rcrx

Tonight I watched Agora on HBO. It's an historical drama based on the last years of the life of Hypatia in Alexandria, Egypt in the early 5th century. She was the daughter of a scholar and was raised to be scholar. She's credited with major advances in geometry and astronomy.

She was also brutally murdered by a Christian mob which may or may not have been led by a group of monks.

As with all dramatizations I take Agora with a grain of salt since it's the producer/director/writer's take on events that they did not witness. However, in doing a bit of online research it seems as though the essential elements of the story are largely true. She was a "pagan" who was murdered by a Christian mob in the period of Alexandrian history when Rome was fading fast and Christians were dominating Alexandran society.

I was raised a christian but refused to get confirmed and so effectively left the church when I was 12 years old. Ironically, after a year of refusing to go to church beginning when I was 11, it was my great-uncle, a bishop and the leading authority on the old testament in all of Asia, that finally "gave his blessing" to my refusal to get confirmed. That's a story for another day. The point is that I refused to get confirmed because I believed that human beings could never understand the infinite and so our various religions were nothing more than our feeble attempts to define the indefinable. As a positivist, I'd argue that the laws of nature as little as we know them are and likely will always have mysteries for us.

So watching a film about a scientist, who apparently refused to convert to Christianity even though it was at the time the thing to do and even though Christians in Alexandria had already carried out atrocities against non-christians, was thought provoking. That she was a woman and clearly a strong formidable woman makes the story more appealing to me.

I'll state it plainly, smart women make me hard. Smart women with guts....forget about it. In my dating life, I've been accused of being an intellectual snob. Well, I admit it. I like women who are at least as smart as I am.

So Hypatia, who was apparently Greek, living in a Roman society, within a rapidly converting christian city was bound to be looked upon with fear. Misogyny runs rampant through early Christian writings (codified by the exclusion of "heretical" texts by the Council of Nicea). The Christian story is supposedly one of brutal oppression first by the Romans and the Jews. However, having achieved power Christians were as brutal in their oppression as their former tormentors. Hypatia in this light has to be seen as doomed, tragic figure. Her murder, by all accounts she was stripped and dragged through the streets to a Christian church where she was either flayed or stoned and her body mutilated dragged through the streets again and finally burned, was horrifically logical for the time and place where she lived.

I'm curious about this and interested because in my most cynical moments, I feel as though we, humanity, has not evolved as far from that brutality, bigotry and ignorance as we would like to think.

I will say that from here on, now that I know at least some of her story, I'll hold her in high esteem and honor her memory the way I honor, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor Roosevelt, and a whole slew of other smart, tough women.