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starladyAgora. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar, 2009.
Those of you who were around this journal last summer may remember that I like Hypatia, the 4th century CE Alexandrian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and feminist/freethinking martyr, quite a lot.
Yeah, there is a line, and I am quite happy that John C. Wright sees me as being on the other side of it from him. Happy to be there, happy to stay there.
Anyway, given that personal history with Hypatia and also the fact that she was awesome and more people should know about her and one of the multitudinous historical wrongs I would right if I could is the total loss of all her works, not to mention her murder, I couldn't not go see this movie.
The movie falls into two unequal parts: the first part takes place in 391 CE and involves the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria, which in reality housed a branch of the Library in Alexandria and in the film houses the Library itself. Hypatia's father Theon allows pagan violence against Christians mocking the Olympian-Egyptian gods in the forum, which leads to the pagans barricading themselves inside the Serapeum and its eventual destruction. Just before this, Hypatia rejects the advances of her aristocratic student Orestes, and her slave Davus abandons her and his furtive interest in Greco-Roman philosophy for Christianity, particularly as it's practiced by an order of desert warrior monks called the parabalani.
The destruction of the Serapeum leads to the outlaw of pagan worship in Alexandria, leaving the elites to become Christian for power and convenience and the city to an uneasy mix of Christians, Jews, and unconverted pagans, Hypatia among them. Orestes becomes prefect and Hypatia's former student Synesius has become Bishop of Cyrene, while the monk Cyril has become Bishop of Alexandria and quickly incites mob violence against the city's Jewish population. Orestes and Synesius together are unable to counter Cyril's influence, and at his incitement after the Jews are driven out in a pogrom Hypatia is murdered too, the morning after she discovers the ellipse theory of heliocentrism, which took Johannes Kepler another 1200 years to figure out.
As you may divine from this plot summary, it's not an easy film to watch--I covered my eyes during the destruction of the library, I will admit, and watching the mob violence, which isn't overly sanitized, is not easy either. If anything I was disappointed in the film for having Davus mercy-strangle Hypatia before the parabalani hacked her apart; it's a cop-out, as much as I have no interest in watching violence against women per se, and if anything it arguably reinforces the gender divide that the Christians in the movie are trying to enforce. On the other hand, the simple fact is that no one should be stoned to death, regardless of gender.
We have no idea what Hypatia actually wrote and taught about, not really--Augustine spends some time he could be using to mull over his sins hating on her, but if I recall correctly he hates on her for the same reason that Cyril in the film inveigles against her, i.e. her daring to usurp a man's place and her unwillingness to convert even to pro forma Christianity. The movie shows some of her teaching and research, and runs laps with the possibility that she could have been working on revisions to the Ptolemaic terracentric theory based on Aristarchus' original formulation of heliocentrism, which again, is not impossible; there's just no way to know, and if it's overly neat screenwriting it also works as a shorthand for Hypatia's intellectual brilliance and general independence of thought and belief. For my money my favorite scene was when one of the members of the Alexandrian Senate asks her what she believes in, if not in god/s, and she answers, "I believe in philosophy." The dude in question (who to the film's credit, is black) asks mockingly what use philosophy is; give it another 130 years and Boethius will write a book telling you, dude! Oh wait, spoiler alert, I will tell you: philosophy is about learning how to die. It's also about learning about the world as it is, full stop, as Hypatia endeavors to see it.
Anyway. I could have stood for more focus on Hypatia herself, and in particular on her (a)sexuality, which is gestured toward but not really explored--she rejects Orestes by giving him a handkerchief with her menstrual blood on it, saying that it's a symbol of her lack of internal harmony, which is interesting, and is either willfully or unknowingly oblivious of his continued romantic regard for her--apparently Rachel Weisz wanted to explore that more, but the director didn't. I was glad, though, that the romance aspect was mostly dropped after the first half of the film.
Orestes is part of the historical record, but Hypatia's slave Davus is not, and in some ways he is the film's most transparent cinematic device--he is there to provide a sympathetic Christian, since Synesius ultimately comes down on the side of dogma in the form of Scripture, despite his personal regard for Orestes and Hypatia. It says a lot about the film that the sword of its sympathetic Christian drips with the blood of Alexandrian Jews.
