Yesterday, Kathleen Parker used her column in the Washington Post to inform readers that she has finally watched the hit reality show “Honey Boo Boo,” which documents the life of a bratty child pageant participant, age seven. A bold admission, from which she draws a broad conclusion. It didn’t even take a full episode of vulgarity and mindlessness to convince her that civilization is basically over. Back in the good old days of ancient civilization, “knowledge was valued as much as gold,” and regardless of the inclinations of individuals, “the larger culture collectively aimed at something higher.”
Maybe. It’s a tempting conclusion, and she shares a number of insights to support it. As recently as her own childhood, people were largely skittish about spectacles like circus freakshows, since it was regarded as unseemly to delight in the faults of others. Our modern defense of trashy pop culture, which usually hinges on free speech, is likewise misguided: the founding fathers intended to ”to liberate ideas, which is not the same as exploring man’s basest instincts.”
So far so good. But when she gets sick of “Honey Boo Boo,” what was her solution? “In urgent need of purification,” as she puts it, Parker dramatically plucks up the remote, and . . . changes the channel. She watches a TV documentary about the ancient city of Alexandria and the famous library built there. It’s this TV show that guides her conclusions about the glories of the past, and it leads her right into a historical trap:
Notably, in the fourth century A.D., Christian mobs dragged the beautiful and brilliant Hypatia — philosopher/mathematician/
astronomer/teacher — from her carriage and commenced to strip, flay and chop her into pieces before burning her body parts on a pyre. A confessed pagan, she was a tad too smart for divinely inspired men — what with that astrolabe she was always toying with.
It may seem unimaginable to us now that Christians from the lower classes in late antique Alexandria could have conspired in the horrific assassination of an unarmed woman and a respected scholar, but, as it happens, that was how Alexandria was often governed at street level, by every sect and persuasion.
In the royal quarter, pagans, Christians, and Jews generally studied together, shared a common intellectual culture, collaborated in scientific endeavor, and attended one another’s lectures. In the lower city, however, religious allegiance was often no more than a matter of tribal identity, and the various tribes often slaughtered one another with gay abandon.
January 9th, 2013 | 5:02 pm
Much similar to today too, Christians also often find themselves determined by the dominant mentality–not at First Things though, thank all that is good.
January 9th, 2013 | 7:37 pm
“Hypatia herself had many Christian admirers. ”
Heck, she may have been Christian herself. No contemporary record claims she was pagan; that claim first appears in accounts much later. Given that all of her known students were Christian, it was compatible with her studies. Plus, of course, the Christians who killed her did so because of claims of her association with the governor — another Christian — and his Christian faction.
January 10th, 2013 | 12:27 pm
Tim O’Neill, at his blogsite Armarium Magnum (http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/), has been exposing the “scholarly” nonsense which underlies the Hypatia myth for some time now.
January 10th, 2013 | 2:34 pm
It’s highly unlikely Hypatia was a Christian (as in professing the belief that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and was resurrected.) The sources mention that Hypatia taught Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus (all connected with Neo-Platonism.) Neo-Platonists believed a person could know the transcendent One (God) from which the rest of the universe emanated, but not through logic or reason alone—only through deep meditation to achieve an ecstatic state. Hypatia’s best known student, Synesius, mentions they studied the Chaldean Oracles, as well as some Christian texts, and compares Hypatia’s lectures to a religious experience. He writes to a fellow student, “For my part I am and I advise you also to be, a more careful guard over the mysteries of philosophy.” He called Hypatia “divine guide” and “the most holy and revered philosopher.”
In 409, the people of Ptolemais asked Synesius to be their bishop. This had more to do with war than religion. As a Neo-Platonist, he didn’t believe in the Christian dogma, including the resurrection, which he considered “nothing for me but a sacred and mysterious allegory, and I am far from sharing the views of the vulgar crowd thereon.” His extensive correspondence with Hypatia shows his frank adoration of her and it’s likely he shared her views on Christianity. He dithered for over six months, before agreeing to take on the Bishopric, but only with several conditions, including keeping his beloved wife. You can read his remaining papers translated here: http://www.livius.org/su-sz/synesius/synesius_cyrene.html
January 10th, 2013 | 7:16 pm
Faith, I don’t know enough about Hypatia to speculate on the probability of her being Christian, but I do know that the fact that she taught and admired philosophers like Plato, Plotinus, and Aristotle hardly counts as evidence that she wasn’t. Augustine was profoundly influenced by Plotinus, and Aquinas called Aristotle “The Philosopher.”
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