The Death of the Gods

by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky

  VII

  At Nicomedia, at Pergamos, and at Smyrna Julian, now nineteen yearsold and an enthusiast for Hellenic wisdom, had heard much of thefamous mage and sophist, Iamblicus of Chaldea, a pupil of theNeo-Platonist, Porphyrius. Men used commonly to call him "the Divine"Iamblicus. In order to see this master, Julian made a journey toEphesus.

  Iamblicus was a little thin and wrinkled old man. He liked complainingof his ailments--gout, rheumatism, nervous headache; he abusedphysicians, but was zealous in carrying out their advice, and used tospeak with deep interest of drugs and infusions of herbs. He alwayswore, even in summer, a double tunic; never seemed warm enough, andwould sit basking in the sun like a lizard.

  From his youth up Iamblicus had broken himself of the habit ofmeat-eating, and spoke of it with disgust as a practice beyond hiscomprehension. His servant used to prepare for him a special broth,made of barley-water, warm wine, and honey, he being toothless andunable to masticate bread.

  He was always surrounded by numberless admiring students who hadtravelled from Rome, Antioch, Carthagena; from Egypt, Mesopotamia, andPersia, to become his pupils.

  All stoutly believed Iamblicus could work miracles. Iamblicus treatedthem like a father irritated at seeing round him so many weaklings.When they began to discuss and to wrangle, the master would make asweeping gesture, followed by a grimace expressive of physical pain.He spoke gently, and in a low-toned, agreeable voice; the louder otherfolk shouted the more subdued his own tone became. He hated all noise,and quarrelsome voices as much as creaking sandals.

  Julian gazed in disappointed perplexity at this chilly, sickly, andwhimsical old man. What power drew towards him the world ofphilosophy? He remembered the story of pupils--that one night thedivine master during prayer was upraised by some invisible force to aheight of twelve cubits from earth, wrapped in a golden glory. Anothertale was about a miracle, by which the master had smitten from a rocktwo warm springs, Eros and Anteros, the two Daemons of love--the onedull-souled, the other joyous. Iamblicus, it was said, had caressedboth, like children, and at a word caused them to disappear.

  But in listening to the master Julian never succeeded in discoveringthe potency of his words. The meta-physic of the school of Porphyriusseemed to him dull, dead, and painfully complicated. Iamblicus would,it is true, emerge a playful victor from the most difficultdialectical discussions. His teaching about God, about the World,about the Ideas, was full of profound learning; but in it lay no vitalstimulus. Julian had hoped otherwise, and nevertheless he hung about,and did not set off again homewards. The eyes of Iamblicus werestrange, green, and deeply-sunk in his bronzed face. Julian waspersuaded that these weird and by no means holy eyes betokened somehidden wisdom, the occult wisdom of the serpent, concerning whichIamblicus never spoke to his pupils. But when "the Divine," in hiscracked voice, used to ask why his barley broth was not ready, orcomplained of gout, the spell was broken.

  On one occasion Iamblicus was sauntering with Julian on the seashore,outside the town. It was a soft and melancholy evening. Behind thecastle of Panormos in the distance glittered, with their array ofstatues, the terraces of the celebrated temple of the EphesianArtemis.

  The dark reeds along the sandy shore made no rustle. It was the spotwhere Latona gave birth to Artemis and Apollo. Smoke of numberlessaltars in the sacred Orthegian wood was rising in columns into thesky. To the south the Samian mountains shone blue on the horizon.Wavelets fell calmly as the breathings of a child, and pellucid wavesswelled over the rocks. The setting sun, hidden behind vapour, gildedthe edge of enormous cloud-masses.

  Iamblicus seated himself upon a boulder, and Julian threw himself onthe ground at his feet. The master caressed the thick black locks ofthe pupil.

  "Are you sad?"

  "Yes."

  "I know you are sad. You seek and you do not find. You have not thestrength to say '_He is_,' and you are afraid to say '_He is not_.'"

  "How have you guessed this, Master?"

  "My poor boy! for fifty years have I not suffered from the same pain?And I shall suffer from it till I die. Do you imagine that I know Himbetter than you--that I have discovered what you have missed? _That_is the birth-pain that never ceases. Beside it other tortures are asnothing. People think that they suffer from hunger, from poverty, fromthirst; in reality they suffer only from the thought that perhaps Hehas no existence. Who shall dare to say '_He exists not_?' and yetwhat superhuman strength one must have to say, '_He is_'!"

  "Do you mean to say that you, even you, have never come near Him?"

  "Thrice in my life have I borne the ecstacy of feeling myself whollyat one with Him. Plotinus felt it four times, Porphyrius five times.But as for me, the moments in my existence in which life was worthliving were precisely three."

