The story in the Gospels cannot, I suppose, be taken as au pied de lettre historical; but no doubt it gives a general picture which is true enough. And the picture it gives shows the Jewish proletariat in very favorable contrast with the officials heads of the church and state. They, the common people, received the Teacher well; to them, he was a gracious figure whom they came in multitudes to hear. He was in fierce opposition to the hierarchic aristocracy,—the "scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites," as he called them: the body that nourished the tradition of exclusiveness and intolerance. He preached pure ethics to the people, and they loved him for it. He gathered round him disciples,—men eager to learn from him that which it would have been ridiculous to have tried to teach the mob: the Secret Wisdom, without which to keep them sweet, ethics become sentimentalism, and philosophy a cold corpse. It is a law in the Schools of this Wisdom that seven years of training are necessary before the disciple can reach that grade of insight and self-mastery which will enable him in turn to become a Teacher: seven years at the very least. Within four years of the beginning of his mission, before, in the nature of things, one single disciple could have been more than half-trained, the hierarchic aristrocracy had had this Teacher crucified.
Who, then, was to transmit his doctrine? he wrote nothing of it down; in the truest sense it never can be written down: had never had time to teach it; from any writings whatsoever each student can only gain the nexus of what he is to learn from life; for teaching does not mean giving dissertations, arguments, proofs; enunciating principles, and explaining them, or the like. It means, so far as one dare try to express it, bringing such experiences to bear on the lives of those who are to be taught, as shall awaken their own inner perceptions to truth. So this Man's doctrine was never transmitted. His disciples, good and earnest men, as we may imagine, had not the weapons spiritual wherewith to wage effective warfare for the Light. Supposing H.P. Blavatsky had died in 1879….?
The next step was, the inevitable materialization of the whole movement. It followed the course all such movements must follow, that are without spiritual leadership at the head, spiritual wisdom at the core. It reacted against the exclusiveness of Judaism,—and at the same time inherited it. Feelings of that sort lie far deeper than the articles of belief; a change of creed will not remove them; it needs special, defined, and herculean efforts to remove them. You might, for example, react from a bigoted creed to one whose sole proclaimed article was universal toleration, and become a fierce bigot in that,—for the creed, not the idea; because creeds always obscure ideas: when a creed is formulated, it means that ideas are shelved. So now Chrisitianity inherited the Chosen People dogma, but transferred it from a racial-ecclesiastical to a wholly ecclesiastical basis; and, since every Teacher comes upon a cyclic impusle outward, took on a missionary spirit. The Chosen People now were the members of the church, who might belong to any race. Within that churchly pale you were saved; you were a special protege of the Maker of Sirius and Canopus and the far limits of the galaxy; who had—for a dogma had to be invented to explain the untimely disastrous death of the Teacher,—incarnated and been crucified in Judea. Outside that pale you were damned,—from Caesar on his throne to the smallest newsboy yelling false news in the Forum. While such a spirit had been confined to the Jews, it had been comparatively harmless; now it was spreading broadcast through the Roman world, an entirely new thing, and the darkest and most ominous yet.
Whom, then, shall we blame? These sectarians?—No: to understand is to forgo the imagined right apportioning blame. It was that humanity had entered on a dark region in time: a region whose terrors had not been forefended; to be entered perforce by a humanity, or section of humanity, that had no Center of Light established in its midst. Had Croton of Pythagoras survived; or the Mysteries at Gaulish Bibracte: had there been but one firm foothold for the Lodge in the world of men;—I think none of these things could have come about; and that for the same reason that you cannot have total darkness in a room in which a lamp is lighted. But this darkness was total: intolerance is the negation of spiritual light. Of all the various movements in the Roman world that had not actual members of the Lodge behind and moving them, Christianity had the greatest impetus; and it was the one that first entered into this murk and deadly gloom. So that it may seem, to an impartial but not too deeply-seeing eye, as if it were Christianity that invented the gloom. Not so; nor Judaism neither; nor any Christians nor Jews. It was the men who burned Croton; the man who killed the Mysteries in Gaul. For every disaster there are causes far and far back.
Christianity had spread, by this third century, perhaps as much through the Parthian empire as through the Roman. The Zoroastrians had been as tolerant as the Romans; much more so to Christianity;—though the motive of their toleration had been pure indifference to everything religious; whereas in Rome there was statesmanship and wisdom behind theirs. The Persians reacted against Parthianism in all its manifestations. They were shocked at Parthian indifference. The Persian is as naturally religious as the Hindoo: and has the virtues and vices of the religious temperament. The virtues are a tendency to mysticism, a need to concern oneself with the unseen; the vices, a non-immunity to fanaticism and bigotry. They came down now from their mountains determined to combat the slackness; the indifference, the materialism of the world. The virus of intolerance was in the air,—a spirit like the germ of plague or any epidemic; one religion catches it from another. Let it be about, and you are in danger of catching it, unless your faith is based on actual inner enlightenment, and not faith at all, but knowledge; or unless you have a Teacher so enlightened to adjust you, and keep you too busy to catch it;—or unless you are totally heedless of the unseen. The Persians were not indifferent, but very much in earnest; and they had no knowledge, but only faith: so they stood in peculiar danger. And presently a Teacher came to them, and they rejected him.
His name was Mani; he was born in Ctesiphon, of noble Persian family, probably in 215; and came forward as a Teacher (according to the Mohammedan tradition, which is the most trustworthy) at the coronation of Sapor I, Ardashir's successor, in 242. Sapor at first was disposed to hear him; but the Magi moved heaven and earth to change that disposition. Ardashir had bound church and state together in the closest union: no worship but the Zoroastrian was allowed in his dominions. This was mainly aimed at the Christians, and must have caused them much discomfort. But Mani, it would seem, rose against all this narrow-ness. It has been said that he taught Reincarnation, and again denied;—this much he taught certainly,—that all religions are founded on one body of truth. He drew his own doctrine from Zoroistrianism, Christianity (chiefly Gnostic), and Buddhism; taking from each what he found to be true. Manichaeism spread quickly, through the Roman world as well as through Persia; in the former it replaced Mithraism, another Persian growth, that had come to be preeminently the religion of the Roman soldier. Sapor looked on him favorably; Hormizd, the heir apparent, was more or less a disciple; but the Magi agitated. They arranged a great debate before the king, and therein convinced him; persuaded him, at least, to withdraw from the Teacher the light of his countenance;—and Mani found it expedient, or perhaps was compelled, to go into exile. In China; where the fimily of the Ts'ao Ts'ao who expelled the Eastern Hans, was reigning as the House of Wei in the north. There Mani busied himself, less in teaching his religion than in studying Chinese civilization,— especially its arts and crafts, and most of all, carpet-weaving. Presently he ventured back to Persia, with a large knowledge of Chinese methods and a large collection of specimens;—with which he gave a new impetus to Persian art and manufactures. Hormizd came to the throne in 271, and befriended him and his doctrine; but reigned only a single year. His successor Bahram I in the name of Zoroastrianism had him flayed and crucified.
