A Pupil of Hypatia

TOWARD the middle of the last decade of the eventful fourth century A. D., when the great Theodosius, who had lately closed the pagan temples, was near his death at Milan, and the kingdom of this world was falling helplessly into its two halves of Eastern and Western empire, a distinguished young Greek from Cyrene, in North Africa, left his home to study philosophy in the still famous pagan school of Alexandria. His name was Synesius, and he had a pedigree beside which the best authenticated descent from the most grasping of mediæval barons appears insignificant. “ If I have no other merit,” he exclaimed long afterward, in the midst of a powerful appeal to his fellow-citizens against the rapacity of a base-born prefect, “ I am at least sprung from ancestors whose succession stands inscribed in your public records, from Eurystheus (the Heraclid), who led the Dorians into Sparta, down to my own father.”

But the future in store for him was well hidden from the mind of the young pilgrim of learning at the time when, after sailing eastward for four days along the African coast, he wrote gayly back from the mouth of the Alexandrian harbor to his brother left behind in Cyrene : “ The wind, though very light, has been always in our favor, so that, while our daily run seemed small, we insensibly made good progress, until, on the fifth evening, we descried the beacon-light which they kindle upon a lofty tower for the guidance of passing mariners. In less time than it takes to tell it, we had disembarked on the island of Pharos ; and a barren spot it is, with no trees or growing crops, but only a few salt grasses.” They had, in fact, landed at the base of the father of all lighthouses.

The venerable city which Synesius had quitted was one of five whence the great promontory which embraced them all derived its name of the Libyan Pentapolis. The adjoining country was both beautiful in its natural features and rich with the culture of a thousand years ; but Cyrene itself was no longer its capital, and is described by Ammianus Marcellinus at about this time as “ desert a,” — shrunk in population and falling into decay. The imposing aspect of the great metropolis to which the student went — or something very like grandeur — has been made familiar to the imagination of us all through historical romance and scenic representation. But let us try, as far as possible, to dismiss from our minds the idealized portraits of Hypatia and her contemporaries, and consider the sufficiently remarkable facts concerning the head of the Alexandrian school of that day as we find them dryly recorded by a contemporary, the ecclesiastical historian Socrates : —

“ There was a woman in Alexandria named Hypatia, a daughter of Theon the philosopher, — so learned that she surpassed all the savants of that time. She therefore succeeded to the chair of philosophy in that branch of the Platonic school which follows Plotinus, and gave public lectures on all the doctrines of the same. Wherefore students resorted to her from all parts ; for her deep learning made her both serious and fearless in speech, while she bore herself composedly even before the magistrates, and mixed among men, in public, without misgiving. Her exceeding modesty was extolled and revered by all. So then wrath and envy were kindled against this woman.” Socrates proceeds to record, in the same dispassionate strain, the unspeakable tragedy of Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob, twenty years later than the time of which we now speak, adding that the inconsistency of the crime with Christian professions created great indignation against Cyril and the whole Church of Alexandria ; and he concludes with the simple but significant remark, “ The thing was done during Lent.”

Not a written word of Hypatia’s own remains, nor the semblance of a formal report of any of her lectures. But we know, in a general way, what she taught, though we can only guess at the extent to which her lessons were enforced by the charm of her personality and the evident fervor of her convictions. She expounded that mystic NeoPlatonism, the last result of centuries of Greek speculation, embracing the remains of many philosophic systems, which had become the religion of nearly all those more elevated heathen minds which could no longer pretend, even to themselves, that they believed in the gods of Olympus. She taught the ultimate unity of one supreme God, remote, unsearchable, unapproachable even, in any direct fashion, by finite beings ; incapable also, as it would seem, of acting upon these except through intermediary agencies. From this transcendent One there issued, however, as inevitably as light from the sun, that universal Mind, whose innate ideas are the first patterns or prototypes of the things of sense. From the universal Mind there was thought to proceed a third and lesser deity, the world-soul, which pervades all the material universe, and of which the universe itself and the sentient beings whereby it is peopled are a direct emanation. Matter is evil ; soul is pure. Man, a mixture of the material and spiritual, has the power, by unflinching self-discipline and subjugation of the senses, to lift himself to a level whence he may receive from the universal Mind a direct revelation of divine truth. This glorious vision once attained, he can and will have no further desire, save to free himself entirely from the trammels of “ those things of time and sense which perish with the using,” and dare that plunge into the fathomless depths of the divine, described in the mystic phrase of Plotinus as “ the flight of the one to the One.”

