"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."
"All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final."
"Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond"
Hypatia of Alexandria: C370-415AD
Follower of Plotinius who developed neo-Platonism at Alexandria from about 400 to her death in 415. She was so well-known, apparently, that correspondence addressed only to "The Philosopher" is said to have reached her.
Also a leading mathematician and astronomer, she is thought to have taught ideas relating to different levels of reality and humanity's ability to understand them. She seems to have believed that everything in the natural world emanates from "the one" - and that human beings lack the mental capacity fully to comprehend ult imate reality.
Her subsequent obscurity probably reflects the fact that none of her work survives (although letters from a pupil do). It appears, however, that her influence made the city's Christian community feel threatened - perhaps partly because of her emphasis on the value of science. She was torn to death by a Christian mob (including monks armed with oyster shells). Admirers revere her as a philosophical martyr comparable to Socrates.
THE TRAGEDY OF HYPATIA
by John Spiers
The acknowledged head of the Platonic Academy at Alexandria, Hypatia’s martyrdom at the hands of a monk-led rabble, marks the first great blot of dogmatic intolerance in the records of orthodox Christianity
Millions of people have seen one or all of the many spectacular films depicting life in Roman times, and there have been quite a number and probably more to come showing the courage of Christian martyrs under the tyranny of the Roman emperors. But it is hardly likely that more than one cinema-goer in a hundred thousand has heard of Hypatia. A hush-hush curtain spreads over her name, and yet compared with many a saint of the Church, Hypatia was a far more important individual, being the recognized Head of the Greek philosophic world.
The Christians murdered Hypatia -- savagely -- in a Church! Such a scandalous, unheard-of deed is unlikely to be the central theme of any of these cinemascopic entertainments. People can stand seeing Christians being nobly slaughtered by pagans. It goes to prove the intolerance of the opposition. Non-Christians are expected to be brutal. But when a proved intolerance is equally manifested on the part of Christians themselves, as soon as they stepped into imperial power in the person of the Spaniard, the emperor Theodosius in the year 379, there is silence.
Her Eminence: Hypatia lived during the reign of Theodosius and his sons (who divided the Empire at Rome and Byzantium between them). Hypatia was born at Alexandria, a city which for hundreds of years had been famed as the great meeting-place of the whole world, where Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Persian and Indian met in commerce and above all in religion and philosophy. Until the dictatorship of the Christian emperors it had always had an open character. Great teachers had achieved fame in its halls, and the noble Plotinus, some 200 years earlier, had found his Guru at Alexandria in the person of Ammonius the Sack-Bearer (probably an Indian), as had also Origen who was a Christian, and between these pupils, one pagan and one a follower of Jesus, there was no quarrel. The memories of the great Library (burnt accidentally when Julius Caesar was there) lingered on in what was left of it, and in the later additions of three centuries. The official language was Greek and great scholars whose names are still in use were proud to belong to his university city of the old world. Euclid was an Alexandrian and so was Eratosthenes who correctly measured the globe, and there was Apollonius who wrote on conic sections. Hipparchus charted the stars and here also Hero devised a steam engine.
To rise to academical eminence in such a centre as Alexandria was therefore difficult, and yet Hypatia, a Greek woman, daughter of Theon, a mathematician, filled the highest seat of honor. To thousands of pupils who flocked to hear her lectures she was the incarnation of wisdom, a veritable Athena, a true disciple of Plato and Plotinus. She seems to have been an only child, and she assisted her father in his learned commentaries, as well as writing commentaries herself on learned subjects like astronomy and mathematics.
Hypatia was noted for four things: her modesty, her beauty, her eloquence and her devotion to philosophy. All her contemporaries of whom there is record bear witness to these four qualities. Many sincere Christians who strove to know something of philosophy, attended her lectures, and among them was a student called Synusius, who after wards became the Bishop of Ptolemais. His letters to her which are extant, are full of reverence and praise. He asks her about the construction of an instrument for ascertaining the positions of the planets and stars, called an astrolabe. She was also on friendly terms with the highest officer of the land, the Prefect of Alexandria, a “pagan” named Orestes.
Why she was murdered: But her advent was at an ill time. Only one hundred years before, the Christians were being persecuted most atrociously by Diocletian, the Roman emperor. Now, although the tables were turned, and a Christian emperor ruled at Constantinople, the memory of those years still persisted, smouldering like an underground fire. And it was Hypatia’s misfortune to be the innocent victim of an occasion for that fire of hate to burst out.
In the year 412 Cyril was made Bishop of Alexandria and there began a kind of minor inquisition, for Cyril wanted power for the church and he was, at the same time, representative of that zealous bigotry which marks many Western theologians. Cyril was the main supporter of the creedal dogma that the Virgin Mary was Theotokos, the Mother of God, and managed to get twelve anathemas on the subject accepted at the general church Council of Epesus in 431. Already there had been rumblings of the hatred-response of the Christians. The great statue of Serapis or Siris had been destroyed by the Christians. The Egyptian Trinity Osiris-Isis-Horus was clearly a rival to the new revalued Christian Trinity, and it had to go.
How irritating for Cyril then, to be bishop of a stronghold of the new religion, and to have even his own best intelligences stolen by a beautiful pagan woman. No compromise was possible for a man of his type. The danger must be stopped.
It was easy. In March, 415, led by one Peter the Reader, a mob of monks from one of the many monasteries, abducted Hypatia when she was returning from one of her lectures. They stirred up the Christian crowd and carried Hypatia to a church - yes, a church! There they stripped her, flayed her with oyster-shells and burnt her poor body piecemeal...
Thus they thought to kill philosophy by savaging an innocent woman. So did the torturers of
Spain and the witch-burners of Scotland and Massachusetts even a few hundred years ago. They all thought that by hurting and liquidating humans they could stifle supposedly rival views. But one Hypatia for her philosophy is worth a thousand emperors and plaster saints. There is no outward monument to this last of the classical Greek philosophers, but in the hall of the Absolute she lives eternally, a lovely light bright in the midst of a light of loveliness.
Illumination from the Liber Scivias showing Hildegard receiving a vision and dictating to her scribe and secretary
Hildegard of Bingen (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis; 1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Blessed Hildegard and Saint Hildegard, was a German magistra who later founded (Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165) in the third quarter of the 12th century.
Hildegard of Bingen was an abbess, artist, author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet, activist, visionary, and composer. She is the first composer for whom a biography exists and one of her works, the Ordo Virtutum is the first form, and possible origination, of opera [1][2]
She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as welll as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and the first surviving morality play, while supervising brilliant miniature illuminations. A biographer, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, described Hildegard of Bingen as a polymath in the 2007 publication, Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader.