  "I have questioned your pupils on this subject; they knew nothing."

  "Have they the courage to know? The shell of wisdom is enough forthem; the kernel, for almost everybody, is deadly."

  "Well, let me die, Master! Give the core to me!"

  "Have you courage?"

  "Yes; but speak--speak!"

  "And what can I tell you? I do not know, ... and need I tell you?Listen to the calmness of the evening, and the secret will be yourswithout words of mine...."

  He kept stroking Julian's head; the boy was dreaming, "This, this iswhat I waited for," and clasping the knees of Iamblicus he falteringlyentreated--

  "Master, have pity!... Reveal it all!... Do not desert me!"

  With green and strangely motionless eyes kept steadily on the clouds,Iamblicus murmured, as if speaking to himself:

  "Yes, we have all forgotten the voice of God. Like children estrangedfrom the cradle from the face of their father, we hear Him, and we donot recognise Him. To hear His voice, every earthly cry in our soulsmust cease. Just so long as reason shines and illumines our souls, weremain imprisoned in ourselves and see not God. But when reason is putby, ecstacy falls upon us like the dew of night--that ecstacy whichthe evil cannot know. The wise, the good alone can become, of theirown will, lyres vibrating under the hand of God. Whence comes thatbeam which falls into the soul? I do not know. It comes unawares, andwhen one least expects it. To search for it is useless. God is notremote from us. One must make ready, with a soul becalmed; and simplywait, as the eyes await (according to the saying of the poet) _therush of the sun from dark ocean_. God does not come, God does not goaway; He is revealed. He is, what the universe is not, the negation ofeverything that exists. He is nothing, and He is All."

  Iamblicus rose and slowly extended his wasted arms:

  "Be still, be still, I tell you! Let all things listen for Him! He ishere! Let the earth and the sea, let even the sky be dumb! Listen!...It is He who fills the universe, the very atoms sing with His breath;He who illumines matter and chaos--_at which the gods tremble_--justas the setting sun illumines that dark cloud."

  Julian listened. It seemed to him that the master's calm weak voicewas filling the world, was reaching the heights of the heaven, and thelast confines of the sea. But the boy's sadness was so deep that itescaped from his bosom in an involuntary sigh.

  "Father, forgive me if the question is a folly; but if it is thus withthe world why go on living? Why this eternal interchange of life anddeath? Why pain? Why evil? Why the burden of the body? Why doubt? Whythis dark thirst for the impossible?"

  Iamblicus looked at him with gentleness, and anew passed his hand overJulian's head. He answered:

  "Ah, my son, that is the very seat of the mystery! there is no evil,there is no body, there is no universe, if He exists! Think! it is He,_or_ the universe! The body, evil, the universe, all are a mirage, adeception of the living senses. All we have once rested together uponthe breast of God in the bosom of invisible light. But there came atime when we beheld from on high matter in its darkness and deadness,and each of us saw in matter its own image, as in a mirror. And thesoul mused to itself, 'I can, and I will to, be free! I am like Him!Why not dare to quit Him and contain all in myself?' S
o the soul, likeNarcissus gazing into the brook, fell under the spell of its ownimage, reflected in its body; and then she fell farther, and desiredto fall for ever, to rend herself from God for ever. She cannot do so.The feet of mortal man touch earth, but his stature lifts him throughthe heavens.

  "Upon the Eternal Ladder of births and of death, all souls, all thingsexisting, are ascending and descending, sometimes towards Him,sometimes away from Him, seeking to leave the Father, and neverfulfilling their endeavour. Each soul desires to be God. It weeps forthe breast of God, has no rest upon earth, and aspires only to returnto the Absolute. We must return to Him, and then all things willbecome God, and God will be in All. Do you imagine that you are alonein regretting Him! Are you not aware that the whole sum of things isyearning for Him? Listen!"

  The sun had set. The edges of the flaming clouds had sunk into ashes.The sea had become pale, light, flocculent as the sky; the sky deepand diaphanous as the sea. Upon the road a cart was passing by; ayoung man and woman were in it--two lovers, perhaps. The woman wassinging a melancholy love song. When they had passed all things wereplunged into silence again, and became sadder still. With hastenedstrides, the oriental night swept over the earth. Julian murmured:

  "How many times have I asked myself why Nature was so sad, and why,when she is proudest then saddest of all...."

