The father of Hypatia was Theon, a noted mathematician and astronomer of
Alexandria. He would have been regarded as a very great man had he not
been cast into the shadow by his daughter. Let male parents beware.
At that time, astronomy and astrology were one. Mathematics was useful,
not for purposes of civil engineering, but principally in figuring out
where a certain soul, born under a given planet, would be at a certain
time in the future.
No information comes to us about the mother of Hypatia--she was so busy
with housework that her existence is a matter of assumption or a priori
reasoning; thus, given a daughter, we assume the existence of a mother.
Hypatia was certainly the daughter of her father. He was her tutor,
teacher, playmate. All he knew he taught to her, and before she was
twenty she had been informed by him of a fact which she had previously
guessed--that considerable of his so-called knowledge was conjecture.
Theon taught his daughter that all systems of religion that pretend to
teach the whole truth were to a great degree false and fraudulent. He
explained to her that his own profession of astronomy and astrology was
only for other people. By instructing her in all religions she grew to
know them comparatively, and so none took possession of her to the
exclusion of new truth. To have a religion thrust upon you, and be
compelled to believe in it or suffer social ostracism, is to be cheated
of the right to make your own. In degree it is letting another live your
life. A child does not need a religion until he is old enough to evolve
it, and then he must not be robbed of the right of independent thinking
by having a fully-prepared plan of salvation handed out to him. The
brain needs exercise as much as the body, and vicarious thinking is as
erroneous as vicarious exercise. Strength comes from personal effort. To
think is natural, and if not intimidated or coerced the man will evolve
a philosophy of life that is useful and beneficent.
Religious mania is a result of dwelling on a borrowed religion. If let
alone no man would become insane on religious topics, for the religion
he would evolve would be one of joy, laughter and love, not one of
misery or horror. The religion that contemplates misery and woe is one
devised by priestcraft for a purpose, and that purpose is to rule and
rob. From the blunt ways of the road we get a polite system of
intimidation which makes the man pay. It is robbery reduced to a system,
and finally piously believed in by the robbers, who are hypnotized into
the belief that they are doing God's service.
"All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted
by self-respecting persons as final," said Theon to Hypatia. "Reserve
your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to
think at all."
Theon gave lectures, and had private classes in esoterics, wherein the
innermost secrets of divinity were imparted. Also, he had a plan for the
transmutation of metals and a recipe for perpetual youth. When he had
nothing else to do, he played games with his daughter.
At twenty-one Hypatia had mastered the so-called art of Rhetoric, or the
art of expression by vocal speech.
It will be remembered that the Romans considered rhetoric, or the art of
the rhetor, or orator, as first in importance. To impress people by your
personal presence they regarded as the gift of gifts.
This idea seems to have been held by the polite world up to the Italian
Renaissance, when the art of printing was invented and the written word
came to be regarded as more important than the spoken. One lives, and
the other dies on the air, existing only in memory, growing attenuated
and diluted as it is transferred. The revival of sculpture and painting
also helped oratory to take its proper place as one of the polite arts,
and not a thing to be centered upon to the exclusion of all else.
Theon set out to produce a perfect human being; and whether his charts,
theorems and formulas made up a complete law of eugenics, or whether it
was dumb luck, this we know: he nearly succeeded. Hypatia was five feet
nine, and weighed one hundred thirty-five pounds. This when she was
twenty. She could walk ten miles without fatigue; swim, row, ride
horseback and climb mountains. Through a series of gentle calisthenics
invented by her father, combined with breathing exercises, she had
developed a body of rarest grace. Her head had corners, as once
Professor O. S. Fowler told us that a woman's head must have, if she is
to think and act with purpose and precision.
So having evolved this rare beauty of face, feature and bodily grace,
combined with superior strength and vitality, Hypatia took up her
father's work and gave lectures on astronomy, mathematics, astrology and
rhetoric, while he completed his scheme for the transmutation of metals.
Hypatia's voice was flute-like, and used always well within its compass,
so as never to rasp or tire the organs. Theon knew the proper care of
nose and throat, a knowledge which with us moderns is all too rare.
