AGORA: Hypatia and being a Philosophical Woman in a Violently Religious Ancient World

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 24, 2015

“Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies.  To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing.  The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.  In fact, men will fight for superstition as quickly as for living truth, even more so, since a superstition is intangible, you can’t get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, as so is changeable.”  

- Hypatia of Alexandria

AGORA, a word that means 'gathering place' or 'assembly', is a period piece film set back in the 4^th century AD, Roman Egypt, that tells the story of a brilliant Greek philosopher and astronomer named Hypatia.  She was a free thinking woman that was a teacher and mentor; she was an inventor, mathematician and authority on the philosophy of Plato.  She lived in Alexandria, in northern Egypt off the coast of the Mediterranean, with her father Theon who was the director of the Musaeum of Alexandria, which was an institution for music, poetry, philosophy and science.  It also housed the vast number of texts in the great Library of Alexandria.  Hypatia would teach future leaders and scholars in assembly rooms.  

Alexandria, in its inception, was to become a multi-cultured metropolis where all types of people who seek knowledge and growth were to reside.  Philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and high priests were all to co-exist under the same sky directly above Alexandria, where writers and scientists would debate and pioneer thought.  It was a dream imagined by Alexander the Great where all knowledge could be stored in one place.  The intellectual city combined this wonderful mix-match of Roman, Greek and Egyptian architecture to erect its monuments and build its temples.

When the Christians arrived they soon began to mock and defile the pagan gods which forced the Pagans to take action.  The Pagans ambushed the Christians, causing many deaths, leading to a massive bifurcation of the city where Pagans and Christians stood apart.  This social unrest began to challenge the Roman rule as the Christians began to take over, gaining more and more power. 

Hypatia was a non-believer; she was a woman of science and philosophy and was quite frankly thinking about more important things than fake gods that scared Christians were forcing people to believe.  When the Pagans instigated the battle with the Christians, they ended up finding themselves barricaded in the Library of the Serapeum, a massive temple where the documents and texts from mostly all the worlds thinkers were held.

While taking refuge behind the walls of the Serapeum, Hypatia continued thinking about the widely believed astronomical, geocentric Ptolemaic system that the Earth was the center of the Solar System, a theory that philosopher Aristotle believed to be true as well.  This model she felt was widely flawed but she was still baffled by the possibility that the Earth was in fact moving.  She considered the 3^rd century astronomer Aristarchus of Samos’ Heliocentric hypothesis that the Earth and the planets, which Hypatia at the time called ‘wanderers’, actually circled the Sun.

Soon an envoy of the Roman Emperor declared that the Pagans would all be pardoned, however the Christians would be allowed access to the library to do with it as they wish.  Hypatia and a number of others furiously scramble to gather as many important scrolls and texts from the Library as possible before fleeing.  Christians ended up overtaking the library, destroying statues and burning all the remaining works of philosophy, science, literature, poetry and mathematics scrolls that were unavoidably left behind.  A body of knowledge that one could only imagine about the possibilities of even furthering an understanding of our species, how we live our lives and the elements that form the world and space around it.  Civilization itself stood still that day as all that knowledge was destroyed out of fear of difference, fear of oneself, fear of loneliness, fear of abandonment and fear of change.  Paganism became outlawed and the Ancient World ended giving birth to what we now call - Modern History.   

“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.” 

– Hypatia of Alexandria

As the years past, the Christians began to dominate Alexandria where even the current Prefect was converted to Christianity.  Their power grew and they wanted to impose their Christianity onto other communities within Alexandria.  Jewish people at this point became their new rivals and sadly remain so to this day in various forms of disagreement.  The Jewish people believe their God of Abraham is the true God were the Christians are saying that Jesus is the true son of God.  The battle back and forth, as these ludicrous futile arguments go, leads to violence against each other.  Christians kill some Jews, Jews stone some Christians, Christians take up swords and kill more Jews and round and round we go.  These two groups among too many on this planet, fight over wanting to be number one, the sad thing here is, they both claim to be peaceful as they cowardly kill one another because these incredulous, hypocritical believers loathe opposition to their insane way of thinking.

