling and toiling for the mere pleasure of action; and as soon as there was nothing to be done, which, till lately, had happened seldom enough with him, paid the penalty for past excitement in fits of melancholy.

A man of magniloquent and flowery style, not without a vein of self-conceit; yet withal of overflowing kindliness, racy humour, and unflinching courage, both physical and moral; with a very clear practical faculty, and a very muddy speculative one--though, of course, like the rest of the world, he was especially proud of his own weakest side, and professed the most passionate affection for philosophic meditation; while his detractors hinted, not without a show of reason, that he was far more of an adept in soldiering and dog-breaking than in the mysteries of the unseen world.

To him Raphael betook himself, he hardly knew why; certainly not for philosophic consolation; perhaps because Synesius was, as Raphael used to say, the only Christian from whom he had ever heard a hearty laugh;

perhaps because he had some wayward hope, unconfessed even to himself, that he might meet at Synesius’s house the very companions from whom he had just fled.

He was fluttering round Victoria’s new and strange brilliance like a moth round the candle, as he confessed, after supper, to his host; and now he was come hither, on the chance of being able to singe his wings once more.

Not that his confession was extracted without much trouble to the good old man, who, seeing at once that Raphael had some weight upon his mind, which he longed to tell, and yet was either too suspicious or too proud to tell, set himself to ferret out the secret, and forgot all his sorrows for the time, as soon as he found a human being to whom he might do good.

But Raphael was inexplicably wayward and unlike himself.

All his smooth and shallow persiflage, even his shrewd satiric humour, had vanished.

He seemed parched by some inward fever; restless, moody, abrupt, even peevish; and Synesius’s curiosity rose with his disappointment, as Raphael went on obstinately declining to consult the very physician before whom he presented himself as patient.

‘And what can you do for me, if I did tell you?

’ ‘Then allow me, my very dear friend, to ask this.

As you deny having visited me on my own account, on what account did you visit me?

’ ‘Can you ask?

To enjoy the society of the most finished gentleman of Pentapolis.

’ ‘And was that worth a week’s journey in perpetual danger of death?

’ ‘As for danger of death, that weighs little with a man who is careless of life.

And as for the week’s journey, I had a dream one night, on my way, which made me question whether I were wise in troubling a Christian bishop with any thoughts or questions which relate merely to poor human beings like myself, who marry and are given in marriage.

’ ‘You forget, friend, that you are speaking to one who has married, and loved--and lost.

’ ‘I did not.

But you see how rude I am growing.

I am no fit company for you, or any man.

I believe I shall end by turning robber-chief, and heading a party of Ausurians.

’ ‘But,’ said the patient Synesius ‘you have forgotten your dream all this while.

‘Forgotten!

--I did not promise to tell it you--did I?

’ ‘No; but as it seems to have contained some sort of accusation against my capacity, do you not think it but fair to tell the accused what it was?

’ Raphael smiled.

‘Well then....

Suppose I had dreamt this.

That a philosopher, an academic, and a believer in nothing and in no man, had met at Berenice certain rabbis of the Jews, and heard them reading and expounding a certain book of Solomon--the Song of Songs.

You, as a learned man, know into what sort of trumpery allegory they would contrive to twist it; how the bride’s eyes were to mean the scribes who were full of wisdom, as the pools of Heshbon were of water; and her stature spreading like a palm-tree, the priests who spread out their hands when blessing the people; and the left hand which should be under her head, the Tephilim which these old pedants wore on their left wrists; and the right hand which should hold her, the Mezuzah which they fixed on the right side of their doors to keep off devils; and so forth.

’ ‘I have heard such silly Cabbalisms, certainly.

’ ‘You have?

Then suppose that I went on, and saw in my dream how this same academic and unbeliever, being himself also a Hebrew of the Hebrews, snatched the roll out of the rabbis’ hands, and told them that they were a party of fools for trying to set forth what the book might possibly mean, before they had found out what it really did mean; and that they could only find out that by looking honestly at the plain words to see what Solomon meant by it.

And then, suppose that this same apostate Jew, this member of the synagogue of Satan, in his carnal and lawless imaginations, had waxed eloquent with the eloquence of devils, and told them that the book set forth, to those who had eyes to see, how Solomon the great king, with his threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins without number, forgets all his seraglio and his luxury in pure and noble love for the undefiled, who is but one; and how as his eyes are opened to see that God made the one man for the one woman, and the one woman to the one man, even as it was in the garden of Eden, so all his heart and thoughts become pure, and gentle, and simple;

how the song of the birds, and the scent of the grapes, and the spicy southern gales, and all the simple country pleasures of the glens of Lebanon, which he shares with his own vine-dressers and slaves, become more precious in his eyes than all his palaces and artificial pomp; and the man feels that he is in harmony, for the first time in his life, with the universe of God, and with the mystery of the seasons; that within him, as well as without him, the winter is past, and the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land....

