HUU Sermon Archives

Hypathia: The Last of the Neoplatonist

by Beryl Lawson and Eric La Freniere
December 8, 2002

The subject of the service was the martyrdom of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonist philosopher-mathematician, Hypatia.

It is presented here for your edification and pleasure.

Beryl's notes:

Contrary to some modern thinkers, there exists the record of much ancient wisdom, going back to ancient Egypt, Babylon, Chaldea, India and beyond. Plato was student to Pythagorus. Pythagorus was known to have traveled extensively to India and been much influenced by Hindu and Buddhist teachings. So the ancient knowledge was transmitted, one to the other until we come to the time of the Neo-Platonist, the time in the first centuries of what we call the common era.

Alexandria was a center of eclectic learning. Founded by Alexander, in 331 BC ,student of Aristotle, who was student of Plato. The city was to be a center of learning and home to many different philosophies and religions. Alexander died before its completion but it was finished by his half brother, Ptolemy, It was laid out in the form of a cross. Alexandria was a busy port and people came from all over the world to trade.

People and ideas from all over were welcomed: Jews, Hindus, Babylonians, and more. It contained a magnificent museum, the most wonderful part of which was its library. To this library were brought scrolls from all parts of the world. Over 700,000 scrolls in the library called Brukion. Unfortunately, it burned during the time of Cleopatra, but it is said that many of the scrolls were saved and hidden, to be discovered, perhaps at some future time.

Alexandria, as well as places in Greece, was the site of several schools of learning that were called the mystery schools. These were schools whose students came to learn the hidden teachings reserved for those who were pure in character and willing to undergo the discipline necessary to attain the wisdom. All schools have their exoteric and esoteric sides, Jesus, Buddha, etc.

When we think of the Neo-Platonist names such as Ammonias Saccas,193 AD, Plotinus,in Rome, 244AD School in Rome. Porphyry, student of Plotinus who preserved the writings of Plotinus. Iamblichus, end of third century AD and Hypatia come to mind. Eric will go into the details of Hypatia's life and death and the significance of both for the last 1500 years.

Like the Transcendentalists of the 19th century, each had a different slant or portion of the transcendental ideas but ultimately they all had a similar philosophy. So the Neo-Platonists followed the same trend. Ammonias , the common source of all religions, Iamblichus, the hidden side of nature but they all believed, with Plato, Pythagoras and the ancients that there is one source of which we are all a part. The source is One, or perhaps numberless. It exists. All manifestation exists within It. There are cyclic periods of manifestation and withdrawal. As soon as manifestation takes place the One becomes the two. Spirit and Matter. Human beings are reflections of the manifestation of the One. He has a higher nature, a nature of spirit and a lower nature of matter. To be so completely immersed in matter is to forget that there is the world of spirit. It was the aim of the neoplatonists to remind people of their higher nature and to train those who were willing to develop the connection with that nature. Thus the schools of philosophy.

All presentations of ideas are really attempts to get back to pure teachings that seem to get lost in the course of time as the ideas pass from one generation to another. The ideas are twisted, very often for the personal aggrandizement of the people who can use the ideas for their own purposes. Thus Buddha came as a reformer of lost Hindu teachings and Jesus came as a reformer of lost or twisted Jewish teachings.

A distinction must be made between the teachings of Jesus and the church which rose up in his name. Jesus' teachings, the pure ethics of which can be found in all religions, The church's history is one of struggle for temporal power and an attempt at exclusivity.

New ideas are always a threat to the "powers that be." Thus Christianity, in the centuries after Christ lost its true mission, the spread of the ideas and ideals of Jesus, and became a power struggle, the church set up its own school to counter the neoplatonic schools. Called the Catechitical school. Some of the teachers in that school had trouble teaching that Christianity was unique. Clement, Origen, Synesius were dismissed from their jobs when they began to see the similarities and even superiority of the so called pagan ideas. The church against the pagans, the ideas which the church was usurping without giving credit to the source of those ideas.

Early Christianity was a mix of many ideas. The Essenes, the Nazarenes, the Ebionites, were several of the branches of early Christianity.. Many of the early members of the church were neoplatonists, seeing no distinction between Jesus' teachings and the so called pagan ideas. Origen, Synesius, to name two were higher-ups in the church. They were to get in trouble for their ideas.

In order for the church to have dominance the source of pagan ideas had to be destroyed. The church had a deliberate attempt to remove any references to the sources of the ideas they had usurped. Thus we see the history of the Christian Church of the first five centuries after Jesus as a deliberate effort in this direction.

