Before the end of the lecture the idea occurred to me to be a disciple of Hypatia for the rest of my life, or a servant who walks behind her. I thought that if I went back to Octavia and apologized to her for deceiving her for a whole three days she might forgive me. I would argue that I was afraid to lose her and decided to stay silent because I had done wrong. And Octavia would forgive me, and kiss me again, and I would live with her and forget the illusions which drove me and took my steps I know not where. I would come to know the Sicilian master when he came back from his journey, and know Hypatia from close by and study medicine until I excelled in it, and maybe find a cure for the disease we call Aa.7 My thoughts wandered and I was too distracted to follow the rest of the lecture.
Then I listened to the end of the teacher’s lecture, and what she said still sticks in my mind. ‘My friends, even if understanding is in fact an intellectual process, it is also a spiritual process, because the truths we arrive at through logic and mathematics, unless we feel them with our souls, will remain raw facts, and we will fall short of grasping how magnificent it is that we perceive them. Two hours have passed that I have been talking to you and I know that I have gone on too long and tired you. So accept my apologies and my appreciation that you attended today. I’ll come back to this hall in half an hour to talk about the mathematics of Diophantos. Those who choose to honour me by taking part are welcome, provided they are students of mathematics, lest they hate it and hate me with it.’
The audience smiled and some of them laughed, and all prepared to go out behind her. I stayed planted at my place like the stones of the Pyramids, like the oval rocks on the banks of the Nile in my old country. Hypatia would come back in half an hour, and where else could I go?
The rows had almost emptied out, except for some disciples who stayed gathering together their papers and moving to the front-row seats with their books. The governor, his retinue and the public were hovering around Hypatia at the table, a table weighed down with varieties of sweet pastries. So that’s what the loudmouth crier meant, the day I came into Alexandria. I don’t like sweet things and I did not eat any with them on that day, even though I was so ravenous with hunger that I almost fainted. Out of modesty I made do with two dates which were in my bag, and refrained from standing in my tattered clothes among the elegant people who were eating.
After a long half-hour, the voices coming from behind the door went quiet, and the governor and most of the public left. Hypatia came back, surrounded by a small group of scholars and students of various ages. She mounted the platform, as she had done the first time, and the hall fell quiet as it had done before. There were no more than twenty people and I was still in my place on the third row when she pointed at me and said, ‘You can come to the front row, if you like.’
‘No, my lady, I’m comfortable here, but thank you for your kindness.’
‘Thank you for your kindness! Strange words, brother stranger.’
‘I’m from the south, reverend lady.’
‘Welcome to our city.’
I did not understand most of what Hypatia said in her second lecture. I was merely staring at her, regretful that in my youth I had avoided studying mathematics. When she spoke I was full of enthusiasm and I made a resolution to do something which in fact I never did. ‘I’ll study mathematics with medicine and theology. I’ll study the principles of geometry and arithmetic first, then specialize in them and excel.’ In those days I was like a dry leaf tossed by the wind, and I think I’m still like that!
After the lecture the audience hovered around her again. I don’t know how I found the courage, but I approached Hypatia fearlessly, and without her asking me anything I told her I had come to Alexandria to study medicine and I planned to stay in the city five years to absorb the learning, then go home and treat the sick in my home country. I added in my outburst that throughout my stay in Alexandria I would eagerly attend all her scientific sessions, even the mathematical ones. Throughout she smiled and took an interest in what I was saying, emboldening me to speak at length, though my only motive was to keep looking at her. When I stopped speaking, she spoke. ‘So I’ll see you here next Sunday, good southern friend.’
‘My lady, do you not give lessons in medicine?’
‘No, my friend, I’m very sorry.’
As she answered my sudden question, her smile was enough to dispel my loneliness, my hunger and my sense that I was a stranger. She pointed at one of those standing around her, five middle-aged men and a thin woman, and said, ‘This good colleague of mine, Synesios the Cyrene, also wanted to study medicine at the start, but ended up studying philosophy.’ She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘And now he wants to renounce philosophy, and believe in its antithesis!’
The man by the name of Synesios gave a pleasant laugh and tossed his head back a little. He put his right hand on my left shoulder affectionately and said, ‘Don’t believe the savante, my brother, for she twice strayed from the truth in what she said; firstly when she described me as a colleague, when I am merely her disciple and she my teacher, and secondly in that, if I follow the way of the church, that does not mean that I will renounce philosophy and believe in its antithesis.’ Everyone laughed at what he said, except me, and they prepared to leave the hall. I never saw the man called Synesios the Cyrene again after that day but I heard later that he became a great man of the church in the Western Pentapolis known as Libya, in fact the bishop of one of the five cities, I think the city of Tolmeita, also known as Barca.
They all went out and I tarried a while, my legs heavy. I had no idea of my purpose after this lesson, which I would have liked to last forever. Before disappearing behind the door, Hypatia smiled and looked towards me as though she were impressing my features on her memory for the next occasion when she saw me, the occasion which I wish had never come. Hypatia left like a delightful dream which gladdened a sad man’s heart for a moment, then faded forever.