So Sassanian history is, on the whole, uninteresting. Their culture stood for no great ideas; only for a narrow persecuting church. West Asia was not ready yet for great and world-important doings; it must wait for these till Mohammed, who struck into the very least promising quarter of it, and kindled in the barbarous wilderness a light to redeem the civilization of the western world. I shall hardly have to turn to the Sassanians again; so will say here what is to be said. We have seen that their empire was quite unlike the Parthian; it was a reversion to, and copy in small of, the Achaemenian of Cyrus and Darius. It never attained the size of that; and only late in its existence, and to a small degree, overflowed the Parthian limits. But it was a well-organized state, with a culture of its own; and enough military power to stand throughout its existence the serious rival of Rome. Its arts and crafts became famous, —thanks largely to Mani; in architecture it revived the Achaemenian tradition, with modifications of its own; and passed the result on to the Arabs when they rose, to be the basis of the Saracenic Style. There was a fairly extensive literature: largely religious, but with much also in belles lettres, re-tellings of the old Iranian sagas, and the like. Its history is mainly the record of gigantic wars with Rome; these were diversified later by tussles with the Turks, Ephthalites or White Huns, et hoc genus omne. Its whole period of existence lasted from 227 to 637; 410 years;—which we may compare with the 426 of the Hans, and the Roman 424 from the accession of Augustus to the final division of the empire. Of its cycles, there is a little information forthcoming; but we may say this: Sapor I came to the throne in 241, succeeding his father Ardashir; he had on the whole a broad outlook; favored Mani at first; was at pains to bring in teachers of civilization from all possible sources;—with his reign the renaissance of the arts and learning, such as it was,—and it was by no means contemptible,— began. Three times thirteen decades from that, and we are at 631. The thirteen decades (less a year) from 499 to 628 are mainly filled with the reigns of Kavadh I and the two Chosroeses,—
"Kai-Kobad the great and Kai-Khusru,"
—all three strong kings and conquerors. When Chosroes II was killed in 628, after a war with Heraclius that began brilliantly and ended in disaster,—the empire practically fell: split up under several pretenders, to be an easy prey for the Moslems a few years later. Was the whole Sassanian period divisible into a day, a night, and a day? Information is not at hand whereby one might gauge the life of the people, and say. The last thirteen decades, certainly, seem to have left their mark as an age of glory on the Persian imagination, and to have been remembered as such in the days of Omar Khayyam.—And here we must leave the Sassanians, having other fish to fry.
We saw the Crest-Wave strike Rome (at Nerva's accession) in 96; then, 131 years later, raise up Ardashir and Persia in 227; —and so, I suppose, should incline to look east again, and jump another thirteen decades, and land in India, in 357 or thereabouts,—praying God to keep us from a bad fall. India I allow; but look before you leap;—or, if you will, in mid-air turn over in your minds the old Indian cycles, as far as you know them, and see if they offer you any prospect of a landing-place. As thus: there were the Mauryas, 320 to 190 B. C.; thence on thirteen decades to 60 B.C.,—and near enough to the reputed 58 of the reputed Vikramaditya of Ujjain. On again (thirteen decades as usual) to the seventies A.D.—and good enough in all conscience for that slippery Kanishka who so dodges in and out among the early centuries, and is fitted with a new date by everyone who has to do with him. On again, from 70 to 200; nothing doing there, I regret to say, (that we know about). Never mind; on thence to 320,—the nearest point to our 357; let us land in the three-twenties then, and see what happens.
On solid ground: for India, remarkably solid. There actually was a Golden Age there at that time; and everybody seems to agree that it lasted, say, one hundred and twenty-nine years; from 326 to 455. This you will note, was the period of the last phase of the Roman Empire: that of its rapid decline. In 323 Constantine came to the throne, and began making Chrisitianity the state religion; in 330 he moved his capital. After 456, no emperor ruled in the west but for puppets set up by the German Ricimer, two set up by Constantinople, and Romulus Augustulus, the last,—and all within twenty years. There is no bright spot within the whole thirteen decades, except the two years of Julian. The faucet was turned on in India; and the Roman garden went waterless, and wilted.
What happened was this: in 320, one Chandragupta Gupta married the Pincess of Magadha; and an era was dated from their coronation on the 26th of February in that year. Their son Samudragupta succeeded his father in 326, and reigned until 375. It is characteristic of India that this, probably the greatest monarch since Asoka, is absolutely unmentioned in any history or contemporary literature: the sole evidence for his reign and greatness comes from coins and inscriptions. One of the latter is to be found on a pillar originally set up and inscribed by Asoka, now in the fort at Allahabad. It shows him a mighty conqueror, reigning over all Hindustan; victorious in the Deccan; and, by influence and alliances, dominant from Ceylon to the Oxus. His coins picture him playing on the lyre; the inscriptions speak of him as a poet and musician; in his reign began a great renaissance in art, architecture, literature, and perhaps especially in music,—a renaissance which reached its culmination in the reign of his successor. Another thing to note: when of old time Pushyamitra overturned the Buddhist Mauryas, he showed his Brahmin orthodoxy by performing the great Horse Sacrifice;—a sign that the ancient religion had come back in triumph. They let loose a horse to wander where it would, and followed it with an army for a whole year; then sacrificed it. Samudragupta performed the same rites;—and it is known that the Gupta age was one of strong reaction against Buddhism. I know that it is disputed now that there was ever a persecution of the Buddhists in India; but the tradition remains; and one of the Teachers, in a letter that appears either in the Occult World or Esoteric Buddhism, speaks of India as a land from which the Light of the Lodge had been driven with the followers of the Buddha. Certainly there were Buddhists in India long after this time: even a great Buddhist king in the seventh century: but it seems more than probably that the spirit of intolerance went east with the eastward cyclic flow we have noted this evening: from Christianity to Zoroastrianism: from Zoroastrianism under the Sassanids to Brahminism under the Guptas.
Not, perhaps, that there was actual persecution, yet. Emissaries from the king of Ceylon found the shrine at Buddhagaya fallen into decay; and they themselves were not well treated at the site. The Buddhist kind, however, determined to remedy things as well as he could. He sent ambassadors with rich gifts to Samundragupta; who called the gifts tribute, and permitted him, on consideration thereof, to restore the shrine. The monastery then built by the Sinhalese was afterwards visited by Hiuen Tsang; who describes it as having three storeys, six halls, three towers, and accommodation for a thousand monks. "On it," says Hiuen Tsang, "the utmost skill of the artist has been employed; the ornamentation is in the richest colors, and the statue of Buddha is cast in gold and silver, decorated with gems and precious stones."
A revolution took place in architecture in this age: the
Buddhist style was abandoned, for something which, says Mrs.
Flora Annie Steel: *
"…..more ornate, less self-evident, served to reflect the new and elaborate pretensions of the priesthood."
——— * To whose book India through the Ages, I am indebted for these facts concerning the Gupta Age. ———
It is summed up, says Mrs. Steel, in the words:
"….cucumber and gourd… tall curved vimanas or towers, exactly like two thirds of a cucumber stuck in the ground and surmounted by a flat gourd-like 'amalika.' …. Exquisite in detail, perfect in the design and execution of their ornamentation, the form of these temples leaves much to be desired. The flat blob at the top seems to crush down the vague aspirings of the cucumber, which, even if unstopped, must erelong have ended in an earthward curve again."
The age culminated in the next reign, that of Chandragupta II Vikramaditya. Heaven knows how to distingusih between him and his half-mythological namesake of B.C. 58 and Ujjain. Very possibly the Nine Gems of Literature and Kalidasa and The Ring of Sakoontala belong to this reign really. At any rate it was a wonderful time. Fa-hien, the Chinese Buddhist traveler, obligingly visited India during its process, and left a picture of conditions. Personal liberty, says Mrs. Steel, was the keynote feature. There was no capital punishment; no hard pressure of the laws; there were excellent hospitals and charitable institutions of all sorts.—We are to see in the whole age, I imagine, a period of great brilliance, and of humaneness resulting from eight centuries of the really civilizing influence of Buddhism: far higher conditions than you should have found elsewhere to east or west at that time;—and also, the moment when the impulse of culture had reached its outward limit, and the reaction against the spiritual sources of culture began.
