Maximus is a visionary, or else he is deceiving you——!
Julian.
How dare you judge of these hidden things? They are beyond your learning, my Gregory! Fearful is the way into the glory of glories. Those dreamers in Eleusis were near the right track; Maximus found it, and I after him—by his help. I have wandered through chasms of darkness. A dead swampy water lay on my left—I believe it was a stream that had forgotten to flow. Piercing voices shrilled through the night confusedly, suddenly, and, as it were, without cause. Now and then I saw a bluish light; dreadful shapes floated past me;—I went on and on in deathly fear; but I endured the trial to the end.—
Since then—oh, beloved ones—with this my body transformed to spirit, I have passed far into the land of paradise; I have heard the angels chant their hymns of praise; I have gazed at the midmost light——
Gregory.
Woe to this ungodly Maximus! Woe to this devil-devoted heathen juggler!
Julian.
Blindness, blindness! Maximus pays homage to his precursor and brother—to both his great brothers, the law-giver of Sinai and the seer of Nazareth.——
Would you know how the spirit of realisation filled me?—It happened on a night of prayer and fasting. I perceived that I was wafted far—far out into space, and beyond time; for there was broad and sun-shimmering day around me, and I stood alone on a ship, with drooping sails, in the midst of the glassy, gleaming Aegean sea. Islands towered aloft in the distance, like dim, still banks of clouds, and the ship lay heavily, as though sleeping, upon the wine-blue plain.—
Then behold! the plain became more and more transparent, lighter, thinner; at last, it was no longer there, and my ship hung over a fearful, empty abyss. No verdure down there, no sunlight,—only the dead, black, slimy bottom of the sea, in all its ghastly nakedness.——