I’m excited about the new movie about Hypatia of Alexandria, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz and directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Here’s the teaser trailer (if you can’t see it, here’s the link):
The brief scene with what looks like Hypatia teaching is lovely — it reminds me of a J.W. Waterhouse painting. Also seen — the Pharos lighthouse, Christian mobs, female librarians scrambling to save the scrolls in the Library of Alexanria (which produces a visceral reaction in me — the idea of all the knowledge and literature lost made me cry when I first learned about it), and the toppling of a statue of Serapis (a syncretic god used by the Ptolemaic dynasty to unite disparate religious groups in Egypt).
Hypatia was the last head librarian of the Library of Alexandria, and the apocryphal story is that her father raised her to be the perfect human being — physically and intellectually. The IMDB listing for the movie calls her an atheist, but she was a Neoplatonist. In that philosophy God becomes a singular concept, which I find a bit similar to the tao of Taosim or what atheists like me half-jokingly invoke as “the Universe.” However, Neoplatonism allows for the existence of many gods and the belief in an immortal soul. So it’s not atheism as we would think of it at all. It actually is compatible with religious pluralism — but not so much with any religions that claim to be the one and only true religion. And thus the problem when Christianity came to Alexandria.
Though, interestingly, the Gospel of John begins in a clearly Platonist way: “In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And Hebrews 9:23-24 is even more blatantly Platonist in its understanding of Christ as one who communes on our behalf with the ideal world, of which our world is only a shadow: “Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.”
I’m interested in seeing how the movie treats this subject. The meaning I would take from a story like the destruction of classical Alexandria is that there are certain absolute stances that are incompatible with peaceful multicultural existence. It’s also a shame that the religious motivation for her murder has overshadowed the accomplishments of Hypatia’s life — she’s become a symbol, and I hope the excellent Rachel Weisz will make her a woman.
A biography of Hypatia:
Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr
by Michael A. B. Deakin
This movie is propagating some myths about Hypatia, namely that she was the “librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria” (it no longer existed in her time) and that she was murdered for her knowledge or her paganism (it was a political tit-for-tat killing and nothing more). See http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia-hollywood-strikes.html for a detailed analysis of the Hypatia of history and the myths that have developed about her. This movie is simply perpetuating those myths.
Thanks for the link to your interesting post, Tim. I’m disappointed, though, that the first comment on my new blog strikes kind of an argumentative tone. I’m curious — have you seen the movie?
I’m aware that the Great Library didn’t exist as it once did in her time, but if the Serapeum was, in fact, the main library of Alexandria at that time, I can see how such a statement could be made. As I wrote, I was hopeful that the movie would treat Hypatia more as the actual woman she was than as a symbol, but I do understand the impulse toward such changes when using a historical event as the basis for an artistic work. One of my favorite movies, Amadeus, is one I know to be full of historical inaccuracies and mischaracterizations, yet I know that it would not be such a powerful artistic work if that artistic license had not been taken.
However, your recounting of the historical events still supports what seems to be the theme, which the director has spoken about in interviews (his line of thinking seems a bit different and more nuanced than what is conveyed in press releases, which, as I know from working in publishing, one should never take at face value), of fantaticism leading to horrific acts. I think it is possible to view the a group of zealous monks as separate from the mainstream Christianity of the time; but it is also cautionary in the sense that it shows how religious belief–or any kind of belief, for that matter–can be twisted into zealotry.
My article isn’t a comment on the movie, which has yet to have general release, but on the trailer and the writer-director’s comments in interviews. I’ll reserve judgement on the movie itself until I see it, but it’s already pretty clear that (i) they depict a Christian mob destroying “the (second) Great Library of Alexandria”, (ii) they depict Hypatia as a atheist and (iii) they depict her as a martyr for science and reason. All these things are not historical. And I point this out as someone who is himself an atheist, a champion of science and reason and an enemy of fundamentalism in all its forms.
The Serapeum was clearly not a library at all, yet the movie perpetuates that Gibbonian myth. Socrates Scholasticus describes the destruction of that shrine 24 years before Hypatia’s death and describes the destruction of its idols and cult objects. He makes no mention of any library. Rufinus Tyrannius does the same, with no mention of any books or library. And Eunapius – a pagan writer who was fiercely anti-Christian and who witnessed the sacking of the Serapeum itself – also makes no mention of any library or books, though he’d have a good incentive to do so.
Ammianus Marcellinus’ earlier description of the Serapeum, based on his visit to Alexandria some years before the sack, says it HAD contained a library once. The city had been devastated by sacks by Caracalla, Aurelian and Diocletian, with Aurelian burning the very quarter in which the Serapeum was situated. So the most likely culprits for destroying any library that had *once* been there were these Roman emperors and their troops, not any Christian mob.
And I’m sorry, but I don’t have a lot of time for movies that distort history to make a polemical point, especially when the makers fervently declare that their film *is* historical (as in this case). Any historian will tell you that they spend a lot of their time knocking erroneous ideas about important subjects in history out of their students’ heads because most people get their grasp of history from popular culture.
Finally, no I don’t agree that the historical events support the “theme” at all. Her murder was a bit of petty tit-for-tat political violence, so to harness it to some theme about “fundamentalism” is ridiculous. And I’m willing to bet the movie ends with some kind of coda about how Hypatia’s death happened at the beginning of the “Dark Ages”, implying that the “fundamentalists” caused that too. In fact, the academy at Alexandria remained a centre of science and philosophy for centuries to come and the “Dark Ages” were a purely western European affair that had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the total collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
If I have an “argumentative tone” it’s because I’m sick of ignorant film-makers peddling myths and calling them history.
You have your own blog on which to take an argumentative tone. I don’t wish that to be the tone of this one. If you want a platform, you have one on your website. Thank you.