Chandragupta Vikramaditya reigned until 413; Kumaragupta, great and successful also, until 455. Then, thirteen decades after Samudragupta's accession, came Skandagupta; and with him, the White Huns. He defeated them on a large scale in the fifties; but they returned again and again to the attack; during the next thirty years their pressure was breaking up the empire; till when Skandagupta died in 480, it fell to pieces.
XXIII. "THE DRAGON, THE APOSTATE, THE GREAT MIND"
The time is the middle of the fourth century A.D. The top of the Crest-Wave is in India, now the greatest country in the world. The young Samudragupta, about thirty years old now, has been filling the whole peninsula with his renown as warrior, poet, conqueror, patron of arts and letters, musician. The Hindus are a busy and efficient people, masterly in this material world. Their colonies are spread over Java, Sumatra, and the other islands; Formosa (think where it lies) has a Sanskrit, but not yet (so far as we know) a Chinese, name; all those seas are filled with Indian shipping.—And with Arab shipping, too, by the way; or are coming to be so; and spray of the Wave (in the shape of Indian and Arab ships) is falling in the port of Canton. But China as a whole is in a deep trough of sea: an intriguing, ceremonious, ultra-elegant, and wily-weak court and dynasty have lately been expelled from precarious sovereignty at Changan in the North to Nankin south of the Yangtse; there to abide a little while un-overturned, looking down in lofty impotent contempt on the uncouth Wether Huns, Tunguses, and Tibetans who are sharing and quarreling over the ancient seats of the Black-haired People in the Hoangho basin, after driving this same precious House of Tsin into the south.—Persia is on the back of the Wave, something lower than the Crest: Sapor II, a dozen or so years older than Samudragupta, has been on the throne since some months before his (Sapor's) birth; and has now grown up into a particularly vigorous monarch; conquering here and there; persecuting the Christians with renewed energy since Constantine took them into favor;—and of late years unmercifully banging about Constantius son of Constantine in the open field, and besieging and sometimes taking his fortresses. This, you may say, with one hand: with the other he has been very busy with his neighbors in the north-east, the nomads; he has been punishing them a little; and incidentally founding, as a protection against their in roads, the city of New Sapor in Khorassan,—famed later as Nai-shapur, and the birthplace of a certain Tent-maker of song-rich memory. In Armenia an Arsacid— that is, Parthian—house has survived and holds sovereignty: and Armenia is a sort of weak Belgium between Persia and Rome; inclining to the latter, of course, because ruled by Arsacids, who are the natural dynastic enemies of the Sassanids of Persia. Rome has turned Christian; so, to cement his alliance with Rome and insure Roman aid against powerful Persia, the Armenian king has had himself coverted likewise, and his people follow suit with great piety;—which sends Shah Sapor, King of the kings of Iran and Turan, Brother of the Sun and Moon, to it with a missionary as well as a dynastic zeal; and a war that is to be of nearly thirty years' duration has been in process along the frontier since 336. Persia, better called a kingdom, perhaps, than an empire, commands about forty millions of subjects; as against imperial Rome's—who can say? The population there must have gone down by many millions since the days of the Antonines, with all the civil wars, plagues, pestilences, and famines that have harrowed the years between.
The sons of Constantine have succeeded to the throne of their father; and the portions of Constantine II, the eldest of the three, and Constans, the youngest, have at last fallen into the hands, or the web, of Constantius,—a sort of cross between a spider, an octopus, and an elderly maiden aunt,—and in general about as unpleasant a creature as ever sat on a throne. Constantine the Great, indeed, had willed the succession into the hands of a much larger number of his relatives; but this Constantius, his father once decently buried, had taken time by the forelock, and insured things to his two brothers and himself by killing out two of his uncles and seven of their sons; so that now, Constantine II and Constans being dead, no male scions of the house of Constantius Chlorus remain as possible rivals to him, except two boys who had been at the time of the massacre, the one too young, and the other too sickly, to count. We shall come to them by and by.
Christianity is well established; though Constantius, followed his father's wise example, is deferring his baptism until the last possible moment: he partly knows the weakness of his nature, and desires to have license for a little pleasant sinning until the end, with the certainty of a glorious resurrection to follow in despite of it.—Dismiss your kindly apprehensions; God was good to Constantius; no untimely accident cut him off unbaptized; his plan worked excellently, and providing an Arian heretic may go to heaven, in heaven he is to this day, singing his Alleluias with the best of them,—and perhaps between whiles arguing it out with the various uncles and cousins he murdered.
Meanwhile, however, priests and bishops are the great men of his empire; and they enjoy immunities from duties and taxation to an extent that throws the whole rational order of government out of gear. Thus, for example, the upkeep of the great roads and posts system,—the lines of communication,—falls upon a certain class called the Decurions, who in each district at their own expense have to maintain all in order. But churchmen,—an enormous class now,—are immune from the decurionship; and are allowed further the use of the post-horses and inns free of cost;—with the result that, practically speaking, no one else can use them at all. Because these churchmen are forever hurrying hither and thither to conference, council, or synod; there each sect,— Arian and Athanasian chiefly,—to damn to eternal perdition (and temporal excommunication when possible) the vile heretics of the other: Homoiousian to thunder against Homoousian, Homoousian against Homoiousian: Arius contra Athanasium, and Athanasius contra mundum:—till the air of the whole Roman world is thick with the fumes of brimstone and the stench of the Nether Pit. Taxation, on those left to tax, falls an intolerable burden; —we have seen how Shah Sapor is dealing with one end of the empire;—at the other end, in Gaul, one Magnentius rose against Constantius, and the latter thoughtfully invited in the Germans to put him down and help themselves to what they found handy;— and a certain Chnodomar, a king in those trans-Rhenish regions, has taken him much at his word. Result: a strip forty miles wide along the left bank of the Rhine from source to mouth has been conquered and annexed; three times as much this side is a perfectly desolate No-man's land; forty-five important cities, including Cologne and Strasbourg, have been reduced to ashes, with innumerable smaller towns and villages; all open towns in north-eastern Gaul have been abandoned; the people of the walled cities are starving on what corn they can grow on vacant corner lots and in their own back-gardens; hundreds of thousands have been killed out, or carried off into slavery in Germany; and King Chnodomar has every reason to think that God is behaving in a very reasonable manner.—As for the rest of the empire, whatever may be its population in human bodies, there is a plentiful lack of human souls to inhabit them; the Roman world has fallen on evil years, truly, but is by no means unchanged;— and the one thing you can prophesy with any decent security is that affairs cannot go on in this way much longer. Rome has conducted a number of funerals in her day, of this nation and that conquered and put an end to; not much intuition is required now, to foresee that the next funeral will be her own.—(Though indeed, I doubt you should have found half-a-dozen in the Roman world who could foresee it.)