A certain correspondence, on its metaphysical side, of this system with the new faith which had just become the state religion of the Roman Empire is at once apparent. On the practical side, if the new Academy did not proclaim, it certainly did not preclude, the love of one’s neighbor. At the same time, it was no religion for the multitude. It could not provide the “ joy of the spirit,” that ineffable boon of restored simplicity, of perfect relaxation, recuperation, reconciliation, for the strained and weary soul which was the crowning gift of the gospel of glad tidings to men of good will. But it could and did suffice, as the histories of Hypatia and Synesius and many others prove, for the formation of character.

To the public exposition of this abstract and austere creed Hypatia added instruction in rhetoric, in mathematics, in physics, as then understood; assuming, after a fashion, like every public teacher of that time, to cover the whole field of human knowledge. Synesius, who had no doubt been born and bred a NeoPlatonist, seems to have attended with special assiduity her lectures on mathematics and the art of oratory. Teacher and pupil were not far from the same age,¹ though Hypatia was presumably the elder. Synesius remained her pupil for more than a year, and it is plain that he soon became a favored, and in some sort an intimate one. They must already have been upon the easiest of terms when he could send her a friend (possibly his uncle Alexander, a philosopher of some renown) with such a word of introduction as follows : —

“To THE LADY PHILOSOPHER :

“ I seem to be playing the part of Echo, for I do but repeat the testimony of others in earnestly recommending to you the signal merits of Alexander.”

It was perhaps the death of his father which called the student rather abruptly back to Cyrene before the close of the year 395. At all events, there seems to have ensued, not long after, a division of the paternal estates, by which Synesius received the country house and farm, situated in an exceedingly fertile region near the borders of the Libyan Desert, about thirty miles south of Cyrene. He also came into possession of the family books — his father having been a man of letters as well as of leisure — and of the rustic slaves, whom he claims to have regarded as his personal friends, and whom he treated most humanely. The elder brother, Euoptius, fixed his residence at Phycus, the port of Cyrene, though he also spent much time at Alexandria. There was a sister, too, Stratonice, a woman so beautiful that Synesius himself says of her portrait-statue that one doubted whether it were hers or that of the golden Venus ; she married an officer of Arcadius’s guard, and lived in state at Constantinople. But before settling down to the country life which he so singularly loved, proposing to divide his time, as he himself tells us in his curious treatise on Dreams, “ between books and the chase,” the young philosopher felt bound to visit Athens.²

The "sacred” city, long fallen from her old glories, both of action and of art, had become a species of university town, venerable indeed and beautiful in its way, but to Synesius, after Alexandria, both dull and disappointing. To his brother, always his most frequent correspondent, he had written, just before setting out for Greece, in the lively vein that was natural to him : —

“ My journey to Athens will have two advantages : I shall get clear of my present worries, and I shall no longer be abashed by the erudition of those who have been there. Not that they seem to know much more about Plato and Aristotle than the rest of us mortals ; but because they have seen the Academy and the Lyceum, and the painted portico where Zeno used to lecture (painted no more, however, since some proconsul or other has carried off the pictures), they behave themselves among us like demigods among donkeys.”

From one of the stations of his return voyage he writes again, lamenting that there is nothing imposing about Athens now save the names of her famous localities. “ It is Egypt, in our day, which cultivates the seeds of wisdom gathered by Hypatia. Athens was once the very hearth and home of learning. Now it is the emporium of the honey trade ! ”

The difficulties mentioned in the first of these notes can hardly have been private embarrassments, since the fortunes of Synesius were very flourishing at that time. His reference is doubtless to the distracted condition of his native province, which had been visited, during the century then closing, with most of the traditional plagues of Egypt, beside being rent by earthquakes, desolated by the incursions of barbarous tribes, and plundered by the soulless and shameless rapacity of Roman governors. Now Cyrene had become a portion of the Eastern Empire, and the local senate resolved to exercise its privilege of sending a special ambassador to Constantinople, who should present the young Emperor Arcadius with a golden crown and a congratulatory address, represent the distress of the Pentapolis, and sue for imperial relief, both by the lightening of taxes and by the reinforcement of garrisons. Somewhat unwillingly, — for, as we have said, the life of his remote estate was exactly suited to his rural and scholarly tastes, — Synesius consented to undertake this mission, and in the already sumptuous capital of Constantine he passed the three years from 397 to 400. It was a period upon which he looked back with a sort of impatient regret, from amid the grave and pressing preoccupations of his later life. “ Oh, if I had not wasted those years ! ” he says in one place ; yet he tells us again that his mission was measurably successful, and they were years of no small moment in the world’s history, — great actors thronging the stage at Constantinople, and great events following one another with dramatic rapidity. Synesius was destined to see, during his sojourn in the Eastern capital, both its occupation and partial plunder by the Gothic soldiery of Gainas, and a great slaughter and subsequent expulsion of the barbarians, through an outburst of rare energy on the part of the citizens.