And suppose I saw in my dream how the rabbis, when they heard those wicked words, stopped their ears with one accord, and ran upon that son of Belial and cast him out, because he blasphemed their sacred books by his carnal interpretations.

And suppose--I only say suppose--that I saw in my dream how the poor man said in his heart, “I will go to the Christians; they acknowledge the sacredness of this same book; and they say that their God taught them that ‘in the beginning God made man, male and female.

’ Perhaps they will tell me whether this Song of Songs does not, as it seems to me to do, show the passage upwards from brutal polygamy to that monogamy which they so solemnly command, and agree with me, that it is because the song preaches this that it has a right to take its place among the holy writings?

You, as a Christian bishop, should know what answer such a man would receive....

You are silent?

Then I will tell you what answer he seemed to receive in my dream.

“O blasphemous and carnal man, who pervertest Holy Scripture into a cloak for thine own licentiousness, as if it spoke of man’s base and sensual affections, know that this book is to be spiritually interpreted of the marriage between the soul and its Creator, and that it is from this very book that the Catholic Church derives her strongest arguments in favour of holy virginity, and the glories of a celibate life.

”’ Synesius was still silent.

‘And what do you think I saw in my dream that that man did when he found these Christians enforcing, as a necessary article of practice, as well as of faith, a baseless and bombastic metaphor, borrowed from that very Neo-Platonism out of which he had just fled for his life?

He cursed the day he was born, and the hour in which his father was told, “Thou hast gotten a man-child,” and said, “Philosophers, Jews, and Christians, farewell for ever and a day!

The clearest words of your most sacred books mean anything or nothing’ as the case may suit your fancies; and there is neither truth nor reason under the sun.

What better is there for a man, than to follow the example of his people, and to turn usurer, and money-getter, and cajoler of fools in his turn, even as his father was before him?

”’ Synesius remained a while in deep thought, and at last-- ‘And yet you came to me?

’ ‘I did, because you have loved and married; because you have stood out manfully against this strange modern insanity, and refused to give up, when you were made a bishop, the wife whom God had given you.

You, I thought, could solve the riddle for me, if any man could.

’ ‘Alas, friend!

I have begun to distrust, of late, my power of solving riddles.

After all, why should they be solved?

What matters one more mystery in a world of mysteries?

“If thou marry, thou hast not sinned,” are St. Paul’s own words; and let them be enough for us.

Do not ask me to argue with you, but to help you.

Instead of puzzling me with deep questions, and tempting me to set up my private judgment, as I have done too often already, against the opinion of the Church, tell me your story, and test my sympathy rather than my intellect.

I shall feel with you and work for you, doubt not, even though I am unable to explain to myself why I do it.

’ ‘Then you cannot solve my riddle?

’ ‘Let me help you,’ said Synesius with a sweet smile, ‘to solve it for yourself.

You need not try to deceive me.

You have a love, an undefiled, who is but one.

When you possess her, you will be able to judge better whether your interpretation of the Song is the true one; and if you still think that it is, Synesius, at least, will have no quarrel against you.

He has always claimed for himself the right of philosophising in private, and he will allow the same liberty to you’ whether the mob do or not.

’ ‘Then you agree with me?

Of course you do!

’ ‘Is it fair to ask me whether I accept a novel interpretation, which I have only heard five minutes ago, delivered in a somewhat hasty and rhetorical form?

’ ‘You are shirking the question,’ said Raphael peevishly.

‘And what if I am?

Tell me, point-blank, most self-tormenting of men, can I help you in practice, even though I choose to leave you to yourself in speculation?

’ ‘Well, then, if you will have my story, take it, and judge for yourself of Christian common sense.

’ And hurriedly, as if ashamed of his own confession, and yet compelled, in spite of himself, to unbosom it, he told Synesius all, from his first meeting with Victoria to his escape from her at Berenice.

The good bishop, to Aben-Ezra’s surprise, seemed to treat the whole matter as infinitely amusing.

He chuckled, smote his hand on his thigh, and nodded approval at every pause--perhaps to give the speaker courage--perhaps because he really thought that Raphael’s prospects were considerably less desperate than he fancied....

‘If you laugh at me, Synesius, I am silent.

It is quite enough to endure the humiliation of telling you that I am--confound it!

--like any boy of sixteen.

’ ‘Laugh at you?

--with you, you mean.

A convent?

Pooh, pooh!

The old Prefect has enough sense, I will warrant him, not to refuse a good match for his child.

’ ‘You forget that I have not the honour of being a Christian.

’ ‘Then we’ll make you one.

You won’t let me convert you, I know; you always used to gibe and jeer at my philosophy.

But Augustine comes to-morrow.

‘Augustine?

’ ‘He does indeed; and we must be off by daybreak, with all the armed men we can muster, to meet and escort him, and to hunt, of course, going and coming; for we have had no food this fortnight, but what our own dogs and bows have furnished us.

He shall take you in hand, and cure you of all your Judaism in a week; and then just leave the rest to me; I will manage it somehow or other.

