The revival of the Hypatia myth

Always welcome it is to see a new History For Atheists post; this week, it is Hypatia's turn. Tim O'Neill here sketches a Christian city fighting a class war; in which, Hypatia - allied with the upper classes - lost her life.

Hypatia herself, as a scholar, wasn't original. As far as I can gather from O'Neill, she mostly edited and improved the Ptolemaic Model. And she did that mainly in service of the Middle Platonism. Thus she shored up one since-discredited model to help another model limp along for a few more years. If anything her work held back the progress of Late Antique science. But she did have students and she did acquire admirers. I consider her a Nile Delta Carl Sagan.

For O'Neill, the first chronicler of these events was on the upper-class side, so on Hypatia's: Socrates Scholasticus. This one was a "Novatian" so in the protoJansenite wing on the Catholic faith. Despite every motive to blame Cyril directly, Socrates didn't. Later, one Damascius mentioned these events in his vita of Isodore. Damascius was a pagan - Alexandria still had some. He was no follower of Hypatia's specific philosophy, but he too knew to side with her against the Christians. This one blamed Cyril, for that one's envy.

In modern times as European scholarship gathered together these Hypatia accounts and others, they made a martyrdom of a mobbery. Every century's secular enthusiasts found something new to raise her profile: Toland's feminism, Gibbon's antiChristianity, Voltaire's neoClassicalism. Kingsley seems the worst of these authors with his Occident / Orient obsessions.

One should have hoped that Kingsley represented a Jumping Of The Crocodile... but that didn't happen. I have a theory on why not.

Soon after Kingsley's death a "new" source came to light. John of Nikiu's history had been translated from Arabic into Ge'ez back in 1603. Europeans found two copies of this translation, and over the 1870s they edited and translated it, first (poorly) to French (thence into Amharic!). In 1913 it made it into English, a bit better than the Amharic had gone. It turns out that John, back in the 690s AD, had found Socrates' account and LOVED IT. John thought that Hypatia had got about what she deserved as a sorceress.

It took awhile for people to figure out that John was adding nothing new but his own bigoted distortions. But in the meantime, here was all the proof Hypatia's twentieth-century fanclub needed. Cyril did it, and all the Christians rejoiced.