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Charles Kingsley: Augustine

Cyril, Bishop and later saint, is nominally the leader of the battling churchmen of the tale; the great Augustine and the philosophic Synesius, bishops both, are minor personages of the drama, with many other passing figures of the church, but the leading character from that side is the humble Philammon, the young boy of the monastery in the desert, who makes his way in the simplicity of his zeal to brave the world, the flesh, and the devil, where so many other monks of fiction have found that interesting triad, keeping headquarters at Alexandria. The city was ruled by Orestes, so far as any prefect could rule that unruly cosmopolis, a worldly and elusive person, who, not satisfied with the troubles already at hand, would conspire to erect an empire of Africa out of the difficulties of Rome and Constantinople, and to crown as his empress Hypatia, idealist, mathematician, neo-Platonist, leader and teacher of what remained of Greek philosophy as a living force. Under Hypatia's sway fell the young Philammon by reason of her beauty, her power of speech, and the inherited appeal of philosophy to one whose ancestry was Athenian. An appeal of another sort came to him from Pelagia, dancer and beauty, darling of the city in general and of individuals in particular. To the charm of Hypatia yielded not only the worldly prefect and the simple monk, but the most interesting figure of the story, Raphael-Aben-Ezra, descended from the blood of Solomon, rich, lazy, and selfish to all appearance, but the personage in whose soul and mind was surging most violently the struggle and conflict which is the keynote of the book. Should the traditions of Jewry, the lure of Greek philosophy, the charm of a pleasant if tumultuous world, or the power of Christianity conquer in him? In his apparently easy-going way through existence, he was measuring what every phase of that seething caldron had to offer as a solution for the problems which a human soul has to ponder for its own salvation. It took him long to decide, and it was only by the ministrations of Augustine and Synesius and the living example of Victoria that he finally found in Christianity the truly democratic creed by which the world could best live.