In Lent, we do not simply concentrate on ourselves. During Lent, we also read the Fathers that we may learn more of the grace of Our God. We read so that we may learn to discipline ourselves and grow in the holiness of Our God. But, if we are fully intending to use Lent as a time of learning and as a time of repenting not only for our sins, but for the sins of all of us, then we will read the accounts of history, the negative accounts. It will often cause us pain to read them, but it is important that we do so, so that we may learn the appropriate lessons from Our Lord and Our God. Reading Christian history is often a painful thing. I teach an online class in World Religions for a major state university. And every term, I am faced with students who will cite events from history as part of their argument against Christianity. And, the events they cite from history are often painful, if one has any sense of Christian history. I cannot use the argument that it was done by “those” people. You see, I know my sinful self. It was done by me. Everyone of the mistaken notions found in history are my notions. I may not have acted on them, but they are in my heart, for I am a sinner. Lent is the time when we recognize that in each and every one of us dwells each and every sin which humanity has committed. Following is the story of Hypatia of Alexandria. It is an example of our sin:
Born between AD 350 and 370; died March 415 was a Greek scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, considered the first notable woman in mathematics,who also taught philosophy and astronomy. She lived in Roman Egypt, and was killed by a Christian mob who accused her of causing religious turmoil. Some suggest that her murder marked the end of what is traditionally known as Classical antiquity, although others such as Maria Dzielska and Christian Wildberg observe that Hellenistic philosophy continued to flourish in the 5th and 6th centuries, Wildberg suggests until the age of Justinian.
A Neoplatonist philosopher, she belonged to the mathematical tradition of the Academy of Athens represented by Eudoxus of Cnidus; she followed the school of the 3rd century thinker Plotinus, discouraging empirical enquiry and encouraging logical and mathematical studies. The name Hypatia derives from the adjective upaté, the feminine form of upatos, meaning “highest, uppermost, supremest”.
Although Hypatia’s death has been interpreted by some as an example of conflict between religion and scientific inquiry, contemporary historians of science have a different view: she essentially got caught up in a political struggle. In the words of David Lindberg, “her death had everything to do with local politics and virtually nothing to do with science”. …
Believed to have been the reason for the strained relationship between the Imperial Prefect Orestes and the Patriarch Cyril, Hypatia attracted the ire of a Christian population eager to see the two reconciled. One day in March AD 415, during the season of Lent, her chariot was waylaid on her route home by a Christian mob, possibly Nitrian monks led by a man identified only as Peter, who is thought to be Peter the Reader. The Christian monks stripped her naked and dragged her through the streets to the newly Christianised Caesareum church, where she was brutally killed. Some reports suggest she was flayed with ostraca (pot shards) and set ablaze while still alive, though other accounts suggest those actions happened after her death.
False monks have been the bane of Christianity during all too many centuries of the Church. True monks are a blessing, but false monks are one of Satan’s best tactics to discredit us. Please note that Hypatia was killed during Lent, during the season of repentance for our sins. Lord, have mercy.
I vaguely remember some Victorian-era quasi-Occult tome (possibly lunatic-fringe conspiracy literature of the time, with Masonic shticks) that had prominent illustrations of the death of Hypatia. Seemed to be using her death as some sort of example of “know your enemies — the enemies of knowledge” or something. I distinctly remember the illustration of Hypatia getting lynched as being in Late 19th Century bookplate style.
At my last ECUSA parish there was an icon of Hypatia which generated much discussion. Of course I had no answer to the hperpious who complained about it until I became Orthodox and saw icons of Socrates and Plato…
I am frankly surprised that Orthodox should jump on the Hypatia badwagon. I suspect that it is not unrelated to the “success” of the film Agora, a piece of historical trash meant to stir again anti-christian sentiments. The real story, sad as it may be, is that Hypatia was slain because of her support for the Jews who just recently burned Churches and killed Christians.
I think you have it somewhat reversed as to who did what.
