Fabrician took Philocrates back to Onessa with him, and two or three years later sent him to Aquileus. Philocrates astounded the priests by his zeal. He rose with the sun, and went on studying late into the night by torchlight. Soon he knew as much as the most learned among them. Before he was seventeen they offered to have him initiated into the mysteries—a very rare thing for a foreigner as young as that.[2] But he declined. He had made friends in Aquileus with a young man of about his own age called Isidore, who was preparing for the priesthood, and to him he wrote a famous letter explaining his decision:
“Do not suppose I scorn or disdain religion and those who serve it. I owe them too much not to love them; I respect and revere them. I believe with all my heart they approach as near the truth as man is permitted to approach the light. I think power without fear of the gods is a great evil, and that if priests themselves cannot rule, at least kings and princes should possess the piety and justice taught us by the gods. And so you will ask me, why do I refuse to serve these gods and to bend to their laws? The reason is that the truth of the gods can only ever be, for us, the truth of the men who translate and interpret it. No man will ever become a god. The gods will never descend to man. I believe only in that unknown inner god who manifests himself dimly in the reason and the heart (χατά ϕρενά χαί χατά θνμόν). He has no need of mysteries or initiation; he needs only tears and hope, affliction and lucidity. And even if this god himself were, in his mercy, to offer to reveal himself to me in all his splendor, I verily believe, Isidore, I should still refuse the gift of his goodness. For man is made to seek, not to know; knowledge is only knowing how far it is possible to know.”[3]
Pascal and Renan both admired this letter, which echoes the conversation between Fabrician and the young Philocrates in the temple at Mursa. It has given rise to the most diverse interpretations. Marxist historians, including Engels, have detected traces of atheism in it; the Jesuits have given it a Christian twist; Protestants have seen it as one of the origins of the spirit of the Reformation; rationalists and believers have all laid claim to its author in endless treatises and exegeses. At all events, Philocrates did not give way—he never became a priest. But his decision to remain a philosopher made his position in Aquileus difficult, and when Fabrician suggested he should go with him to Balkh, he eagerly accepted. He joined Fabrician between Onessa and Balkh, and they entered the great forest together.
In Balkh, Philocrates was very close to Fabrician. He rarely saw Roderick or Helen or even Simeon. Because of his youth, he was one of those who remained behind instead of accompanying Roderick into the steppes, and he was in Balkh throughout the battle against Gandolphus’s men, the siege and fall of the city, and the passion of the two lovers. During the siege he did all he could to protect Fabrician and Helen, and he was probably the only one to whom Fabrician confided his secret before he died. Fabrician had told Helen the story of the meeting in the temple at Mursa, and praised Philocrates’ learning and wit. After Fabrician’s death, Philocrates went with Helen as a matter of course when Roderick abandoned the city of Balkh. And when, many years after the feast of the summer solstice in the temple at Mursa, and many years after Fabrician’s death even, Alexis, following the wolf hunt with his brother Simeon, decided to leave the forest, Helen was happy to keep faith with Fabrician by entrusting his son to Philocrates.
The young Greek and the boy traveled together. For Alexis they were long years of apprenticeship. The two companions crossed oceans and visited cities. They were seen in Vienna, Adrianople, Como, Avenches, Autun, Cologne, Trier, Carthage, Dura-Europos, Samarkand, and Bukhara. They thirsted in the desert, and were often so weary they threw themselves down fully dressed in miserable inns, barns, wayside ditches. They mixed with pilgrims, armies on the march, artists, and vagabonds. They worked in circuses, with jugglers and ropewalkers. They hired themselves out to farmers, rich herdsmen, woodcutters, and owners of boats. They were attacked by brigands, and killed some of them. They went to war in order to eat, and to survive they sacrificed to unknown, savage gods. They went through the world, and wondered at it. They saw strange animals, signs in the heavens, all the miracles of nature. Men seemed to them varying yet alike, always different yet everywhere the same. Their houses, clothes, speech, and beliefs altered from town to town, valley to valley, from one bank of a river to the other. In one place the women slew their children, in another the men burned their wealth to dazzle their rivals. But the women still loved the children they offered up to their gods, and the men still prized power and glory and supremacy. Poverty, laziness, or humiliation explained the vagueness or extravagance of the meanings they attributed to their lives. The travelers saw something of everything in this world they went through, and often one day’s revelation was the opposite of what they had seen the day before. But these differences, paradoxes, contradictions, marvels were everywhere similar, and Philocrates explained to Alexis that the world was the dream of a god, and its diversities the image and reflection of an unknown unity of which all men formed part. Absurdity, the ridiculous, cruelty, ugliness, pain, and death all had a hidden meaning. We could not know what that meaning was. But there still remained the world where the sun shone for all and only died to be reborn.
