HYPATIA

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3830, 6 November 1936, Page 2

HYPATIA

PHILOSOPHER AND MARTYR. A GREAT WOMAN OF HISTORY. The city which she graced and sought to instruct was founded by Alexander the Great about seven centuries before Hypatia was born. Alexander was for long the intellectual centre of the world. Greeks, Jews, Egyptians and representatives of all nations crowded its streets, and its population when prosperity reigned amounted to about 300,000 free citizens and probably a larger number of slaves. As the junction between East and Wiest, its commerce was world-wide. Under the Romans after the death of Cleopatra its glory was undimmed, until it was eclipsed by the rise of Constantinople. According to tradition, Christianity was introduced into the city by St Mark, and the conflict between it and heathenism was fierce and long, but in 389 A.D. the Christians captured the Serapeum, the*head quarters of pagan theology, and turned it into a church.

In these days of turbulence Hypatia was a child of nine years of age, her father, Theon, being a teacher of mathematics and astronomy. The student of ancient history will find wide pasture in the Ecclesiastical History by Socrates, not the husband of Xanthippe, but the. tolerant, easy-going scribe of the young Church. The modern reader will find something much more to his taste in the shining pages of Charles Kingsley’s romance called “Hypatia.” It is written with complete knowledge of the political, philosophical and religious situation, and depicts the age and its manners as only a master of history was capable of doing. The church had conquered, the emperors had become Christians, but the empire was still the same, with its tyrranies and crimes. The church had been busy hammering out her creed, and the sequel was a system of dogmas rather than a spiritual and practical religion. Cyril, patriaren of Alexandria, was totally unlike a Christian prelate. His ambition, his capacity for intrigue, his ferocity in persecuting both Jews and fellowChristians, were atrocious, and he crowneel his list of crimes, if not by the murder of Hypatia, at least by being an accessory before the fact. The capture of the church by the world and the scandals which brought Christianity into disrepute explain to a large extent the rise of monasticism, as a revolt against ecclesiasticism, with its worldliness and luxury. But the monk could still be used by the church in the war against heresy. This was the position when Hypatia was at the zenith of her power. Her beauty, her learning, her sagacity, her high ideal of the religious life made her the most influential teacher in Alexandria, and attracted students from all parts of the world. She had accepted the doctrines of Neo-Platonism, a system of eclectics which had a world-wide sway, and for three centuries proved a formidable rival to Christianity. Its influence on Christianity is recognised by all authorities, and its appeal to men of a transcendental and religious turn is manifest in various sects not unfamiliar in our own land, ‘tft sought to make the Greek religion philisophical and Greek philosophy religious.” “It aimed at constructing a religion on a basis of dialectrics.”

Hypatia, while lecturing on this theme, carried weight all unconsciously perhaps by her personal appearance and charm. Kingsley dwells enthusiastically on her dress, her hail}, her neck and her simple snow-white lonic robe. “Her features, arms and hands were of the severest and grandest type of old Greek beauty, at once showing everywhere the high development of the bones, and covering them with that firm, round, ripe outline, and waxy morbidezza of skin which the Greeks owed to their continual use of the bath and muscular exercise, but also of daily unguents.” Kingsley goes on to point out here marked resemblance to the ideal portraits of Athene which adorned every pane’ of the walls. The world in which she lived had reached a critical era. The old oracles were silent. The gods had deserted them. Cherished creeds were abandoned. Myths were dead. And what had taken their place? New, vulgar and, absurd (superstitions, said Hypatia. Emperors and kings were proclaiming the crucified son of a carpenter to be God. Hypatia clung to the old gods because she believed they had not ceased to speak to their own elect. Though busy writing her commentary on Plotinus, she felt disturbed by the difficulty of making plain £o the youth of Alexandria the lofty doctrines of that great master. How could she hoilp them to the point at which the empirical knowledge was left behind and an intuitive knowledge of the absolute take its place? How could she teach them to see the non-existence of evil and how it was only a lower form of good, a product of the one great allpervading mind? How could they be (taught to grasp the idea that the soul ere it gave itself to the body had listened to the divine harmony and still remembers it? The myths were adumlbaritons of deeper mystery. The universal soul thrills through the whole creation, and the wise/ recognise fthemselves as por-

tions of the universal soul. Diety is in them. In her system Christians were the idolaters While the Greeks only embodied in symbolic beauty ideas which were beyond the reach of words. Her objection to Christianity was its claim to be the supreme revelation of the Divine while its dogmas, she declared, were all found in some form or other in the very religions it disdained. Her lectures were so largely attended and hdr views so much discussed in public that the Christian authorities felt she must be suppres ■ sed. Peter thei Reader took the matter in hand, and a young monk called Philammon carried a message warning Hypatia that her life was in danger. She refused to take any steps to save herself. “I must follow my destiny. I must speak the words which I have to speak. If my gods are gods, they will protect me; and if not, let your God prove His rule as seems to Him good.” A daughter of Theon knew how to face death. They bore her towards the temple. The mob increased by hundreds, and many of them carried flints, shells and fragments of pottery.

The church seemed filled with men and women changed into wild beasts. They drove to the altar and under the colossal statue of Christ they stripped her naked, and before she could speak, she was struck down and the yelling crowd fell upon her, tore her to pieces, took the body to the Cinaron, and burned it to ashes. She was thirty-five years of age. A degraded ecclesiasteciss had done its work. Theodore, writing of Cyril, the patriarch some years later, said:—“His death made those who survived him joyful, but it grieved most probably the dead, and there is cause to fear, lest, finding his presence too troublesome, they should send him back to us.” The corruption of the best is the worst. Truth needs no lies to promote it, and when men think they held it by scorning it in the supposed interest of religion they wound the religion and inflict a deeper wound upon themselves. Hypatia died nobly, heroically at the hands of those not intelligent enough to understand either her teaching or that of their own scriptures. In later and happier times, many came to declare that they could be at the same time Neo-Platonists and Christians. The murder of Hypatia gave the Church of Alexandria its death blow, for it multiplied intrigue and persecution, and grew lawless and inhuman. It could slay its opponents, but the love of supremacy set its leaders wrangling over metaphysical statements “till the Mahometans appeared.” Greek philosophy became confused, quarrelsome and shallow, for it had nothing to tell men about what they needed to know. Hypatia’s merit lay in hqr sincerity. She was a noble and gifted representative of a philosophy unfitted to redeem the multitude, and not eclectic enough to do justice to Christianity. Nevertheless, she will be remembered and honoured for her purity and earnestness in an age of bigotry, selfishness and immeasurable cruelty.