WI: Hypatia of Alexandria and the Church

Had a thought and wondered how it would effect the development of Christianity.

Hypatia being murdered by a Christian mob in Alexandria is seen as a result of the feud between the Bishop Cyril and the Governor Orestes. The Bishop was seen by the Governor as over stepping his bounds and interfering in city affairs - the banishment of the Jewish citizens.

Both appealed to the Emperor, without much result. What would be the long term result if the Emperor stepped in and ruled that Bishops could not interfere in day to day affairs - the church elders could only deal with spiritual and not temporal affairs.
 
I don't really see such imperial decision happening, to be honest : the episcopal structure was a main feature of Christianity, especially due to imperial intervention.
Let's not forget, furthermore, that Alexandria was the traditional clerical center in eastern Mediteranean at this point and not Constantinople. Opposing the bishop/patriarch of Alexandria had to have religious undertones or at least be interpreted as such.

As his struggle against Nestorius highlight, Cyril of Alexandria was a really influential man not only on his diocese or patriarcate, but thanks to the help of oriental monks and clerks as well than regional important men, could prevent a political backleash.

At best, Pulcheria, in the name of Theodosius, could have called for an earlier council, as it happened in the 430's/440's where Cyril would likely have the upper hand thanks to not only his own clientele and influence network, but trough regence's favor.

That said, Cyril wouldn't have really interest on such council : it's only the beggining of his patriarchate, and he had to deal with radicals as Parabolani, non-Alexandrine monks but popular among the city's population*.
It wasn't on his interest to legitimize a para-clerical counter-power : rather tell Orestes to abide by imperial policy without general change on episcopal institutions one way or another.

*It's not like riots were something unknown in Alexandria : at the contrary it was a part of Alexandrine urban life since Ptolemies.

Maybe you should have the 414 mob being more violent, instead of 415, while Anthemius is still regent in ERE. Even he he followed the same religious line than Pulcheria, he seems to have been less focused on it, maybe preventing the situation to degenerate as much as it did.

Then again, the background of Late Antiquity Christianism is already established, and changing it would ask for radical imperial changes.
 
It's disheartening to see ideas shot down by such logically thought out arguments.

Is it at all possible to establish or modify the church such that it doesn't take such powerful interests in day to day politics and stays much more in the spiritual sphere?
 

Art

Monthly Donor
Not much chance. . .

After Constantine making Christianity the only official religion, Christianity was adopted by many for political reasons. Cyril, from what I know of him, and his monks were a bunch of bunch of unwashed fanatics who liked nothing better than breaking heads. They seem to have destroyed the Library of Alexandria for no better reason than it was full of Pagan books and scrolls, instead of Christian Bibles. Though the Bible had not really been codified at that time.
 

Spengler

Banned
After Constantine making Christianity the only official religion, Christianity was adopted by many for political reasons. Cyril, from what I know of him, and his monks were a bunch of bunch of unwashed fanatics who liked nothing better than breaking heads. They seem to have destroyed the Library of Alexandria for no better reason than it was full of Pagan books and scrolls, instead of Christian Bibles. Though the Bible had not really been codified at that time.
Yeah I would learn the fallowing.

1. Cosmos gets its history wrong.
2. Gibbon was wrong on most things.
3. Agora is a very, very bad movie.
4. Cyril was a firebrand intellectual who wrote numerous tomes agianst Nestorius.
5. The Library had been destroyed twice already.
6. It was destroyed in a explicit political dispute.
7. Hypatia was a neoplatonist. Pagan ? kindof. She almost certianly didn't beleive in any of the old Gods.
8. Yeah msot Chrisitans liked Pagan writings for the most part.
9. Riots were par for the course in Alexandria seince its founding.
 
I think your post presumes a sharper division between the 'spiritual' and the 'temporal' than was evident in late antiquity. Bishops were responsible for the spiritual well-being of their flock--how could the presence of a rival religious community, which could lead unwary Christians astray (n.b. a real problem for many ancient Christian preachers, even if their rhetoric often seems excessive to the modern mind), be removed from their concern? This is not too far removed from the famous case of the synagogue of Callinicum, burned down by some Christians in 388; the emperor (Theodosius I) tried to make local Christians build a replacment, but Ambrose of Milan intervened, arguing that that would amount to forcing the Christians to support a false religion--obviously a big problem, from the bishop's perspective!

Where are you going to make the emperors draw the line, and how is that actually going to change anything in practice? Ancient laws were notoriously difficult to enforce, as Cyril's actions (or the actions of the mob that claimed his patronage) show: they were pretty clearly acting against the law, just as people had at Callinicum (sure, there were laws that forbade Jews from proselytizing, but certainly not laws that allowed them to be driven out of a city or their property to be wantonly destroyed), but they got away with it anyway.

I think it's because I forgot how political religion was pre-Christianity, especially in Rome.
 