Rufinus, the infamous first minister of Arcadius, had speedily fallen, only to be succeeded by a worse miscreant than himself, in the contemptible person of the eunuch Eutropius. Through the machinations of the latter, the weakling Emperor had been married to the beautiful parvenue Eudoxia, whose insensate pride and extravagance John Chrysostom, the saint of the golden tongue, lately come from Antioch, and just now at the summit of his power in the metropolitan church, deplored and rebuked in vain. Synesius must have heard Chrysostom preach, probably many times, for we know from himself that he went often to the Christian churches, and found their services curiously attractive.

A majority of the imperial officers, though by no means all, were now nominal Christians ; and Synesius had come furnished with excellent introductions, while his genial and versatile spirit enabled him to make friends rapidly among clever men of all shades of speculative opinion. The highest in rank of these friends, as well as the most distinguished character among them, Aurelian, who was three times prætorian prefect, and consul in the year of Synesius’s return to Africa, is supposed to have embraced Christianity at about this time.

None of Synesius’s private letters from Constantinople have been preserved. If he wrote any, — and we can hardly fancy that so full and facile a correspondent failed to do so, — they seem never to have reached their destination. But there is an interesting note to Aurelian, written apparently not long after his return to Africa, to thank the consul for some signal service, which may be inserted here as indicating the love and reverence which he came to entertain for the man :

“ If states have souls, as indeed they have, — tutelary genii, divine guardians, — you must have won the grateful remembrance of all such, for benefits conferred while you held high office. Never doubt that these beings will at all times stand your friends and advocates ; beseeching the universal God to reward you, as you deserve, for having copied his dealings with men as closely as may be. For the power to do good is all men have in common with God ; and imitation is identification, and unites the follower to him whom he follows.”

This is the letter of a Platonist, certainly, but one who is no bigot, and who seems inclined, at least in his own fancy, to associate the watch and ward of dæmons and genii with the intercession of Christian saints.

It was not until 399, after he had been nearly two years in Constantinople, that, through Aurelian’s intercession, Synesius obtained personal access to the Emperor, and permission to deliver his long-prepared address. That address, retouched a little, no doubt, but substantially the same as it was spoken, has come down to us in the form of an essay on monarchical government, De Regno. It is very fine and outspoken in tone ; beginning with a picture of the ideal monarch, who thinks largely and lives simply, seeking always the best men for his officers, disdaining vain ostentation, cultivating the personal attachment of his Subjects, ever striving to lighten their burdens and to constitute himself their earthly providence. Proceeding from theory to practical application and appeal, the orator uses wonderfully little of servile circumlocution, but dwells upon the widespread misery and manifold perils of the time ; praying the young sovereign to come promptly to the aid, not of his own obscure province alone, but of all his people, if haply the sublime vision of Plato may at last be realized, and Arcadius himself embody, in his auspicious reign, the grand ideal of the philosopher-king.

The mournful vanity, as we know it now, of this Utopian dream invests the closing paragraphs of the De Regno with a pathos which they were probably far from breathing when uttered in the imperial presence ; for the general tone of the address is, after all, most sanguine. The only other piece of literary work which Synesius is known to have attempted in Constantinople was the first part of a sort of allegorical romance, entitled Ægyptius, or The Egyptian ; a story “ with a purpose,” designed to illustrate the providence of God in delivering the city from the Goths, through the instrumentality of Aurelian, who figured in the tale as Osiris.

It was the severe earthquake of the year 400, of which Chrysostom speaks as having sent the people in throngs to the churches, which finally caused Synesius to leave rather hastily for his African home. “ The sea seemed to me safer than the land,” he observes dryly. But he wrote back, at the first opportunity, to apologize for his unceremonious departure, and also to beg, with characteristic good nature, that a certain superb Egyptian rug, on which he had been used, to recline in the palace porticos while waiting to be received by the Emperor, might be given to the notary Asturius, who had always greatly admired it.

