Who is hypatia

Christian factions had previously preached and interpreted their own unique gospels. The council sparked a debate between orthodoxy and heresy, resulting in several texts being banned from the official Bible and ultimately destroyed. The teachings of Arius, an early Christian writer who denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, were burned, and anyone found hiding his books was sentenced to death; other Christian writings, including the recently discovered Nag Hammadi manuscripts and the Dead Sea Scrolls, were hidden away during this period with the hope of preserving them.

Pagan writings would likewise be viewed as heretical and suppressed. His entire library of work was destroyed and exists only in fragments today. In contrast to syncretism, Constantine championed the idea of monotheism and a jealous god who reigned supreme over all the others. The implication was there needed to be one ruler over all as well, a veiled reference to his reuniting the entire empire under one throne.

Over the next fifty years, Christians fought among themselves to establish control and define the orthodox canon. This state of affairs changed when Theodosius I became emperor in ; by he had declared Christianity the state religion.

Suddenly the office of the bishop held power commensurate to the prefect, a post responsible for maintaining law and order and considered the highest imperial appointment. Emboldened bishops encouraged their followers to lay waste to pagan temples and Jewish synagogues. In Alexandria, the bishop Theophilus enlisted the aid of the parabalani. The monks were such a menace that in Emperor Theodosius banished them to the desert, far away from cities or temples.

The emperor also banned paganism in He outlawed sacrifices and temple visits; abolished pagan holidays; and forbade witchcraft, divination, and the practice of traditional rituals even in the privacy of the home. Worse, he authorized the demolition of pagan temples and holy sites to their very foundations.

Seizing this opportunity was Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, who summoned the parabalani from their desert lairs to aid his overthrow of the most revered pagan monuments.

They annihilated the Mithraeum, the temple of the all-male cult of the god Mithras, who was popular with soldiers. They toppled the statue of the god Priapus, a fertility god represented by a large phallus early Christians deplored allusions to sexuality—lustful statues of naked Aphrodite also fared badly. The destruction was a devastating blow to pagan philosophers, many of whom left the city, never to be heard from again.

Christianity was silencing all opposing voices, a victory that would become absolute with the coming murder of Hypatia. W hen Theophilus died in , his nephew Cyril succeeded him as bishop of Alexandria—but only after the parabalani overpowered the supporters of a contender.

Cyril is remembered by Christian theologians for his writings on the Incarnation, his efforts to unify both the divine and human aspects of Jesus Christ into one being.

His attempts at unification go no further. Among his first acts as bishop was to persecute the Novations, a rival sect of Christians. He inflamed tensions between Christians and Jews, resulting in violence on both sides. The Jewish population of Alexandria that had flourished since the time of Alexander the Great was exiled from the city as Cyril shuttered synagogues.

Around this same time, Alexandria received a new prefect named Orestes. He formed a close friendship with Hypatia immediately after his arrival to Alexandria—they probably shared mutual friends who facilitated their meeting—and she was chief among his supporters and advisers.

When Cyril expelled the Jewish population from the city, Orestes was infuriated and wrote to the emperor to complain. Meanwhile, Hypatia has become a symbol for feminists, a martyr to pagans and atheists and a character in fiction. Voltaire used her to condemn the church and religion.

The English clergyman Charles Kingsley made her the subject of a mid-Victorian romance. And she is the heroine, played by Rachel Weisz, in the Spanish movie Agora , which will be released later this year in the United States.

The film tells the fictional story of Hypatia as she struggles to save the library from Christian zealots. Neither paganism nor scholarship died in Alexandria with Hypatia, but they certainly took a blow. She may have been a victim of religious fanaticism, but Hypatia remains an inspiration even in modern times.

Sarah Zielinski is an award-winning science writer and editor. She is a contributing writer in science for Smithsonian. Plotinus stressed that people did not have the mental capacity to fully understand both the ultimate reality itself or the consequences of its existence. Iamblichus distinguished further levels of reality in a hierarchy of levels beneath the ultimate reality.

There was a level of reality corresponding to every distinct thought of which the human mind was capable. Hypatia taught these philosophical ideas with a greater scientific emphasis than earlier followers of Neoplatonism. She is described by all commentators as a charismatic teacher.

Hypatia came to symbolise learning and science which the early Christians identified with paganism. However, among the pupils whom she taught in Alexandria there were many prominent Christians. One of the most famous is Synesius of Cyrene who was later to become the Bishop of Ptolemais.

Many of the letters that Synesius wrote to Hypatia have been preserved and we see someone who was filled with admiration and reverence for Hypatia's learning and scientific abilities. In Cyril later St Cyril became patriarch of Alexandria. However the Roman prefect of Alexandria was Orestes and Cyril and Orestes became bitter political rivals as church and state fought for control.

Hypatia was a friend of Orestes and this, together with prejudice against her philosophical views which were seen by Christians to be pagan, led to Hypatia becoming the focal point of riots between Christians and non-Christians. Fields: Mathematics , Astronomy , Physics.

Main achievements: Head of the Platonist school at Alexandria. As head of the Platonist school at Alexandria, she taught philosophy and astronomy.

As a Neoplatonist philosopher, she belonged to the mathematic tradition of the Academy of Athens, as represented by Eudoxus of Cnidus; she was of the intellectual school of the 3rd century thinker Plotinus, which encouraged logic and mathematical study in place of empirical enquiry and strongly encouraged law in place of nature.