After Constantine making Christianity the only official religion, Christianity was adopted by many for political reasons. Cyril, from what I know of him, and his monks were a bunch of bunch of unwashed fanatics who liked nothing better than breaking heads. They seem to have destroyed the Library of Alexandria for no better reason than it was full of Pagan books and scrolls, instead of Christian Bibles. Though the Bible had not really been codified at that time.

There are numerous problems with accuracy in this post that undermine your point. Starting with the fact that Constantine did not make Christianity the official religion of the Empire, Theodosius did.
 
Eh, that's doubtful too, actually--at least Malcolm Errington has made a mighty good case that Theodosius' famous edict Cunctos populos was only really aimed at a specific, local Constantinopolitan situation. What do we even mean by 'official religion', anyway? One gets bogged down in semantics mighty swiftly.

Certainly a valid point. However, traditional historiography has it that Theodosius did that, while Constantine simply legalized Christianity, which is the point I was making.
 
Oh, divine Hypatia ... what is worse - that she was killed on the occasion of wacky (all versions expected at wacky developments), the fact that such a painful death, or the realization that disappeared something beautiful.
 
Maybe the mob can be brought under control before they can do too much damage - say Orestes and Cyril end up at an impasse somehow. The emperor/whoever orders Orestes to suppress the riot (which he does, saving Hypatia and the Library for now), but that he agrees at least in theory/principle with Cyril, so he doesn't curb him publicly, just lets him understand very uncomfortably that if he doesn't keep the mob under control, he'll be posted to the furthest bishopric the empire has to offer OR be kept in Constantinople as the emperor's personal chaplain on a VERY short leash
 
It's disheartening to see ideas shot down by such logically thought out arguments.

It's the AH-poster's bane. D:

Is it at all possible to establish or modify the church such that it doesn't take such powerful interests in day to day politics and stays much more in the spiritual sphere?

IDK; bear in mind that distinctions between "secular" and "political" were much more fuzzy in the ancient world.

After Constantine making Christianity the only official religion, Christianity was adopted by many for political reasons.

Theodosius did that, not Constantine.

Cyril, from what I know of him, and his monks were a bunch of bunch of unwashed fanatics who liked nothing better than breaking heads. They seem to have destroyed the Library of Alexandria for no better reason than it was full of Pagan books and scrolls, instead of Christian Bibles. Though the Bible had not really been codified at that time.

None of the ancient sources on Hypatia's death mention library-destruction. Indeed, given that the last mention of the famous Library of Alexandria is several centuries before Hypatia's birth, it may not even have been around to destroy.

With you on most of the rest of this (though we can always quibble about what the 'Library of Alexandria' was and how many times you can destroy something that was not a single, continuous institution), but what's your evidence for this claim? Famously, Plotinus did not think worshipping the gods had anything to do with philosophical contemplation (they should come to him, not he to them, he said, according to his student Porphyry), but even Porphyry, who questioned many traditional practices in To Anebo and radically separated philosophy from civic cult in De abstinentia, still thought the philosopher should worship the gods through prayer, bloodless offerings, and, above all, silence.

Plenty of other Neoplatonists (including Iamblichus, Julian, and Proclus), however, believed in 'old gods', whatever exactly you mean by that (that is, they worshipped entities that they called Zeus or Hera or Apollo or Dionysus or Osiris or Cybele, and so on, however their metaphysics explained them, and believed that traditional worship did lead to those true gods). Now, Maria Dzielska, the foremost expert on Hypatia, thinks (IIRC) that she belonged more on the Porphyrian end of things, but I don't recollect her giving very strong evidence for that claim; I suspect it is more a hunch formed because Hypatia and her father, Theon, didn't end up among the pagan die-hards who holed up in the Serapeum in 392. Theon's interest in the Hermetica and Orphic writings (if we can trust John Malalas) would suggest, if anything, a more religious inclination, as Dzielska recognizes, and that might extend to his daughter, as well.

I know it gets repeated a lot, but I don't think there's any hard evidence that Hypatia actually was a pagan, is there? She was almost certainly a Neoplatonist, but there were plenty of Christian Neoplatonists around as well (the most famous probably being Augustine).

I think your post presumes a sharper division between the 'spiritual' and the 'temporal' than was evident in late antiquity. Bishops were responsible for the spiritual well-being of their flock--how could the presence of a rival religious community, which could lead unwary Christians astray (n.b. a real problem for many ancient Christian preachers, even if their rhetoric often seems excessive to the modern mind), be removed from their concern? This is not too far removed from the famous case of the synagogue of Callinicum, burned down by some Christians in 388; the emperor (Theodosius I) tried to make local Christians build a replacment, but Ambrose of Milan intervened, arguing that that would amount to forcing the Christians to support a false religion--obviously a big problem, from the bishop's perspective!

I think it might be profitable to consider the parallels between anti-heresy laws and modern anti-hate speech or -Holocaust denial laws. We moderns ban people from expressing certain opinions because we think they might be harmful; well, 5th-century Christians thought that people expressing heresy were also harmful -- far more harmful, in fact, since going to Hell is worse than anything that can happen to you on earth.
 
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