It is sure to come right.

No; do not be bashful.

It will be real amusement to a poor wretch who can find nothing else to do--Heigho!

And as for lying under an obligation to me, why we can square that by your lending me three or four thousand gold pieces--Heaven knows I want them!

--on the certainty of never seeing them again.

’ Raphael could not help laughing in his turn.

‘Synesius is himself still, I see, and not unworthy of his ancestor Hercules; and though he shrinks from cleansing the Augean stable of my soul, paws like the war-horse in the valley at the hope of undertaking any lesser labours in my behalf.

But, my dear generous bishop, this matter is more serious, and I, the subject of it, have become more serious also, than you fancy.

Consider: by the uncorrupt honour of your Spartan forefathers, Agis, Brasidas, and the rest of them, don’t you think that you are, in your hasty kindness, tempting me to behave in a way which they would have called somewhat rascally?

’ ‘How then, my dear man!

You have a very honourable and praiseworthy desire; and I am willing to help you to compass it.

’ ‘Do you think that I have not cast about before now for more than one method of compassing it for myself?

My good man, I have been tempted a dozen times already to turn Christian: but there has risen up in me the strangest fancy about conscience and honour....

I never was scrupulous before, Heaven knows--I am not over-scrupulous now--except about her.

I cannot dissemble before her.

I dare not look in her face when I had a lie in my right hand....

She looks through one-into one-like a clear-eyed awful goddess....

I never was ashamed in my life till my eyes met hers....

’ ‘But if you really became a Christian?

’ ‘I cannot.

I should suspect my own motives.

Here is another of these absurd soul-anatomising scruples which have risen up in me.

I should suspect that I had changed my creed because I wished to change it--that if I was not deceiving her I was deceiving myself.

If I had not loved her it might have been different: but now--just because I do love her, I will not, I dare not, listen to Augustine’s arguments, or my own thoughts on the matter.

’ ‘Most wayward of men!

’ cried Synesius, half peevishly; ‘you seem to take some perverse pleasure in throwing yourself into the waves again, the instant you have climbed a rock of refuge!

’ ‘Pleasure?

Is there any pleasure in feeling oneself at death-grips with the devil?

I bad given up believing in him for many a year ....

And behold, the moment that I awaken to anything noble and right, I find the old serpent alive and strong at my throat!

No wonder that I suspect him, you, myself--I, who have been tempted, every hour in the last week, temptations to become a devil.

Ay,’ he went on, raising his voice, as all the fire of his intense Eastern nature flashed from his black eyes, ‘to be a devil!

From my childhood till now never have I known what it was to desire and not to possess.

It is not often that I have had to trouble any poor Naboth for his vineyard: but when I have taken a fancy to it, Naboth has always found it wiser to give way.

And now....

Do you fancy that I have not had a dozen hellish plots flashing across me in the last week?

Look here!

This is the mortgage of her father’s whole estate.

I bought it--whether by the instigation of Satan or of God--of a banker in Berenice, the very day I left them; and now they, and every straw which they possess, are in my power.

I can ruin them--sell them as slaves--betray them to death as rebels--and last, but not least, cannot I hire a dozen worthy men to carry her off, and cut the Gordian knot most simply and summarily?

And yet I dare not.

I must be pure to approach the pure; and righteous, to kiss the feet of the righteous.

Whence came this new conscience to me I know not, but come it has; and I dare no more do a base thing toward her, than I dare toward a God, if there be one.

This very mortgage--I hate it, curse it, now that I possess it--the tempting devil!

’ ‘Burn it,’ said Synesius quietly.

‘Perhaps I may.

At least, used it never shall be.

Compel her?

I am too proud, or too honourable, or something or other, even to solicit her.

She must come to me; tell me with her own lips that she loves me, that she will take me, and make me worthy of her.

She must have mercy on me, of her own free will, or--let her pine and die in that accursed prison;

and then a scratch with the trusty old dagger for her father, and another for myself, will save him from any more superstitions, and me from any more philosophic doubts, for a few aeons of ages, till we start again in new lives--he, I suppose, as a jackass, and I as a baboon.

What matter?

but unless I possess her by fair means, God do so to me, and more also, if I attempt base ones!

’ ‘God be with you, my son, in the noble warfare!

’ said Synesius, his eyes filling with kindly tears.

‘It is no noble warfare at all.

It is a base coward fear, in one who never before feared man or devil, and is now fallen low enough to be afraid of a helpless girl!

’ ‘Not so,’ cried Synesius, in his turn; ‘it is a noble and a holy fear.

You fear her goodness.

Could you see her goodness, much less fear it, were there not a Divine Light within you which showed you what, and how awful, goodness was?

Tell me no more, Raphael Aben-Ezra, that you do not fear God; for he who fears Virtue, fears Him whose likeness Virtue is.

Go on--go on....

Be brave, and His strength will be made manifest in your weakness.

’ ...............