  Iamblicus answered by a smile--

  "Yes... Yes... Look, she longs to say why; and cannot speak. She isdumb. She sleeps, and seeks to remember in her dreams, but Matterweighs down her eyelids. Only vaguely can she see Him. Everything inthe universe, stars and sea, and earth, animals, plants, and peopleare dreams of Nature, thinking of God. What she so contemplates, isborn and dies. She creates by contemplation, as a dream creates, witheffortless ease, and no obstacle to her thought. That is why her worksare so beautiful, so free, so purposeless, and so divine. The play ofthe dreams of Nature is like the play of clouds, without end orbeginning. Outside that contemplation of hers nothing in the worldexists; and the deeper that contemplation is, the more silent. Believeme, Will, Action, Effort, are only enfeebled and deflectedcontemplations of God. Nature, in her grandiose indolence, createsforms like the geometrician, for whom nothing exists except what hesees on the paper before him. She brings forms, one after another, outof the womb of her dream. But her mute meditation is only theappearance of reality. Nature, that sleeping Cybele, never lifts hereyelids, and never finds words. Man, he only, has found utterance. Thehuman soul is Nature having lifted the lashes of her eyes, awakenedand ready to see God, no longer in half-slumber, but really and faceto face...."

  The first stars were shining in the firmament; now they vanished, andnow sparkled again into sight, like diamonds set in the dark azure.More stars, and yet more, kindled their new lights, till the arraybecame incalculable. Iamblicus lifted his finger towards them--

  "Julian, to what should one compare the universe of all those stars?One might liken it to a fisherman's net thrown into the sea. God fillsthe universe as the water fills the net, which moves, but which cannotretain the waters; and the universe desires, but cannot keep God inher meshes. The net is drawn, but God remains. If the universe made nostir God would create nothing--would not issue from the calm thatsurrounds Him. For whither should He sweep, and to what end? Yonder,in the realm of the eternal Mothers, in the soul of Calm, dwell theseeds, the Forms, the Ideas, of all that is, has been, and shall be.The germ of hearth-cricket and of atom, together with the germ of theOlympian god."

  Then Julian cried aloud, and his voice rang in the silence of Naturelike a cry of mortal pain--

  "But who then is He; why does He not answer when we call Him? What isHis name? I wish to know, I desire to know Him, to hear Him--to seeHim--why does He escape my thought? Where is He? Where does He dwell?"

  "My poor boy! What matters thought to Him? What means it? He has noname. He is such, that we can say that He must exist, but it isimpossible for us to say what He is. But do you think that you cansuffer love, or curse Him, without singing His praises? TheAll-Creator is Himself, having no likeness to His creations. When yousay, '_He is not_,' you are exalting Him as much as if you said '_Heis_.' One can affirm nothing about Him, because He is above existence,reality, and life. That is why I have said to you that He is thenegation of the universe and of your thought. Deny, renounce all thatexists for us here, and yonder, in the soundless profundity ofdarkness, as in the light, you shall find Him still. Give Him friends,family, country, heaven, earth, yourself, your reason, then you willno longer see light, you shall yourself be it. You will not say, 'Heand I,' because you will feel that He and you are '_one_'; and yoursoul will smile at your body as at a phantasm of the desert. You shallbecome silence, you shall no more find utterance. And if at thatmoment the world should crumble away, you would be happy: for whatwould the world signify to you, since you shall be with Him? Your soulshall not desire, because He has no desires; it shall no longer live,because He is above living; it shall no longer think, because He isabove thought. Thought is the search for light. He seeks not, becauseHe is Himself the light. He penetrates the whole soul--He laps it inHimself. And then, impartial and solitary, it rests above reasonhigher than goodness, higher than beauty, reposes in the infinite, onthe breast of God the Father of Light. The Soul becomes God, or, toput it better, it remembers that in the night of ages it has been, is,and shall be, God.... Such, my son, is the life of the Olympians; suchis the life of the wise and heroic among men; renunciation of theuniverse, contempt of earthly passions, the flight of the Soul towardsGod, whom at last it sees face to face."

  Iamblicus ceased speaking. Julian fell at his feet without daring totouch them, and kissed the earth where they rested. Then he raised hishead and gazed into those strange green eyes, in which dwelt thewisdom of the serpent. They appeared calmer and deeper than the sky,and as if exhaling a miraculous power.

  Julian murmured--

  "Master! thou canst do all things. I believe! Command the mountains,and they shall approach each other! Be like God. Work a miracle,create the impossible. Grant my prayer! I believe!"

  "My poor boy, what are you asking for? Is not the miracle which may beaccomplished in your soul more beautiful than any wonders which _I_can work? Son, is it not a terrible and a happy miracle, this power inthe name of which you can dare to say: 'He is,' and if 'He is not' itmatters nothing, '_He will be_,' and you say 'Let God exist! Amen, sobe it!'"