Hypatia — Ch 21: The Squire-Bishop, pt 3 (4101 words)

And chuckling at the prospect of action, the gallant bishop wheeled his little troop and in five minutes more dashed out of the copse with a shout and a flight of arrows, and rushed into the thickest of the fight.

One cavalry skirmish must be very like another.

A crash of horses, a flashing of sword-blades, five minutes of blind confusion, and then those who have not been knocked out of their saddles by their neighbours’ knees, and have not cut off their own horses’ heads instead of their enemies’, find themselves, they know not how, either running away or being run away from--not one blow in ten having taken effect on either side.

And even so Raphael, having made vain attempts to cut down several Moors, found himself standing on his head in an altogether undignified posture, among innumerable horses’ legs, in all possible frantic motions.

To avoid one was to get in the way of another; so he philosophically sat still, speculating on the sensation of having his brains kicked out, till the cloud of legs vanished, and he found himself kneeling abjectly opposite the nose of a mule, on whose back sat, utterly unmoved, a tall and reverend man, in episcopal costume.

The stranger, instead of bursting out laughing, as Raphael did, solemnly lifted his hand, and gave him his blessing.

The Jew sprang to his feet, heedless of all such courtesies, and, looking round, saw the Ausurians galloping off up the hill in scattered groups, and Synesius standing close by him, wiping a bloody sword.

‘Is the litter safe’?

’ were his first words.

‘Safe; and so are all.

I gave you up for killed when I saw you run through with that lance.

‘Run through?

I am as sound in the hide as a crocodile, said Raphael, laughing.

‘Probably the fellow took the butt instead of the point, in his hurry.

So goes a cavalry scuffle.

I saw you hit three or four fellows running with the flat of your sword.

’ Ah, that explains,’ said Raphael, why, I thought myself once the best swordsman on the Armenian frontier....

’ ‘I suspect that you were thinking of some one besides the Moors,’ said Synesius, archly pointing to the litter; and Raphael, for the first time for many a year, blushed like a boy of fifteen, and then turned haughtily away, and remounted his horse, saying, ‘Clumsy fool that I was!

’ ‘Thank God rather that you have been kept from the shedding of blood,’ said the stranger bishop, in a soft, deliberate voice, with a peculiarly clear and delicate enunciation.

‘If God have given us the victory, why grudge His having spared any other of His creatures besides ourselves?

’ ‘Because there are so many the more of them left to ravish, burn, and slay,’ answered Synesius.

‘Nevertheless, I am not going to argue with Augustine.

’ Augustine!

Raphael looked intently at the man, a tall, delicate-featured personage, with a lofty and narrow forehead, scarred like his cheeks with the deep furrows of many a doubt and woe.

Resolve, gentle but unbending, was expressed in his thin close-set lips and his clear quiet eye; but the calm of his mighty countenance was the calm of a worn-out volcano, over which centuries must pass before the earthquake-rents be filled with kindly soil, and the cinder-slopes grow gay with grass and flowers.

The Jew’s thoughts, however, were soon turned into another channel by the hearty embraces of Majoricus and his son.

‘We have caught you again, you truant!

’ said the young Tribune; ‘you could not escape us, you see, after all.

’ ‘Rather,’ said the father, ‘we owe him a second debt of gratitude for a second deliverance.

We were right hard bested when you rode up.

’ ‘Oh, he brings nothing but good with him whenever he appears; and then he pretends to be a bird of ill-omen,’ said the light-hearted Tribune, putting his armour to rights.

Raphael was in his secret heart not sorry to find that his old friends bore him no grudge for his caprice; but all he answered was-- ‘Pray thank any one but me; I have, as usual, proved myself a fool.

But what brings you here, like Gods e Machina?

It is contrary to all probabilities.

One would not admit so astounding an incident, even in the modern drama.

’ ‘Contrary to none whatsoever, my friend.

We found Augustine at Berenice, in act to set off to Synesius: we--one of us, that is--were certain that you would be found with him; and we decided on acting as Augustine’s guard, for none of the dastard garrison dare stir out.

’ ‘One of us,’ thought Raphael,--‘which one?

’ And, conquering his pride, he asked, as carelessly as he could, for Victoria.

