Hypatia of Alexandria, Harvard University Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England,1998.
Author:Maria Dzielska.
Review: BayoumiAndil.
I admit from the outset, that I liked the subject more than I did the treatment. Our author was wise to pick that issue of such
great savagely-murdered Egyptian
philosopher/Scientist Hypatia , the daughter of Theon, also a philosopher and Scientist. However the defence, our author attempted, of Hypatia''s murderers proved to be, thanks to
pagan gods of antiquity, sheer failure.
Dzielska starts her investigation by reviewing what she calls "the literary
legend" of Hypatia. That legend which enjoyed, according to our author, wide popularity for centuries, obstructing scholarly endeavors to present Hypatia''s life impartially, and it persists to this day.
Dzielska goes on to say that if we ask who is Hypatia, we will probably be told that she was that beautiful young pagan philosopher who was torn to pieces by monks(or more generally, by Christians) in Alexandria in 415." Then our investigator portrays this answer, which she calls a "pat" one, as not based on ancient sources, but on the mass of belletristic literature. Most of these works present Hypatia as
an innocent victim of the fanaticism of nascent Christianity, and her murder as marking the banishment of the freedom of inquiry."
But Dzielska does not try to shake any of the bases upon which that "legend" was constructed. Moreover she could not produce one single plausible argument, throughout her book, to the effect that Hypatia was anything else other than "
an innocent victim of…", something which she disapproves of from the very beginning.
Dzielska contends that Hypatia''s death had no connection with the antipagan policy pursued by Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria and his church at that time. How? Dzielska answers back: "he, in the first years of his rule merely obliterated the
temple of Isis in Méneuthé near Canopus, replacing it with the cult of
Christian saints (Cyrus and John). She adds that the Patriarch who attained later, to the lofty rank of sainthood, did not persecute pagans in Alexandria itself as he was more interested in heretics and Jews. Not until the years 420-430,- a considerable time after Hypatia''s death- did he launch an assault on pagan thought and practices in his treatise
Contra Julianum, which attacked Julian the Apostate''s
Contra Galilaeos. In this discreet way of hers, she, instead of taking away from the verdict against the Patriach of Alex.,she reminds us of more crimes committed by him, as long as we, rather the modern readership would not accept, for a moment, neither the destruction of Isis temple nor the persecution of some Christians, dubbed "heretics" as well as all Jews. So her apology turns to be counterproductive in the last analysis.
In any case Dzielska could not deny the fact that "Hypatia" was one of the great 18th century''s discoveries, or in our writer''s words "
the era of Skepticism known historically as the Enlightment". But that discovery served, to her seemingly dismay, several writers as an instrument in religious and philosophical polemics.
I think that there is no better words to
end this review than of M. Bernal, writing about the Afro-Asian sources of classical civilization: "Twenty-five years later (after the destruction of the Serapis temple) the brilliant and beautiful philosopher and mathematician Hypatia was gruesomely murderd in the same city by monks instigated by St.Cyril. These two acts of violence mark the end of Egypto-Paganism and the beginning of the Christain Dark Ages." However I can not but make a reservation: they were Christian Dark Ages only in the West, but in the East they were not, precisely Christian.
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