One evening, after years of weary wandering, the master and the disciple came to a big city full of stir and activity. The relevant texts do not allow us to identify it for certain: some historians think it was Alexandria, others Emesa or Edessa, others again Antioch or Tarsus. It was a place where there were soldiers and merchants, slaves and judges. There were also many priests, some of whom ministered to the worship of the sun. Though not the most powerful or influential, these had a great reputation for wisdom and learning. Philocrates had long been in communication with some of them, and they now welcomed him as one of themselves and opened their schools and temples to Alexis.
Alexis had always been attracted by sun worship. In his native forest he used to bask in the sun with an abandon at once wild and voluptuous. He may once or twice have yielded to a sort of ecstasy, an illumination which later took on the sense of a mystic communion with the sun. In all events, he saw in the sun the principle of unity toward which a nature like his, solicited on all sides by passionate curiosity, eagerly aspired.[4] The triple cult of the sun, the eagle, and the oak practiced in Balkh as in the rest of the Empire may have directed him when still young toward a kind of religious experience in which solar myths played a part. But despite appearances the religion of the Empire, which did not concern itself with any ideas of order or unity in the universe, accorded only a very minor place to the veneration of the sun. Not only had the oak and the eagle ultimately eclipsed the sun in the pantheon of the Empire, but the dissipation of godhead among a multitude of different divinities had deprived the sun of that primary function as source and rallying point which for real sun worshippers was its essential. But in the temples of Emesa, Alexandria, or Antioch, Alexis found the sun exercising undivided rule over the world and its inhabitants. Philocrates, too, inclined toward a solar-type monotheism for which he had been prepared by a whole group of thinkers no longer satisfied with the old religious traditions of the Empire or the controversies between the supporters of Hermenides and those of Paraclitus. Still faithful to the views he had expressed several years earlier in the letter to Isidore, he refused to be initiated into the mysteries of sun worship as he had refused to be initiated into those of the priests of Aquileus. But faithful also to an almost relativist conception of the relationship between nature and truth, he thought the problem was not the same for Alexis as for himself, and that the path of the disciple was not strewn with the same obstacles as his own. Philosophers, moralists, and historians of religion have all expressed surprise at Philocrates’ dual attitude, and many have found it incomprehensible and disappointing that he should have encouraged Alexis to accept an initiation that he refused himself. But this indignation takes too little account not only of what would now be called Philocrates�
�� liberalism, but also of his explicit doctrine on the diversity of approaches to the divine. He played the same role toward Alexis as Fabrician had played toward him. Thus the disciple of the father was the master of the son, and thus was begun the long and lovely concatenation of culture and tradition, which required, in the name of Philocrates’ open skepticism and relativism, that Alexis’s longing for unity and peace should be assuaged by initiation.
Alexis was initiated into the cult of the sun at noon on the day of the summer solstice, twenty-five or twenty-six years to the day after the bloody ceremony in the temple at Mursa.[5] He was eighteen years old. A maiden led him blindfolded and walking backward to the mouth of a cave in which incense was burning. He wore a white robe and a thin white fillet around his brow; his head and feet were bare. He went alone into the cave, whence he had to crawl along a path, or rather an underground tunnel, to a large, dark, silent chamber full of rough pillars painted red and black. The walls were covered with representations of sphinxes and griffins, horrible grimacing heads, masks, and bones. Bats fluttered about unseen. Slowly burning herbs made him cough at first, then brought about a state of intoxication or unconsciousness full of flames and torrents from which he was aroused, he never knew whether it was hours or minutes later, by a voice calling his name from on high.
“Alexis!”
The young man raised his hands palms upward in a gesture of prayer. The voice pronounced his name three times and began to question him.
“What are you doing? What do you want? What are you waiting for?”