The homeward voyage was not altogether propitious, if, as appears to us most probable, it was then that he suffered the harmless shipwreck of which he has left us so amusing an account. He seems to have gone first to Alexandria, and thence to have embarked for Cyrene upon a coasting - vessel, which, after grounding twice, was driven helplessly out to sea, and finally had to discharge its passengers at the tiny port of Azarium. The letter sent back from this hamlet to Euoptius, then in Alexandria, is very graphic, and describes with much humor the apathy of the captain, who was so loaded with debt that he appeared, on the whole, to prefer foundering to meeting his creditors at Cyrene ; the fanaticism of the Jew pilot, who flatly refused to work at all on a Friday night because it was the preparation for the Sabbath, and who plainly thought it would be a good deed to drown as many Gentiles as possible ; the excitement of the women on board. Unhappily, this delightful letter is unreasonably long, as the writer himself acknowledges. On his arrival in his native city, he found a state of things calculated to subdue his exuberant spirits. The barbarians were again harrying the land, and the government officials, as usual, were offering no effective resistance. Synesius must have seen Hypatia, too, during that flying visit to Alexandria, and what seems his first letter after his arrival at Cyrene is addressed to her, and shows how little their honorable friendship had suffered during his three years’ absence in the East.

“ To the Lady Philosopher,”he begins, as usual, and then comes a verse from Homer : “' Though all things be forgotten in the home of the dead, yet even there, methinks, I shall remember my dear ’ Hypatia. But I am hemmed in by the troubles of my country, and much distressed on her behalf. Not a day passes that I fail to see men slain like cattle in some violent fray. The very air I breathe is foul with death ; my own turn is like to come next. For how can hope live under these most sorrowful skies, dark with the shadowing wings of birds of prey ? Yet here I am bound to remain so long as the present state of things continues. How else, indeed, being, as I am, a Libyan, brought up here, and with the tombs of no inglorious ancestors ever before my eyes ? You, I think, are the only being who could wean me from my country ; and not even you, so long as I am needed here.”

This, one would think, must have been in answer to an entreaty from Hypatia that he would forsake a scene so unfavorable to philosophic repose and reflection as the Cyrene of that period. It was a mania of the day, by which Christians and pagans were alike possessed, to find a peculiar merit in this kind of retreat from action and relinquishment of responsibility. But Synesius had Spartan blood in his veins, and his eminently manly and healthy instincts taught him a more excellent way. Presently we find him flinging off his momentary depression, organizing a stout resistance to the invaders, drilling recruits, and importing arms and other munitions of war. To his weaker brother, shivering with ague and apprehension at Phycus, he sends a stirring, not to say stinging appeal : —

“ Are we to stand tamely by, and see these wretches prepared to perish rather than surrender their ill-gotten booty to its rightful owners, and shall we care only to protect our miserable persons ? Shall we not rather brave all hazards for the homes, the shrines, the laws, endeared by such venerable associations ? We are no men if we hesitate. Myself, such as I am, I propose to have at the barbarians. I want to test in person the quality of their courage who presume to insult Roman citizens. Even a sick camel, as the proverb says, can carry the load of many asses, and I have observed that in affairs of this kind the men who are most anxious about their own lives usually die, while those who take no thought for themselves survive : I prefer to be one of the latter. I will fight though I perish, but I believe I shall survive. I am, at all events, a Lacedæmonian, and I remember the message of the ephors to Leonidas : ‘Let them (the soldiers) go prepared to resist to the death, and they will not die.’ ”

By and by the tyranny of the moment passed over : this particular outbreak of the empire’s incurable disease was subdued, and the savages retired for the nonce into their desert. Synesius could then go down with a clear conscience to his beloved country home, which had not yet been molested, and where, beside hunting regularly and with enthusiasm, and looking carefully after the culture of his fields and the welfare of his people, he applied himself once more to literary work. He completed the allegorical romance begun in Constantinople ; and it may have been at this time, also, that he wrote his jeu d’esprit on the advantages of baldness, as well as a poem on the pleasures of the chase, the Cynegetica, which has not come down to us.