So, yes. This is me talking around the old religion versus science! hobby horse, which the film has trotted out to beat again. If you are scrolling down to hit the reply button to tell me that it's a false dichotomy, you get a gold star--the opposition isn't religion versus science but intolerance versus tolerance, certainty versus doubt, fundamentalism versus nuanced interpretation. In fact another telling scene is when Hypatia tells Synesius that his faith demands no questions, while she must question everything, and he doesn't contradict her and clearly doesn't understand her. The Christian scientists of the Enlightenment would have known exactly what Hypatia meant about doubt, and they accounted their doubt and their discoveries ad maiorem Dei gloriam. (Hi, Baron Leibniz! Hi, Sir Isaac!) But Hypatia was too early, or too late, for Christianity as a faith to have become intellectual enough to accommodate that sort of doubt; there's no Søren Kirkegaard wandering around Alexandria: the parabalani are not knights of faith.
Basically my rule of thumb is that wherever people are burning books, that is not a particularly good thing that they are promulgating--who else saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? And Cyril quoting the letter of Paul to Thomas is a perfect example of why I sympathize with the Quaker idea that you can't put the truth in a book; words can be misinterpreted, and the truth they attempt to encapsulate perverted, which Orestes tries to tell Synesius but Synesius can't accept with regard to the word of god--and Christianity by this time is old enough that it's becoming the dominant power structure, shrugged off its radical appeal to women, grown Pauline. Less flippantly, I sat there in the theater and I identified very much with Hypatia, with her passionate intellectual curiosity and her more or less atheism. I think the film shows her as more isolated in the city than she actually was, but it's so interesting and, as a classicist, wrenching to see late Roman Alexandria recreated, to watch the era of its glory fading as a new age begins, a new culture sweeping the old away uncaringly, to see the scientific and cultural wealth of two civilizations destroyed. The agora in a Greek town was its center, the marketplace and the heart of sociopolitical life, and it's a metaphor for the marketplace of ideas, which early Christianity had little interest in and of which Hypatia was a devoted member, which as a concept and an architectural feature was swiftly discarded after the classical era. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Sidenote: Was it me or were most of the Christians less white than the other characters? Cyril and Synesius clearly had the good bishop/bad bishop thing going on in their clothing, and though the casting particularly among the secondary characters was fairly diverse I think the actual city elite was much less white than the movie shows. Actually, I'd be surprised if it weren't.
So yes, philosopher and feminist martyr. Hypatia = awesome. John C. Wright, eat your heart out.
Those of you who were around this journal last summer may remember that I like Hypatia, the 4th century CE Alexandrian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and feminist/freethinking martyr, quite a lot.
Anyway, given that personal history with Hypatia and also the fact that she was awesome and more people should know about her and one of the multitudinous historical wrongs I would right if I could is the total loss of all her works, not to mention her murder, I couldn't not go see this movie.
The movie falls into two unequal parts: the first part takes place in 391 CE and involves the destruction of the Serapeum in Alexandria, which in reality housed a branch of the Library in Alexandria and in the film houses the Library itself. Hypatia's father Theon allows pagan violence against Christians mocking the Olympian-Egyptian gods in the forum, which leads to the pagans barricading themselves inside the Serapeum and its eventual destruction. Just before this, Hypatia rejects the advances of her aristocratic student Orestes, and her slave Davus abandons her and his furtive interest in Greco-Roman philosophy for Christianity, particularly as it's practiced by an order of desert warrior monks called the parabalani.
The destruction of the Serapeum leads to the outlaw of pagan worship in Alexandria, leaving the elites to become Christian for power and convenience and the city to an uneasy mix of Christians, Jews, and unconverted pagans, Hypatia among them. Orestes becomes prefect and Hypatia's former student Synesius has become Bishop of Cyrene, while the monk Cyril has become Bishop of Alexandria and quickly incites mob violence against the city's Jewish population. Orestes and Synesius together are unable to counter Cyril's influence, and at his incitement after the Jews are driven out in a pogrom Hypatia is murdered too, the morning after she discovers the ellipse theory of heliocentrism, which took Johannes Kepler another 1200 years to figure out.
As you may divine from this plot summary, it's not an easy film to watch--I covered my eyes during the destruction of the library, I will admit, and watching the mob violence, which isn't overly sanitized, is not easy either. If anything I was disappointed in the film for having Davus mercy-strangle Hypatia before the parabalani hacked her apart; it's a cop-out, as much as I have no interest in watching violence against women per se, and if anything it arguably reinforces the gender divide that the Christians in the movie are trying to enforce. On the other hand, the simple fact is that no one should be stoned to death, regardless of gender.