Now there is a Way, narrow and most difficult to find,—a Way of conducting the affairs of this life and this world, in balance, in equilibrium; in that fine I condition through which alone the life-renewing forces from the vaster worlds within may flow down, and keep existence here in harmony, and forefend decay. This was, of course, the essence of Chinese thought, Confucian and Taoist. You maintained the inner harmony, and the forces of heaven might use you as their channel. You found Tao (the Way), and grew never old; you succeeded in all enterprises; walked through life unruffled,—duty flowing, beautifully accomplished, at every moment from your hands. You met with no snags or adjusted yourself always to conditions as they arose, and over-rode them in quietest triumph.—They said that, possessing Tao, one might live on many times the common threescore years and ten; very likely there is some truth in it; it seems as if it were true at any rate, of the life of nations. China caught glimpses, and lived on and on; grew old, and reviewed her youth time and again. But normally, what do we find with these un-Taoist nations of the West?—They go easily for some period; then it becomes harder and harder for them to adjust theniselves to conditions. They become clogged with the detritus of old thought and action. What is the meaning of the incessant need we see for reform? Under whatever form of government a nation may be, it arises perpetually; it carries us around the ring of the-archies and-cracies, and there is no finality anywhere.—No; there is no straight line of political progress; but round in a ring you go! You turn out your kings, because they are tyrannical: which means that their government is no longer efficient, and cannot cope with affairs; there is a lack of adjustment between the inner and the outer, between the needs and the provision made to meet them. The monarchy, which was at first representative and the true expression of the nation,—because it, or anything else, when there was no detritus, but things were new and the inner air uncluttered, gave freedom to the national aspirations to pour themselves out in action,—gives such freedom no longer; it irks; it misfits; you feel it chafing everywhere. And yet it has not ceased by any means to be representative: it represents now a nation which has lost its adjustment to the inner things and is clogged up by the detritus of old thought and action, and it is that detritus that irks and misfits and chafes you. So you rise and smash an astral mold or two; turn out your kings; shout freedom and liberty, and are very glorious for a time under a totally free and independent republic;—which means, at once or after a while, government by a class. And this succeeds just as well and badly as its predecessor; neither has found Tao, the Way,—following which, your detritus should be consumed as it goes, and life lifted above the sway of Karma. So once more the detritus accumulates, and blocks the channels; and the life of the nation labors and is oppressed. Need arises for reforms; and the reforms are difficultly carried through; the franchise is extended, and there is loud talk about political growth and what not; we see the millennium at hand, and ourselves its predestined enjoyers. And the old process repeats itself, till you have a very full-fledged democracy:—you make all the men vote, and all the women; and presently no doubt all the children; but even when you have all adult dogs and cats and cows voting as well,—you will not find that that order is Tao, the Way, any more than the others were. The presence of a cow or two, or an ass or two, more or less, in your parliament will not really insure efficiency of administration. The detritus grows again, under the most democratic of democracies; and weighs things down;—and you cast about for new methods of reform. Democratic government, somehow, does nothing of what was expected of it; is not the panacea;—you see that, to bring the chaos of affairs into order, you must stop all this jabber and tinkering, and set up some undivided council,—some Man, for God's sake!—a Dictator who can keep his own and other people's mouths shut and hands busy, and get things done unimpeded. So you make one more grand reform for the sake of efficiency, and set up your Imperator, and have peace, and decent government; and you have, wittingly or not, started up old bugbear Monarchy again; and things go well for a time. But, bless you, you have not found the Way; you know nothing about Tao, which is not to be discovered in the fields of politics, and has nothing whatever to do with forms of government. So you go in search once more for a political method of dealing with that one and only oppressing thing, the detritus,—your karma;—and away you go squirreling round the changes again; and all this you call political evolution, as I dare say the squirrel does his own gyrations in his cage;—whereas if you found Tao,—if you lived balancedly,— if you kept open the channels between this and the God-world,— there would be no political evolution at all—no squirreling,— but only calm, untrammeled beautiful life. All the claptrap about Western Superiority to the Orient, and the growth of freedom in the West, in contrast with Eastern political immobility, simply means that the Orient is less fond of squirreling than we are; taking its aces by and large, there has been a little more Tao with them than with us: more consuming the detritus as they went; more balanced living, and thus more keeping the channels open.—At least, I imagine so.
Now Rome was very old; and, since Augustus' day, the detritus had grown and grown. Diocletian had devoted a political sagacity amounting in some respects to genius to setting things right, and had accomplished something. He had moved out of Rome itself, where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly encumbered; had gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer; had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with the definite insignia of imperial state: wore a tiara, was to be kneeled to, addressed as Dominus, and so forth:—all outward expedients, and Brummagem substitutes for that inner adjustment which Laotse called Tao: the Way that you are to seek by retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone, nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress, self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone; but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desire to enter it. Diocletian knew nothing of this; so, great statesman as he was, his methods were effective only while he sat on the throne; in his old age and retirement he had to watch, from his palace at Spalato, the empire he had piloted banging about in a thousand storms again; and to plead in vain to those to whom he had given their thrones for the safety and life of his own wife and daughter;—the total failure of his life and labors thus miserably brought home to him before he died.
"Where there is no vision the people perish," said that learned Hebrew of old, King Solomon; and by that one saying proclaimed his right to his title of 'the Wise.' Look into it, and you have almost the whole philosophy of history. The incessant need of humanity is this thing Vision: men and nations go mad for lack of it: they seek in hell the joys of heaven which should be theirs, and which they cannot see. It means vision of the Inner Worlds, of the heaven that lies around us. Oh, nothing spooky or foolish; one is far from meaning the Astral Light. People who go burrowing into that are again seeking a substitute for Vision, and a very poisonous one.—If I may speak of a personal experience: coming to Point Loma from London was like coming from the bottom of the sea into the upper ether. There, in the heart of that old civilization, the air is thick with detritus; here—if only because a long pralaya and fallow time have made the land new,—the detritus is negligible; perhaps it is not even forming, but consumed as we go; because at least we have glimpses of the Way. Result: the mental outlook that extended there, in visionary moments, to some six inches, before one's nose, here has broadened out to take in some seas and mountains; in comparison, it runs to far horizons. I take it that this is the experience of us all. So this is what that wise Solomon meant: "When the detritus has accumulated to the point where, like a thick fog, it shuts away all vision of the True, then the nation must go into abeyance; it must fall."—Rome was very near that point.
One wishes one could say something about those Inner Worlds of Beauty. When the voices of self are silenced, and desires abashed and at peace,—how they shine through! This outer world, truly, reflects them; but another and ugly world of our own making.
…..is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers,—
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
Sometimes; not always, thank God! Look again: there are the mountains, and above them the mournful glories of the anti-sunset; the mute and golden trumpetings of the dawn; —there is the sea, and over it the wistfulness and pomp and pageantry of the setting sun, and the gentleness of heaven at evening;—there is the whole drama of Day with its tremendous glories; and the huge mystery of Night-time: Niobe Night, silent in the heavens,
"Glittering magnificently unperturbed;"
—and there are the flowers in the garden, those Praelarissimi and Nobilisimi in the Court of God, the Pansy, the Blue Larkspur, the Purple Anemone;—and what are all these things?— Just symbols; just mirrorings of a beauty in the World of Ideas within; just places where the Spirit has touched matter, and matter, at that fiery and creative touch, has flamed up into the likeness of God, which is Beauty.—What is Vision?—It is to have luminous forms rising in the imagination, like Wordsworth had, like Shelley; it is with shut eyes to see the beauty and wonder of the Gods; it is to have no grayness or dearth or darkness within; but to have the 'bliss of solitude' crowded with beautiful squadrons of deities, trembling with the light of legions on legions of suns. For:
Not all we are here
Where this darkness oppresses us;
Not this oblivion
Of Beauty expresses us.
Gaze not on it,
To be stained with its stain;
The Lonely All-Beautiful
Calls us again.
In galleried palaces,
Turquoise blue,
With the sweetness of many suns
Filtering through,—
In the Suns's own garden,
Where galaxies flame
For lilac and daffodil,
Each on his stem,—
Where apple-bloom Capricorn
Hangs from his tree,
Glittering dim o'er
The dim blue sea,—
And billowing dim o'er
The dim blue lawns
Of heaven come the nebular
Sunsets and dawns,—
We too have the regallest
Part of our being,
Far beyond dreaming of,
Hearing of, seeing.
And the Lonely All-Beautiful
Calls to us here:—
"My knights, my commissioned,
My children dear!
"The hell where affrighted,
Enchanted, ye roam,—
Ye set forth to make it
A heaven for my home!"