At the theatre door I stood lost in thought as she mounted her two-horse carriage. The train of her embroidered robe was the last I saw of her, and the last beautiful thing I saw for days to come. When her carriage disappeared from sight, I was back to my loneliness and anxiety. I had nowhere to go. For a moment I stood helpless, everything jumbled up inside me. With heavy steps I turned towards the big garden, and when the sun rose high in the sky I went back to the tree under which I had slept the night before. Under it and around it many people were taking cover from the midday sun, and among them was something I never expected to see: a group of my school colleagues from Naga Hammadi, all of them in ecclesiastical garments.
As soon as they saw me they gathered around me, delighted at my surprise arrival, though it was in fact they who took me by surprise. They asked me what brought me here and I said I was lost. They asked me about my church clothes and I said they were torn and dirty and I was keeping them in my bag until I could mend and wash them, and to save myself from ridicule by the pagans. They asked me where I was going and I said I had a letter for the priest Yoannes the Libyan. They knew him and led me to him, and so for the first time I entered the great Church of St Mark in Alexandria, the Church of the Wheat Seed, surrounded by eight monks.
When Yoannes had finished reading the letter of recommendation which had been in my bag, he lifted his face and asked me quietly and concisely after the health and circumstances of his friend who recommended me. I reassured him and did not tell him I knew that they both rejected the ideas and the violent acts of the previous bishop, Theophilus, and that they had written each other letters about that, although in their youth they were his disciples and believed he was fighting against the paganism which had long struggled against Christianity. When they found him prolonging his war indefinitely, they shunned and avoided him. I also did not tell him that his friend had sent me to Alexandria after the bishop’s death in the hope that the situation would calm down. I did not hint at any of this, even remotely. I just mentioned some of the stories he had told about
them when they were monks at St Antony’s monastery and when they were neighbours to St Shenouda the Archimandrite, the head of the solitaries in Akhmim. His face showed signs of relief and when I finished he invited me to rest from my long journey, and he called on his servant to show me the way.
The servant first took me to the vast refectory and ate some hot food with me. Then he took me to a guest wing with many very small rooms, and told me that in a few days I would move from these temporary quarters to a monk’s room. Two days passed as I swam in the seas of the church, which have no shores. The church had dozens of priests and monks, and hundreds of visitors and people came all day long to pray, seek blessings or confess. The church never slept; it was a beehive always glorifying the kingdom of God. Even in the depths of night, when they lit the prodigious and extraordinary lantern which hung in the church, it seemed to me that this place was the world where I truly belonged, and I told myself often in those days that I was not part of this ephemeral world. The Lord had chosen me for some mysterious purpose known to him, so let the Lord’s will be done.
I ended up staying in a small room inside the church, surrounded by other rooms occupied by many like me, servants of the Lord. Most of them were monks from the Western Pentapolis and Upper Egypt, and some were priests who had come on short missions from faraway places, such as Abyssinia, where they speak that strange language. In the early days no one paid me any attention, except a visiting monk originally from a small village near the Muharraq Monastery, which I had passed by on my way to Alexandria. The remote monastery was built years ago by the late Bishop Theophilus in the Qusqam Mountain overlooking Lycopolis (Assiut). The monk was staying in the next room, waiting to leave with the Abyssinians, to live in their land and never come back. I no longer remember his name, perhaps Bishoy, but I am not certain now. ‘Bishoy’ in the Egyptian language means ‘elevated’ but this monk was short. I was drawn by his dignity, goodness and the fact that he was a stranger. At the time he was about thirty years old and spoke the Sa’idi dialect of Egyptian like me. We used to chat between the prayers and the masses, and on our way to the refectory. After a few days we became brothers in the fold of the Lord. When I told him on Saturday that I planned to go out the next day to go to Hypatia’s lecture, he shouted at me,: ‘That’s quite wrong.’ He told me in alarm that if this act was committed, it could never be forgiven, and he advised me never to mention her name again. ‘It would be a mortal sin. Would you miss the Sunday sermon by Pope Cyril, the great bishop, to go and see a harpy! That sin would never be pardoned if you committed it. As for me, you have nothing to fear. I’ll consider it a bad joke, and will never mention it to anyone.’