‘She is there in the litter, poor child!

’ said her father in a serious tone.

‘Surely not ill?

’ ‘Alas!

either the overwrought excitement of months of heroism broke down when she found us safe at last’ or some stroke from God--....

Who can tell what I may not have deserved?

--But she has been utterly prostrate in body and mind, ever since we parted from you at Berenice.

’ The blunt soldier little guessed the meaning of his own words.

But Raphael, as he heard, felt a pang shoot through his heart, too keen for him to discern whether it sprang from joy or from despair.

‘Come,’ cried the cheerful voice of Synesius, ‘come, Aben-Ezra; you have knelt for Augustine’s blessing already, and now you must enter into the fruition of it.

Come, you two philosophers must know each other.

Most holy, I entreat you to preach to this friend of mine, at once the wisest and the foolishest of men.

’ ‘Only the latter,’ said Raphael; ‘but open to any speech of Augustine’s, at least when we are safe home, and game enough for Synesius’s new guests killed.

’ And turning away, he rode silent and sullen by the side of his companions, who began at once to consult together as to the plans of Majoricus and his soldiers.

In spite of himself, Raphael soon became interested in Augustine’s conversation.

He entered into the subject of Cyrenian misrule and ruin as heartily and shrewdly as any man of the world; and when all the rest were at a loss, the prompt practical hint which cleared up the difficulty was certain to come from him.

It was by his advice that Majoricus had brought his soldiery hither; it was his proposal that they should be employed for a fixed period in defending these remote southern boundaries of the province; he checked the impetuosity of Synesius, cheered the despair of Majoricus, appealed to the honour and the Christianity of the soldiers, and seemed to have a word--and that the right word--for every man; and after a while, Aben-Ezra quite forgot the stiffness and deliberation of his manner, and the quaint use of Scripture texts in far-fetched illustrations of every opinion which he propounded.

It had seemed at first a mere affectation; but the arguments which it was employed to enforce were in themselves so moderate and so rational that Raphael began to feel, little by little, that his apparent pedantry was only the result of a wish to refer every matter, even the most vulgar, to some deep and divine rule of right and wrong.

‘But you forget all this while, my friends,’ said Majoricus at last, ‘the danger which you incur by sheltering proclaimed rebels.

’ ‘The King of kings has forgiven your rebellion, in that while He has punished you by the loss of your lands and honours, He has given you your life for a prey in this city of refuge.

It remains for you to bring forth worthy fruits of penitence; of which I know none better than those which John the Baptist commanded to the soldiery of old, “Do no violence to any man, and be content with your wages.

”’ ‘As for rebels and rebellion,’ said Synesius, ‘they are matters unknown among as; for where there is no king there can be no rebellion.

Whosoever will help us against Ausurians is loyal in our eyes.

And as for our political creed, it is simple enough--namely, that the emperor never dies, and that his name is Agamemnon, who fought at Troy; which any of my grooms will prove to you syllogistically enough to satisfy Augustine himself.

As thus-- ‘Agamemnon was the greatest and the best of kings.

‘The emperor is the greatest and the best of kings.

‘Therefore, Agamemnon is the emperor, and conversely.

’ ‘It had been well,’ said Augustine, with a grave smile, ‘if some of our friends had held the same doctrine, even at the expense of their logic.

’ ‘Or if,’ answered Synesius, ‘they believed with us, that the emperor’s chamberlain is a clever old man, with a bald head like my own, Ulysses by name, who was rewarded with the prefecture of all lands north of the Mediterranean, for putting out the Cyclop’s eye two years ago.

However, enough of this.

But you see, you are not in any extreme danger of informers and intriguers....

The real difficulty is, how you will be able to obey Augustine, by being content with your wages.

For,’ lowering his voice, ‘you will get literally none.

’ ‘It will be as much as we deserve,’ said the young Tribune: ‘but my fellows have a trick of eating--’ ‘They are welcome, then, to all deer and ostriches which they can catch.

But I am not only penniless, but reduced myself to live, like the Laestrygons, on meat and nothing else; all crops and stocks for miles round being either burnt or carried off.

’ ‘E nihilo nihil!

