Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (157 page)

JULIAN.
And am I not my army’s father, Sallust?

SALLUST.
The soldiers’ father; their wives’ and children’s buckler and defence.

JULIAN.
And what will be the fate of the empire should I waver now? A decrepit Emperor, and after him a helpless child, upon the throne; faction and revolt; every man’s hand against his neighbour, in the struggle for power. — Not many nights ago I saw a vision. A figure appeared before me, with a halo round its head; it looked wrathfully upon me, and said:
“
Choose!” With that it vanished away, like morning mist. Hitherto I had interpreted it as referring to something far different; but now that I know of the Emperor’s approaching marriage — Yes, indeed, it is time to choose, ere misfortune overwhelms the empire. I am not thinking of my own interest; but dare I shirk the choice, Sallust? Is it not my duty to the Emperor to defend my life? Have I a right to stand with folded arms and await the murderers whom he, in his mad panic, is bribing to hew me down? Have I a right to give this unhappy Constantius an opportunity of heaping fresh blood-guiltiness upon his sinful head? Were it not better for him — as the Scriptures say — that he should suffer wrong rather than do wrong? If, therefore, this that I do to my kinsman can be called a wrong, I hold that the wrong is wiped out by the fact that it hinders my kinsman from inflicting a wrong on me. I think that both Plato and Marcus Aurelius, that crowned bridegroom of wisdom, would support me in that. At any rate, it would be no unworthy problem for the philosophers, my dear Sallust! — Oh that I had Libanius here!

SALLUST.
My lord, you are yourself so far advanced in philosophy, that —

JULIAN.
True, true; yet I would fain hear the views of certain others. Not that I am vacillating. Do not think that! Nor do I see any reason to doubt a favourable issue. For those omens should by no means discourage us. The fact that I retained the handle, when my shield broke during the games, may with ample reason, I think, be taken to mean that I shall succeed in holding what my hand has grasped. And if, in vaulting upon my horse, I overthrew the man who helped me to mount, may not this portend a sudden fall to Constantius, to whom I owe my rise? Be this as it may, my Sallust, I look forward to composing a treatise which shall most clearly justify —

SALLUST.
Very good, my gracious lord; but the soldiers are impatient; they would fain see you, and learn their fate from your own lips.

JULIAN.
Go, go and pacify them; — tell them that Caesar will presently show himself.

SALLUST.
My lord, ‘tis not Caesar, it is the Emperor himself they want to see.

JULIAN.
The Emperor is coming.

SALLUST.
Then he comes — though empty-handed — yet with the lives of thousands in his hands!

JULIAN.
A barter, Sallust; the lives of thousands against the death of thousands.

SALLUST.
Have your enemies the right to live?

JULIAN.
Happy you, whose gods are afar off. Oh, to possess this hardihood of will — ! A Voice.
[Calling from deep in the galleries below.]
Julian, Julian!

SALLUST.
Ah! What is that?

JULIAN.
Leave me, dear friend; go quickly!

THE VOICE.
Silence the psalm-singing, Julian!

SALLUST.
It calls again. Oh, then it is true!

JULIAN.
What is true? —

SALLUST.
That you abide down here with a mysterious stranger, a soothsayer or a magician, who came to you by night.

JULIAN, Ha-ha; do they say that? Go, go!

SALLUST.
I conjure you, my lord, — have done with these noxious dreams. Come with me; come up to the light of day!

THE VOICE.
[
Nearer, underneath.]
All my labour is vain.

JULIAN.
[Speaking down the passage to the right.]
No sign, my brother?

THE VOICE.
Desolation and emptiness.

JULIAN.
Oh, Maximus!

SALLUST.
Maximus!

JULIAN.
Go, I tell you! If I leave this house of corruption, it will be as Emperor.

SALLUST.
I implore you — ; what seek you here in the darkness? — .

JULIAN.
Light. Go, go!

SALLUST.
If Caesar loiters, I fear he will find the way barred against him.
[He goes by the passage on the left. A little while afterwards
, Maximus the Mystic
ascends the steps; he wears a white sacrificial fillet round his brow; in his hand is a long
,
bloody knife.

JULIAN.
Speak, my Maximus!

MAXIMUS.
All my labour is vain, I tell you. Why could you not silence the psalm-singing? It strangled all the omens; they would have spoken, but could utter nothing.

JULIAN.
Silence, darkness; — and I can wait no longer! What do you counsel me to do?

MAXIMUS.
Go forward blindly, Emperor Julian. The light will seek you out.

JULIAN.
Yes, yes, yes; that I, too, believe. I need not, after all, have sent for you all this long way. Know you what I have just heard — ?

MAXIMUS.
I will not know what you have heard. Take your fate into your own hands.

JULIAN.
[Pacing restlessly up and down.]
After all, what is he, this Constantius — this Fury-haunted sinner, this mouldering ruin of what was once a man?

MAXIMUS.
Be that his epitaph, Emperor Julian!

JULIAN.
In his whole treatment of me, has he not been like a rudderless wreck, — now drifting to the left on the current of suspicion, now hurled to the right by the storm-gust of remorse? Did he not stagger, terror-stricken, up to the imperial throne, his purple mantle dripping with my father’s blood? perhaps with my mother’s too? — Had not all my kin to perish that he might sit secure? No, not all; Gallus was spared, and I; — a couple of lives must be left wherewith to buy himself a little pardon. Then he drifted into the current of suspicion again. Remorse wrung from him the title of Caesar for Gallus; then suspicion wrung from him Caesar’s death-warrant. And I? Do I owe him thanks for the life he has hitherto vouchsafed me? One after the other; first Gallus, and then — ; every night I have sweated with terror lest the next day should be my last.