“All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.”  

- Hypatia

While all the men fight in the streets over piety, Hypatia continued work on her theory that the Earth not only revolves around the Sun but it doesn’t do so in a perfect symmetrical circle.  She also was trying to prove the Earth was in fact moving even though everyone on it wouldn’t necessarily feel it moving.  Clearly here she wasn’t considering what we know now about gravity, but her insight into the physics of the planet was ambitious.  The Christians figured that the world must be flat because if it was a sphere which was being suggested, then why aren’t people and animals falling from the top of the earth down the side and then sliding off it?  It seems a bit silly these days, to even consider such a thing, but we were all born into a planet where all these questions had answers.   To Christians, the Book of Genesis is their scientific text that explains how the Earth came to be.  All Christians and certainly many Christians to this day believe that God created the Earth and the Stars.  They believe the geocentric model is the center where God placed his blessed children, and thinking otherwise is an act of heresy.

Hypatia didn’t believe in any of it and today we know now she was more or less correct in not believing in it.  Her purview was still understandably limited by the senses and the capacity of the mind with such a minute amount of cosmic information.  She continued to prove that the Earth was moving and that the motion would not affect a falling object on the Earth itself.  The Christians ended up forbidding Hypatia to teach at school anymore because of their objections against heliocentrism.

While being subjugated by the Christians, Hypatia still focusing on her work, discovered an astrodynamic theory that the Earth orbits the Sun in an elliptical motion, not a circular one.  This explains why the Sun sometimes appears closer to the Earth than other times.  This oval orbit placed the Earth in various distances from the Sun and thus explained why the seasons changed.

The Christians, reading straight from their bible that a woman should never be in a position of power over a man, declared Hypatia a witch, a godless woman and inciting religious turmoil, and vowed to kill her.  Hypatia, a lover of wisdom and the endless possibilities of human thought, was kidnapped on her way home by a group of Christians.  This mob of mad men tore her clothing off, stripping her naked in front of an increasing heathen crowd.  They dragged her naked into the Caesaruim, which was a temple and then converted to a church, and grabbed sharp pieces of any wood or rock they could find and they then began to fillet her alive.  Once she was dead, like a pack of wolves, they pulled her limbs apart and took her dismembered body parts to the edge of the city and burnt them.  

The core of all this isn’t necessarily religion, the core is fear which at its feet spawns violence, through the rationalization of rejecting fear and weakness, violence in the mind becomes reasonable if one wants to protect the very structure of their being.  This is the madness found at the heart of most all religions.  It promises so much and is never able to live up to those promises, thus moving the believer into a psychotic disposition that must force its fantasy into the world and oddly, in this person’s fractured mind, validate it.  Here they would have believed that they were doing God’s work for him and would have excused themselves of all blame, which would relieve any guilt, which would make them feel better about themselves and ultimately this would result in an avoidance of fear. 

Alexander the Great would have been profoundly disappointed to what eventually happened to his great city.  This city was to be a place of enlightenment yet that act of barbarism blew out the candle of Alexander’s dream of a more knowledgeable, informed future.  Instead of human growth, understanding, respect to all the living, silly superstitions manifested into real world consequences was how these men chose to solve what they perceived as a problem, a problem that we all know too well today.  Thankfully Christianity has matured to the point that in the developed countries this type of thing doesn't regularly happen.  All Hypatia wanted was to learn and teach what she had learned to a group of open-minded people in a city that welcomed difference and thrived on change.

Hypatia’s achievements are even more exceptional because she was able to study the stars in a very male dominated ancient world.  She was a humanist, a person that looked beyond gender, allowing her mind, equal neurologically to anyone else’s, to expand without the weight of everyday banality and religious dogmatism truncating it.

“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.  To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.”  

- Hypatia