’ said Augustine, having nothing else to say.

But here Raphael woke up on a sudden with-- ‘Did the Pentapolitan wheat-ships go to Rome?

’ ‘No; Orestes stopped them when he stopped the Alexandrian convoy.

’ ‘Then the Jews have the wheat, trust them for it; and what they have I have.

There are certain moneys of mine lying at interest in the seaports, which will set that matter to rights for a month or two.

Do you find an escort to-morrow, and I will find wheat.

’ ‘But; most generous of friends, I can neither repay you interest nor principal.

’ ‘Be it so.

I have spent so much money during the last thirty years in doing nothing but evil, that it is hard if I may not at last spend a little in doing good.

--Unless his Holiness of Hippo thinks it wrong for you to accept the goodwill of an infidel?

’ ‘Which of these three,’ said Augustine, ‘was neighbour to him who fell among thieves, but he who had mercy on him?

Verily, my friend Raphael Aben-Ezra, thou art not far from the kingdom of God.

’ ‘Of which God?

’ asked Raphael slyly.

‘Of the God of thy forefather Abraham, whom thou shalt hear us worship this evening, if He will.

Synesius, have you a church wherein I can perform the evening service, and give a word of exhortation to these my children?

’ Synesius sighed.

‘There is a ruin, which was last month a church.

’ ‘And is one still.

Man did not place there the presence of God, and man cannot expel it.

’ And so, sending out hunting-parties right and left in chase of everything which had animal life, and picking up before nightfall a tolerably abundant supply of game, they went homewards, where Victoria was entrusted to the care of Synesius’s old stewardess, and the soldiery were marched straight into the church; while Synesius’s servants, to whom the Latin service would have been unintelligible, busied themselves in cooking the still warm game.

Strangely enough it sounded to Raphael that evening to hear, among those smoke-grimed pillars and fallen rafters, the grand old Hebrew psalms of his nation ring aloft, to the very chants, too, which were said by the rabbi to have been used in the Temple-worship of Jerusalem....

They, and the invocations, thanksgivings, blessings, the very outward ceremonial itself, were all Hebraic, redolent of the thoughts, the words of his own ancestors.

That lesson from the book of Proverbs, which Augustine’s deacon was reading in Latin--the blood of the man who wrote these words was flowing in Aben-Ezra’s veins....

Was it a mistake, an hypocrisy?

or were they indeed worshipping, as they fancied, the Ancient One who spoke face to face with his forefathers, the Archetype of man, the friend of Abraham and of Israel?

And now the sermon began; and as Augustine stood for a moment in prayer in front of the ruined altar, every furrow in his worn face lit up by a ray of moonlight which streamed in through the broken roof, Raphael waited impatiently for his speech.

What would he, the refined dialectician, the ancient teacher of heathen rhetoric, the courtly and learned student, the ascetic celibate and theosopher, have to say to those coarse war-worn soldiers, Thracians and Markmen, Gauls and Belgians, who sat watching there, with those sad earnest faces?

What one thought or feeling in common could there be between Augustine and his congregation?

At last, after signing himself with the cross, he began.

The subject was one of the psalms which had just been read--a battle psalm, concerning Moab and Amalek, and the old border wars of Palestine.

What would he make of that?

He seemed to start lamely enough, in spite of the exquisite grace of his voice, and manner, and language, and the epigrammatic terseness of every sentence.

He spent some minutes over the inscription of the psalm--allegorised it--made it mean something which it never did mean in the writer’s mind, and which it, as Raphael well knew, never could mean, for his interpretation was founded on a sheer mis-translation.

He punned on the Latin version--derived the meaning of Hebrew words from Latin etymologies....

And as he went on with the psalm itself, the common sense of David seemed to evaporate in mysticism.

The most fantastic and far-fetched illustrations, drawn from the commonest objects, alternated with mysterious theosophic dogma.

Where was that learning for which he was so famed?

Where was that reverence for the old Hebrew Scriptures which he professed?

He was treating David as ill as Hypatia used to treat Homer--worse even than old Philo did, when in the home life of the old Patriarchs, and in the mighty acts of Moses and Joshua, he could find nothing but spiritual allegories wherewith to pamper the private experiences of the secluded theosophist.

