‘Be it so.’
‘Then this archetype must be a son also.’
‘Whose son, Raphael?’
‘Why not of “Zeus, father of gods and men”? For we agreed that it—we will call it he, now, having agreed that it is a person—could owe its existence to none but God Himself.’
‘And what then?’ said Hypatia, fixing those glorious eyes full on his face, in an agony of doubt, but yet, as Raphael declared to his dying day, of hope and joy.
‘Well, Hypatia, and must not a son be of the same species as his father? “Eagles,” says the poet, “do not beget doves.” Is the word son anything but an empty and false metaphor, unless the son be the perfect and equal likeness of his father?’
‘Heroes beget sons worse than themselves, says the poet.’
‘We are not talking now of men as they are, whom Homer’s Zeus calls the most wretched of all the beasts of the field; we are talking—are we not?—of a perfect and archetypal Son, and a perfect and archetypal Father, in a perfect and eternal world, wherein is neither growth, decay, nor change; and of a perfect and archetypal generation, of which the only definition can be, that like begets its perfect like?.... You are silent. Be so, Hypatia.... We have gone up too far into the abysses....
And so they both were silent for a while. And Raphael thought solemn thoughts about Victoria, and about ancient signs of Isaiah’s, which were to him none the less prophecies concerning The Man whom he had found, because he prayed and trusted that the same signs might be repeated to himself, and a child given to him also, as a token that, in spite of all his baseness, ‘God was with him.’
But he was a Jew, and a man: Hypatia was a Greek, and a woman—and for that matter, so were the men of her school. To her, the relations and duties of common humanity shone with none of the awful and divine meaning which they did in the eyes of the converted Jew, awakened for the first time in his life to know the meaning of his own scriptures, and become an Israelite indeed. And Raphael’s dialectic, too, though it might silence her, could not convince her. Her creed, like those of her fellow-philosophers, was one of the fancy and the religious sentiment, rather than of the reason and the moral sense. All the brilliant cloud-world in which she had revelled for years,—cosmogonies, emanations, affinities, symbolisms, hierarchies, abysses, eternities, and the rest of it—though she could not rest in them, not even believe in, them—though they had vanished into thin air at her most utter need,—yet—they were too pretty to be lost sight of for ever; and, struggling against the growing conviction of her reason, she answered at last—