“I seek,” answered Alexis. “I hope. I believe.”
“Where do you come from?”
“From darkness and the depths of night.”
“Where are you going?”
“Toward the light that calls me.”
“May it be yours if you obey.”
“I shall obey.”
“May it be yours if you command.”
“I shall command.”
“Whence come the oak and the acorn?”
“From the sun which feeds them.”
“Whither fly the eagle and the eaglet?”
“Toward the sun which draws them.”
This catechism went on for some time. Then two priests brought the young man some ears of corn, a handful of earth, a pinch of salt, a vessel of wine, and a shell full of seawater, and led him to a fire giving off sweet odors, in a smaller room with stone columns carved in the shape of lotuses and palm trees. They left the young man praying before the dying fire, which slowly went out, plunging the whole cave once more into utter darkness. Then Alexis fell asleep.
He had a dream. A dazzling light spread through the cave and drew him toward itself, so that he seemed to be rising into the air and merging with it. The universe and all the ages unfolded before his eyes; all the secrets of the world were revealed to him. He floated. At his feet, everything was reduced to the smallest dimensions, and yet each detail was minutely visible. All was limpid and clear, and the marvelous multiplicity of beings and things reduced itself into beauty, light, and order. He could see roads where travelers hastened toward their inns; kings on their thrones; girls waiting for their sweethearts. Money flowed everywhere, like rivers; many suffered and wept; others sang, to the gods or to their lovers. Battles, births, children playing, sailors at sea, villages scorching and still in the midday sun. Snow on the mountaintops, valleys of violets, great cities with prisons, cunning, chance. Everything constantly moved and changed, but in an immutable harmony. At each moment the world was born and vanished in order to be born again. Slaves became rich, the powerful became slaves. Plowmen, fishermen, craftsmen in their workshops, merchants in their countinghouses, hope and movement, and sorrow and death. Philosophers thinking, and the ambitious, and the lovers, and the madmen, and those who built bridges, houses, aqueducts, and temples. In his dream he saw other dreams, and pangs, terrors, lies. He saw the fish of the sea, and the carp and pike and eels and toads. He could even see the trees, the flowers, the pebbles, the coral in the lagoons, the grains of sand on the shore, the drops of water in the ocean. He saw his own life, stretching out vast from his birth in the forest to glory and death, just like one of those grains of sand or drops of water. He saw his place in history and the echoes of his life across the years and the centuries. He saw all those, in the ages of ages, who would write his name and invoke his memory; all those who would read the books he would appear in; perhaps he saw you, at this very moment, thinking of him. Justus Dion tells us Alexis had, in a flash, a complete prophetic vision of all that would be contained in all the volumes future historians would write about his adventures. Measureless space, limitless time were to him transparent. He called to himself—“Alexis!”—and his name rebounded to the ends of the universe. All trembled at his voice and at his look; the world was his voice and his look also. Then he knew that both men and things were his.
Six white-robed maidens came to him in the cave, and he made love to each of them in a different position.[6] Then a seventh appeared at the entrance to the cave, in a blaze of light. She was more beautiful than all the others, with fair hair falling about her shoulders, her green eyes, and a noble and winning mien. He would have liked to rush and take her in his arms, but he knew he was forbidden to possess her. She was the symbol of those distant limits where power, will, and life all are halted. He asked her name. She answered that he would know soon enough, and took him by the hand. She led him into another room, so small it was scarcely more than a widening in the tunnel and he could hardly stand, and there she left him.
As soon as she had gone, two wooden grates came down over the two exits. With one outstretched arm the voluntary prisoner could now touch all four of the narrow walls enclosing him. A dull noise came from overhead, like stamping interspersed with raucous breathing. Alexis looked around and then above. The ceiling of the room consisted of a sort of open grid. As he looked up at the gleams of light filtering through, something heavy fell from above and made all dark again. At the same moment Alexis felt some warm, sticky liquid running over his brow and cheeks and chest—first a few drops, then a thin trickle, then a stream. In a few moments the neophyte was drenched from head to foot, and when he tried the liquid with his tongue it was thick, strong, sweetish. It was blood.
