Hypatia quotes

his hard hands and sinewy sunburnt limbs told of labour and endurance; his flashing eyes and beetling brow, of daring, fancy, passion, thought, which had no sphere of action in such a place.

What did his glorious young humanity alone among the tombs?

So perhaps he, too, thought, as he passed his hand across his brow, as if to sweep away some gathering dream, and sighing, rose and wandered along the cliffs, peering downward at every point and cranny, in search of fuel for the monastery from whence …

the sand was slipping down and piling up around them, their heads were frosted with the arid snow; everywhere was silence, desolation—the grave of a dead nation, in a dying land.

And there he sat musing above it all, full of life and youth and health and beauty⁠—a young Apollo of the desert.

His only clothing was a ragged sheepskin, bound with a leathern girdle. His long black locks, unshorn from childhood, waved and glistened in the sun; a rich dark down on cheek and chin showed the spring of healthful manhood;

So down he went, hardly daring to raise his eyes to the alluring iniquities of the painted imagery which, gaudy in crimson and blue, still blazed out upon the desolate solitude, uninjured by that rainless air.

But he was young, and youth is curious; and the devil, at least in the fifth century, busy with young brains.

Now Philammon believed most utterly in the devil, and night and day devoutly prayed to be delivered from him; so he crossed himself, and ejaculated, honestly enough, “Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity!” … and looked nevertheless. …

and the devil, at least in the fifth century, busy with young brains. Now Philammon believed most utterly in the devil, and night and day devoutly prayed to be delivered from him; so he crossed himself, and ejaculated, honestly enough,

“Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity!”⁠ ⁠… and looked nevertheless.

…

“Ah!” said the abbot, as if suddenly relieved from a heavy burden. “But how knewest thou them to be women, when thou hast never yet, unless thou liest—which I believe not of thee—seen the face of a daughter of Eve?”

“Perhaps⁠—perhaps,” said Philammon, as if suddenly relieved by a new suggestion⁠—“perhaps they were only devils. They must have been, I think, for they were so very beautiful.”

“Ah! how knowest thou that devils are beautiful?”

“Perhaps—perhaps,” said Philammon, as if suddenly relieved by a new suggestion—“perhaps they were only devils. They must have been, I think, for they were so very beautiful.”

“Ah! how knowest thou that devils are beautiful?”

“I was launching the boat, a week ago, with Father Aufugus;

And obeyed he was, with a loyal, reasonable love, and yet with an implicit, soldierlike obedience, which many a king and conqueror might envy. Were they cowards and slaves? The Roman legionaries should be good judges on that point.

They used to say that no armed barbarian, Goth or Vandal, Moor or Spaniard, was so terrible as the unarmed monk of the Thebaid.

Twice the old man lifted his staff to strike; twice he laid it down again; and then, slowly rising, left Philammon kneeling there, and moved away deliberately, and with eyes fixed on the ground, to the house of the brother Aufugus.

The beautiful can never die. If the gods have deserted their oracles, they have not deserted the souls who aspire to them. If they have ceased to guide nations, they have not ceased to speak to their own elect.

If they have cast off the vulgar herd, they have not cast off Hypatia.

“Ay. To believe in the old creeds, while everyone else is dropping away from them. … To believe in spite of disappointments. … To hope against hope.

“And multiplying, I don’t doubt. Well, there will be less loss to the empire if I have to crucify a dozen or two, as I positively will, the next riot.

It is really a great comfort to a statesman that the masses are so well aware that they deserve hanging, and therefore so careful to prevent any danger of public justice depopulating the province.

But how go on the schools?”

“Let them go. If you are secure in the consciousness of innocence, what matter?”

“Consciousness of innocence? I shall lose my prefecture!”

“Your danger would just be as great if you took notice of it. Whatever happened, you would be accused of favouring the Jews.”

scribbling one half-hour on philosophy, and the next on farriery; sitting up all night writing hymns and drinking strong liquors; off again on horseback at four the next morning; and talking by the hour all the while about philosophic abstraction from the mundane tempest.

Heaven defend me from all two-legged whirlwinds!

By the by, there was a fair daughter of my nation came back to Alexandria in the same ship with me, with a cargo that may suit your highness.”

“It is the root and marrow of all philosophy.

Your practical man, poor wretch, will try to help this and that, and torment his soul with ways and means, and preventives and forestallings; your philosopher quietly says⁠—‘It can’t be helped.’

If it ought to be, it will be—if it is, it ought to be.