The letters of this period ³ are again quite gay. There is one to his brother, describing the lamentable marriage which one of their kindred was about to make, and the flagrant levity and absurdity of the underbred bride ; the whole arrangement, plainly, being most distasteful to the descendant of Eurystheus. Then there is an interesting note to his lifelong friend Herculianus, who had been a fellow-pupil of his in Hypatia’s school, concerning the recapture of a fugitive slave : “ Not one of those whom I inherited, pray understand, or who have been brought up with me. These are all well educated, and have been treated so entirely as my equals that they love me as the master of their choice rather than dread in me a ruler appointed by law. This Philoromus belonged to my first cousin, the daughter of Amelius, and she made him over to me. But having been carelessly brought up, and never properly controlled, he could not endure the Spartan regimen of this philosophic house.”

Elsewhere, in reply to a letter in which Euoptius had bemoaned his own bad health, Synesius writes : —

“ What can you expect but chills and blood-poisoning, if you will stay on in that hot, unwholesome Phycus ? It would be a miracle if your health were not undermined. . . . But if you will only come to me, you may, please God, get quite well again. I never could understand the pleasure of stretching one’s self out upon a sandy beach, your only resource there. . . . But here you may sit under shady leafage, and when you are tired move on from tree to tree, or even from one grove to another, if you do not mind crossing a little brook. How softly the leaves rustle in the breeze ! What an endless variety of bird-notes ! Also of flowers and shrubs, some native and some cultivated ! The air is sweet, the earth lavishly generous. I '11 not praise my grotto of the nymphs, — it would need Theocritus to do that ; but I have not begun to tell you all.”

Here, too, not far from this time, Synesius must have written the first four of the ten so-called Hymns which bear his name. They are all in one or other of the short metres which were considered especially appropriate, in the fourth century,to this kind of composition ; but the early hymns of Synesius are purely Platonic rhapsodies, often strongly tinged with pantheism, always employing the phraseology of the school whose tenets he professed. Only when, in his attempt to express the Trinity of Plotinus, he uses terms like these, “ For where the depth of the Father is, there too, great offspring of his heart, is the glorious Son, who hath made the world in wisdom, and there shines the reconciling light of the Holy Spirit,” we must needs think that we see traces of that superficial, and, so to speak, sentimental attraction toward Christianity which he certainly experienced at Constantinople.

In the year 403, being then about thirty, Synesius went again to Alexandria for a visit of some length, and appears almost immediately to have fallen under the strenuous influence of Theophilus, the worldly, ambitious, and intriguing bishop of the metropolitan see. There is no need here to attempt an analysis of that complex and rather repulsive character. Theophilus will be remembered for his violent destruction, ten years or so before this time, of the crowning glory of Alexandrian architecture,— the assemblage of temples and porticos called the Serapeum, — which one of the great travelers of the period pronounced the only group of buildings in the world fit to be named beside the Capitol of golden Rome. He will be remembered well by all who are familiar with the most exquisite piece of religious biography ever written, Cardinal Newman’s life of St. John Chrysostom, as the grim foe of that radiant spirit, the man who virtually procured the final banishment into the winter Caucasus, and so the death from exposure, of the angelic orator. He will be remembered by a few as having trained to succeed himself in his sacred office his nephew Cyril, in the first years of whose episcopate Hypatia met her doom. But Theophilus was a man of considerable culture, and it would seem as if there must have been a nobler and more sympathetic side to his nature than these acts reveal, or Synesius could hardly have esteemed him as his later letters prove that he did. On the other hand, Synesius was obviously rather careless in his generosity, and easily credulous of good in other men.

Theophilus was already bishop at the time of Synesius’s first, visit to the Egyptian capital, nine years before ; indeed, the Serapeum must have been destroyed before the Cyrenean ever saw the place. As one among the crowd of pagan undergraduates, He was very unlikely to have attracted the notice of the astute prelate, but now the case was altered. Not only had the still youthful Synesius been ambassador to the Eastern court, and come back with a certain reputation both as a statesman and as a, scholar, but he had become a landed proprietor and a local magnate. His soul might be no better worth saving than when he was obscure, but he was now a very desirable acquisition to any party.

It is plain, at all events, from Synesius’s own expressions that it was Theophilus who "arranged,” as the phrase is, a marriage for him with a Christian maiden, besides performing with his own august hands the ceremony which united them. It is a slender little ghost, this of Synesius’s Christian bride, flitting swiftly and shyly across the dismal historic page, never so much as called by name. We know, from allusions both in letters and in the later Hymns, that her husband loved her tenderly, and that he defended her position, when afterward it came to be assailed, with a chivalry rare enough in those times. We know that she lived to bear him three boys, of whom the oldest, at least, was born in Alexandria, and we literally know no more. The most probable conclusion, and the happiest perhaps for her, is that she died before her children, and while Still very young. She had, plainly, no interest in her husband’s literary work, any more than she can have sympathized with his philosophical opinions; and it was to the greater woman, earlier known and always “ platoideally ” loved, that he still turned for sympathy and counsel, and continued to turn until the end.