Hypatia told of and practised the vocal ellipse, the pause, the glide,
the slide and the gentle, deliberate tones that please and impress. That
the law of suggestion was known to her was very evident, and certain it
is that she practised hypnotism in her classes, and seemed to know as
much about the origin of the mysterious agent as we do now, even though
she never tagged or labeled it.
One very vital thought she worked out was, that the young mind is
plastic, impressionable and accepts without question all that it is
told. The young receive their ideas from their elders, and ideas once
impressed upon this plastic plate of the mind can not be removed.
Said Hypatia: "Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and
miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most
terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only
through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved
of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as
for a living truth--often more so, since a superstition is so intangible
you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so
is changeable."
Gradually, over the mind of the beautiful and gifted Hypatia, there came
stealing a doubt concerning the value of her own acquirements, since
these were "acquirements," and not evolutions or convictions gathered
from experience, but things implanted upon her plastic mind by her
father.
In this train of thought Hypatia had taken a step in advance of her
father, for he seems to have had a dogmatic belief in a few things
incapable of demonstration; but these things he taught to the plastic
mind, just the same as the things he knew. Theon was a dogmatic liberal.
Possibly the difference between an illiberal Unitarian and a liberal
Catholic is microscopic.
Hypatia clearly saw that knowledge is the distilled essence of our
intuitions, corroborated by experience. But belief is the impress made
upon our minds when we are under the spell of or in subjection to
another.
These things caused the poor girl many unhappy hours, which fact, in
itself, is proof of her greatness. Only superior people have a capacity
for doubting.
Probably not one person in a million ever gets away far enough from his
mind to take a look at it, and see the wheels go round. Opinions become
ossified and the man goes through life hypnotizing others, never
realizing for an instant that in youth he was hypnotized and that he has
never been able to cast off the hypnosis.
This is what our pious friends mean when they say, "Give me the child
until he is ten years old and you may have him afterward." That is, they
can take the child in his plastic age and make impressions on his mind
that are indelible. Reared in an orthodox Jewish family a child will
grow up a dogmatic Jew, and argue you on the Talmud six nights and days
together.
Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, the same. I once knew an Arapahoe
Indian who was taken to Massachusetts when four years old. He grew up
not only with New England prejudices, but with a New England accent, and
saved his pennies to give to missionaries that they might "convert" the
Red Men.
When the suspicion seized upon the soul of Hypatia that her mind was but
a wax impression taken from her father's, she began to make plans to get
away from him. Her efforts at explanations were futile, but when placed
upon the general ground that she wished to travel, see the world and
meet people of learning and worth, her father acquiesced and she started
away on her journeyings. He wanted to go, too, but this was the one
thing she did not desire, and he never knew nor could know why.
She spent several months at Athens, where her youth, beauty and learning
won her entry into the houses of the most eminent. It was the same at
Rome and in various other cities of Italy. Money may give you access to
good society, but talent is always an open sesame. She traveled like a
princess and was received as one, yet she had no title nor claim to
nobility nor station. Beauty of itself is not a credential--rather it is
an object of suspicion, unless it goes with intellect.
Hypatia gave lectures on mathematics; and there was a fallacy abroad
then as there is now that the feminine mind is not mathematical. That
the great men whom Hypatia met in each city were first amazed and then
abashed by her proficiency in mathematics is quite probable. Some few
male professors being in that peculiar baldheaded hypnotic state when
feminine charms dazzle and lure, listened in rapture as Hypatia
dissolved logarithms and melted calculi, and not understanding a word
she said, declared that she was the goddess Minerva, reincarnated. Her
coldness on near approach confirmed their suspicions.
* * * * *
Just how long a time Hypatia spent upon her pilgrimage, visiting all of
the great living philosophers, we do not know. Some accounts have it one
year, others ten.
Probably the pilgrimages were extended over a good many years, and were
not continuous. Several philosophers proved their humanity by offering
to marry her, and a prince or two did likewise, we are credibly
informed. To these persistent suitors, however, Hypatia gently broke the
news that she was wedded to truth, which is certainly a pretty speech,
even if it is poor logic. The fact was, however, that Hypatia never met
a man whose mind matched her own, otherwise logic would have bolstered
love, instead of discarding it.