MAXIMUS.
Were Constantius and death your worst terrors? Think?

JULIAN.
No, you are right. The priests — ! My whole youth has been one long dread of the Emperor and of Christ. Oh, he is terrible, that mysterious — that merciless god-man! At every turn, wheresoever I wished to go, he met me, stark and stern, with his unconditional, inexorable commands.

MAXIMUS.
And those commands — were they within you?

JULIAN.
Always without. Always “Thou shalt.” If my soul gathered itself up in one gnawing and consuming hate towards the murderer of my kin, what said the commandment: “Love thine enemy!” If my mind, athirst for beauty, longed for scenes and rites from the bygone world of Greece, Christianity swooped down on me with its “Seek the one thing needful!” If I felt the sweet lusts of the flesh towards this or that, the Prince of Renunciation terrified me with his: “Kill the body that the soul may live!” — All that is human has become unlawful since the day when the seer of Galilee became ruler of the world. Through him, life has become death. Love and hatred, both are sins. Has he, then, transformed man’s flesh and blood? Has not earth-bound man remained what he ever was? Our inmost, healthy soul rebels against it all; — and yet we are to will in the very teeth of our own will! Thou shalt, shalt, shalt!

MAXIMUS.
And you have advanced no further than that! Shame on you!

JULIAN.
I?

MAXIMUS.
Yes, you, the man of Athens and of Ephesus.

JULIAN.
Ah, those times, Maximus. ‘Twas easy to choose then. What were we really working at? A philosophic system; neither more nor less.

MAXIMUS.
Is it not written somewhere in your Scriptures! Either with us or against us”?

JULIAN.
Did not Libanius remain the man he was, whether he took the affirmative in a disputation, or the negative? This lies deeper. Here it is action that must be faced.
“
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” In Athens I once made a game of that; — but it is no game. You cannot grasp it, you, who have never been under the power of the god-man. It is more than a doctrine he has spread over the world; it is an enchantment, that binds the soul in chains. He who has once been under it, — I believe he can never quite shake it off.

MAXIMUS.
Because you do not wholly will.

JULIAN.
How can I will the impossible?

MAXIMUS.
Is it worth while to will what is possible?

JULIAN.
Word-froth from the lecture-halls! You can no longer cram my mind with that. And yet — oh no, no, Maximus! But you cannot understand how it is with us. We are like vines transplanted into a new, strange soil; transplant us back again, and we die; yet in the new soil we cannot thrive.

MAXIMUS.
We? Whom do you call we?

JULIAN.
All who are under the terror of the revelation.

MAXIMUS.
A terror of shadows!

JULIAN.
Be that as it may. But do you not see that this paralysing terror has curdled and coiled itself up into a wall around the Emperor? Ah, I see very well why the great Constantine promoted such a will-binding doctrine to power and authority in the empire. No bodyguard with spears and shields could form such a bulwark round the throne as this benumbing creed, for ever pointing beyond our earthly life. Have you looked closely at these Christians? Hollow-eyed, pale-cheeked, flat-breasted, all; they are like the linen-weavers of Byssus; they brood their lives away unspurred by ambition; the sun shines for them, and they do not see it; the earth offers them its fulness, and they desire it not; — all their desire is to renounce and suffer, that they may come to die.

MAXIMUS.
Then use them as they are; but you yourself must stand without. Emperor or Galilean; — that is the alternative. Be a thrall under the terror, or monarch in the land of sunshine and gladness! You cannot will contradictions; and yet that is what you would fain do. You try to unite what cannot be united, — to reconcile two irreconcilables; therefore it is that you lie here rotting in the darkness.

JULIAN.
Show me light if you can!

MAXIMUS.
Are you that Achilles, whom your mother dreamed that she should give to the world? A tender heel alone makes no man an Achilles. Arise, my lord! Confident of victory, like a knight on his fiery steed, you must trample on the Galilean, if you would reach the imperial throne —

JULIAN.
Maximus!

MAXIMUS.
My beloved Julian, look at the world around you! Those death-desiring Christians you speak of are fewest of the few. And how is it with all the others? Are not their minds falling away from the Master, one by one? Answer me, — what has become of this strange gospel of love? Does not sect rage against sect? And the bishops, those gold-bedecked magnates, who call themselves the chief shepherds of the church! Do they yield even to the great men of the court in greed and ambition and sycophancy — ?

JULIAN.
They are not all like that; think of the great Athanasius of Alexandria —

MAXIMUS.
Athanasius stood alone. And where is Athanasius now? Did they not drive him out, because he would not sell himself to serve the Emperor’s will? Was he not forced to take refuge in the Libyan desert, where he was devoured by lions? And can you name me one other like Athanasius? Think of Maris, the bishop of Chalcedon, who has now changed sides three times in the Arian controversy. Think of old Bishop Marcus, of Arethusa; him you know from your boyhood. Has he not lately, in the teeth of both law and justice, taken all municipal property from the citizens, and transferred it to the church? And remember the feeble, vacillating Bishop of Nazianzus, who is the laughing-stock of his own community, because he answers yes and no in the same cause, in the hope to please both parties.

JULIAN.
True, true, true!

MAXIMUS.
These are your brothers in arms, my Julian; you will find none better among them. Or perhaps you count upon those two great Galilean lights that were to be, in Cappadocia? Ha-ha; Gregory, the bishop’s son, pleads causes in his native town, and Basil, on his estate in the far east, is buried in the writings of secular philosophers.

JULIAN.
Yes, I know it well. On all sides they fall away! Hekebolius, my former teacher, has grown rich through his zeal for the faith, and his expositions of it; and since then — ! Maximus — it has come to this, that I stand almost alone in earnestness.