During the first year of his married life, while yet in Alexandria, he wrote, in answer to some severe criticisms on his modes of thought and expression, a sort of apologia, or history of his own mental development, which he entitled Dion, and dedicated to his unborn child. But he would not publish it without Hypatia’s approval, and he submitted to her judgment, along with the manuscript, of the Dion, the curious essay on Dreams, already mentioned, written, as he says, in one night, — “ or rather in the latter half of one night ; ” “ the one effort being inspired by man, the latter directly by God.” To these, “ by way of making complete the number ” (that is, the number three, beloved of every Platonist), he added a copy of the letter with which, when in Constantinople, he had accompanied the gift to a certain great personage there of a silver astrolabe, or engraved chart of the celestial sphere ; and, in the longest letter to her which we have, he earnestly requests the impartial judgment of Hypatia on the value of all these productions. It was probably favorable, since they all exist ; and the De Insomniis, at least, is full of subtle psychological suggestion, and may still be read with interest by those whom such subjects attract. But in none of them do we find anything which in the smallest degree prepares us to look upon Synesius as a Christian convert, and the reader must judge from the strangely moving letter presently to be quoted how far the masterful patriarch was justified in so regarding him.

In 405 Synesius quitted Alexandria once more, and returned with his wife and child to Cyrene. So good a patriot must needs have felt that his place was there, for the times were worse than ever. He went back to lead for four years more the sort of life which he had broken off in 403, — periods of harassing civic and military service alternating with ever briefer and more precarious intervals of rest in the country home. The letters usually referred to this time are numerous and always high-spirited, if no longer particularly hopeful. Two more boys were born to Synesius ; and when they were old enough to begin learning, a little cousin, son of Euoptius, used to share their studies, while a niece, the child, apparently, of the beautiful Stratonice, and greatly beloved by both her uncles, was often a member of the household. But the year 409 brought a sudden arrest, and wrought a great revolution in this anxious and laborious, yet full, humane, and eminently unselfish life.

The Bishop of Ptolemais, now the capital of the Pentapolis, died, and it happened to Synesius, as it had done five and thirty years before to the great Ambrose, to be named, while as yet unbaptized, by popular acclamation, to the vacant see. The cases were after all not very similar. Ambrose, though a layman and a lawyer, was a Christian by tradition and conviction. Synesius, when the popular vote was earnestly enforced by Theophilus as patriarch of the African Church, found himself in a position of painful perplexity. The bishop of those days was also a civil magistrate, clothed with great authority ; and so far as the temporal half of his duties went, Synesius probably knew that he was better fitted, by practical experience and the confidence that had been spontaneously reposed in him, to defend the rights and interests of his unhappy compatriots than any other man upon whom their choice might have fallen. But how about his fitness for the spiritual functions of the episcopate, the preparation of heart and mind, the initial and essential gift of faith in the risen Christ ? Theophilus might be willing to waive subtleties for the sake of putting a strong man in a difficult place, but Synesius, in the rectitude of his pagan conscience, revolted from so equivocal a position.

The upshot of his mental conflict was that he set forth, in a letter addressed to his brother in Alexandria, but expressly intended to be laid before the Christian authorities there, the fullest and frankest statement possible of his own principles and opinions. Every line of this document — the most significant in some respects of all that have survived out of that transition time — is painfully interesting. We must content ourselves with a few quotations.

