CHAPTER LX

THE VENGEANCE OF HEAVEN

Before we resume the story of Philip and Chrysostom let us pause to observe whether the wickedness of their enemies ultimately prospered; for those enemies will henceforth disappear from our pages.

The overthrow of the saintly Patriarch was due, as we have seen, to the combined hatred of the Empress; of the corrupt, worldly, frivolous society of Constantinople; of evil-hearted women, headed by a clique of painted and bejewelled widows; of large multitudes of bad priests and deacons, false monks, false nuns, false virgins, constituting the main section of the ecclesiastical world in Constantinople; of the agapetæ, or ladies who lived in the houses of the clergy under the thinly veiled name of spiritual sisters; and, most of all, of Theophilus, the wicked Patriarch of Alexandria, and the group of ambitious, intriguing, envious, unscrupulous, and slanderous bishops, of whom Severian and Cyrinus were among the worst, who constituted the execrable Synod of the Oak.

The ways of God with men are often very difficult to decipher. It is only when we are able to trace on a large scale the workings of Divine Providence that we can watch

The apparent prosperity of the wicked, the apparently crushing and miserable overthrow of the just, have been sore problems since the earliest ages of the world. The Psalmist and other saints found comfort in the general 507 fact that, though the wicked seem to flourish like a green bay-tree, it was frequently seen that they perished suddenly, and came to a fearful end; and that, as a rule, the righteous were not forsaken, nor did his seed beg their bread. But this law of averages was liable to tremendous exceptions, and hardly met the case of saints who died in the midst of affliction, or even perished in the flames of martyrdom. It remained for later ages to find new and deeper solutions of the problem, and to view it with untroubled faith, in the twofold conviction that holiness in itself is happiness, and sin is of its own nature retributive and penal; and that there is a world beyond the grave, where the false weights and imperfect balances of earth shall be redressed. It is not possible for man to furnish perfect theoretic explanations of the state of things in a world so full of sin and death and woe. Job sat in his leprosy, upon his dunghill, a bereaved, abject, humiliated pauper, on whom the very drunkards made their songs. The sanctimonious infallibility of his orthodox friends made them pour oil of vitriol upon his wounds by assuming that his misery was the penalty of secret guilt. Their cruel and infallible orthodoxies awoke the thunder of God’s disapproval, and, even if Job had never been uplifted out of the overwhelming deeps into the sunshine of prosperity, men would not have been entitled to adduce his anguish in proof that God cares not for the souls which He has made, and thinks no more of right and wrong upon this atom globe than of ‘a trouble of ants in a million millions of worlds.’ All that we should be entitled to say, if such cases as that of Job appeared to be the rule, and not the exception, would be, in the wail of the blameless king:

But when men of the stamp of Theophilus pointed to the exile of Chrysostom, the martyrdom of Eutyches, the affliction of Olympias, and the tortures of Tigrius and Serapion, in proof that God had declared Himself against John and the Johannites, they did not deceive either themselves 508 or the world. On the one hand, men saw Chrysostom ruined and yet happy; calumniated and yet happy; exiled and yet happy—sick, and persecuted, and suffering, and yet happy—and they would not have exchanged his trials for the gorgeous criminality of the Patriarch of Alexandria, or the full-fed unctuousness of Severian, with his heart fat as brawn, cold as ice, and hard as the nether millstone. Nor was there one woman in Constantinople—not Epigraphia, in her gilded boudoir, amid her clerical votaries, nor the most voluptuous of the nuns and spiritual sisters; not even Eudoxia herself in her imperial purple—who would not have been glad to lay aside her unhallowed ease if hers might have been the heart, the life, and the ultimate reward of good Nicarete or woe-worn Olympias. There was enough in the outward colour of events to make men sure that, amid the apparent silence and indifference of the Eternal, they could sometimes see the gleam of His avenging thunderbolts upon transgressors, and the Angel of the Dew standing in the furnace to beat back the flames from His beloved.

If there was one person to whom, more even than to Theophilus, the ruin of Chrysostom was due, it was to the Empress Eudoxia. She blindly abandoned herself to the furies of hatred and ambition. Well had it been for the daughter of Bauto if she had married in her own rank; if Eutropius had never intrigued against Rufinus, and had never shown her portrait to the susceptible Arcadius. Intoxicated by her dizzy elevation, she indulged without stint her passion for flattery and for the exercise of power. Nothing would sate her pride but the burning of perpetual incense. Half of her rage against Eutropius was due to her belief that he helped to delay her investiture with the title and dignities of an Augusta and her claims to statues and universal adoration throughout the provinces, which had caused such disgust throughout the Western world.