He fell to his knees beneath the bloody baptism. His eyes gradually got used again to the dark, and he thought he could make out, above him, the inert form of a white sacrificial bull. When its sacred blood stopped flowing, he seemed to fall asleep again. He awoke in broad daylight, lying laved and perfumed on a flat stone, wearing a blue-and-red tunic and a crown of laurel and flowers. Sweet music sounded in his ears, and he felt pure and strong. Beside him he recognized a man still young but very ugly whose familiar face smiled at him kindly and with a shade of irony—it was Philocrates. There were two others standing beside him: a man with long hair and a white beard, and a radiantly lovely young woman. The first was the chief priest of the temple of the sun, and the girl was the seventh maiden, she whom Alexis was forbidden to love by all the laws of heaven and of earth. The look she bent on him was gentle yet lofty, and there, under the sun at its zenith, washed clean of the blood of the bull, and still intoxicated with having soared above space and time, he thought how beautiful she was, and how beautiful the world, with its mysteries and miracles.[7]
XI
FEASTING IN ALEXANDRIA
THIS WORLD LIT UP BY BEAUTY AND WONDER SOON offered Helen’s son attractions other than holiness. It seems that Philocrates, once having urged Alexis to be initiated, set about weaning him away from religious mysteries and reintroducing him to the charms, and perhaps the follies, of everyday life. The four or five years following Alexis’s experience in the temple of the sun appear to have been devoted to every kind of pleasure. We possess two or three letters from Helen to Philocrates in which she actually reproaches him with abandoning Alexis to temptation and loose living. Philocrates’ reply to Helen is as famous as his letter to
Isidore:
“The gods have granted each of us but a few years upon earth, and what awaits us after death is revealed to none. But what we have always known is that life is short. You know it, madam, and I know it too, and not a day passes but I say to myself: My soul, instead of harking after eternal life, exhaust the sphere of the possible. Though we know nothing of the gods and the mysteries in the beyond, they are present here below in their reflections, mysteriously lighting up our path across the earth. That is why I did not feel it my duty to deny Alexis what I have always denied myself, and he dedicated himself to the gods and their service. For a life without the gods is an impoverished one, and to be really a man one must look toward them. But to serve them also means, in a way, to turn aside from men. I did not help Alexis to approach the gods in order to drive him away from men, but in order to bring him nearer men, too. If he plunged into pleasure as if death and heaven were only tales for children, I would put him to shame for his folly. But if he devoted himself to the gods and to uncertain hopes as if life and the earth were mere mirages, I would remind him that he is a man, and that laughter and women and wine and horses were created by the gods for men to enjoy. Alexis already venerates and serves the gods. So now let him live, and let his life serve him.”[1]
This and other letters, and certain occasions on which Philocrates seems deliberately to have urged Alexis on to pleasure and perhaps to a certain form of vice, have been used by several historians as evidence that Philocrates was Basil’s or even Gandolphus’s agent, whose object was to divert Alexis from nobler ambitions.[2] But this theory does not seem to bear examination. All those who put it forward see Alexis’s youth in the light of his future glory. But at the time, when Alexis was unrestrainedly indulging in all the pleasures proper to his age, how could Basil and Gandolphus have seen him as a possible threat to their own supremacy? The emperor, Thaumas, and Gandolphus were all aware of the existence of Helen’s son. They had had dealings with Roderick, Simeon, Fabrician, and Helen herself, and the slightest evidence of ambition on the part of a descendant of the Porphyries would have aroused mistrust and even hatred—perhaps not in Thaumas, who would have been more likely to favor him, but certainly in Basil and Gandolphus. But up till now had the young man manifested the least desire to assert any rights at all? Had he given the emperor and Gandolphus the least occasion for displeasure? A document by Thaumas, which Renan uses in support of his theory, does show a certain reserve toward Philocrates, while at the same time valuing him as Fabrician’s disciple. But Thaumas certainly does not accuse him of alienating the young man from affairs of state and political ambition—the idea of such a plan apparently does not even enter his head. He merely wonders whether the Greek philosopher does not lay too much stress on nature rather than the gods in the instruction he offers his pupil. It is perfectly natural that the great priest should be preoccupied about the feelings and actions of a young man who was dear to him. Nor is there anything to suggest some mysterious ambitions which might be causing concern to the young Greek tutor. At the time of the initiation, such ambitions were still nonexistent and imaginary.
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