After expressing his deep sense of the honor done him by the people of Ptolemais, and of the shame it would be in him to accept that honor unworthily, “ You understand,” he says. “ how it is with me. . . . I habitually divide my days between study and amusement. In the study, especially of things divine, I can isolate and absorb myself completely, but in my pleasures I am peculiarly social. You know that the moment I have shut my books I am ready for any kind of diversion. . . . But a bishop should be a holy man, as inaccessible as God himself to the charm of vain amusements. Ten thousand eyes are on him, scanning the consistency of his life, whose owners will derive scant profit, if any, from their gaze unless he be given over to serious things, and proof against any temptation to pleasure. Even in sacred matters he is not free to think exclusively of himself, but should take thought for all, as one who is a teacher of laws by which his own conversation is ruled. The labors of all devolve upon him, and unless he is able to perform his task unaided he exposes himself to universal blame.” Synesius goes on to say that undoubtedly there are men strong enough to move without staggering under so enormous a load, and at the same time keep the divine spark alight within themselves, but that he is not one of them. He is conscious of misdemeanors and stains without number. But he who undertakes to purify the lives of others should himself be spotless. There is more than this, however, and he cares not who knows it. “ Nay, rather I have written with the express purpose of making clear to all men my extreme reluctance to assume this burden, in order that, whatever happens, I may have a conscience void of offense before God and man, and especially before Father Theophilus. For if I tell the truth about myself without reserve, and then leave the decision of my case to him, I ought certainly to be clear of blame. God, therefore, and the laws of my country, and the sacred hands of Theophilus himself have given me a wife, and I hereby declare to the whole world that I will neither put her away nor have clandestine intercourse with her. The one would be contrary to divine, the other to human law. Furthermore, it is the wish of my heart to have a numerous and noble progeny. There is also another point, . . . concerning which he (Theophilus), indeed, has nothing to learn, but I must needs recall it to his memory, pending future discussion, for it is perhaps the most important of all. It is difficult, I may say it is impossible, that a truth scientifically demonstrated, and once accepted by the understanding, should ever be eradicated from the mind. Now you know that much of what is held by the mass of men is utterly repugnant to philosophy. It is absolutely impossible for me to believe either that the soul is created subsequently to the body, or that this material universe will ever perish. As for that doctrine of the resurrection which they bruit abroad, to me it is a sacred mystery, but I am far enough from sharing the popular view.” He goes on to say that he does not himself believe in imparting transcendental verities to the vulgar. The mass of men ought, he thinks, to be approached in another fashion. “ If it were decent for me to accept this charge on the condition of thinking my own thoughts at home, and telling fables to the people abroad, neither teaching them anything new nor disabusing them of old errors, but leaving them exactly where they were before, I might do so. . . . As to preaching doctrines that I do not hold, I call God and man to witness that this I will not do. Truth is of the essence of God, before whom I desire to stand blameless, and the one thing that I cannot undertake is to dissimulate. . . . If, therefore, after this statement, which I have desired to make as explicit as possible, he whom God has empowered shall choose to enroll me among his bishops, I shall submit to the necessity, and regard my commission as divine. I say to myself that I should unhesitatingly obey any mandate of the Emperor, or even of his meanest officer, and how can I dally when it is God who commands ? ”

Theophilus, as we know, had no hesitation about accepting these terms. He allowed Synesius seven months for deliberation and the study of doctrine, a proceeding as irregular as was the appointment to high ecclesiastical office of a man who had passed through none of the preliminary grades ; and so strong, sometimes, during this interval, were the dissuasions of the dæmonic voice in Synesius’s own breast that he confesses, in various letters, to having prayed for death, and even meditated flight from his native country, to escape the sharp dilemma. At the end of the period, however, he received consecration, and entered, with little heart, indeed, but with heroic resolve, upon the duties of the sacred office.

The records of his brief and anxious episcopate are tolerably full, but we do not propose to enter into them minutely. All his favorite pursuits were put aside. He managed the temporal affairs of his diocese with a vigor and ability which answered the highest expectations of his sponsor ; he even launched, with signal effect, the thunders of excommunication against an incorrigible imperial officer. He conscientiously studied the Scriptures, of which, at the outset of his ecclesiastical career, he confessed himself almost completely ignorant, and, in the two short homilies of his which we possess, he makes no inapt use of that Biblical phraseology which was then de rigueur for a preacher.

Less conventional, and indeed almost incredibly ingenuous, is a letter which he addressed to his clergy collectively, very soon, as it would seem, after assuming office : “ I would have dared more than one death to escape this charge, for which I felt myself so unfit. . . . How can I ever, under the manifold pressure of affairs, attain again to those joys of the mind whose first condition is untroubled leisure ? And to me and my kind, life is barely livable without such joys. I myself am not equal to this. But with God, they say, all things are possible, — even the impossible. Pray for me, therefore, and direct that prayer be made, both publicly and privately, in every church, whether of city, village, or country, if haply by his mercy I may find the priesthood a help rather than a hindrance to philosophy.”