—And it is Vision, not to mistake mankind for less or other than Deific Essence cruelly encumbered over with oblivion; it is to see the flame of Eternal Beauty and valiant Godhood in all men; and not to rest or sit content without doing something to uncover that Beauty, to rescue that Godhood.—You go into the slums of a great city; and you do not wonder that the God-essence, inmingling and involved in the clay which is (the lower) man, goes there quite distraught and unrecognizable; where life is so far from the great reflexion of the Worlds of Beauty; where the Sun is no bright brother and confidential friend, but a breeder up of pestilences; where the sky is shut away and there are no flowers to bloom;—whether we like it or no, these things, the unperverted manifestations of the formative pressure of the Spirit, are needed to keep men sane. Beauty you must have, to nourish the Divine within you; alas for him that thinks he may attain to the Good or the True, and in a thin meager or Puritan spirit, strives to shut out their divine sister from his needs and aspirations!—But there, in our hideous modern conditions, there is no vision, without or within; so men go mad with fearful lusts and despairs; and it is the van of the Battle, in one sense, between Godhood and Chaos; and reeks with the slaughter and bloodshed and the madness of that conflict; there too the Holy Spirit of Man is incarnate; there the Host of Souls;—but in the shock and din and the carnage, there on the slippery brink of yet unconquered hell,—all the divine descent and ancient glory of the Host is forgotten:—there is no Vision, and the people perish.
(It may seem I go a long way round to come to him; but in reality I am already trying to draw you a character-sketch of the subject of this evening's lecture: to present you the permanent part and significance of a strange incarnation of Vision that appeared in Rome's dark and dying days: the man to whom Saint Gregory Nazianzen, in his grand attack, applied that ringing triplet of epithets I have taken for the title of the lecture: "The Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind." Know him first in his impersonality thus: a great white flame of Vision; a tremendous Poet of the Gods in action;—and then, when you come to his personality, with what it might have retained of personality, of hereditary impairments, perhaps, that should have vanished had he lived past his young manhood, these will not hinder you from understanding the greatness and beauty and tragedy of that life apparently wasted. But we shall come to him in our time.)
Back in the sixth century B. C., when all those Great Teachers came: when the forces that until then had been pent up in the Mysteries were suddenly let loose upon the world,—and the more vehement for their having been so pent up, and their now being so let loose;—what a flood of vision they brought with them! In Greece, to rouse up almost at once that wonderful wave of artistic creation; in Persia, to create quickly a splendid and chivalrous empire; in India, (so far as we know) to pervade as an ethical illumination the life of the people for some centuries before manifesting in art or empire; in China, to work in a twofold current, on one side upon the imagination, on the other upon the moral conceptions of the race, until the Chinese manvantara began. Its effect in each case was according to the cyclic position of the country at the time: those, seemingly, being the most fortunate, that had to wait longest for the full fruition. Thus it struck China in the midst of pralaya, and lay in the soil fructifying until the pralaya had passed; then, appearing and re-appearing according to cyclic law, was a saving health in the nation for fifteen centuries at least;—India, I imagine, when the manvantara there some five centuries old, and under a minor shadow; which shadow once passed, it produced its splendors in the Maurya time; and was in all effective for a thousand years. But it came to Persia in the autumn of the great cycle, when the forces it brought had to ripen quickly, and descend at once on to the military (the lowest) plane;—and to Greece just at noon or early summer,—just before the most intellectual moment,—and so there, too, had no time to ripen, but must burst out at once in artistic creation without ever a chance first to work in and affect the moral life of the race. This last is what Pythagoras at Croton had in mind to do: had Croton endured, there would have been a stable moral basis for the intellectual spendors.—I believe that you have here the very archeus and central clue to history. In China, it was enough for Laotse to float his magical ideas, and for confucius to give out his extremely simple (but highly efficient) philosophy, and to provide his grand Example; in India it was enough for the Lord Buddha to teach his wisdom and to found his Order; he might trust the future to them;—For Persia, one cannot say: the facts as to Zoroaster are not enough known; there might seem to have been some failure there too;—but in Greece, it was imperative that Pythagoras should establish his Lomaland; nothing else could save the forces from squandering themselves at once, in that momentous time, on the intellectual and artistic planes, and leaving life unredeemed and unaffected.
Which indeed they did; and thence on it Europe we see century by century vision waning and the world on a downward path, until the moment comes when a new effort may be made. Augustus calls a halt then; moves heaven and earth; works like ten Herculeses, along all lines, to bring about an equilibrium in outer affairs; and so far succeeds that in his time one or two men may have the Vision, at any rate:—Virgil may catch more than glimpses of the Inner Beauty, and leave the outer world a litle less forlorn. But in place of the rush and fine flow of the Grecian Age, what painful strivings we find in the Augustan!—When too, Teachers labor to illumine the vastnesses within; Apollonius; Moderatus; shall we add, the Nazarene?—So the downward tendency is checked; in the following centuries we see a slow pushing upward,—in the heroic effort of the Stoics, not after Vision—that was beyond their scope and ken,—but after at least that which should bring it back,—a noble method of life.
And then, at last, a dawn eastward: and the bugles of the Spirits of the Dawn heard above the Pyramids, heard over the shadowy plains where Babylon was of old;—and out of that yellow glow in the sky come, now that the cycle permits them, masters of the Splendid vision. They come with something of light from the ancient Mysteries of Egypt; with some shining from Star Plato, and from Pythagoras; and at their coming light up the dark worlds and the intense blue deeps of the sky,—wherein you can see now, under their guidance, immeasurable and beautiful things to satisfy the highest cravings of your heart: winged Aeons on Aeons, ring above ring,—mystery emanating mystery, beauty, beauty, from here up to the Throne of the Lonely All-Beautiful.— What growth there had been in Roman Europe, to prepare the way for the spread of Neo-Platonism, I cannot say; but imagine Gnosticism had something to do with it; and that Gnosticism was a graft on the parent stem of Christianity set there by some real Teacher who came later than Jesus. If we knew more of the realities about Simon Magus on the one hand, and Paul of Tarsus on the other, we might have clearer light on the whole problem; at present must be content with saying this much:—that Gnosticism, with its deep mystical truths, emerges into the light of well-founded history about neck and neck with orthodox Christianity; was considered a branch of the same movement, equally Christian; but was at least tinged with esoteric truth, and deeply Hellenized, and perhaps Persianized;—whereas the orthodox branch was the legitimate heir of exoteric Judaism. How much of real vision there may have been in Gnosticism; how much of mere speculation, which is but a step towards vision,—I am not prepared to guess; but have little doubt that Gnostic activities made ready the ground for Neo-Platonism; so that when the latter's Manasaputric light incarnated, it found fit rupas to inhabit.
This was the Lodge's most important effort to sow truth in Europe since Pythagoras. Says even the Enyclopaedia Britannica (without help from Esotericism):
"Neo-Platonism is in one aspect … the consummation of ancient philosophy. Never before in Greek or Roman speculation had the consciousness of man's dignity and superiority to Nature received such adequate expression…. From the religious and moral point of view, it must be admitted that the ethical 'mood' which Neo-Platonisni endeavored to create and maintain is the highest and purest ever reached by antiquity…. It is a proof of the strength of the moral instincts of mankind that the only phase of culture which we can survey in all its stages from beginning to end culminated not in materialism but in the highest idealism."
