Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face Part 60

'Surely,' said she half carelessly: but not unwilling, like a philosopher and a Greek, as a matter of course, to embark in anything like a word-battle, and to shut out sadder thoughts for a moment.

'Then must not the Autanthropos, the archetypal and ideal man, who is more perfect than any individual specimen, be perfectly righteous also?'

'Yes.'

'Suppose, then, for the sake of one of those pleasant old games of ours, an argument, that he wished to manifest his righteousness to the world.... The only method for him, according to Plato, would be Glaucon's, of calumny and persecution, the scourge and the cross?'

'What words are these, Raphael? Material scourges and crosses for an eternal and spiritual idea?'

'Did you ever yet, Hypatia, consider at leisure what the archetype of man might be like?'

Hypatia started, as at a new thought, and confessed-as every Neo-Platonist would have done-that she had never done so.

'And yet our master, Plato, bade us believe that there was a substantial archetype of each thing, from a flower to a nation, eternal in the heavens. Perhaps we have not been faithful Platonists enough heretofore, my dearest tutor. Perhaps, being philosophers, and somewhat of Pharisees to boot, we began all our lucubrations as we did our prayers, by thanking G.o.d that we were not as other men were; and so misread another pa.s.sage in the Republic, which we used in pleasant old days to be fond of quoting.'

'What was that?' asked Hypatia, who became more and more interested every moment.

'That philosophers were men.'

'Are you mocking me? Plato defines the philosopher as the man who seeks after the objects of knowledge, while others seek after those of opinion.'

'And most truly. But what if, in our eagerness to a.s.sert that wherein the philosopher differed from other men, we had overlooked that in which he resembled other men; and so forgot that, after all, man was a genus whereof the philosopher was only a species?'

Hypatia sighed.

'Do you not think, then, that as the greater contains the less, and the archetype of the genus that of the species, we should have been wiser if we had speculated a little more on the archetype of man as man, before we meddled with a part of that archetype,-the archetype of the philosopher?.... Certainly it would have been the easier course, for there are more men than philosophers, Hypatia; and every man is a real man, and a fair subject for examination, while every philosopher is not a real philosopher-our friends the Academics, for instance, and even a Neo-Platonist or two whom we know? You seem impatient. Shall I cease?'

'You mistook the cause of my impatience,' answered she, looking up at him with her great sad eyes. 'Go on.'

'Now-for I am going to be terribly scholastic-is it not the very definition of man, that he is, alone of all known things, a spirit temporarily united to an animal body?'

'Enchanted in it, as in a dungeon, rather,' said she sighing.

'Be it so if you will. But-must we not say that the archetype-the very man-that if he is the archetype, he too will be, or must have been, once at least, temporarily enchanted into an animal body?.... You are silent. I will not press you.... Only ask you to consider at your leisure whether Plato may not justify somewhat from the charge of absurdity the fisherman of Galilee, where he said that He in whose image man is made was made flesh, and dwelt with him bodily there by the lake-side at Tiberias, and that he beheld His Glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father.'

'That last question is a very different one. G.o.d made fles.h.!.+ My reason revolts at it.'

'Old Homer's reason did not.'

Hypatia started, for she recollected her yesterday's cravings after those old, palpable, and human deities. And-'Go on,' she cried eagerly.

'Tell me, then-This archetype of man, if it exists anywhere, it must exist eternally in the mind of G.o.d? At least, Plato would have so said?'

'Yes.'

'And derive its existence immediately from Him?'

'Yes.'

'But a man is one willing person, unlike to all others.'

'Yes.'

'Then this archetype must be such.'

'I suppose so.'

'But possessing the faculties and properties of all men in their highest perfection.'

'Of course.'

'How sweetly and obediently my late teacher becomes my pupil!'

Hypatia looked at him with her eyes full of tears.

'I never taught you anything, Raphael.'

'You taught me most, beloved lady, when you least thought of it. But tell me one thing more. Is it not the property of every man to be a son? For you can conceive of a man as not being a father, but not as not being a son.'

'Be it so.'

'Then this archetype must be a son also.'

'Whose son, Raphael?'

'Why not of "Zeus, father of G.o.ds and men"? For we agreed that it-we will call it he, now, having agreed that it is a person-could owe its existence to none but G.o.d Himself.'

'And what then?' said Hypatia, fixing those glorious eyes full on his face, in an agony of doubt, but yet, as Raphael declared to his dying day, of hope and joy.

'Well, Hypatia, and must not a son be of the same species as his father? "Eagles," says the poet, "do not beget doves." Is the word son anything but an empty and false metaphor, unless the son be the perfect and equal likeness of his father?'

'Heroes beget sons worse than themselves, says the poet.'