And Raphael felt very much inclined to get up and go away, and still more inclined to say, with a smile, in his haste, ‘All men are liars.

’....

And yet, what an illustration that last one was!

No mere fancy, but a real deep glance into the working of the material universe, as symbolic of the spiritual and unseen one.

And not drawn, as Hypatia’s were, exclusively from some sublime or portentous phenomenon, but from some dog, or kettle, or fishwife, with a homely insight worthy of old Socrates himself.

How personal he was becoming, too!...

No long bursts of declamation, but dramatic dialogue and interrogation, by-hints, and unexpected hits at one and the other most commonplace soldier’s failing....

And yet each pithy rebuke was put in a universal, comprehensive form, which made Raphael himself wince--which might, he thought, have made any man, or woman either, wince in like manner.

Well, whether or not Augustine knew truths for all men, he at least knew sins for all men, and for himself as well as his hearers.

There was no denying that.

He was a real man, right or wrong.

What he rebuked in others, he had felt in himself, and fought it to the death-grip, as the flash and quiver of that worn face proclaimed....

But yet, why were the Edomites, by an utterly mistaken pun on their name, to signify one sort of sin, and the Ammonites another, and the Amalekites another?

What had that to do with the old psalm?

What had it to do with the present auditory?

Was not this the wildest and lowest form of that unreal, subtilising, mystic pedantry, of which he had sickened long ago in Hypatia’s lecture-room, till he fled to Bran, the dog, for honest practical realities?

No....

Gradually, as Augustine’s hints became more practical and orated, Raphael saw that there was in his mind most real and organic connection, true or false, in what seemed at first mere arbitrary allegory.

Amalekites, personal sins, Ausurian robbers and ravishers, were to him only so many different forms of one and the same evil.

He who helped any of them fought against the righteous God: he who fought against them fought for that God; but he must conquer the Amalekites within, if he expected to conquer the Amalekites without.

Could the legionaries permanently put down the lust and greed around them, while their own hearts were enslaved to lust and greed within?

Would they not be helping it by example, while they pretended to crush it by sword-strokes?

Was it not a mockery, an hypocrisy?

Could God’s blessing be on it?

Could they restore unity and peace to the country while there was neither unity nor peace within them?

What had produced the helplessness of the people, the imbecility of the military, but inward helplessness, inward weakness?

They were weak against Moors, because they were weak against enemies more deadly than Moors.

How could they fight for God outwardly, while they were fighting against him inwardly?

He would not go forth with their hosts.

How could He, when He was not among their hosts?

He, a spirit, must dwell in their spirits ....

And then the shout of a king would be among them, and one of them should chase a thousand....

Or if not--if both people and soldiers required still further chastening and humbling--what matter, provided that they were chastened and humbled?

What matter if their faces were confounded, if they were thereby driven to seek His Name, who alone was the Truth, the Light, and the Life?

What if they were slain?

Let them have conquered the inward enemies, what matter to them if the outward enemies seemed to prevail for a moment?

They should be recompensed at the resurrection of the just, when death was swallowed up in victory.

It would be seen then who had really conquered in the eyes of the just God--they, God’s ministers, the defenders of peace and justice, or the Ausurians, the enemies thereof....

And then, by some quaintest turn of fancy, he introduced a word of pity and hope, even for the wild Moorish robbers.

It might be good for them to have succeeded thus far; they might learn from their Christian captives, purified by affliction, truths which those captives had forgotten in prosperity.

And, again, it might be good for them, as well as for Christians, to be confounded and made like chaff before the wind, that so they too might learn His Name....

And so on, through and in spite of all conceits, allegories, overstrained interpretations, Augustine went on evolving from the Psalms, and from the past, and from the future, the assertion of a Living, Present God, the eternal enemy of discord, injustice, and evil, the eternal helper and deliverer of those who were enslaved and crushed thereby in soul or body....

It was all most strange to Raphael....

Strange in its utter unlikeness to any teaching, Platonist or Hebrew, which he had ever heard before, and stranger still in its agreement with those teachings; in the instinctive ease with which it seemed to unite and justify them all by the talisman of some one idea--and what that might be, his Jewish prejudices could not prevent his seeing, and yet would not allow him to acknowledge.