It asserted the Gods, the great stars and luminaries of the Inner World; it asserted the Divinity of Man,—superior, truly, as the Encyclopaedia says to (the lower) Nature, but of the Higher, one part or factor in the whole. It came into Europe trailing clouds of splendor and opening the heavens of Vision. The huge menace and perils of the age, the multiplying disasters, were driving men to seek spiritual refuge of some kind; and there were, in the main, two camps that offered it:—this of Neo-Platonism, proclaiming Human Divinity and strong effort upward in the name of that; and that other which proclaimed human helplessness, and that man is a poor worm and weakling, originally sinful, and with nothing to hope from his own efforts, but all from the grace, help, or mercy of Extracosmic Intervention. It was a terribly comfortable doctrine, this last, for a race staggering towards the end of its manvantara under a fearful load of detritus, a culture old and thoroughly tired. No wonder Europe chose this path, and not the Neo-Platonist path of flaming idealism and endeavor. Ammonius, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus,—they had worked wonders; but not the crowning wonder of that which could save the age and the age to come: Plotinus had failed of that, because there no tool at hand for the Gods, but a silly, weak Gallienus.—So now Constantine has made the great change; and the empire that was Roman is now Roman no longer: You owe your first allegiance now, not to the state or to the emperor at its head, but to an imperium within the state which claims immunity from laws and duties: the kingdom is divided within itself, and must look for the fate of divided kingdoms. Zeus on Olympus now weighs the Roman empire in his scales,—and finds the fate is death, and no help for it: there are to be thirteen decades of moribundity, and then Christian burial, with Odoacer and sundry other the like barbarians to be mourners and heirs; and then,—blackest night over the western world for God knows how long: night, with nightmare and horror, and no Vision, no beautiful dreams, no refreshment, no peace. For the party that Constantine has now made dominant despises cordially all the ancient light of Hellenism; Aeschylus, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Euripides,— everyone you could in any sense a light-bearer that came of old, to bring mankind even the merest brain-mind culture,—these people condemn and abhor for heathen, and take pleasure in the thought that they are now, and have been since they died, and shall be forever, frizzling in the nether fires: they condemn the substance of their writings, and will draw no ideas, no saving grace, from them whatever;—will learn from them nothing in the world but grammar and eloquence with which to thunder at them and all their like from barren raucous pulpits. So, Vision having gone, culture is to go too, and all you can call civilization; and therewith law and order, and the decencies of life: all that soap stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha; all that the Soul stands symbol for is to be anathema maranatha;—a pretty prospect! Zeus sighs in heaven, and his sigh is a doleful thunder prophetic of the gloom that is to overspread all the western skies for many centuries to come.
—And then comes Helios, the Unconquered Sun, and lays a hand on his arm, and says: "Not so fast!; Never despair yet; look down—there!"
And the Gods look down: to a gloomy castle upon a crag in the wild mountains of Cappadocia; and they see there a youth, a captive banished to that desolate grand region: well-attended, as befits a prince of the royal blood, but lonely and overshadowed; —not under fear, because fear is no part of his nature; but yet never knowing when the order for his death may come. They read all this in his mind, his atmosphere. They see him deep in his books: a soul burning with earnestness, but discontented, and waiting for something: all the images of Homer rising about him beckoning on the one hand, and on the other a grim something that whispers, These are false; I alone am true! —"What of him?" says Zeus; "he too is a Christian."—"Watch!" says Sol Invictus; "I have sent my man to him."—And they watch; and sure enough, presently they see a man coming into this youth's presence, and pointing upwards towards themselves; and they see the youth look up, and the shadow pass from his eyes as a great blaze of light and splendor breaks before him,—as he catches sight of them, the Gods, and his eye meets theirs, and he rises, illumined and smiling;—and they know that in the Roman world there is this one man with the Grand Vision; this man who may yet (if they play their cards well) wear the Roman diadem;— that there is vision in the Roman world again, and it may be the people shall not perish.
It was Julian, "the Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind"; I thank thee, Gregory of Nazianzus, for teaching me that word!—and the one that came to him there in Cappadocia was Maximus of Smyrna, Iamblichus' disciple. His story has been told and re-told; I expect you know it fairly well. How he was a son of Julius Constantius, son of Constantius Chlorus,—and thus a nephew of Constantine the Great, and a first cousin to the Octopus-Spider-Maiden Aunt Constantius then on the throne;—how he because of his infancy, and his half-brother Gallus because of a delicate constitution which made it seem impossible he should grow up, were spared when Constantius had the rest of the family massacred;—how he was banished and confined in that Cappadocian castle;—of Gallus' short and evil reign that ended, poor fool that he was, in his being lured into the spider-web of Constantius and beheaded;—how Julian was called then to the court at Milan, expecting a like fate;—how he spent seven months there, spied on at every moment, and looking for each to be his last;—how he was saved and befriended by the noble Empress Eusebia (a strangely beautiful figure to find in those sinister surroundings);—and sent presently to the University of Athens, there to spend the happiest moments of his life;—then called back to be made Caesar: he who had never been anything but a student and a dreamer, called from his books and dreams at twenty-four, and set to learn (as Caesar) his elementary drill,— which he found very difficult to learn indeed;—and then sent to fight the Germans in Gaul. How Constantius tried always to thwart him while he was there: setting underlings over him with power to undo or prevent all he might attempt or do;—how in spite of it all he fought the Germans, and drove them across the Rhine, and followed them up, and taught them new lessons in their own remote forests; and took the gorgeous Chnodomar, their king, prisoner; and sent for him, prepared to greet friendlily one so great in stature and splendid in bearing; but was disgusted when the gentleman, on coming into his presence, groveled on the floor and whined for his life,—whereupon Julian, instead of treating him like a gentleman as he had intended, packed him off to his (Chnodomar's) old ally the Maiden Aunt at Milan to see what they would make of each other;—how he fought three campaigns victoriously beyond the Rhine; restored the desolated Cisrhenish No-man's land, and brought in from Britain, in six hundred corn-ships, an amount Gibbon calculates at 120,000 quarters of wheat to feed its destitute population.—And this fact is worth nothing: if Britain could export all that wheat, it surface was not, as some folks hold, mainly under forest: it was a well-cultivated country, you may depend, with agriculture in a very flourishing condition,—as Gibbon does not fail to point out.
—And you know, probably, how Julian loved his Paris, and governed Gaul thence in civil affairs in such a manner that Paris and Gaul loved him;—how his own special legions, his pets, his Tenth, so to say, were the Celts and Petulants, and after these, the Herulians and Batavians (or shall I say Dutchmen?);—how Constantius tried to deprive him of these, ordering him to send them off to him for wars with Sapor in the east;—how Julian sorrowfully bade them go, judging well by Gallus his brother's experience (whom Constantius had treated in the same way as a first step towards cutting off his head) what the next thing should be;—but how they, (bless their Celtic and Petulant and Herulian and Dutch hearts!) told him very plainly that that kind of thing would not wash with them: "Come!" said they; "no nonsense of this sort; be you our emperor, and condemn that old lady your cousin Constantius!—or we kill you right now." Into his bed-room in Paris they poured by night with those terms,—an ultimatum; whether or not with a twinkle in their eyes when they proposed the alternative, who can say?—What was a young hero to do, whom the Gods had commissioned to strike the grand blow for them; and who never should strike it, that was certain, if Constantius should have leave to take away from him, first his Celts and Petulants, and then his head? So he accepts; and writes kindly and respectfully to his Maiden Aunt— Spidership the Emperor telling him he must manage without the legions, and with a Co-Augustus to share the empire with him,— ruling (it was to be hoped in perfect harmony with himself) the west and leaving the east to Constantius. However, all will not do: Constantius writes severe and haughtily, Send the men, and let's hear no more of that presumptuous fooling about the second Augustus!—So Julian marches east; whither, accompanying him, the lately rebellious Celts and Petulants are ready enough to go now; and Constantius might after all have fallen in battle, and so missed his saving baptism; but his plans had gone agley, and the whole situation was extremely disturbing; and you never knew what might happen: and really, when you thought how you had treated this Julian's father, and his two brothers, and numberless uncles and cousins, you might fear the very worst;— and so, good maiden-auntish soul, he fell into a sadness, and thence into a decline; and while Julian and his Petulants were yet a long way off, got baptized respectably, and slipped off to heaven.
