#HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA
When I was a girl in the 1950s, I was taught about all the great men who had shaped our culture and history. I was informed that men led the field in art, literature, music and especially in science, women’s contributions there being a very late addition. For every Marie Curie, there were a hundred Einsteins, so to speak. It was not until the 1970s that information began to filter out, information that challenged this perception of a male monopoly.
I had never heard of Hypatia of Alexandria until I saw her name mentioned in Judy Chicago’s exhibition ‘The Dinner Party’. I was instantly captivated by this woman who had been a leading Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician in Alexandria at the turn of the fifth century CE and who was brutally murdered by a gang of Christian monks. Why had she died in such a way? Had she committed some grievous crime, or was it nothing more than her gender that had condemned her to a violent death? I was determined to find out…
In the 4th century CE, Egyptian Alexandria succumbed to monotheism. The city had been founded on the orders of Alexander the Great to be a Hellenic centre for his empire, but he visited it only once — to be buried (Forster 1968:13). It was his general, Ptolemy (323–285 BCE) who chose it as his capital and it flourished under the Ptolemaic dynasty to become the second largest city in the world (Butler: 135). Ptolemy I (Soter) founded a Museum on the Athenian model, to be a centre of learning, at the heart of which was a great Library. Under royal patronage, scientists and mathematicians flocked to Alexandria, but it was not until the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty that the great school of Alexandrian philosophy arose; the kings were somewhat averse to philosophy in case it led to freedom of thought! (Forster op cit: 40) They preferred science, as it “could not criticize their divine right” and in the 3rd century BCE Mathematics, Geography, Astronomy and Medicine all flourished (Forster op cit: 41–45).
It was only with the rise of Christianity that science declined (Forster op cit:55). Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire by the end of the 4th century CE and in Alexandria it led to the closure of the temple of Serapis and the destruction of its Library by Christian monks. The Patriarchate of Alexandria became very powerful, as did its “army of monks.” By the 4th century these monks, who were “averse to culture and incapable of thought”, had gathered into formidable communities around Alexandria, from whence they would make occasional raids on the city (Forster op cit:41–45).
Hypatia was born in c370CE, the daughter of Theon, a mathematician and astronomer at the Museum, who seems to have been determined to educate his daughter well. No sources give any information about her mother. Hypatia travelled to Athens and Italy, and on her return to Alexandria became a teacher of mathematics and philosophy, perhaps even holding a municipal Chair of Philosophy (Alic 1986:42). This was a dangerous time for academics, as the early Christian zealots saw “only heresy and evil in mathematics and science.” Allegedly renowned for her beauty as well as her intellect, Hypatia taught Neo-Platonist philosophy to students of all religious persuasions, although by this time Alexandria had separate schools for Jews, Christians and Pagans; “[h]er home became an intellectual centre, where scholars gathered to discuss scientific and philosophical questions.” (Alic op cit: 42) She must have been a wonderful teacher as all sources comment on the devotion of her students.
Although Neoplatonist thought came to have a profound influence on Christianity, there are certain fundamental doctrinal differences. As expounded by Plotinus (c205–270 CE), Neoplatonism drew on the teachings of Plato but did not replicate them in their entirety. Plotinus theorized God as a hierarchical triad composed of The One, followed by Mind, followed by Soul. In the original Greek, The One is a neuter word, the Mind, masculine and the Soul feminine. This may have been a deliberate (or unconscious) attempt by Plotinus to illustrate that the ‘ultimate reality of divinity lies beyond the distinctions of sex.’(Macquarrie 1984:69) Rejecting the Gnostic duality of good and evil, he envisages matter as far lesser than divinity but nonetheless an ‘emanation’ of it, not absolutely other, as in Christian doctrine. Therefore he could write: “All is just and good in the universe in which every actor is set in his own quite appropriate place. Even as things are, all is well.”(Plotinus 1984ed: III, 2, 17) Nor is Plotinus’s ‘There’ or ‘Yonder’, which he uses to contrast with the ‘Here’ of embodied existence, a region somewhere beyond the sky or an eschatological age that will occur in the distant future. We are already ‘There’ when we contemplate the One and Mind and Soul (Macquarrie op cit: 71). The history of the early Church is characterized by bloody disputes over seemingly absurd points of doctrine and dogma within its ranks, therefore it is not surprising that it displayed hostility to any radically alternative views.
The fact that Hypatia was a high-profile woman espousing philosophies that were anathema to the Church must have exacerbated the Christians’ hostility towards her. Although in its original form Christianity had been welcomed by women as a liberating religion and had indeed survived only with the support of women’s ‘house churches’, to become acceptable to the patriarchal Empire it had been evolved by Paul into a religion that excluded women from any positions of authority (Fiorenza 1983 et al). Thus Hypatia was twice vulnerable.
