The
movie Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, is one of the few fictional movies ever to
be reviewed in Science magazine. I
have now seen it three times and have come to understand it. It is one of the
few essential movies that you need to see to understand the meaning of science
in the human mind. You’d better see it at least once.
Hypatia
of Alexandria (Egypt), in the fourth century of the Christian Era, was a
philosopher and teacher. She accepted students of diverse faiths, including a
Roman pagan and a Christian. She taught them that if two things are equal to a
third, then all are equal, and she insisted that this applies to herself and to
her students: she the (we would say today) atheist, and her pagan and Christian
students, were all equal.
Hypatia’s
faith was different from those of any of her students. They believed that
truths were revealed by one or more gods, while she believed that the highest
pursuit of the human spirit was to understand the universe itself, to decipher
what it is telling us. In particular, she wanted to understand why the planets
did not move in a perfect circle around the Earth. Ptolemy had said that the
planets and sun traced their own little circles as they orbited the Earth, but
this seemed whimsical: if the universe is perfect, why should these little
epicycles be necessary? Then she found out that the philosopher Aristarchus, centuries
previously, had suggested that the planets, including Earth, went around the
sun. But if the universe was built on perfect circles, then the Earth must
describe a perfect circle around the sun, which it does not: sometimes the sun
was smaller (more distant) and dimmer than at other times. Then she figured out
that the Earth travels in an ellipse around the sun. After she died, and her
writings were lost, it took another 1,200 years until Johannes Kepler
rediscovered this truth. To Hypatia, the universe had to have mathematical
perfection, and it was our job to understand it. This remains the fundamental
belief of scientists, although we now recognize that a great deal of historical
contingency, what we might call messiness (for example, the Big Bang created
globs of galaxies, not perfectly spaced ones) that Hypatia might have found
unacceptable.
Alexandria
was going through successive waves of turmoil all during this time. Unlike
Hypatia and her students, the adherents of religions all hated each other. The
Egyptian pagans attacked the Christians, then the Christians attacked the
Egyptians and destroyed the library of Alexandria, the most famous condensation
of knowledge in all of history, gleefully rejoicing in the burning of
scientific books. Then the Christians turned on the Jews. The Romans couldn’t
do much; they were the nominal rulers, but the Empire was in decline and the
Roman soldiers couldn’t do much. Hypatia’s Roman student became the Consul of
Alexandria, and he very publicly loved Hypatia. Her Christian student became a
famous bishop. They tried to keep violence from getting out of hand, but the majority
of Christians did not listen to the peaceful bishop; instead they followed the
radicals who called upon Christians, in the name of Jesus, to stone to death
everyone who did not agree with them, and this eventually included Hypatia. The
charges leveled against Hypatia were that Scripture forbade a woman to teach in
public. They should just stay home and, if they should happen to venture out in
public, keep their damned mouths shut. Hypatia spoke in public and was a
scholar. This was plenty of reason for the Christians to push her to the altar,
strip her, stone her, and drag her mutilated body through the streets. A young
Christian man, who had been Hypatia’s slave but whom she liberated even though
he sexually assaulted her, tried to save her, but not very hard.
In this
image, Hypatia tries to save scrolls from the Library of Alexandria as it is
being pillaged and burnt.
All of
the religions that were concentrated together in Alexandria were guilty of
killing people of other religions. But in Alexandria during Hypatia’s time, it
was clearly the Christians who carried out the most and the worst violence, and
who eventually became the leaders of the western world. The leaders of this
violence became saints, such as Saint Cyril.
Hypatia
was troubled by the fact that the events on the Earth were so messy and random,
while all around the Earth, the heavens were perfect, though in an elliptical
rather than a circular way. The recurring imagery of the movie is the
ellipse—such as the circular opening in the library vault, seen from the
side—and a view of Earth from outer space, focusing down onto Alexandria, and
then receding again into the indifferent stars.
Today,
most of the American opponents of scientific truth are evangelical Christians,
and they are closer to using violence against scientists than we usually think.
American evangelical Christians do not even want to question whether the
proclamations of their preachers and of Donald Trump are consistent with the
Bible, much less with scientific and historical truth. At other times and in
other places, there are other enemies of truth: Stalin killed geneticists, and
Islamic terrorists don’t want anybody to disagree with them about anything. But
for me, here in America and now, it is the evangelical Christians whom I
consider the most dangerous, just as they were to Hypatia of Alexandria. The
violent Christians (that is, most of them) set science back a millennium. Many
of them appear to want to do so again.
Whether
the tragedy of Hypatia is repeated again, or not, we should not forget her or
the power of a woman’s mind.