I had a sleepless night, torn by every conflicting thought. Should I forget that I had seen Hypatia and devote myself to my purpose in coming, then go back to my native country safe and sound? Or should I leave the church forever? Should I go out tomorrow morning and never come back? At least I am not a prisoner between these walls. What’s the point in staying? Jesus the Messiah began his great mission among the people, not between walls amidst monks and priests. There was real life around him, yet why should we die before death comes? But I am safe in the church, after I was homeless, and the men of the faith are my real family, since I have no earthly family except my uncle who is weakened by the Aa disease and who I doubt will still be alive when I return. Who would I go back to if I returned to my home country? And which is my home country? Is it the village of my uncle who’s waiting to die? Is it my father’s village, where no one will know me? Or the village where my mother settled? My mother who slept every night in the arms of a man with sin on his hands. I hate him and I hate her, and the hatred will kill me. But I should love my enemies and do good to those who have done me ill, to be truly Christian, and truly loving. I have seen real love only in a pagan woman, who met me by chance on the beach and took me into her paradise for three nights together and four unforgettable days. If I went back to Octavia, would she accept me or would she again call me vile and despicable? That was the first time anyone had insulted me and I will try to make sure it’s the last. No one will dare insult me as long as I am a monk in the great church, and perhaps I will rise in the clerical hierarchy until I become bishop of one of the big cities. But what do I want with a bishopric? Will it compensate me for my dream of excelling in medicine, and my hope of curing Aa? Will I follow my earthly ambitions, after promising my ailing uncle that I was giving my life to Jesus the Saviour? That would not be right of me, and that way I would lose my reason for living. What if tomorrow I offered to live in Hypatia’s house to serve her and learn from her? She would agree and she would help me study medicine in the Museion or scientific academy and I would be a distinguished doctor within only two years, because I had studied medicine extensively in Akhmim. Of all its many branches the only one I lacked was anatomy, and the doctors of the Museion had been dissecting for hundreds of years and knew all the secrets of medicine. That’s what I told myself that night, though I had not yet discovered that the Museion had closed down years earlier.
That night my brain kept churning with conflicting ideas. My heart ached and my spirit was broken. I thought, ‘If I leave the church, and leave it when they know who I am, they will see me as an apostate and they will persecute me as they persecuted those who renounced Christianity in the days of Emperor Julian.’ Christianity was now the official religion of the whole empire and I would not survive denunciation by the fearsome group called the Lovers of the Passion. Because of them I would meet the same fate as my father, and they would rejoice as my mother rejoiced. But I was burning with desire to see Hypatia the next day. I would discuss philosophical matters with her and I would rise in her estimation, though she in any case esteems everyone. She is true to the meaning of her Greek name Hypatia: sublime. She was only ten or fifteen years older than me, and that’s not a big difference. Let her adopt me as a son or a younger brother, or maybe the day will come when she will fall in love with me, and we would be like the couples Octavia spoke of when she said that women who love younger men make them the happiest of the happy. But there is no happiness or joy in this world.
I awoke from my reverie to the sound of the bells for Bishop Cyril’s sermon, and I went out with all the others as they left their rooms. I was squeezed between hundreds of people going into the church. The nave was full and there was no longer any way to leave or to move from the spot where I was stuck among the monks, priests, deacons, gospel readers, initiates great and small, former wrestlers who had become believers, members of the Lovers of the Passion group, sons of penitents who had rejoined the church, bewildered followers of the Tall Brothers, and groups of monks from the Wadi Natroun monasteries. I was surrounded on all sides by the army of the Lord. Their chant, which made the nave quake and the walls tremble, foretold that great news and momentous events were nigh. When the chant reached its climax and their voices were close to cracking, Bishop Cyril appeared above us in his pulpit.
The bishop’s awesome aspect stunned and amazed me. It was the first time I had seen him, and after that for the next two years I would see him every Sunday morning without exception. I also saw him the day of the private meeting, which I will relate if the occasion arises to speak of it. When I saw the bishop for the first time I was astonished, because he looked down on us from a pulpit with walls covered in gilt. That was just one level, and above it there was an enormous wooden cross holding a statue of Jesus made of coloured plaster. From the forehead, hands and feet of the crucified Christ flowed blood coloured bright red.
I looked at the ragged piece of cloth on the statue of Jesus, then at the bishop’s embroidered robe. Jesus’s clothes were old rags, torn at the chest and most of the limbs, while the bishop’s clothes were embellished with gold thread all over, so that his face was hardly visible. Jesus’s hands were free of the baubles of our world, while the bishop held what I think was a sceptre made of pure gold, judging from how brightly it shone. On his head Jesus had his cro
wn of thorns, while the bishop had on his head the bright gold crown of a bishop. Jesus seemed resigned as he assented to sacrifice himself on the cross of redemption. Cyril seemed intent on imposing his will on the heavens and the earth.
The bishop looked at his people and his flock, and gazed around at the crowd which had pressed into the nave of the church. He raised his golden sceptre and they fell silent. Then he spoke, saying, ‘Sons of Christ, in the name of the living God I bless this day of yours, and all your days. I start my sermon with the truth which Paul the Apostle speaks in his second epistle to Timothy when he says to him, and to every Christian in every time and every place: “Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs – he wants to please his commanding officer. Similarly, if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes according to the rules.”’
I thought for a moment that the bishop meant me by what he said and that this was one of his mysterious miracles. He raised his voice until it reverberated against the walls of the solemn church. ‘Let me start with this. Let me remind you that we live in a time of sedition, thus we are in the midst of a holy war. The light of Christ has spread so that it today almost covers the earth and dispels the darkness which lasted so long. But the forces of darkness are still nestling here and there, looking down on God’s earth in the guise of sedition and of heresies which burrow into people’s hearts. We will not cease fighting them as long as we live. We have dedicated ourselves to our Lord Jesus Christ. Let us be the soldiers of the truth, content only with the wreath of heavenly triumph. Let us be loyal to the religion of the Saviour, that we may join the martyrs and the saints who passed through the world to obtain heavenly glory and eternal life.’
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