What seems to have precipitated her brutal murder was that she undoubtedly became embroiled in the politics of the city through her friendship with the Roman Prefect of Egypt, Orestes, who was wont to consult her. When Cyril, a fanatical Christian, became Patriarch of Alexandria in 412, an “intense hostility” developed between him and Orestes (Alic op cit: 45). Cyril succeeded in driving thousands of Jews from the city, and then turned his attention to the Neoplatonists.
Hypatia refused to convert to Christianity, despite the pleading of Orestes, and the rumour began to spread among the Christians that it was she who was the cause of the rift between the Roman Prefect and the Patriarch (Scholasticus chap xv). Adair suggests that Cyril focussed his hatred on her because of her profound influence on the community and the possibility that she could hinder the spread of Christianity (Adair 1999:2). Rumours spread throughout Alexandria claiming that Hypatia was “a witch that influenced people using black magic”; this was a chilling pre-cursor of the widespread accusations of witchcraft that devastated European women several hundred years later (Adair op cit:2). As a result, in 415 CE, a gang of monks, led by one Peter, waylaid her on her way home one evening. They dragged her from her carriage and took her to the church called Caesareum, where they ripped off her clothes and cut her to shreds, using either sharp shells or broken roof-tiles — the Greek word used by Scholasticus can mean either. There is no mention of rape in any sources. The monks then took her dismembered body to a place called Cinaron and burned her remains (Scholasticus op cit).
Whether Cyril was directly responsible for Hypatia’s murder is open to question. Butler, writing in the 19th century, absolves him of all blame, but earlier commentators are less charitable. Scholasticus, a contemporary of Hypatia’s, although himself a Christian, deliberately implicates Cyril in the murder. The long and complimentary entry on Hypatia in the Suda Lexicon, a 10th century encyclopaedia, also hints at his involvement (Reedy 1993). The writer of an anonymous pamphlet published in London 1720 had no doubt as to who was to blame — it was entitled:”Hypatia, or the history of a most beautiful, most virtuous, most learned, and every way accomplished lady, who was torn to pieces by the clergy of Alexandria to gratify the pride, emulation and cruelty of their archbishop, Cyril, commonly but undeservedly styled St.Cyril” (Encyclopaedia Britannica 9th ed: 596). Whether Cyril was guilty or not, no-one was ever brought to trial for the crime and the Church authorities saw fit to canonize him in 1822.[1]
What then is the significance of Hypatia’s death? And can her fate be linked to her gender? Clifton notes that she “…has been held up ever since [her murder] as an example of the intellectual woman hated — or at least mistrusted — by the institutional church.” (Clifton 1992:61) For Alic, she was “the last Pagan scientist in the western world” (Alic 1986:43). With the fall of Alexandria to the Muslims in 640 CE, Greek science survived and flourished in the Arab world while Europe entered the Dark Ages, partly as a result of early Christianity’s hostility to Classical learning. To Judy Chicago Hypatia represented “women’s ongoing efforts to exercise their intellectual, cultural and political power.” (Chicago 1996:59) [2]
The Suda records an extraordinary story about her; she was supposedly “so beautiful and shapely” that one of her students who fell in love with her confessed his infatuation to her face. To discourage him, she is alleged to have shown him a handful of rags stained with her menstrual blood as a “sign of her unclean descent”, saying: “This is what you love, young man, and it isn’t beautiful!” (Reedy op cit:2) Although there is no evidence to support my theory, I suggest this story may reflect a tendency to revision female stories to make them acceptable to the sensibilities of an increasingly misogynistic system; Hypatia becomes an ‘acceptable’ woman only by denouncing her own femaleness. The Suda also invented a husband for her, but there is no corroborative evidence for this anywhere else. Be that as it may, all sources credit her with being both attractive and intelligent although Forster believes both her achievements and her charms to have been exaggerated. He describes her as a “middle-aged lady who taught mathematics” although he does not reveal any sources that encouraged him in his assessment (Forster op cit:55).
That Hypatia was a formidable academic is evidenced by the reputation her work on the idea of conic sections enjoys among those who are aware of it. She is held on a par with her predecessor Miriam the Prophetess who invented the “bain Marie” that is still in use in laboratories today (Alic op cit43). Tragically, the bulk of Hypatia’s writings have been lost, but we know she edited a book titled “On the Conics of Appollonius” and she also wrote a commentary on the Arithmetica of Diophatus. Parts of her work may appear in the treatises of her father, Theon (Alic op cit:42). Until Marie Curie, Hypatia was considered by many to be “the only female scientist in history” (Alic op cit:42). Although this is untrue, so invisible did women become under patriarchy that it is an understandable, if unforgivable, mistake. What is less understandable is why a woman like Hypatia is still largely unknown today.
There is a myth in academia of the objectivity of knowledge. Traditionally, texts are taken at their face value, ignoring the prejudices or vested interest of the writer. This process of interpretation is known as ‘hermeneutics’ and is most commonly used in reference to Biblical texts. Feminist scholars, however, challenge traditional approaches, arguing that all knowledge is in fact subjective. Thus, nothing can be taken at face value, but must be approached with what feminist theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza dubbed ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’.