Compilers of patrologies and ecclesiastical biographers, most of all the learned and indefatigable Druon, have done their best, as they were bound to do, to represent the conversion of Synesius as authenticated by the sacraments which he must have received, to explain away the anomalies of his position ; to charge to an oversensitive humility his obstinate and distressful misgivings. To us the whole moral point and pathos of his story lie in the fact that, for all his rectitude and piety and his deep awe of the episcopal office, he was never, properly speaking, a Christian. A “ change of heart ” he hardly needed ; but whether or no a change of the mature mind be impossible, as he had so simply and solemnly professed his belief, it is clear that, from the hour when Synesius’s manly scruples were overborne, his own comfort of soul and poise of spirit were fatally impaired. He does indeed appeal, in his later hymns, to the Son of God as Helper and Saviour. It is as if he craved that Christian consciousness, that sense of the personal sympathy and support of One who had promised to be with his people alway, which he must have seen suffice to so many humbler converts. But for him the access to that visionary peace was barred. Private calamities crowded upon him : his fortune melted away, his health was broken, one after another his children were all taken, his house was left unto him desolate. The old props were withdrawn ; the new sustained but imperfectly. To his friend Anastasius, after discussing the case of Andronicus, whom he had excommunicated, he wrote, in the sickness of his heart : —

“ With me the cure of misfortune has been fresh misfortune. One tempest of the soul has followed another. My very grief for the loss of my boy is now aggravated by wrath ” (over the affair of Andronicus). “ Do you know that the day of my own death was once foretold to me, and that it proved to be the day on which I was made bishop ? My life is changed indeed ! Formerly I passed it light-heartedly, as though it were a continual feast-day, and I enjoyed human honors and intellectual pleasures more than any other man who ever embraced philosophy : and this not merely because of my external advantages, but through the strength and steadfastness of my own soul. Now all is lost ; and the saddest and most desperate part of it is, that whereas formerly my prayers were always answered, now I have come to feel that prayer also is vain.”

But the days of this anguish were mercifully shortened ; and, as the end approached, we find Synesius opening his heart to his early teacher as he could have done to no other living friend. There are two more short letters to Hypatia, and they run as follows : —

“ To THE LADY PHILOSOPHER :

“ Fate, which has taken from me ‘ many and brave children,’ has nevertheless not taken my all. She cannot rob me of the love of right, or of the disposition to relieve suffering ; she cannot, please God, transform my nature. I have hated injustice, as was meet. How gladly would I also prevent it ! But the ability to do this is among the things which I have lost. It vanished before my children.

‘The Milesians wore brave men in days of yore.'⁴

“ There was a time when I had the power to assist my friends ; when you called me the providence of others, and even accused me of abusing, on their behalf, my influence with the great. I did indeed employ the latter like my own hands. Now, however, I have no resources remaining, unless you can aid m e; for I count you, like my honor, among the good things of which I cannot be deprived. Your influence is still great, and it would be impossible for you to use it otherwise than nobly. I therefore recommend to your protection and that of all your friends, whether in public or in private life, two very distinguished young men, relatives, Nicæus and Philolaus, who desire to recover their patrimony.”

Later still we have what is probably the last letter of Synesius. It is the cry of a brave but heart-broken man, — a faltering confession of mortal weakness and final defeat : —

“ I am dictating from my couch these lines which I trust may find you well, — my sister, my mother, my teacher ! to whom I owe so much, who deserve every honorable name I can give you. My bodily infirmity comes of the sickness of my soul. The memory of my dead children overpowers me. Synesius ought never to have survived his good days. Like a torrent long dammed up, calamity burst upon me, and the savor of life is gone. If I cannot forget the graves of my children, let me die. But you, may you live and prosper ! Greet all my more fortunate comrades for me : the aged Theotecnus first, and after him Athanasius, whom I loved like a brother, and all the rest. And if there be any other who is now very near your heart, greet him too in my name as a cherished friend, for your affection is enough to recommend him. If you care for me still, it is well ; if not, this too I can understand.”

There is no record of Synesius’s death, but it is supposed to have taken place in 414. He had been some five years bishop, and was about forty. If he died in that year, one horror, at least, was spared him. He did not hear that his revered instructress had been torn limb from limb in Alexandria, before the high altar of “ the church which is called Cæsar’s ; ” for this happened on the 15th of March, 415.

“ Remember March, the Ides of March remember.”

The successor of Synesius in the bishopric of Ptolemais was named Euoptius ; but whether or no this was his own less distinguished brother is uncertain.

Harriet Waters Preston.

Louise Dodge.