Travel, public speaking and meeting people of note form a strong trinity
of good things. The active mind is the young mind, and it is more than
the dream of a poet which declares that Hypatia was always young and
always beautiful, and that even Father Time was so in love with her that
he refused to take toll from her, as he passed with his hourglass and
scythe.
In degree she had followed the example of her great prototype, Plotinus,
and had made herself master of all religions. She knew too much of all
philosophies to believe implicitly in any. Alexandria was then the
intellectual center of the world. People who resided there called it the
hub of the universe. It was the meeting-place of the East and the West.
And Hypatia, with her Thursday lectures, was the chief intellectual
factor of Alexandria.
Her philosophy she called Neo-Platonism. It was Plato distilled through
the psychic alembic of Hypatia. Just why the human mind harks back and
likes to confirm itself by building on another, it would be interesting
to inquire. To explain Moses; to supply a key to the Scriptures; to
found a new School of Philosophy on the assumption that Plato was right,
but was not understood until the Then and There, is alluring.
And now the pilgrims came from Athens, and Rome, and the Islands of the
Sea to sit at the feet of Hypatia.
* * * * *
Hypatia was born in the year Three Hundred Seventy, and died in Four
Hundred Thirty. She exerted an influence in Alexandria not unlike that
which Mrs. Eddy exerted in Boston. She was a person who divided society
into two parts: those who regarded her as an oracle of light, and those
who looked upon her as an emissary of darkness.
Strong men paid her the compliment of using immoderate language
concerning her teaching. But whether they spoke ill or well of her
matters little now. The point is this: they screeched, sneezed, or
smiled on those who refused to acknowledge the power of Hypatia. Some
professors of learning tried to waive her; priests gently pooh-poohed
her; and some elevated an eyebrow and asked how the name was spelled.
Others, still, inquired, "Is she sincere?"
She was the Ralph Waldo Emerson of her day. Her philosophy was
Transcendentalism. In fact, she might be spoken of as the original
charter member of the Concord School of Philosophy. Her theme was the
New Thought, for New Thought is the oldest form of thought of which we
know. Its distinguishing feature is its antiquity. Socrates was really
the first to express the New Thought, and he got his cue from
Pythagoras.
The ambition of Hypatia was to revive the flowering-time of Greece, when
Socrates and Plato walked arm in arm through the streets of Athens,
followed by the greatest group of intellectuals the world has ever
seen.
It was charged against Hypatia that Aspasia was her ideal, and that her
ambition was to follow in the footsteps of the woman who was beloved by
Pericles. If so, it was an ambition worthy of a very great soul.
Hypatia, however, did not have her Pericles, and never married. That she
should have had love experiences was quite natural, and that various
imaginary romances should have been credited to her was also to be
expected.
Hypatia was nearly a thousand years removed from the time of Pericles
and Aspasia, but to bridge the gulf of time with imagination was easy.
Yet Hypatia thought that the New Platonism should surpass the old, for
the world had had the Age of Augustus to build upon.
Hypatia's immediate prototype was Plotinus, who was born two hundred
four years after Christ, and lived to be seventy. Plotinus was the first
person to use the phrase "Neo-Platonism," and so the philosophy of
Hypatia might be called "The New Neo-Platonism."
To know but one religion is not to know that one.
In fact, superstition consists in this one thing--faith in one religion,
to the exclusion of all others.
To know one philosophy is to know none. They are all comparative, and
each serves as a small arc of the circle. A man living in a certain
environment, with a certain outlook, describes the things he sees; and
out of these, plus what he imagines, is shaped his philosophy of life.
If he is repressed, suppressed, frightened, he will not see very much,
and what he does see will be out of focus. Spiritual strabismus and
mental myopia are the results of vicarious peeps at the universe. All
formal religions have taught that to look for yourself was bad. The
peephole through the roof of his garret cost Copernicus his liberty, but
it was worth the price.
