Hypatia | Page 5

people could offer no resistance to the
steadily-increasing tyranny of the Eastern Empire. In vain did such men
as Chrysostom and Basil oppose their personal influence to the hideous
intrigues and villainies of the Byzantine court; the ever-downward
career of Eastern Christianity went on unchecked for two more
miserable centuries, side by side with the upward development of the
Western Church; and, while the successors of the great Saint Gregory
were converting and civilising a new-born Europe, the Churches of the
East were vanishing before Mohammedan invaders, strong by living
trust in that living God, whom the Christians, while they hated and
persecuted each other for arguments about Him, were denying and
blaspheming in every action of their lives.
But at the period whereof this story treats, the Graeco-Eastern mind
was still in the middle of its great work. That wonderful metaphysic
subtlety, which, in phrases and definitions too often unmeaning to our
grosser intellect, saw the symbols of the most important spiritual
realities, and felt that on the distinction between homoousios and
homoiousios might hang the solution of the whole problem of humanity,
was set to battle in Alexandria, the ancient stronghold of Greek
philosophy, with the effete remains of the very scientific thought to
which it owed its extraordinary culture. Monastic isolation from family
and national duties especially fitted the fathers of that period for the
task, by giving them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with a
lifelong earnestness impossible to the more social and practical
Northern mind. Our duty is, instead of sneering at them as pedantic
dreamers, to thank Heaven that men were found, just at the time when
they were wanted, to do for us what we could never have done for
ourselves; to leave to us, as a precious heirloom, bought most truly with
the lifeblood of their race, a metaphysic at once Christian and scientific,
every attempt to improve on which has hitherto been found a failure;
and to battle victoriously with that strange brood of theoretic monsters
begotten by effete Greek philosophy upon Egyptian symbolism,
Chaldee astrology, Parsee dualism, Brahminic spiritualism-graceful and
gorgeous phantoms, whereof somewhat more will be said in the

coming chapters.
I have, in my sketch of Hypatia and her fate, closely followed authentic
history, especially Socrates' account of the closing scene, as given in
Book vii. Para 15, of his Ecclesiastical History. I am inclined, however,
for various historical reasons, to date her death two years earlier than he
does. The tradition that she was the wife of Isidore, the philosopher, I
reject with Gibbon, as a palpable anachronism of at least fifty years
(Isidore's master, Proclus, not having been born till the year before
Hypatia's death), contradicted, moreover, by the very author of it,
Photius, who says distinctly, after comparing Hypatia and Isidore, that
Isidore married a certain 'Domna.' No hint, moreover, of her having
been married appears in any contemporary authors; and the name of
Isidore nowhere occurs among those of the many mutual friends to
whom Synesius sends messages in his letters to Hypatia, in which, if
anywhere, we should find mention of a husband, had one existed. To
Synesius's most charming letters, as well as to those of Isidore, the
good Abbot of Pelusium, I beg leave to refer those readers who wish
for further information about the private life of the fifth century.
I cannot hope that these pages will be altogether free from
anachronisms and errors. I can only say that I have laboured honestly
and industriously to discover the truth, even in its minutest details, and
to sketch the age, its manners and its literature, as I found
them-altogether artificial, slipshod, effete, resembling far more the
times of Louis Quinze than those of Sophocles and Plato. And so I send
forth this little sketch, ready to give my hearty thanks to any reviewer,
who, by exposing my mistakes, shall teach me and the public
somewhat more about the last struggle between the Young Church and
the Old World.
CHAPTER I
: THE LAURA
In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian Era, some three
hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was

sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting
sand. Behind him the desert sand-waste stretched, lifeless, interminable,
reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of the cloudless vault of blue. At
his feet the sand dripped and trickled, in yellow rivulets, from crack to
crack and ledge to ledge, or whirled past him in tiny jets of yellow
smoke, before the fitful summer airs. Here and there, upon the face of
the cliffs which walled in the opposite side of the narrow glen below,
were cavernous tombs, huge old quarries, with obelisks and half-cut
pillars, standing as the workmen had