Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (26 page)

What does Jone tell Theophilus?
 
Who attends our meetings?
 
No name would surprise him, not even the name of Isidore, who turns out as much a failure as a Companion as he does a
Parabalanoi
.
 
He cannot be fully either for lack of spine and lack of mind.
 
As for the listing of my name, where else should I be but here…as I too am a spy?

Walking past Jone who thinks herself unseen in her guard’s room, Synesius and I share a sigh of indulgence.
 
Jone is ever a source of amusement.
 
In truth, if I could, I would save her from such things.

But as she is already “saved,” I would fail before I began.

~

Hypatia of Alexandria

I pace, waiting for the Companions to seat themselves in the atrium wherever they will, for Synesius to gather pillows for his full-bellied Catherine, who holds a sleeping Hypatios.
 
I wait for Minkah who must tend to some demand of Father’s.
 
We all wait as Isidore, late as ever, settles.
 
Nildjat Miw sits on the rim of the pool, talking to fish.
 
Any who understand, hide.

“Tonight,” I say when all is still, “I will tell you a story of Sophia.
 
Sophia’s tale is ancient, told before the people of India and the people of the Land of Silk, before the Egyptians, before even the Sumerians who are old indeed, and her name is as varied as the people who spoke of her.
 
Like all ‘true’ stories, Sophia’s asks eternal questions which are the questions I ask of you.
 
Who are we?
 
Why are we here?
 
What is here?
 
Why do we suffer?
 
What is death?”

My “saints” make faces, each face wondering if he or she is meant to answer these questions.
 
Before any try, I speak on.

“Before the Beginning of the World there was no thing.
 
The Egyptians called this no thing the Dazzling Darkness.
 
They called it Absolute Mystery.
 
The greatest of all Gnostic teachers and poets, Valentinus, called it
Bythos
, the Deep, teaching that
Bythos
 
was pure unmanifest Consciousness.
 
But what would a conscious No Thing which is No Where in No Time
be conscious
of
?
 
Plato had already taught that the first principle—stemming from this Consciousness—is intellect whose only function can be to think, and the only possible object of thought must be itself.
 
And then, at some unknowable point of no time, Consciousness contemplated itself into a First Idea: it knew itself by becoming both that which is known and that which knows, experience and witness.
 
And from this sprang the Many, meaning the World and all it contains.
 
Valentinus devised the Idea of the Godhead who, by thought alone, manifested itself as both male and female in the form of the Son.
 
From the Son came forth the Aeons, gendered pairs which are the divine powers or natures.
 
Together these made up the
Pleroma
, or the Fullness of Consciousness, and each pair played a role in the emerging world.
 
The last of these pairs was Sophia, which is Greek for Wisdom, and Christ, which is Greek for Savior.”

Already Isidore would speak, or otherwise make himself known.
 
But I allow him no room.

“But, said Valentinus, by being sent forth, the Aeons forgot their creator, yet longed to remember, sensing themselves incomplete.
 
On behalf of them all, Sophia carried this burden of longing, setting out on a quest to know God.
 
Believing herself alone, she strayed farther and farther from
Pleroma
, growing fearful and full of anguish.
 
Wandering in sorrow through a world spun of her own pain and her own longing for Source, Sophia lost herself in illusion.
 
And there, her suffering grew so great she cried out, God take me home!
 
And in that moment, her paired Aeon, the Christ, woke her from her suffering dream so that once again she knew her true eternal divinity in Consciousness.”

Isidore is now as a child who longs to leave a table.
 
He would speak.
 
He would not speak.
 
He would leave.
 
He would stay.
 
Though the other Companions would not have me see, I cannot miss the rolling of eyes, the sucking of teeth, the shifting in place.
 
Even Minkah, ever composed, loses patience with Isidore.

I open my arms.
 
I smile.
 
“Isidore, what torments you?”

“All this is…I couldn’t say.
 
What you say, it is all well and good—but Valentinus?
 
Valentinus is a heretic.”

“Is he?
 
Have they made him one now?
 
He was not when he lived.
 
When he lived he was friend to Origen.”

Isidore, for a single moment, is speechless.
 
We see he did not know this.
 
But he finds his voice, a voice I increasingly despair of.
 
“I find this talk of Sophia incomprehensible.
 
It makes no sense.
 
A thing which is no thing imagines other things?
 
There must be a reasoning Creator!
 
How could something come from nothing?”

“It did not.”

“But you said…”

“Valentinus did not teach the tale of Sophia as true.
 
By it, he wove truths.”

“What truths?
 
I have heard nothing true.”

“Then do not hear this.
 
All who teach a beginning are wrong.
 
The world had no beginning.
 
And what has no beginning is as a circle and can have no end, therefore all who wait for End Times will wait forever.
 
Plato and Plotinus were wrong.
 
There is no first principle.
 
There is no time, no space, no self, no matter.
 
The world was not thought into being from nothing.
 
It always was and always will be, constantly imagined by
All That Is
and
All That Is
is precisely that: All.
 
Sophia is the self we imagine we are, believing ourselves doomed to wander alone and lost through the world of sorrowing matter.
 
She is soul creating the perception of reality.
 