We have no idea what Hypatia actually wrote and taught about, not really--Augustine spends some time he could be using to mull over his sins hating on her, but if I recall correctly he hates on her for the same reason that Cyril in the film inveigles against her, i.e. her daring to usurp a man's place and her unwillingness to convert even to pro forma Christianity. The movie shows some of her teaching and research, and runs laps with the possibility that she could have been working on revisions to the Ptolemaic terracentric theory based on Aristarchus' original formulation of heliocentrism, which again, is not impossible; there's just no way to know, and if it's overly neat screenwriting it also works as a shorthand for Hypatia's intellectual brilliance and general independence of thought and belief. For my money my favorite scene was when one of the members of the Alexandrian Senate asks her what she believes in, if not in god/s, and she answers, "I believe in philosophy." The dude in question (who to the film's credit, is black) asks mockingly what use philosophy is; give it another 130 years and Boethius will write a book telling you, dude! Oh wait, spoiler alert, I will tell you: philosophy is about learning how to die. It's also about learning about the world as it is, full stop, as Hypatia endeavors to see it.
Anyway. I could have stood for more focus on Hypatia herself, and in particular on her (a)sexuality, which is gestured toward but not really explored--she rejects Orestes by giving him a handkerchief with her menstrual blood on it, saying that it's a symbol of her lack of internal harmony, which is interesting, and is either willfully or unknowingly oblivious of his continued romantic regard for her--apparently Rachel Weisz wanted to explore that more, but the director didn't. I was glad, though, that the romance aspect was mostly dropped after the first half of the film.
Orestes is part of the historical record, but Hypatia's slave Davus is not, and in some ways he is the film's most transparent cinematic device--he is there to provide a sympathetic Christian, since Synesius ultimately comes down on the side of dogma in the form of Scripture, despite his personal regard for Orestes and Hypatia. It says a lot about the film that the sword of its sympathetic Christian drips with the blood of Alexandrian Jews.
So, yes. This is me talking around the old religion versus science! hobby horse, which the film has trotted out to beat again. If you are scrolling down to hit the reply button to tell me that it's a false dichotomy, you get a gold star--the opposition isn't religion versus science but intolerance versus tolerance, certainty versus doubt, fundamentalism versus nuanced interpretation. In fact another telling scene is when Hypatia tells Synesius that his faith demands no questions, while she must question everything, and he doesn't contradict her and clearly doesn't understand her. The Christian scientists of the Enlightenment would have known exactly what Hypatia meant about doubt, and they accounted their doubt and their discoveries ad maiorem Dei gloriam. (Hi, Baron Leibniz! Hi, Sir Isaac!) But Hypatia was too early, or too late, for Christianity as a faith to have become intellectual enough to accommodate that sort of doubt; there's no Søren Kirkegaard wandering around Alexandria: the parabalani are not knights of faith.
Basically my rule of thumb is that wherever people are burning books, that is not a particularly good thing that they are promulgating--who else saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? And Cyril quoting the letter of Paul to Thomas is a perfect example of why I sympathize with the Quaker idea that you can't put the truth in a book; words can be misinterpreted, and the truth they attempt to encapsulate perverted, which Orestes tries to tell Synesius but Synesius can't accept with regard to the word of god--and Christianity by this time is old enough that it's becoming the dominant power structure, shrugged off its radical appeal to women, grown Pauline. Less flippantly, I sat there in the theater and I identified very much with Hypatia, with her passionate intellectual curiosity and her more or less atheism. I think the film shows her as more isolated in the city than she actually was, but it's so interesting and, as a classicist, wrenching to see late Roman Alexandria recreated, to watch the era of its glory fading as a new age begins, a new culture sweeping the old away uncaringly, to see the scientific and cultural wealth of two civilizations destroyed. The agora in a Greek town was its center, the marketplace and the heart of sociopolitical life, and it's a metaphor for the marketplace of ideas, which early Christianity had little interest in and of which Hypatia was a devoted member, which as a concept and an architectural feature was swiftly discarded after the classical era. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Sidenote: Was it me or were most of the Christians less white than the other characters? Cyril and Synesius clearly had the good bishop/bad bishop thing going on in their clothing, and though the casting particularly among the secondary characters was fairly diverse I think the actual city elite was much less white than the movie shows. Actually, I'd be surprised if it weren't.
So yes, philosopher and feminist martyr. Hypatia = awesome. John C. Wright, eat your heart out.