New Foes With an Old Face
Preface
«A
picture of life in the fifth century must needs contain much which will be
painful to any reader, and which the young and innocent will do well to leave
altogether unread. It has to represent a very hideous, though a very great,
age; one of those critical and cardinal eras in the history of the human race,
in which virtues and vices manifest themselves side by side--even, at times, in
the same person, with the most startling openness and power. One who writes of
such an era labours under a troublesome disadvantage. He dare not tell how evil
people were; he will not be believed if he tells how good they were. In the
present case that disadvantage is doubled; for while the sins of the Church,
however heinous, were still such as admit of being expressed in words, the sins
of the heathen world, against which she fought, were utterly indescribable; and
the Christian apologist is thus compelled, for the sake of decency, to state
the Church's case far more weakly than the facts deserve.
Not, be it ever remembered, that
the slightest suspicion of immorality attaches either to the heroine of this
book, or to the leading philosophers of her school, for several centuries. Howsoever
base and profligate their disciples, or the Manichees, may have been, the great
Neo-Platonists were, as Manes himself was, persons of the most rigid and
ascetic virtue.
For a time had arrived, in which
no teacher who did not put forth the most lofty pretensions to righteousness
could expect a hearing. That Divine Word, who is 'The Light who lighteth every
man which cometh into the world,' had awakened in the heart of mankind a moral craving
never before felt in any strength, except by a few isolated philosophers or
prophets. The Spirit had been poured out on all flesh; and from one end of the
Empire to the other, from the slave in the mill to the emperor on his throne,
all hearts were either hungering and thirsting after righteousness, or learning
to do homage to those who did so. And He who excited the craving, was also
furnishing that which would satisfy it; and was teaching mankind, by a long and
painful education, to distinguish the truth from its innumerable counterfeits,
and to find, for the first time in the world's life, a good news not merely for
the select few, but for all mankind without respect of rank or race.
[…]
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 left them centuries before; 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
sheep-skin, 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; 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?» In Charles Kingsley, Hypatia, New
Foes With an Old Face, 1853, Project Gutenberg, 1971, 2002-2004, 10ª Edition, Fonthill Media, 2016,ISBN 978-178-155-546-0.
Cortesia de EFonthill/Wook/JDACT
JDACT, Charles Kingsley, Literatura, Filosofia, Matemática, Cultura,