And you know, too, probably, how Julian, being now sole emperor, reigned: working night and day; wearing out relays of secretaries, but never worn out himself; making the three years of his reign, as I think Gibbon says, read like thirty; disestablishing Christianity, and refounding Paganism,—not the Paganism that had been of old, but a new kind, based upon compassion, human brotherhood, and Theosophical ethics, and illumined by his own ever-present vision of the Gods;—how he reformed the laws; governed; made his life-giving hand felt from the Scottish Wall to the Nile Cataracts;—instilled new vigor into everything; forced toleration upon the Christians, stopping dead their mutual persecutions, and recalling from banishment those who had been banished by their co-religionists of other sects;—made them rebuild temples they had torn down, and disgorge temple properties they had plundered;—and amidst all this, and much more also, found time in the wee small hours of the nights to do a good deal of literary work: Theosophical treatises, correspondence, sketches….—And you will know of the spotless purity, the asceticism, of his life; and how he stedfastly refused to persecute;—whereby his opponents complained that, son of Satan as he was, he denied them the glory of the martyr's crown;—and of his plan to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, and to re-establish Jews and Judaism in their native land:—of his letter to the Jewish high priest or chief Rabbi, beginning "My brother";—of the charitable institutions he raised, and dedicated to the Lord of Vision, his God the Unconquered Sun;—of his contests with frivolity and corruption at Antioch, and his friendship with the philosophers;—and then, of his Persian expedition, with its rashness,—its brilliant victories,—its over-rashness and head-strong advance;—of the burning of the fleet, and march into the desert; and retreat; and that sudden attack,—the Persian squadrons rising up like afreets out of the sands, from nowhere; and Julian rushing unarmed through the thickest of the fight, turning, first here, then there, confusion into firmness, defeat into victory;—and of the arrow, Persian or Christian, that cut across his fingers and pierced his side; and how he fainted as he tried to draw it out; and recovered, and called for his horse and armor; and fainted again; and was carried into a tent hastily run up for him:—and of the scene there in the night, that made those who were with him think of the last scene in the life of Socrates; Julian dying, comforting his mourning officers; cheering them; talking to them quietly about the beauty and dignity of death, and the divinity of the Soul; then suddenly inquiring why Anatolius was not present,—and learning that Anatolius had fallen,—and (strange inconsistency!) the dying man breaking into tears of the death of his friend.—And you will know of the hopeless march of the army back under ignominious Jovian, all Shah Sapor's hard terms accepted;—and the doom of the Roman Empire sealed.
That was the Man: that is the record, outwardly, of a Soul fed upon the immensities of Vision. Vision is the keynote of him: the intense reality to him of the ever-beautiful compassionate Gods…. It is true there was a personality attached; and all his defenders since have found much in it that they wished had not been there. A lack of dignity, it is said; a certain self-consciousness… Well; he was very young; he died a very boy at thirty-two; he never attained to years of discretion:—in a sense we may allow that much. You say, he might very well have followd the reaonable conventions of life; and condescended, when emperor, not to dress as a philosopher of the schools. So he might. They laughed at his ways, at his garb, at his beard;— and he went the length of sitting up one night to write the Misopogon, a skit upon his personality. Only philosophers wore beards in those days; it was thought most unsuitable in an emperor. I do not know what the men of Antioch said about it; but he speaks of it as unkempt and,—in the Gibbonistic euphemism,—populous; indeed, names the loathsome cootie outright, which Gibbon was much too Gibbonish to do. In the nature of things, this was a libel.
I read lately an article, I think by an Irish writer, on the eccentricities of youthful genius. It often happens that a soul of really fine caliber, with a great work to do in the world, will waste a portion of his forces, at the outset, in fighting the harmless conventions. But as his real self grows into mastery, all this disappears, and he comes to see where his battle truly lies. Julian died before he had had time quite to outgow the eccentricities; but for all that, not before he had shown the world what the Soul in action is like.
Every great soul, incarnating, has still this labor to carry through as prolog to his life's work:—he must conquer the new personality, with all its hereditary tendencies; he must mold it difficultly to the perfect expression of the glory and dignity of himself. Julian had to take up a body in which on the one side ran the warrior blood of Claudius Gothicus and Constantius Chlorus, on the other, the refinement and culture of the senatorial house of the Anicii. Two such streams, coming together, might well need some harmonizing: might well produce, for example, an acute self-consciousness,—to be mastered. What he got from them, for world-service, was on the one hand his superb military leadership and mastery of affairs; on the other, his intense devotion to learning and culture. Thus the two streams of heredity appeared, dominated by his own quality of Vision. The paternal stream, by his generation, had grown much vitiated: it was pure warriorism in Claudius Gothicus, and even in Constantius Chlorus; it was warriorism refined with subtlety and cruelty in Constantine I; it was mere fussy treacherous cruelty in the Spider-Octopus,—and sensual brutality in Julian's brother Gallus. The vices of the latter may indicate how great a self-conqueror the unstained Julian was.
He was a Keats in imperial affairs, dying when he had given no more than a promise of what he should become. He laws, his valor, his victories, his writings, are no more than juvenilia: they are equal to the grand performance, not the promise, of many who are counted great. He came out from his overshadowment and long seclusion, from him books and dreams; was thrown into conditions that would have been difficult for an experienced statesman, and won through them all triumphantly; was set to conduct a war that would have taxed the genius of a Caesar, a Tiberius, or an Aurelius,—and swept through to as signal victories as any of theirs. He learnt the elements of drill, and was straight sent to conquer the conquering Germans; and did it brilliantly. He came to a Gaul as broken and hopeless as Joan of Arc's France; and found within himself every quality needed to heal it and make it whole.
Joan conquered with her Vision; Julian conquered with his. He set out with this before his eyes and in his soul:—The Gods are there; the beautiful Gods; uttermost splendor of divinity is at the heart of things. The glory of the Gods and of their world filled his eyes; and the determination filled his soul to make this outer world conform to the beauty of his vision. The thing he did not care about,—did not notice, except in a humourous way,—was that queer thing of a personality that had been allotted to himself. How could he have succeeded, in the world that then was?—And yet even a Christian poet was constrained to say,—and to rise, says Gibbon, above his customary mediocrity in saying it,—that though Julian was hateful to God, he was altogether beneficent to mankind.
I do not know how to explain the Persian expedition. He himself said, when dying, that he had loved and sought peace, and had but gone to war when driven to it. We cannot see now what were the driving factors. Did he go to reap glory that he might have used, or thought he might have used, in his grand design? Did he go to break a way into India, perhaps there to find a light beyond any that was in Rome? … Or was it the supreme mistake of his life…. one would say the only mistake?
It failed, and he died, and his grand designs came to nothing; and Rome went out in utter darkness. And men sneered at him then, and have been sneering at him ever since, for his failure. Perhaps we must call it that; it was a forlorn hope at the best of times. But you cannot understand him, unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision lonely in a world wholly bereft of it: a man for whom all skies were transparent, and the solid earth without opacity, but with the luminous worlds shining through wherein Apollo walks, and all the Masters of Light and Beauty;—unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision moving in an outer world, a phase of civilization, old, tired, dying, dull as ditch-water, without imagination, with no little vestige of poetry, no gleam of aspiration,—with wit enough to sneer at him, and no more; by no means with wit enough to allow him to save it from itself and from ruin.