The Donatists pitted again fairly against the orthodox, to cut each other’s throats in peace … no more of Cyril’s spying and talebearing to Constantinople. … Not such a bad dish of fare. … But then—it would take so much trouble!”

With which words, Orestes went into his third warm bath for that day.

“Ask him in Greek, man.”

“Greek is a slave’s tongue. Make a slave talk to him in it, not me.”

“Here—some of you girls! Pelagia! you understand this fellow’s talk. Ask him how far it is to Asgard.”

“You must ask me more civilly, my rough hero,” replied a soft voice from underneath the awning.

“Beauty must be sued, and not commanded.”

“Come, then, my olive-tree, my gazelle, my lotus-flower, my—what was the last nonsense you taught me?—and ask this wild man of the sands how far it is from these accursed endless rabbit-burrows to Asgard.”

“Do leave the wild man, and come,” growled the Amal from within the palanquin. “You are not going to turn nun, I hope?”

“Not while the first man I ever met in the world stays in it,”

answered Pelagia, as she skipped into the palanquin, taking care to show the most lovely white heel and ankle, and, like the Parthian, send a random arrow as she retreated.

A devout woman, full of good works, and sorely ill-treated by her heathen husband. Peter, thou shalt go to her tomorrow with the physician, and see if she is in need of anything. Boy, thou hast done well.

Cyril never forgets.

Now bring up those Jews. Their Rabbis were with me two hours ago promising peace: and this is the way they have kept their promise. So be it. The wicked is snared in his own wickedness.”

I have faced naughty little Eros like a man, rod in hand. What could a poor human being do more than try to marry her to someone else, in hopes of sickening himself of the whole matter?

Well, every moth has its candle, and every man his destiny.

But the daring of the little fool! What huge imaginations she has! She might be another Zenobia, now, with Orestes as Odenatus, and Raphael Aben-Ezra to play the part of Longinus, and receive Longinus’s salary of axe or poison. She don’t care for me;

The old woman, unable to restrain her impatience, literally ran at him, gnashing her teeth, and, before he was aware, dragged him out of bed upon the floor, where he stood meekly wondering what would come next.

“Many thanks, mother, for having saved me the one daily torture of life⁠—getting out of bed by one’s own exertion.”

“Raphael Aben-Ezra! are you so besotted with your philosophy and your heathenry, and your laziness, and your contempt for God and man, that you will see your nation given up for a prey, and your wealth plundered by heathen dogs?

“

The cause wants martyrs. Send the boy to me.

”

“Two are quite difficult enough to keep.

Youth is rash in promises, and rasher in forgetting them.

Promise me that, whatever happens, you will not strike the first blow.”

… a crowd of philosophers and philosophasters, students, and fine gentlemen, following her in reverend admiration across the street to her lecture-room, a ragged beggar-man, accompanied by a huge and villainous-looking dog, planted himself right before her, and extending a dirty hand, whined for an alms.

Hypatia, whose refined taste could never endure the sight, much less the contact, of anything squalid and degraded, recoiled a little

, and bade the attendant slave get rid of the man with a coin.

… And a whisper thrilled through the inmost depth of his soul—“Is there a Gospel? Is there a Spirit of Christ? Would not their fruits be different from these?”

Faint, and low, and distant, was that whisper, like the mutter of an earthquake miles below the soil.

And yet, like the earthquake-roll, it had in that one moment jarred every belief, and hope, and memory of his being each a hair’s-breadth from its place. … Only one hair’s-breadth. But that was enough;

Such moments come to every free-willed creature. Happy are those who have not, like poor Philammon, been kept by a hotbed cultivation from knowing how to face them?

But he had yet to learn, or rather his tutors had to learn, that the sure path toward willing obedience and manful self-restraint, lies not through slavery, but through liberty.

He was not certain which was Hypatia’s house; but the door of the Museum he could not forget.

Look at those thousand birds—and without our Father not one of them shall fall to the ground: and art thou not of more value than many sparrows, thou for whom God sent His Son to die? …

Ah, my friend, we must look out and around to see what God is like.

It is when we persist in turning our eyes inward, and prying curiously over our own imperfections, that we learn to make a God after our own image, and fancy that our own darkness and hardness of heart are the patterns of His light and …

Many a man I have seen who, in his haste to fly from the fiends without him, has forgotten to close the door of his heart against worse fiends who were ready to harbour within him.

Many a monk, friend, changes his place, but not the anguish of his soul.