Borrowing ideas is a form of flattery, stealing and then murdering the owner of that idea is another. Ideas, like air, I suppose, cannot be owned. Certainly the pagans didn't claim an exclusivity to their ideas. The philosophers of Alexandria believed in living and letting live. A person who is comfortable with his ideas has no need to force them on others, let along kill those who don't believe as he does. But this was exactly what the Christian Church did. In order to gain converts to their way of thinking, they appropriated ideas from many sources. In order to claim uniqueness of doctrine there was the need, they felt, to destroy the source so that the people would think that their ideas were unique, the only truth from their God, the only God.

Constantine's battle, forgiveness of sins, forcing people to become Christians. His policies followed by his two sons, then nephew, Julian, neoplatonists, reversed Constantine's edicts. After his death back to Christianity with a vengeance.

What has all this to do with us today? Is there something here that UU's can profit from, aside from learning a bit of history? Intolerance in any form is deadly, to ideas, to hopes, to people, to civilizations. Closed minds are as good as dead minds. Other people's ideas have value, not just because they have them but because there might be something there for us. If we keep searching we may well find that there is a common source or commonality to all of our ideas and why would we want to kill or destroy an idea that may well hold something of value for us?

Intolerance, in whose ever name, can only lead to ignorance and pain. Let us value the life that is in everyone and everything. Let us not be satisfied that we have all the answers. If we keep open to others in all ways we will find the basic kinship that we seek. And we don't make war on our kinfolk.

Eric's sermon:

Beryl's covered the philosophical / religious end of today's service, the evolution from Pythagoras to Plato to Plotinus, and I get to cover the historical context and significance of the Alexandrian philosopher-mathematician, Hypatia.

Broadly speaking, history is the tale of the rise and fall of great civilizations, and all too often is a list of warlords and battles.

But civilization is more than just the ability to field a superior military force. there is a history of ideas and the spirit, too, and it usually foreshadows more physical history.

In fact, the final fall of Rome to a Germanic warlord was but the death rattle of Greco-roman civilization. its motivating spirit had already perished; the seeds of Europe's dark ages had already been sown.

you see, at the time of Hypatia, the power of Rome had already been transferred to Constantinople, which Constantine had declared the new capital of the empire. he had made Christianity the imperial religion, and moved his seat of power as close as possible to the birthplace of the young religion. this move of the heart of empire, away from the more traditionally rational, democratic Europe, was a harbinger of things to come.

Later emperors, under pressure from and needing the support of, Christian bishops, would declare worship of the old gods and goddesses, as well as any deviation from the official version of Christianity, illegal.

In one of history's greatest ironies, what probably began as a peaceful reform movement within Judaism, a radical teaching of universal love and compassion, was being transformed into an imperial cult of prestige and power, as well as a form of idolatry -- the literal worship of a man as a god.

Now, over the couple of centuries preceding Hypatia, the philosophical mantle of Athens had fallen on the shoulders of Alexandria, which had become the melting pot of west and east, Europe and the orient (then conceived of mainly as Egypt and the middle east, and then India, and perhaps China).

In boisterous, prosperous Alexandria, the last, most developed schools of Greco-roman philosophy mingled and merged with Egyptian and middle eastern mystery cults.

In Hypatia's Alexandria were the ruins of the museum, or temple to the muses, and the serapium, a temple to the universal, abstract god behind all gods. both had been recently destroyed by members of the new religion, Christianity. later, after Hypatia, Alexandria's renowned library, which housed hundreds of thousands of hand-written and inscribed texts, would be destroyed by the followers of radical monotheism.

At the time of Hypatia, Alexandria was a city torn by frequent riots between the adherents of the young and famously intolerant religion of Christianity and the followers of the traditional gods, with the Alexandrian Jews usually caught in the middle.

Hypatia, daughter of a well-known geometer and philosopher, was loved and respected by the citizens of Alexandria. proudly wearing the laurel wreath, bestowed upon her by an over-awed Athenian academy, she lectured on science, mathematics and philosophy to crowds of students from every corner of the known world.

She was priestess and professor of a supremely refined vision of a spiritual tradition shared -- in essence -- by groups as far flung as the Indian Brahmins and Egyptian priests, the Greek philosophers and the Celtic druids. with roots and runners in so many countries and cultures, the branches of this so-called hermetic tradition reached upwards, into the most subtle spheres, the highest heavens conceived by the human mind and spirit.