XXIV. FROM JULIAN TO BODHIDHARMA
When the news came drifting back over the Roman world that the Emperor had been killed in Persia, and that an unknown insignificant Jovian reigned in his stead;—and while three parts of the population were rejoicing that there was an end of the Apostate and his apostasy; and half the rest, that there was an end of this terrible strenuosity, this taking of the Gods (good harmless useful fictions—probably fictions) so fearfully in earnest: I wonder how many there were to guess how near the end of the world had come? The cataclysm was much more sudden and over-whelming than we commonly think; and to have prophesied, in Roman society, in the year 363, that in a century's time the empire and all its culture would be things of the past (in the West), would have sounded just as ridiculous, probably, as such a prophesy concerning Europe and its culture would have sounded in a London drawing-room fifteen years ago. There were signs and portents, of course, for the thoughtful; and no doubt some few Matthew Arnolds in their degree to be troubled by them. And of course (as in our own day, but perhaps rather more), an idea with cranks that at any moment Doomsday might come. But while the world endured, and the Last Trump had not sounded, of course the Roman empire would stand.—Christianity? Well, yes; it had grown very strong; and the extremists among the Christians were rabid enough against culture of any sort. But there were also Christians who, while they hated the olden culture of Paganism, were ambitious to supply a Christian literature in prose and verse to take the place of the Classical. There had been an awful devastation of Gaul; the barbarians of the north had been, now and again, uneasy and troublesome; but see how Julian—even he, with the Grace of God all against him—had chastised them! The head of the Roman State would always be the Master of the World.
And strangely enough, this was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman empire and its civilization were gone.
Life, when Julian died, was still capable of being a very graceful and dignified affair,—outwardly, at any rate. On their great estates in Gaul, in Britain, in Italy, great and polished gentlemen still enjoyed their otium cum dignitate. The culture of the great past still maintained itself amongst them; although thought and all mental vigor were buried deep under the detritus. In fourth century Gaul there was quite a little literary renaissance; centering, as you might expect, in the parts furthest from German invasion. Its leading light was born in Bordeaux in the three-thirties; and was thus (to link things up a little) a younger contemporary of the Indian Samudragupta. He was Ausonius: teacher of rhetoric, tutor to the prince Gratian, consul, country gentleman, large land-owner, and, in a studious uninspired reflective way, a goodish poet. Also a convert to Christianity, but unenthusiastic:—altogether, a dignified and polished figure; such as you might find in England now, in the country squire who has held important offices in India in his time, hunts and shoots in season, manages his estates with something between amateur and professional interest, reads Horace for his pleasure, and even has a turn for writing Latin verses. Ausonius leaves us a picture of the life of his class: a placid, cultured life, with quite a strong ethical side to it; sterile of any deep thought or speculation; far removed from unrest.— Another respresentative man was his friend Symmachus at Rome: also highly cultured and of dignified leisure; a very upright and capable gentleman widely respected for his sterling honesty; a pagan, not for any stirring of life within his heart or mind, but simply for love of the ancient Roman idea,—sheer conservatism;—for much the same reasons, in fact, as make the Englishman above-mentioned a staunch member of the English Church.
There were many such men about: admirable men; but unluckily without the great constructive energies that might, under Julian's guidance for example, have saved the empire. But the empire! In that crisis,—in that narrow pass in time! It is not excellent gentlemen that can do such near-thaumaturgic business; but only disciples; for the proposition is, as I understand it, to link this world with the God-world, and hold fast through thunders and cataclysm, so that what shall come through,—what shall be when the thunder is stilled and the cataclysm over,— shall flow on and up onto a new order of cycles, higher, nearer the Spirit. . . . . No; it is not to be done by amiable gentlemen, or excellent administrators, or clever politicians. . . . Julian had come flaming down into the world, to see if he could rouse up and call together those who should do it; but his bugles had sounded in the empty desert, and died away over the sands.
There were tremendous energies abroad; but they were all with the Destroyers, and were to be, ever increasingly: with such men as, at this time, Saint Martin of Tours, that great tearer-down of temples; or in the next century, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and Peter the Reader, the tearers-to-pieces of Hypatia. Perhaps the greatest energies of all you should have found, now and later, in the Christian mob of Alexandria,—wild beasts innocent of nothing but soap and water.
It was Symmachus who was chosen by the Roman Senate to remonstrate with the emperor Valentinian against the removal of the altar and statue of Victory,—the Pagan symbols,—from the senate house. I quote you Gibbon's summary of a part of his petition:
"The great and incomprehensible Secret of the Universe eludes the enquiry of man. Where reason cannot instruct, custom may be permitted to guide; and every nation seems to consult the dictates of prudence by a faithful attachment to those rites and opinions which have received the sanction of ages. If those ages have been crowned with glory and prosperity—if the devout people have frequently obtained the blessings which they have solicited at the altars of the Gods—it must appear still more advisable to persist in the same salutary practise and not to risk the unknown perils that may attend any rash inovations. The test of antiquity and success, (continues Gibbon), was applied with singular advantage to the Religion of NUMA, and Rome herself, the celestial genius that presided over the fates of the city, is introduced by the orator to plead her own cause before the tribunal of the emperors. 'Most excellent princes,' says the venerable matron, 'fathers of your country! pity and respect my age, which has hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of piety. Since I do not repent, enjoy my domestic institutions. This religion has reduced the world under my laws. These rites have repelled Hannibal from the city, and the Gauls from the Capitol. Were my grey hairs reserved for such intolerable disgrace? I am ignorant of the new system I am required to adopt; but I am well assured that the correction of old age is always an ungrateful and ignominious office.'"
Symmachus was addressing a Christian emperor; and it was an ill thing then, as in the days of Hadrian, to argue with the master of the legions. Still, the method he chooses is interesting: it holds a light up to the inwardness of the age, and shows it dead. This was at twenty-one years after the death of the Dragon-Apostate; whose appeal had all been to the realities and the divinity of man and the living splendor of the Gods he knew and loved. That splendor, said he, should burn away the detritus, and make Romans men and free again. But Symmachus, for all his admirable restraint, his rhetorical excellence, his good manners and gentlemanly bearing,—which I am sure we should admire,— appeals really only to the detritus; to nothing in the world that could possibly help or save Rome. The Christians wanted to be free of it, because they felt its weight; the Pagans wanted to keep it, because they found it warm and comfortable. Symmachus sees nothing higher or better than custom; the secret of the universe, says he, is unknowable; there is no inner life. —He was confuted by a much more alive and less estimable man: Ambrose, bishop of Milan,—with whom, also, both he and Ausonius were on friendly terms. Ambrose's argument, too, is illuminating: like the King of Hearts', it was in the main that "you were not to talk nonsense." How ridiculous, said he, to impute the victories of old Rome to the Religion of Numa and favor of the Gods,—when the strength and valor of the Roman soldier were quite enough to account for all. Thus he appears in the strange role of a rationalist. Christianity, he continued, was the one and only true religion; and all the rest—etc., etc., etc. Ambrose and his party were fighting towards a definite and positive end; knew what they wanted, and meant to get it. Of course they won. Symmachus and the senate were fighting only for a sentiment about the past, and had no chance at all. And it really did not matter: Rome was doomed anyway.
But in passing I must e'en linger on a note of sublimity in this petition of Symmachus: of sublime faith;—when he makes Dea Roma refer to her history as having "hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of piety." It makes one think that they taught Roman history in their schools then much in the same way that we teach our national histories in our schools today; here and in England, and no doubt elsewhere, "An uninterrupted course of piety!" quotha. Marry come up!