In overthrowing Chrysostom because of the real severity of his remonstrances against her faults, and the purely imaginary insults against her with which he was charged by forgers and slanderers, the Empress was acting against the admonitions of her own conscience. This had been shown by the terrified insistency with which she had 509 demanded his recall from his first banishment, when her superstitious fears had been aroused by the earthquake which shook her chamber. It is not too much to say that after his second expulsion she never enjoyed a happy hour. She was in a perpetual tremor of alarm, and, as she was again expecting to become a mother, her condition became truly pitiable.

The Patriarch had been banished on June 20, 401. Then followed the horrible persecution of the Johannites. On September 30 there burst over Constantinople the unusual trouble of a furious storm of hail so terrific and so disastrous that men were killed in the streets, and many buildings were seriously damaged. Eudoxia saw in this storm the wrath of God. She became more and more pale, more and more miserable, and the anguish of remorse decided her fate. She was but thirty-one years old, yet on September 30—less than three and a half months after the departure of Chrysostom—the beautiful Augusta had died a miserable death.

For her troubled mind brought on the pangs of a miscarriage. The infant—such was the terrified whisper of the multitude—had ceased to live three months before its birth, and the dead burden caused her an indescribable agony. There was no strength to bring forth. Then, desparing of all holy or lawful aid, she entreated her wretched husband to send secretly for a magician to the Palace. The sorcerer came, and muttered over her his incantations, and laid magic writing on her breast. The infant was born dead, and the hapless mother died. It was not strange that men should attribute to a visitation of God so untimely and so deplorable an end.

Among the most envenomed opponents of the Patriarch, as we have seen, had been the Egyptian Cyrinus, cousin of Theophilus, and Bishop of Chalcedon. Chrysostom had treated him with kindness and confidence, and had even appointed him one of his three assessors in Asia Minor, whence he lad returned an unpitying foe and accuser of his metropolitan. Very swift was the retribution—if retribution it were—which fell upon him. He never recovered from the wounds made on his foot by the heavy tread of Maruthas, Bishop of Mesopotamia, at the meeting 510 preliminary to the Synod of the Oak. The fierce inflammation and incessant agony did not prevent him from pushing his animosities to the bitter end. He was one of the most violent agitators. He was one of the four who took on their own heads the criminal responsibility from which Arcadius shrank. He was one of the bishops who signed the letter to Pope Innocent containing the lying charge that Chrysostom had set fire to his own church, which letter they had thought fit to send by the dwarfish, deformed, and half-inarticulate presbyter, Paternus. But during the rest of his short life the body of Cyrinus became as inflamed and gangrened as his mind. His foot was amputated, and still the gangrene spread; his leg was amputated, and it still spread. In the following year he died in agonies so indescribable as to be an object of pity even to his enemies.

What happened to Severian of Gabala, and how the lurid sun of his ambition set while it yet was day, leaving him a foiled and haunted man, we have already seen.

Nor did others of the leading conspirators long escape to vaunt their nefarious victory. Though Palladius, Bishop of Helenopolis, drops the veil of oblivion over their names, they were perfectly well known to him and his contemporaries.

One of these, a notorious calumniator of Chrysostom, died of a quinsy, in which his tongue became so swollen that he could no longer speak. In this condition he made a sign that he wanted his tablets, and when they were handed to him he wrote on them a confession of his evil deeds.

Another, seized shortly after with a sort of virulent pyæmia, was eaten of worms, and died a loathsome death.

Another fell violently down a staircase, and was killed by the fall.

Another, seized with chronic gout, found the worst aggravation of his malady in the supernatural terrors which haunted his miserable soul.

Antiochus, Bishop of Ptolemais, after amassing great wealth by the neglect of his duties and his see, employed himself in writing a treatise against avarice, and died despised in his hypocritical worldliness.

Arsacius, the intruded Patriarch of Constantinople, after a year of miserable and disputed power, embittered by contemptuous opposition, repudiated by all that was best and holiest in Constantinople and in the whole Western world, terminated an easy life by but a single year of dishonoured age, and died on November 11, 405.

And Theophilus of Antioch, the arch-criminal, the arch-conspirator, the arch-apostate?

He lived—for a continued life is sometimes a chief element in God’s punishments. He lived to feel that his jealous fury against a saint of God would overwhelm his name with infamy, and, in causing his many other crimes to glare under the full light of publicity, would hand him down to an immortality of execration.

He lived to hear the Alexandrians, over whom he tyrannised with a rod of iron, heap their reproaches on him in the streets for his base intrigues.

He lived to know that the fulsome adulation of the pitiable bishops whom he had consecrated to serve his own ends could not drown one howl of the conscience which he had transformed into a bandog within him.