I have known those who, driven to feed on their own thoughts in solitude, have desperately cast themselves from cliffs or ripped up their own bodies, in the longing to escape from thoughts, from which one companion, one kindly voice, might have delivered them.

Well, friend!—and what if thou art troubled at times by anxieties and schemes for this brother and for that?

Better to be anxious for others than only for thyself. Better to have something to love⁠—even something to weep over⁠—than to become in some lonely cavern thine own world⁠—perhaps, as more than one whom I have known, thine own God.

”

“I am a plain man, and know nothing about arguments.

If a thing be true, let it lead where it will, for it leads where God wills.

”

But she disdained. …

People are apt to disdain what they know they cannot do.

… ‘It was an axiom,’ it was, ‘like one and one making two.’.

and they are every one of them dead dolls, wooden, worked with wires, which are petitiones principii. … Each philosopher begs the question in hand, and then marches forward, as brave as a triumph, and prides himself—on proving it all afterwards.

No wonder that his theory fits the universe, when he has first clipped the universe to fit his theory.

Have I not tried my hand at many a one—starting, too, no one can deny, with the very minimum of clipping, … for I suppose one cannot begin lower than at simple ‘I am I’ … unless—which is equally demonstrable—at ‘I am not I.’

“I? Heaven forbid! I have gone right through that slough, and come out sheer on the other side. For sweeping the last lingering taint of it out of me, I have to thank, not sulphur and exorcisms, but your soldiers and their morning’s work.

Philosophy is superfluous in a world where all are fools.

”

“

What better thing can happen to a fool, than that God should teach that he is one, when he fancied himself the wisest of the wise?

Listen to me, sir. Four mouths ago I was blessed with health, honour, lands, friends—all for which the heart of man could wish.

but nevertheless it had fallen fast asleep for the time being. He did not disbelieve it; he would have been shocked to hear such a thing asserted of him: but he happened to be busy believing something else—geometry, conic sections, cosmogonies, psychologies, and whatnot.

And so it befell that he had not just then time to believe in Christianity.

He recollected at times its existence; but even then he neither affirmed nor denied it.

“Don’t be stingy, prince, for the honour of the Goths,” said Smid, laughing.

“If I take in gold I pay in iron,” answered Wulf, drawing half out of its sheath the huge broad blade, at the ominous brown stains of which the studentry recoiled

; and the whole party swept into the empty lecture-room, and seated themselves at their ease in the front ranks.

The old man looked up sadly and tenderly, and answered in a low voice, meant only for her ear—

“And how can I help weeping, when I see anything as beautiful as you are destined to the flames of hell forever?”

“The flames of hell?” said Pelagia, with a shudder. “What for?”

Philammon recoiled across the pavement, with eyes flashing defiance.

A slave! The light of heaven grew black to him.

… Oh, that Hypatia might never know his shame! Yet it was impossible. Too dreadful to be true. …

I want a faith past arguments; one which, whether I can prove it or not to the satisfaction of the lawyers, I believe to my own satisfaction, and act on it as undoubtingly and unreasoningly as I do upon my own newly-rediscovered personal identity.

I don’t want to possess a faith. I want a faith which will possess me.

And if I ever arrived at such a one, believe me, it would be by some such practical demonstration as this very tent has given me.”

“Pardon me, my friends, I do not doubt it a moment.

I know enough of the world never to have found a sheepdog yet who would not, on occasion, help to make away with a little of the mutton which he guarded.

Eh, my venerable sir?” turning to Wulf with a knowing bow.

“

Like a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman who is without discretion.

”

“Not to thank me, but to obey me; for mind, I can prove your debt to me, every obol, and claim it if I choose. But don’t fear; I won’t be hard on you, just because you are in my power.

I hate everyone who is not so. As soon as I have a hold on them, I begin to love them. Old folks, like children, are fond of their own playthings.

”

“I? I know everything.

I know what the swallows say when they pass each other on the wing, and what the fishes think of in the summer sea.

You, too, will be able to guess some day, without the teraph’s help. But in the meantime you must enter Orestes’s service. Why?—What are you hesitating about? Do you not know that you are high in his favour?

“Better to keep it secret till others tell it.

Reserved knowledge is always reserved strength

; and if the man, as I hope he does not, intends evil to the Church, let him commit himself before you use your knowledge against him.

And really, Orestes’s power of getting through business, when he chose, was surprising enough.

A cold head and a colder heart make many things easy.

But Philammon’s whole soul was fixed on those words. “His bride elect!”.

