The Death of Hypatia
The pagan tradition of religious liberty may have outlasted the last pagan emperor, but only for a few decades—history provides us with a series of benchmarks that signify the final and total victory of monotheism in the war of God against the gods.
In 390, for example, a mob of Christian zealots attacked the ancient library of Alexandria, a place where works of the greatest rarity and antiquity had been collected. Here were preserved the oldest manuscripts of the Bible and other writings of Jewish and Christian origin, far older than the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the pagan texts were even more ancient and even more abundant, some 700,000 volumes and scrolls in all. The whole collection of parchment and papyri was torched, the library itself was pulled down, and the loss to Western civilization is beyond calculation or even imagination.
The next year, Theodosius I ordered the destruction of the Serapeum, a magnificent temple that served as the principal shrine of Isis and Serapis and “the most important monument in the Empire after the Capitol in Rome.”
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The order was carried out with ardor by the Christian patriarch of Alexandria—his name was Theophilus, and he is memorably described by Gibbon as “a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.”
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Pagan diehards fortified the shrine, but they were overwhelmed by the Christian attackers, and the Serapeum was left in ruins. The heartbroken defenders consoled themselves with the idea that the gods had abandoned the shrine “and gone back to the heavens.”
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Meanwhile, the Christians delighted when they broke up a wooden statue of Serapis and discovered that it was infested with vermin.
“The Egyptians’ god had become an apartment-block for mice!” exults the ancient Christian historian Theodoret. “So they broke him into pieces and fed them to the flames. But the head they dragged through the whole city, so that his worshippers could see it, and with it the impotence of the gods they had prayed to.”
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The most poignant incident of all, however, took place in 415. A pagan woman called Hypatia, who is recalled as both beautiful and brilliant, succeeded in scandalizing the Christians of Alexandria, not only because of her faith but also because of her gender. She participated in the study of the old pagan texts on astronomy, mathematics and philosophy, and she did so alongside the otherwise male faculty and student body. She even insisted on wearing a short tunic that was regarded as something both grotesque and immodest on a woman. But Hypatia, like Julian, was a pagan ascetic who was said to regard the human body, including her own, as “a pile of garbage,” and she once sought to discourage one of her love-smitten students by displaying one of her blood-soaked menstrual pads.
“That, young man, is what you have fallen in love with,” she admonished him, “and there is nothing beautiful about it.”
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Such eccentricity might have been regarded as charming and endearing by a man like Julian, who boasted of the lice in his beard. And Palladas, among the last of the pagan poets of ancient Rome, hails her as the “[u]nsullied Star of true philosophy.”
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But Hypatia inspired only contempt and disgust in the zealous Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria, a nephew of Theophilus, and he prevailed on the “men in black” to do something about the vile woman. So it was that a “wild black army,” as the English novelist E. M. Forster describes the mob, followed her carriage as she headed toward the hall where her students were waiting—they dragged her out, carried her into the convenient darkness of a nearby church, stripped her naked, tortured her with broken shards of pottery and finally hacked her body into pieces. Then they put her butchered body parts on public display and, finally, tossed her remains on a bonfire.
“With her the Greece that is a spirit expired,” writes Forster in his own tribute to Alexandria and its pagan heritage, “the Greece that tried to discover truth and create beauty.”
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The Handless Scribe
The embers of paganism, of course, continued to glow even after the torching of the library, the destruction of the Serapeum and the butchering of Hypatia. “For the majority of the rural population, down to the eighth century (and often much later still),” writes historian J. N. Hillgarth, “some form of ancestral paganism was at least as attractive as Christianity.”
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The last academy where the texts of the pagan philosophers had been taught without interruption since the era of Julian was not closed down until the eleventh century. Yet the brutal death of Hypatia remains an enduring symbol, heart shaking and haunting, of the fate that befell men and women whose only crime was a belief in the many gods rather than the Only True God.
No longer was zealotry a matter of rigorist bishops and riotous mobs. Church and state now acted together to purge the Roman empire of religious diversity and dissent. “The triumph of Catholic Christianity over Roman paganism, heretical Arianism [and] pagan barbarism,” argues Hillgarth, “was certainly due in large part to the support it received, first from the declining Roman State and later from the barbarian monarchies”—that is, the kingdoms of western Europe whose tribal armies conquered imperial Rome in the fifth century.
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Nor were human beings the only victims of the new Christian state. Tragically, Rome under the Christian emperors set out to destroy its own rich patrimony—the writings of the pagan poets, philosophers and historians, which were among the highest achievements of classical civilization. Scribes were forbidden to copy out the old pagan texts on pain of death or, perhaps worse, the amputation of the scribe’s writing hand. Existing texts were seized and burned or, sometimes, literally erased—because vellum was both expensive and reusable, the old pagan writings were often rubbed off the page so that a pious Christian text could be put there in its place.
“Our sole copy of the sole work about political good sense by the person arguably best able to deliver it to us from classical antiquity, Cicero,” writes Ramsay MacMullen, “was sponged out from the vellum to make room for our hundredth copy of Augustine’s meditations of the Psalms.”
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Ironically, many of the pagan writings that survive from antiquity were preserved by pious Christian tract-writers who quoted their pagan adversaries in order to repudiate them. The only fragments of Julian’s fiery anti-Christian manifesto
Against the Galileans
that survived Christian censorship, for example, appear in a refutation that was composed by Bishop Cyril of Alexandria in the fifth century. The original text, consisting of three books, is lost to us, and we are forced to rely on Cyril—“a hostile witness,” as Robert Browning points out
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—for a glimpse of what Julian actually wrote.