Plotinus made a study of all philosophies--all religions. He traveled
through Egypt, Greece, Assyria, India. He became an "adept", and
discovered how easily the priest drifts into priestcraft, and fraud
steps in with legerdemain and miracle to amend the truth. As if to love
humanity were not enough to recommend the man, they have him turn water
into wine and walk on the water.
Out of the labyrinth of history and speculation Plotinus returned to
Plato as a basis or starting-point for all of the truth which man can
comprehend. Plotinus believed in all religions, but had absolute faith
in none. It will be remembered that Aristotle and Plato parted as to the
relative value of poetry and science--science being the systematized
facts of Nature. Plotinus comes in and says that both were right, and
each was like every good man who exaggerates the importance of his own
calling. In his ability to see the good in all things, Hypatia placed
Plotinus ahead of Plato, but even then she says: "Had there been no
Plato, there would have been no Plotinus; although Plotinus surpassed
Plato, yet it is plain that Plato, the inspirer of Plotinus and so many
more, is the one man whom philosophy can not spare. Hail, Plato!!"
* * * * *
The writings of Hypatia have all disappeared, save as her words come to
us, quoted by her contemporaries. If the Essays of Emerson should all be
swept away, the man would still live in the quotations from his pen,
given to us by every writer of worth who has put pencil to paper during
the last fifty years. So lives Sappho, and thus did Charles Kingsley
secure the composite of the great woman who lives and throbs through his
book. Legend pictures her as rarely beautiful, with grace, poise and
power, plus.
She was sixty when she died. History kindly records it forty-five--and
all picture her as a beautiful and attractive woman to the last. The
psychic effects of a gracefully-gowned first reader, with sonorous
voice, using gesture with economy, and packing the pauses with feeling,
have never been fully formulated, analyzed and explained. Throngs came
to hear Hypatia lecture--came from long distances, and listened
hungrily, and probably all they took away was what they brought, except
a great feeling of exhilaration and enthusiasm. To send the hearer away
stepping light, and his heart beating fast--this is oratory--which isn't
so much to bestow facts, as it is to impart a feeling. This Hypatia
surely did. Her theme was Neo-Platonism. "Neo" means new, and all New
Thought harks back to Plato, who was the mouthpiece of Socrates. "Say
what you will, you'll find it all in Plato." Neo-Platonism is our New
Thought, and New Thought is Neo-Platonism.
There are two kinds of thought: New Thought and Secondhand Thought. New
Thought is made up of thoughts you, yourself, think. The other kind is
supplied to you by jobbers. The distinguishing feature of New Thought is
its antiquity. Of necessity it is older than Secondhand Thought. All
genuine New Thought is true for the person who thinks it. It only turns
sour and becomes error when not used, and when the owner forces another
to accept it. It then becomes a secondhand revelation. All New Thought
is revelation, and secondhand revelations are errors half-soled with
stupidity and heeled with greed.
Very often we are inspired to think by others, but in our hearts we have
the New Thought; and the person, the book, the incident, merely remind
us that it is already ours. New Thought is always simple; Secondhand
Thought is abstruse, complex, patched, peculiar, costly, and is passed
out to be accepted, not understood. That no one comprehends it is often
regarded as a recommendation.
For instance, "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image," is
Secondhand Thought. The first man who said it may have known what it
meant, but surely it is nothing to us. However, that does not keep us
from piously repeating it, and having our children memorize it.
We model in clay or wax, and carve if we can, and give honors to those
who do, and this is well. This commandment is founded on the fallacy
that graven images are gods, whatever that is. The command adds nothing
to our happiness, nor does it shape our conduct, nor influence our
habits. Everybody knows and admits its futility, yet we are unable to
eliminate it from our theological system. It is strictly
secondhand--worse, it is junk.
Conversely, the admonition, "Be gentle and keep your voice low," is New
Thought, since all but savages know its truth, comprehend its import,
and appreciate its excellence.
Dealers in Secondhand Thought always declare that theirs is the only
genuine, and that all other is spurious and dangerous.