And for the time being, he would make a pathetic appeal to respectability and moderation in general, of which Alexandria, wherein some hundred thousand tradesmen and merchants had property to lose, possessed a goodly share.

Respectability responded promptly to the appeal; and loyal addresses and deputations of condolence flowed in from every quarter

, expressing the extreme sorrow with which the citizens had beheld the late disturbances of civil order, and the contempt which had been so unfortunately evinced for the constituted authorities:

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.

“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.”

“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?”

“And is one still.

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

”

“Let me see. … No. They may make inquiries there. Drown him at sea.

Nobody can ask questions of the sharks.

”

“

Oh, that the mob had but one throat, that I might give them an emetic!

Well, we must buy more corn, that’s all.”

He wished to enjoy my smiles to the last moment, and then to cast me off, when I had once given him an excuse. … Too cowardly to upbraid me, he let me ruin myself, to save him the trouble of ruining me.

Oh, men, men! all alike! They love us for their own sakes, and we love them for love’s sake.

We live by love, we die for love, and yet we never find it, but only selfishness dressed up in love’s mask.

… Too cowardly to upbraid me, he let me ruin myself, to save him the trouble of ruining me. Oh, men, men! all alike! They love us for their own sakes, and we love them for love’s sake.

We live by love, we die for love, and yet we never find it, but only selfishness dressed up in love’s mask.

… And then we take up with that, poor, fond, self-blinded creatures that we are!—and in spite of the poisoned hearts around us, persuade ourselves that our latest asp’s egg, at least, will hatch into a dove, and that though all men are faithless, our …

and even if she missed of that, better for her the cell in the desert than a life of self-contented impurity! If that latter were her destiny, as Hypatia said, she should at least die fighting against it, defying it, cursing it!

Better virtue with hell, than sin with heaven!

And Hypatia had not even promised her a heaven. The resurrection of the flesh was too carnal a notion for her refined and lofty creed.

“No! No drugs; no magic!

He must love me really, or not at all!

He must love me for myself, because I am worth loving, because he honours, worships me, or let me die.

I, whose boast was, even when I was basest, that I never needed such mean tricks, but conquered like Aphrodite, a queen in my own right!

I have been my own love-charm: when I cease to be that, let me die!

”

“So much the better.

I never found mine till I lost it.

”

Above all, I must let no Christian say, that the philosopher dared less than the fanatic. If my Gods are Gods, then will they protect me: and if not, let your God prove His rule as seems to Him good.”

Raphael tore the letter to fragments.

… The guards, at least, were not gone mad like the rest of the world. It wanted half an hour of the time of her lecture. In the interval he might summon force enough to crush all Alexandria.

“I have thought of them this day: and I do not believe you! No—I do not! God is not so cruel as you say! And if He were:—to lose my love, that is hell!

Let me burn hereafter, if I do but keep him now!

”

Their heavenly man! Odin’s own son, their joy and pride, and glory! Their “Kingdom of heaven,” as his name declared him, who was all that each wished to be, and more, and yet belonged to them, bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh!

Ah, it is bitter to all true human hearts to be robbed of their ideal, even though that ideal be that of a mere wild bull, and soulless gladiator.

…

“No. … One of them I saw behave this very afternoon worthy of a Vala. And they, too—they may make heroes’ wives after all, yet. …

Women are better than I fancied, even the worst of them.

No. Go down, heroes, and throw the gates open; and call in the Greek hounds to the funeral supper of a son of Odin.”

Miriam looked at him with a quiet smile.

“The witch is accustomed long ago to hear fools lay on her the consequences of their own lust and laziness.”

“Hew her down, Smid, son of Troll, that she may pass the Amal’s soul and gladden it on her way to Niflheim.”

The mob had weltered and howled ineffectually around the house for some half-hour.

But the lofty walls, opening on the street only by a few narrow windows in the higher stories, rendered it an impregnable fortress.

Suddenly, the iron gates were drawn back, disclosing to the front rank the court, glaring empty and silent and ghastly in the moonlight. For an instant they recoiled, with a vague horror, and dread of treachery:

From three different doors issued a line of Goths, whose helmets and mail-shirts made them invulnerable to the clumsy weapons of the mob, and began hewing their way right through the living mass, helpless from their close-packed array.

True, they were but as one to ten; but what are ten curs before one lion?

… And the moon rose higher and higher, staring down ghastly and unmoved upon that doomed court of the furies, and still the bills and swords hewed on and on, and the Goths drew the corpses, as they found room, towards a dark pile in …