But, howsoever he might redden with Hebrew pride; howsoever he might long to persuade himself that Augustine was building up a sound and right practical structure on the foundation of a sheer lie; he could not help watching, at first with envy, and then with honest pleasure, the faces of the rough soldiers, as they gradually lightened up into fixed attention, into cheerful and solemn resolve.

‘What wonder?

’ said Raphael to himself, ‘what wonder, after all?

He has been speaking to these wild beasts as to sages and saints; he has been telling them that God is as much with them as with prophets and psalmists....

I wonder if Hypatia, with all her beauty, could have touched their hearts as he has done?

’ And when Raphael rose at the end of this strange discourse, he felt more like an old Hebrew than he had done since he sat upon his nurse’s knee, and heard legends about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

What if Augustine were right after all?

What if the Jehovah of the old Scriptures were not merely the national patron of the children of Abraham, as the Rabbis held; not merely, as Philo held, the Divine Wisdom which inspired a few elect sages, even among the heathen; but the Lord of the whole earth, and of the nations thereof?

--And suddenly, for the first time in his life, passages from the psalms and prophets flashed across him, which seemed to assert this.

What else did that whole book of Daniel and the history of Nebuchadnezzar mean--if not that?

Philosophic latitudinarianism had long ago cured him of the Rabbinical notion of the Babylonian conqueror as an incarnate fiend, devoted to Tophet, like Sennacherib before him.

He had long in private admired the man, as a magnificent human character, a fairer one, in his eyes, than either Alexander or Julius Caesar....

What if Augustine had given him a hint which might justify his admiration?....

But more.

What if Augustine were right in going even further than Philo and Hypatia?

What if this same Jehovah, Wisdom, Logos, call Him what they might, were actually the God of the spirits, as well as of the bodies of all flesh?

What if he was as near--Augustine said that He was--to the hearts of those wild Markmen, Gauls, Thracians, as to Augustine’s own heart?

What if He were--Augustine said He was--yearning after, enlightening, leading home to Himself, the souls of the poorest, the most brutal, the most sinful?

--What if He loved man as man, and not merely one favoured race or one favoured class of minds?....

And in the light of that hypothesis, that strange story of the Cross of Calvary seemed not so impossible after all....

But then, celibacy and asceticism, utterly non-human as they were, what had they to do with the theory of a human God?

And filled with many questionings, Raphael was not sorry to have the matter brought to an issue that very evening in Synesius’s sitting-room.

Majoricus, in his blunt, soldierlike way, set Raphael and Augustine at each other without circumlocution; and Raphael, after trying to smile and pooh-pooh away the subject, was tempted to make a jest on a seeming fallacious conceit of Augustine’s--found it more difficult than he thought to trip up the serious and wary logician, lost his temper a little--a sign, perhaps, of returning health in a sceptic--and soon found himself fighting desperately, with Synesius backing him, apparently for the mere pleasure of seeing a battle, and Majoricus making him more and more cross by the implicit dogmatic faith with which he hewed at one Gordian knot after another, till Augustine had to save himself from his friends by tripping the good Prefect gently up, and leaving him miles behind the disputants, who argued on and on, till broad daylight shone in, and the sight of the desolation below recalled all parties to more material weapons, and a sterner warfare.

But little thought Raphael Aben-Ezra, as he sat there, calling up every resource of his wit and learning, in the hope, half malicious, half honestly cautious, of upsetting the sage of Hippo, and forgetting all heaven and earth in the delight of battle with his peers, that in a neighbouring chamber, her tender limbs outspread upon the floor, her face buried in her dishevelled locks; lay Victoria, wrestling all night long for him in prayer and bitter tears, as the murmur of busy voices reached her eager ears, longing in vain to catch the sense of words, on which hung now her hopes and bliss-how utterly and entirely, she lead never yet confessed to herself, though she dare confess it to that Son of Man to whom she prayed, as to One who felt with tenderness and insight beyond that of a brother, a father, even of a mother, for her maiden’s blushes and her maiden’s woes.

CHAPTER XXII: PANDEMONIUM