Christ is Sophia’s double and equal, what we sense as duality.”

Isidore’s breath comes faster and faster as I speak until it is labored.
 
“A female is equal to Christ?”

“Have you not heard me?
 
Christ is Gnosis, who comes if we call.
 
He awakens the dreamer.”

“Woman!
 
Are you saying the Christ was neither man nor God?”

Why answer?
 
He would not understand my answer.
 
Turning away, I speak to those who can “hear.”
 
“And when he comes, we remember once again that we are eternal and loved and filled with Spirit.
 
Sophia is the soul.
 
Christ is that which enlightens the soul.
 
Christians have denied and hidden Sophia in their
Holy Spirit
, a mysterious concept they do not explain.
 
And by so doing, they have unbalanced the world.
 
Without Sophia, Christ is alone…and is not called.
 
Without Christ, we remain asleep, lost in self-created illusion.”

There.
 
I have told them what it is I begin to sense has something of truth about it.
 
When I look again, Isidore is gone.
 
I had not noticed his leaving.

Nildjat Miw remains, the tip of her tongue poking from her closed mouth where it appears now forgotten.
 
One tooth shows, sharp as a thorn.
 
And then, she speaks—a most complex series of sounds.
 
I feel as Isidore; I can only imagine what they might mean.
 
I smile and I scratch her chin.
 
“Indeed,” I say, sure that I agree to something profound.

And then the atrium fills with the voices of my Companions.
 
The debate I have engendered lasts for hours, and when it is over I am limp with thought.

~

Though I believed him gone, Isidore sits in my workroom.
 
That I do not scream with surprise surprises me.
 
It is late and it is hot.
 
We swim in wet heat.

His back is bent with despair, his face black with anger.
 
I think of Synesius.
 
His whole life seems a lament.
 
Synesius would be bishop or he would not, he would leave what he loves or he would not.
 
Isidore’s life seems a tale of ill-use.
 
He would remain, humbled, without access to power.
 
He would find another kind of power.
 
He would have riches.
 
He would not.

 
I can help neither of them.

He speaks without looking at me.
 
“I am lost in the jaws of a lion.”

“Do you ask for advice?”

“As I love you, it is exactly your advice I cannot take.
 
I attend your lectures, Hypatia, I am called Companion.
 
But I remain a priest of Christ, and my faith is strong.”

“I love not your faith, but you…”—he would hear the word “love”; he leans forward to savor it, but it sticks in my throat—“…I care for.
 
No matter the price, you must follow your true belief.”

Throughout, his eyes are bleak.
 
What smolders within him escapes into flame.
 
“But the price, Hypatia!
 
So high; how can I pay?
 
To curry favor with Rome and with Constantinople, Theophilus abandons Origen.”
 
He slaps his thigh with a sound like the short sharp bark of a dog.
 
“Origen! What greater teacher of Christ has walked this earth?
 
Who brought together so much that was disparate, yet so worthy?
 
Philo the Jew, Numenius of Apamea who loved Pythagoras and Plato, your own Valentinus, these and more he bound round with his own godly thoughts.
 
Origen, not Theophilus, gave Christianity what it did not have, but which Hellenists gloried in and even Gnostics achieved: an orderly and self consistent system!
 
To remain with Origen I cannot also remain near Theophilus.
 
But if not a hermit, what choice is left me?
 
Do you know where it is I must go and do you know who is already there?”

He tells me what he has told me before.
 
I answer as I have answered before.
 
I am decided.
 
Isidore must leave the Companions.
 
Though I had hoped we did, we hold nothing for him.
 
I will tell him so kindly, but I will tell him.
 
And I do know where he must go; to the caves of men hardened by rage and made brutal by ignorance, fanatics driven from Alexandria by the hunger of their bishop.
 
This too decides me.
 
I must cause him pain.
 
To cause pain is to feel pain.
 
“As you cannot deny Origen, you will crouch in a cave, own only what you can carry, eat only what can be found there.
 
But you will sleep as a babe for you will be a principled man.”

Isidore shakes his head.
 
“All this is so.
 
And because it is so, I cannot sleep.
 
I cannot eat.
 
I cannot think.
 
I ask myself, over and over, in heaven’s holy name, how do I do this?”

“Isidore, I have read the gospels, the Bible, the commentaries.
 
The church of Theophilus darkens the light.
 
It takes from the world what was offered it by Jesus and by Origen: that the soul is eternal, existing before the body as it will exist after, that all come and go in this world living each life as an actor takes part in a play, and that no soul suffers an eternal hell.
 
Like ancient masters in the Valley of the Indus, Origen believed even the souls of demons, if demons there are, would return to their Source.
 
Are souls not free, he asked, and will they not, when perfected, restore themselves in
apokatastasis
to the Perfect Mind?”

Isidore comes close, too close.
 
“I knew you, of all, would see through to the truth…and I am asked to deny Origen!
 
If I do not comply, Theophilus will strip me of my priesthood!”

“Then you must leave.”

From flame, Isadore is swept yet again into gloom.
 
“But so too do I love my life here.”

“You love the role you play, as I love mine.
 
Like Sophia, we are daily fooled by them.
 
Even Origen lost himself in matter.”