He lived to revile the name of Chrysostom in a written invective as a frantic tyrant of hardened forehead; the sacrilegious patron of sacrilege; not only not a Christian, but worse than a Belshazzar; a hypocrite whose guilt transcended all possible penalties, but would incur everlasting damnation hereafter, and be cast out by Christ into outer darkness.

He lived to imbue his nephew and like-minded successor, Cyril, with the hatred which made him say that to enter the name of John on the episcopal records of Constantinople would be as bad as entering the name of Judas. He lived to vilify the name of the saintly Olympias, before whom, when he hoped to get something from her, he had gone on his knees and kissed her hand. He lived to besmirch the holy name of Origen, for whom all the while he had a secret admiration.

He lived in perpetual dread of death. ‘What fear, and trouble, and anguish we have to see,’ he said, ’when the soul is parted from the body!’ He lived, in splendour and despotism, to express his envy of the desert hermit, Arsenius, 512 who had ever been mindful of the hour when he should meet his God.

He was found dead on his bed on October 15, 412.

He had retired to rest from the midst of his episcopal pomp, but had hardly laid down to sleep before a dark and hideous figure took its seat by the bedside.

‘Who art thou, that darest intrude into my chamber?’ he cried in fury.

‘That tone avails your Holiness no more,’ said the figure, mockingly. ‘Wicked man! thine hour has come. From this bed thou risest, from this chamber thou steppest forth, no more.’

‘Avaunt thee, horrible fiend!’ cried the Patriarch, and he made the sign of the cross.

The figure laughed. ‘Art thou, then, so foolish, O wise theologian!’ it cried, ‘as to think that a mechanical motion with the fingers can avert the retribution due to a life of pride and crime?’

‘Who art thou?’ gasped Theophilus.

‘What! dost thou not know me?’ said the fiend. ’Not know thine own familiar friend? Not know him who has lived so long with thee, who has whispered all thy masterful lies into thine ear, who has sat on thy shoulder, who has clutched thee by the hair for these many years?’

‘I know thee not,’ he moaned; ‘I never yet saw anyone so hideous as thou.’

The fiend laughed long and loud. ‘Not know me? Whom, then, shouldest thou know? Thou hast created me. I am thyself! and wouldst thou now disown me? Nay, for the present moment I am thine, and thou art mine. Look at all the scenes in which we have acted, all the things that we have done.’

He waved his hand, and Theophilus saw before him heaps of gold got by chicanery, by falsehood, by flattery, and by oppression. ‘Does it not content thee?’ he said. ’See, how rich we are! How useful we found it, you and I. How we bribed the Alexandrian officials with it. How effectual it was in getting the votes of priests and bishops at Constantinople. How it enabled us to suborn a throng of useful perjurers. Perhaps we shall be able to take it with us. Perhaps the angels may be open to a bribe.

‘Look again.’

Before the miserable eyes of the dying man rose the figure of a youth, bribed with fifteen pounds of gold to bring an infamous charge against a priest, but himself recoiling with horror from his own perjury. Yet the priest, in his innocence, was overwhelmed with agony, and driven to death in squalor and in ruin.

‘Do you recognise the good Isidore, the Hospitaller?’ said the ruthless voice. ‘We tried once, you know, to make him Patriarch of Constantinople. That failed. Nevertheless, in due time we wreaked our grudge on him, and ruined him effectually.

‘Look again.

‘I need not tell you who those four Tall Brothers are. See, the face of one of them is bleeding from your cruel blow! What a delicious thing is vengeance! How you imprisoned them, slandered them, scourged them, robbed them, hunted them from city to city, starved them, ruined them, ultimately all but demoralised them, when their best force was beaten down by age and misery; and then you shed crocodile tears over those of them whom you had not already done to death. It is a pleasing sight for your deathbed, is it not?

‘Look again.

‘Who is that old man in a frightful Armenian village, liable to the depredations of Isaurian brigands, driven from his see; his body tormented, his name blackened, himself killed so slowly that no man might call it murder? Ah! I see that you recognise the saintly Patriarch of Constantinople. You branded him as an impure demon, doomed to an endless hell. How completely you and your Egyptian bishops’—and here the figure laughed again—’triumphed over him. Ah! but would you not exchange a thousand times your victory for his defeat?

‘There is plenty more to show you of our doings—much more than the world knows, for by good luck we managed to get the memorial suppressed which the Tall Brothers presented to Arcadius about our past doings. But do you enjoy even thus much of the picture of your life? Farewell!’

The figure and the pictures seemed to fade away. ’Ugh!’ said Theophilus, ‘it was an ugly dream.’

But then another dark and veiled figure entered. ’Theophilus,’ it said, ‘thy last hour is come! Prepare to meet thy God!’ The figure touched him. He fell back upon his pillow. Next morning they found him lying dead, with a horrid stare in his wide-open eyes.