'We are not talking now of men as they are, whom Homer's Zeus calls the most wretched of all the beasts of the field; we are talking-are we not?-of a perfect and archetypal Son, and a perfect and archetypal Father, in a perfect and eternal world, wherein is neither growth, decay, nor change; and of a perfect and archetypal generation, of which the only definition can be, that like begets its perfect like?.... You are silent. Be so, Hypatia.... We have gone up too far into the abysses....

And so they both were silent for a while. And Raphael thought solemn thoughts about Victoria, and about ancient signs of Isaiah's, which were to him none the less prophecies concerning The Man whom he had found, because he prayed and trusted that the same signs might be repeated to himself, and a child given to him also, as a token that, in spite of all his baseness, 'G.o.d was with him.'

But he was a Jew, and a man: Hypatia was a Greek, and a woman-and for that matter, so were the men of her school. To her, the relations and duties of common humanity shone with none of the awful and divine meaning which they did in the eyes of the converted Jew, awakened for the first time in his life to know the meaning of his own scriptures, and become an Israelite indeed. And Raphael's dialectic, too, though it might silence her, could not convince her. Her creed, like those of her fellow-philosophers, was one of the fancy and the religious sentiment, rather than of the reason and the moral sense. All the brilliant cloud-world in which she had revelled for years,-cosmogonies, emanations, affinities, symbolisms, hierarchies, abysses, eternities, and the rest of it-though she could not rest in them, not even believe in, them-though they had vanished into thin air at her most utter need,-yet-they were too pretty to be lost sight of for ever; and, struggling against the growing conviction of her reason, she answered at last-

'And you would have me give up, as you seem to have done, the sublime, the beautiful, the heavenly, for a dry and barren chain of dialectic-in which, for aught I know,-for after all, Raphael, I cannot cope with you-I am a woman-a weak woman!'

And she covered her face with her hands.

'For aught you know, what?' asked Raphael gently.

'You may have made the worse appear the better reason.'

'So said Aristophanes of Socrates. But hear me once more, beloved Hypatia. You refuse to give up the beautiful, the sublime, the heavenly? What if Raphael Aben-Ezra, at least, had never found them till now? Recollect what I said just now-what if our old Beautiful, and Sublime, and Heavenly, had been the sheerest materialism, notions spun by our own brains out of the impressions of pleasant things, and high things, and low things, and awful things, which we had seen with our bodily eyes? What if I had discovered that the spiritual is not the intellectual, but the moral; and that the spiritual world is not, as we used to make it, a world of our own intellectual abstractions, or of our own physical emotions, religious or other, but a world of righteous or unrighteous persons? What if I had discovered that one law of the spiritual world, in which all others were contained, was righteousness; and that disharmony with that law, which we called unspirituality, was not being vulgar, or clumsy, or ill-taught, or unimaginative, or dull, but simply being unrighteous? What if I had discovered that righteousness, and it alone, was the beautiful righteousness, the sublime, the heavenly, the G.o.dlike-ay, G.o.d Himself? And what if it had dawned on me, as by a great sunrise, what that righteousness was like? What if I had seen a human being, a woman, too, a young weak girl, showing forth the glory and the beauty of G.o.d? Showing me that the beautiful was to mingle unshrinking, for duty's sake, with all that is most foul and loathsome; that the sublime was to stoop to the most menial offices, the most outwardly-degrading self-denials; that to be heavenly was to know that the commonest relations, the most vulgar duties, of earth, were G.o.d's commands, and only to be performed aright by the help of the same spirit by which He rules the Universe; that righteousness was to love, to help, to suffer for-if need be, to die for-those who, in themselves, seem fitted to arouse no feelings except indignation and disgust? What if, for the first time, I trust not for the last time, in my life, I saw this vision; and at the sight of it my eyes were opened, and I knew it for the likeness and the glory of G.o.d? What if I, a Platonist, like John of Galilee, and Paul of Tarsus, yet, like them, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, had confessed to myself-If the creature can love thus, how much more its archetype? If weak woman can endure thus, how much more a Son of G.o.d? If for the good of others, man has strength to sacrifice himself in part, G.o.d will have strength to sacrifice Himself utterly. If He has not done it, He will do it: or He will be less beautiful, less sublime, less heavenly, less righteous than my poor conception of Him, ay, than this weak playful girl! Why should I not believe those who tell me that He has done it already? What if their evidence be, after all, only probability? I do not want mathematical demonstration to prove to me that when a child was in danger his father saved him-neither do I here. My reason, my heart, every faculty of me, except this stupid sensuous experience, which I find deceiving me every moment, which cannot even prove to me my own existence, accepts that story of Calvary as the most natural, most probable, most necessary of earthly events, a.s.suming only that G.o.d is a righteous Person, and not some dream of an all-pervading necessary spirit-nonsense which, in its very terms, confesses its own materialism.'