We might summarize her argument thus:
1. All texts are androcentric, therefore suspect them.
2. Since the female make up half the population — seek the female.
3. When you find her, celebrate her.
4. If the terror has been so great you cannot find names or traces, raise her up by mourning her.[3]
When I first became aware of Hypatia, what stunned me was that this woman had probably been the head of an institution comparable to a leading modern university, a respected mathematician and philosopher and throughout my first class (girls only!) grammar school education, nobody had ever told me that a woman in antiquity had held such a position! None of my female colleagues in college had ever heard of her either. I celebrate her and I mourn her.
A very sympathetic, though fictional, treatment of Hypatia’s death can be found in the story “A Shock of Orange Hair” by David Martin. Although he introduces a rape, possibly to illustrate the depth of envy and craving for power of the uneducated mob of fanatical monks, he makes Hypatia the symbol of the great Library of Alexandria itself. She is murdered because she follows no system but doubt itself — uncontrollable intellect, uncontrollable woman. By the end of the story, the narrator, although himself a participant (albeit a reluctant one) in her death is secretly learning to read and following her imagined last words: “Think it out for yourself” (Martin 1986:20).
It could be argued that Hypatia brought disaster upon herself by getting involved in local politics, although in the climate of the times, it seems unlikely that she would have survived for long anyway. What we need to celebrate is her courage and integrity as a Pagan and a woman. She refused to surrender to the intolerance and hostility of Cyril and his murderous monks by converting to a Christianity in which she did not believe. One can only wonder whether she would have been so easily dispatched by the mob had she been a man, or whether her murder would have been more rigorously investigated. It is possible that Orestes was so desperate to avoid making more martyrs that he reluctantly chose not to pursue the killers of his friend (Clifton op cit:62). Be that as it may, we cannot rewrite history, but we can restore her visibility today.
Although after Plato, pagan philosophy developed an unfortunate tendency to belittle mundane reality in favour of abstract divinity, it nevertheless was less destructive to the natural world than subsequent Western philosophy, although from the first it attempted to belittle women. Robert Graves suggests that Socrates, Plato’s inspiration and the acknowledged founder of the ‘scientific’ method of thinking, in turning away from poetic myths was “really turning his back on the Moon-goddess who inspired them and who demanded that man should pay woman spiritual and sexual homage” (Graves 1984ed:11). The murder of Hypatia can therefore by seen as part of an ongoing effort to expel women from the centre stage of religious, intellectual and political influence. That the editors of the journal ‘Hypatia’ chose her name to honour women currently involved in feminist philosophy is to be commended. But until her story is part of the curriculum in all schools, the suspicion will remain that female emancipation is still suffered only begrudgingly by men who choose to see themselves as the ‘Self’ with woman as the eternal and insignificant ‘Other’.
HYPATIA OF ALEXANDRIA
Alic,M.(1986)Hypatia’s Heritage The Women’s Press London
Blackburn,S(1994)The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy OUP
Bowker, J.(ed)(1997)The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions OUP
Chicago,J.(1996)The Dinner Party Penguin Books
Clifton,C.S.(1992)Encyclopaedia of Heresies and Heretics ABC-CLIO
Fiorenza,E.S. (1983) In Memory of Her SCM Press
Forster,E.M.(1968ed)Alexandria — A History and a Guide Peter Smith,Gloucester,Mass.
Gaarder,J.(1998 ed) Sophie’s World Phoenix
Goring,R.(ed)(1992)The Wordsworth Dictionary of Beliefs Wordsworth
Graves,R.(1961/1984) The White Goddess Faber and Faber
Hypatia(1992) A Journal of Feminist Philosophy,Vol 7 No 1
Martin,D.(1986)A Burst of Orange Hair Stand Magazine
Macquarrie,J.(1984) In Search of Deity SCM Press Ltd
Plotinus (trans.Macquarrie J.) (1984) Enneads in ‘In Search of Deity’ SCM Press Ltd
Reedy,J.(trans)(1993)The Life of Hypatia IIIe://A:\Damascus The Life of Hypatia from the Suda
Richardson,A.(ed) A Dictionary of Christian Theology SCM Press Ltd
[1] Charles Kingsley, author of ‘The Water Babies’ also wrote a romanticised novel titled ‘Hypatia’ in which he reputedly lays the blame at Cyril’s door, but I have been unable to locate a copy of this.
[2] “The Dinner Party” was an art exhibition created in the 1980s to honour and reclaim women’s contributions throughout history. Each place setting used traditionally female crafts such as embroidery to illustrate the names, while the ceramic plates often echoed labial shapes. For each woman whose name was placed on the table, there was an additional list of others working in a similar field.
[3] With thanks to #Asphodel Long for her help in compiling the list.