At this time, the arch-bishop of Alexandria was Cyril, an ambitious man later made a saint, who jealously saw Hypatia as his nemesis. by giving credibility to the old ways, he felt she kept from the new religion its rightful followers and power. he was sure that, by removing Hypatia, he would be doing god's work.

Unfortunately for him, the imperial prefect of Alexandria, a man named Orestes, was a pupil and great admirer of Hypatia, so lawful action against the heathen temptress was out of the question. although Cyril, by fomenting violence, had been able to force Orestes to issue proclamations against the Jews of Alexandria, he was legally powerless to do anything against the pagan philosopher-mathematician.

But his right-hand man, an ill-tempered fanatic named Peter the Reader, recruited a posse of gaunt hermit monks from the Egyptian desert. to tell what happened next at a spiritual gathering is painful (would that the truth and beauty were always one).

As Hypatia rode her chariot throughout the city streets to her morning lecture, the mob of black-robed Christian monks seized her. they stripped her of her simple white scholar's robes, and savagely beat her. then they dragged her into a nearby Christian church, where, in front of the altar, they scrapped the flesh from her body with broken roofing tiles. after thus murdering and mutilating Hypatia, the monks burned and scattered her remains.

It was Edgar Allen Poe, a true connoisseur of horror, who said, there is nothing more terrible than the death of a beautiful women. Hypatia was paganisms fairest flower, and her grisly martyrdom at the hands of Christian fanatics was both the death of the classical world, and the birth pangs of the dark ages.

in this case, the real hinge of history was the brutal murder of a beautiful woman genius, and she was brutally murdered precisely because she was beautiful, a woman, and a genius.

Beauty: the neo-platonists had seen physical and artistic beauty as symbolic of spiritual truth. but the concrete-bound, literalist Christians did not care for the subtleties of symbolism, and saw beauty only as temptation.

Woman: a beautiful woman was the very symbol of earthly evil. the goddess, from Ishtar to Isis to Artemis was banished, and eve, pawn and servant of the deceiver, agent of the mankind's fall, was the new symbol of woman, to usher in the dark ages.

Genius: to the mind of a fanatic, genius counted as nothing, indeed as a potential distraction and danger to the new way of radical faith. had not church father tertullian proudly proclaimed: "i believe in the resurrection because it is absurd!" what use had he for geometry and logic, or the astrolabe?

Rome fell to the barbarians, but , typically, when barbarians had conquered a high civilization, there was enough of that civilization's culture left intact to seduce the conquerors. Within two to three hundred years, the barbarians would adopt and emulate the conquered civilization's culture, with some modifications. This had happened in Egypt, Sumeria and Greece, each overrun by Hyksos, Semites, and Romans, respectively.

Would the barbarians who had overrun Rome come to adopt and emulate Greco-roman culture? would another high civilization arise, like a phoenix, from the ashes of the old pagan culture? no. and why not? because, at the same time Rome was being overrun by barbarians, she was going through a spasm of historical and cultural revisionism. she was trying desperately to legitimize her new state faith.

To the eternal loss of all mankind, this meant the destruction and suppression of thousands of years of painstakingly accumulated pre-Christian knowledge and culture. the learning and wisdom of Egypt, Babylon, Greece and even Rome herself would be lost or hoarded away. only a naive version of Plato's metaphysics, used merely to lend credence to exclusivist religious claims, would survive this general censorship of the old, pagan culture. (even so, our culture would more properly be called Greco Judaic, rather than Judeo-Christian). learning was suspect, the medical arts all but disappeared, philosophy became the slave of theology

On the up side, after 1000 years, the wisdom of classical civilization was gradually, if incompletely, rediscovered, and the renaissance, or re-birth, began. this led to the enlightenment and our modern, if imperfect, world.

Much was lost, but much has been recovered. but we should remember Hypatia. her story is history, and there is a lesson to be learned. from the blind hatred of fanaticism, we must always guard freedom, tolerance, genius, truth and beauty.

Primary Sources

The Life of Hypatia
By Socrates Scholasticus, from his Ecclesiastical HistoryThe Life of Hypatia

From Damascius's Life of Isidore, reproduced in The Suda

The Life of Hypatia
By John, Bishop of Nikiu, from his Chronicle 84.87-103

Her works include:

A Commentary on the Arithmetica of Diophantus
A Commentary on the Conics of Apollonious
She edited the third book of her father's Commentary on the Almagest of Ptolemy

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