Similarly, some pagan traditions were rescued from the bonfires because they were expropriated for use in Christian ritual. Christmas is celebrated on December 25, the traditional birthday of
Sol Invictus
, because the early bishops realized that the pagans whom they sought to convert to Christianity were accustomed to celebrating
something
on that date. The depiction of Horus at the breast of Isis in the pagan art of Egypt, insists James Frazer in
The Golden Bough
, “is so like that of the Madonna and child that it has sometimes received the adoration of ignorant Christians.”
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Even those “uncanny places” that served as venues for the worship of pagan gods and goddesses—caverns, grottoes, crags and glens—were recycled into sites for the construction of Christian chapels, shrines and martyriums: “Let altars be built and relics be placed there,” decrees Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) “so that [the pagans] have to change from the worship of the
daemones
to that of the true God.”
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And thus did a bejeweled statue of Julian the Apostate take on a new life as the reliquary of a Christian martyr.
“God Is Great! Truth Has Come! Falsehood Is Vanquished!”
Ultimately, the legacy of classical culture was too rich to be repudiated merely because it was also the legacy of pagan culture. “Early Christian writers composed diatribes ‘against the Pagans,’ by which they meant philosophers and theologians such as Plato, Porphyry, Plutarch, Celsus and other predecessors or contemporaries,” write Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick.
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But the art, science, philosophy and literature of the ancient pagans were preserved in the remote stretches of the former Roman empire that came to embrace Islam, the third and last of the great monotheisms, in the seventh century and afterward.
The prophet Mohammed was no less a rigorist than his Jewish and Christian counterparts when it came to polytheism and idolatry. In 620, for example, he led an army of 10,000 devoted followers into Mecca, where he used his own staff to shatter the 360 pagan idols that had long been displayed in the Ka’bah, the shrine that came to serve as the focal point of the annual pilgrimage known as the
Hajj
. “God is great!” he cried. “Truth has come! Falsehood is vanquished!”
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Nevertheless, the Islamic civilization that came to power after the death of Mohammed was willing to spare the pagan writings that the Christian civilization of medieval Europe was so quick to burn. For example, the scientific writings of Aristotle were preserved in Arabic long after the original Greek texts had been destroyed.
Ironically, Christian Europe reconnected with its pagan roots when the Crusaders embarked upon a campaign to take back Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the Muslims during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Of course, these latest Soldiers of Christ did not hesitate to spill the blood of
all
their fellow monotheists—Jews, Byzantine Christians and Muslims were murdered in horrific numbers during the Crusades. But the Crusaders were exposed to the remnants of classical Greece and Rome that had been preserved under Islam, and they returned to Europe as the bearers of a lost civilization. From the very moment that the West reconnected with the traditions of classical paganism, the so-called Dark Ages—an era of obscurantism, stagnation, and terror in the service of true belief—slowly began to recede. “[S]ome Christians were learning from Arabs and Jews instead of slaughtering them in the name of God,” explains Karen Armstrong in
Holy War
, “and from this fruitful and positive cooperation a new intellectual life was born in Europe.”
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Still, the restoration of religious liberty and religious diversity was a long, painful and halting process. Pope Innocent III sent a crusade into southern France to exterminate a sect of Christian rigorists known as the Cathars (“Pure Ones”) in 1208, for example, and the Cathars were the very first target of the Inquisition, which was organized in 1233 and continued to prey upon Christians, Muslims and Jews for the next six hundred years. Women accused of witchcraft were being tried in public courts and hanged in the American colonies as late as the seventeenth century. And Jews were being executed on utterly false charges of murdering children to obtain blood for religious rituals well into the twentieth century.
In fact, the impulse to seek out and punish anyone who did not embrace an approved set of beliefs and practices turned out to be an enduring legacy of monotheism. Long after the coming of the “Age of Reason,” when the modern nations of Western Europe prided themselves on embracing the ideal of universal human rights, new and ever more terrible instruments of persecution were still being invented. As much ingenuity as the ancients showed in devising ways to maim and kill, they were far outclassed by the totalitarians of the twentieth century. And, as we know only too well, torture and murder have been put to use in the name of various kinds of true belief in our own benighted world on a scale that the ancients simply could not have imagined.
When power of true belief is alloyed with the power of the totalitarian state—a phenomenon that began in ancient Egypt under the pharaoh Akhenaton, reappeared in biblical Israel under King Josiah and reached its fullest expression in Rome under the Christian emperors—anyone and everyone who does not embrace the approved beliefs and practices, or does not embrace them with sufficient ardor, is at risk of death. The same rigorism and zeal that characterized the war of God against the gods can be found in
all
totalitarianism, and nowhere more terribly than in such modern and supposedly secular phenomena as Nazism and Communism. Eusebius of Caesarea came to the conclusion that the Only True God had appointed a single man as “the Ruler of the Whole World”—the emperor Constantine—and, in their own way, the followers of more recent autocrats did the same.
“The conclusion is reminiscent of the acclamation of the emperor: ‘One God, one Logos, one emperor,’ ” writes historian Hermann Dorries. “The perversions implicit in this formulation became manifest in the words of Louis XIV, ‘
Un roi, une loi
,
une foi
’ ”—“One king, one law, one faith”—“and in the vastly more sinister slogan of the Nazis, ‘
Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer
’ ”—“One people, one nation, one leader.”
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The New Age
Perhaps the single most illuminating (and oft-quoted) description of the battleground on which the war of God against the gods was fought is provided by Franz Cumont, the early-twentieth-century Belgian historian. He invites his readers in the Western world—Catholics, Protestants and perhaps a few Jews—to imagine themselves in a time and place of religious and cultural diversity so extravagant and so unlikely that he means them to experience it as a dream, if not a nightmare.