The Encyclopedia Britannica — Theodosius I, Roman emperor in the East from 379 to 392 and then emperor in both the East and West until 395, initiated an official policy of intolerance to paganism and Arianism in 380. In 391, in reply to Theophilus, the bishop of Alexandria, he gave permission to destroy Egyptian religious institutions. Christian mobs obliged by destroying the Library of Alexandria, the Temple of Serapis, and other pagan monuments. Although legislation in 393 sought to curb violence, particularly the looting and destruction of Jewish synagogues, a renewal of disturbances occurred after the accession of Cyril to the patriarchate of Alexandria in 412. Tension culminated in the forced, albeit illegal, expulsion of Alexandrian Jews in 414 and the murder of Hypatia, the most prominent Alexandrian pagan, by a fanatical mob of Christians in 415. The departure soon afterward of many scholars marked the beginning of the decline of Alexandria as a major centre of ancient learning.
Even a Christian historian from the same century agreed. Hypatia’s murder is described in the writings of the fifth-century Christian historian, Socrates Scholasticus: “All men did both reverence and had her in admiration for the singular modesty of her mind. Wherefore she had great spite and envy owed unto her, and because she conferred oft, and had great familiarity with Orestes, the people charged her that she was the cause why the bishop and Orestes were not become friends. To be short, certain heady and rash cockbrains whose guide and captain was Peter, a reader of that Church, watched this woman coming home from some place or other, they pull her out of her chariot: they hail her into the Church called Caesarium: they stripped her stark naked: they raze the skin and rend the flesh of her body with sharp shells, until the breath departed out of her body: they quarter her body: they bring her quarters unto a place called Cinaron and burn them to ashes.”
Hmm,
That’s a bit of short shrifting history. We were talking about the relations between Jews and Christians in Alexandria. Do you want to say that the burning of Churches and killing of Christians in Alexandria by the Jews were a response to the ‘intolerance’ towards pagans?
It was Theodosius II who prohibited the celebrations of the Purim because they were mocking the Crucifixion of Christ. The same Socrates relates an incident dated in 411 when the Jews crucified a statue of Christ mocking the Christians. The Christians failed, fanatics as they were, to see the fun and a riot ensued. This happened not long after the incident of Inmestar. The events, also related by Socrates, which led to the killing of Hypatia, took place a few years later. They were the result of the attacks of the Jews upon Christians (precisely the arson of the Church and the killing of the Christians who came to extinguish the fire), which led Cyril to ‘expel’ the Jews from the city.
So let’s get the facts right if we don’t want to become sitting ducks.
Yes, but here is the problem. The killing of Hypatia was not justified, even by the Socrates who recorded the burning of churches by the Jews. My post was about a sinful Christian response to what even the Christians of that time agreed was an innocent person. Hypatia really was killed unjustly by a Christian mob.
Regardless of incitation, the killing of an innocent victim, by dragging her alive, and then skinning her to death takes the name of Christian down to the basement. We really ARE sitting ducks on this one. And, when we use the Jewish mobs to “diminish” our sin, we are coming all too close to attempting to justify the unjustifiable.
And, read back, I did point out in the original article that this was a killing due to the political tensions of that time. I did not go into the details because they can in no way excuse the killing of Hypatia. NO source or later writing even tries to claim that she was in any way complicit in any of what happened.
Father Ernesto,
I would not argue that murder is a sin. My point was that we Orthodox should not fall so easily into the cheap anti-christian propaganda. The case of Hypatia, and I stress again, sad, tragic, despicable, or you name it, as it may be, could not be a reason why we repent during Lent.
She was not that innocent. The sources indicate that she was the stumbling bloc in the attempts at reconciliation initiated by Cyril with Orestes. That suggest that she sided with the killers of Christians. The neoplatonists were rabid antichristians themselves. And the ‘political tensions’ of the time were precisely the attempts of the Jews and their allies, the philosophers, to regain the upper hand they lost by the Christianization of the Roman Empire. The times of Julian the Apostate were not so far in the past and the memory was alive. The image of the pure, virginal, beautiful young Hypatia is a literary creation. At the time of her death she was rather a cantankerous old hag, and a witch, the Margaret Murray type.
And certainly not the Christians burnt the Library of Alexandria!