With all the publicity and discussion around Alejandro Amenábar’s film Agora, there’s unlikely to be anyone who hasn’t at least heard the name Hypatia. But for those who haven’t, Hypatia lived in Egypt in the early years of the fifth century AD, in an empire that by then was ruled by a Christian. Her home city, Alexandria, was torn by a conflict between three forces: the pagan aristocracy, the new religious power represented by its bishop, Cyril, and a large Jewish community. She was a teacher and Neo-Platonist philosopher, a mathematician and astronomer, and was said to have been most beautiful and idolized by her pupils. A group of Parabalani, who were a sort of Christian Taliban of the time and Bishop Cyril’s personal militia, attacked Hypatia and literally tore her to pieces.
No works by Hypatia have survived (Cyril may have had them destroyed), and there is little evidence, Christian or pagan, about her. More or less everyone accepts that Cyril was to some extent responsible for her death. Hypatia lay forgotten until the seventeenth century, when she was reappraised, in particular by Enlightenment philosophers, as a martyr of free thought, and celebrated by Gibbon, Voltaire, Diderot, Nerval, Leopardi, up to Proust and Mario Luzi, until she became a feminist icon.
The film certainly isn’t kind to Christians or to Cyril, though it doesn’t conceal the violence of pagans and Jews, and when word spread that dark reactionary forces were intending to stop its screening in Italy, a petition was circulated that collected thousands of signatures. As far as I understand, the Italian distributors were rather hesitant about releasing a film that might stir strong Catholic opposition, thus jeopardizing its screening, but the petition persuaded them to go ahead. What I want to talk about, however, is not the film, which is well made despite some glaring anachronisms, but the conspiracy theory that it set off.
Surfing the Internet, I found attacks by Catholics who protested against the presentation of only the violent side of religion. The director has repeatedly said that his argument was against fundamentalism of every kind, but no one has tried to deny that Cyril, who was not only a man of the Church but also a political figure, was tough on Jews and pagans alike. It’s no coincidence that he was made a saint and doctor of the Church almost 1,500 years later by Leo XIII, a pope obsessed with the new paganism of Freemasonry and the anticlerical liberals who held power in Rome at that time. It was embarrassing to witness the commemoration of Cyril on October 3, 2007, by Pope Benedict, who praised “the great energy” of his rule without a word to lift the shadow that history has placed over him.
Cyril puts everyone in difficulty. On the Internet I found one Italian journalist who relied on Eusebius of Caesarea as a guarantor of his innocence. An excellent witness, except that Eusebius died seventy-five years before the execution of Hypatia and so couldn’t have witnessed anything. If anyone feels the need to spark off a religious war, they should at least check Wikipedia.
But back to the conspiracy. On the Internet there are numerous reports of censorship (by whom?) to cover up the Hypatia scandal. For example, it has been stated that volume 8 of Storia della filosofia greca e romana (History of Greek and Roman Philosophy) by Giovanni Reale—dedicated to Neo-Platonism, with information about Hypatia—has mysteriously disappeared from bookshops. A telephone call to the publisher clarified that, of the ten-volume series, only volumes 7 and 8 are out of stock and will be reprinted, no doubt because they touch on arguments such as the Corpus Hermeticum and certain aspects of Neo-Platonism that not only interest students of philosophy but excite all those who dabble in real or occult sciences. But then I found a copy of this infamous volume 8 on my bookshelves and saw that Giovanni Reale—a historian of philosophy whose writings can all be read, whereas nothing of Hypatia’s survives—devotes seven lines, yes, seven lines, to Hypatia, where he limits himself to saying what little is known. So why censor it?
But the conspiracy theory goes further, and on the Internet they say that all books on Neo-Platonism have disappeared from the bookshops, a nonsense that would make any first-year philosophy student laugh. In short, if you want to find out something about Hypatia, there are additional references on Wikipedia, or you’ll find all you wish, uncensored, in Roman Women by Silvia Ronchey, in a chapter called “Hypatia the Intellectual.”
2010