Dealers in New Thought say, "Take this only as it appeals to you as your
own--accept it all, or in part, or reject it all--and in any event, do
not believe it merely because I say so."
New Thought is founded on the laws of your own nature, and its
shibboleth is, "Know Thyself."
Secondhand Thought is founded on authority, and its war-cry is, "Pay and
Obey."
New Thought offers you no promise of paradise or eternal bliss if you
accept it; nor does it threaten you with everlasting hell, if you don't.
All it offers is unending work, constant effort, new difficulties;
beyond each success is a new trial. Its only satisfactions are that you
are allowing your life to unfold itself according to the laws of its
nature. And these laws are divine, therefore you yourself are divine,
just as you allow the divine to possess your being. New Thought allows
the currents of divinity to flow through you unobstructed.
Secondhand Thought affords no plan of elimination; it tends to
congestion, inflammation, disease and disintegration.
New Thought holds all things lightly, gently, easily--even thought. It
works for a healthy circulation, and tends to health, happiness and
well-being now and hereafter. It does not believe in violence, force,
coercion or resentment, because all these things react on the doer. It
has faith that all men, if not interfered with by other men, will
eventually evolve New Thought, and do for themselves what is best and
right, beautiful and true.
Secondhand Thought has always had first in its mind the welfare of the
dealer. The rights of the consumer, beyond keeping him in subjection,
were not considered. Indeed, its chief recommendation has been that "it
is a good police system."
New Thought considers only the user. To "Know Thyself" is all there is
of it.
When a creator of New Thought goes into the business of retailing his
product, he often forgets to live it, and soon is transformed into a
dealer in Secondhand Thought.
That is the way all purveyors in secondhand revelation begin. In their
anxiety to succeed, they call in the police. The blessing that is
compulsory is not wholly good, and any system of morals which has to be
forced on us is immoral. New Thought is free thought. Its penalty is
responsibility. You either have to live it, or else lose it. Its reward
is Freedom.
* * * * *
It was only a little more than a hundred years before the time of
Hypatia that the Roman Empire became Christian. When Constantine
embraced Christianity, all of his loyal subjects were from that moment
Christians--Christians by edict, but Pagans by character, for the
natures of men can not be changed by the passing of a resolution. From
that time every Pagan temple became a Christian church, and every Pagan
priest a Christian preacher.
Alexandria was under the rule of a Roman Prefect, or Governor. It had
been the policy of Rome to exercise great tolerance in religious
matters. There was a State Religion, to be sure, but it was for the
nobility or those who helped make the State possible. To look after the
thinking of the plain people was quite superfluous--they were allowed
their vagaries.
The Empire had been bold, brazen, cruel, coercive in its lust for power,
but people who paid were reasonably safe. And now the Church was coming
into competition with the State and endeavoring to reduce spoliation to
a system.
To keep the people down and under by mental suppression--by the engine
of superstition--were cheaper and more effective than to employ force or
resort to the old-time methods of shows, spectacles, pensions and costly
diversions. When the Church took on the functions of the State, and
sought to substitute the gentle Christ for Cæsar, she had to recast the
teachings of Christ. Then for the first time coercion and love dwelt
side by side. "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire prepared
for the devil and his angels," and like passages were slipped into the
Scriptures as matters of wise expediency. This was continued for many
hundred years, and was considered quite proper and legitimate. It was
slavery under a more subtle form.
The Bishop of Alexandria clashed with Orestes the Prefect. To hold the
people under by psychologic methods was better than the old plans of
alternate bribery and force--so argued the Bishop.
Orestes had come under the spell of Hypatia, and the Republic of Plato
was saturating his mind.
"To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another
world is just as base as to use force," said Hypatia in one of her
lectures. Orestes sat in the audience and as she spoke the words he
clapped his hands. The news was carried to the Bishop, who gently
declared that he would excommunicate him.
Orestes sent word back that the Emperor should be informed of how this
Bishop was misusing his office by making threats of where he could land
people he did not like, in another world. Neither the Bishop nor the
Prefect could unseat each other--both derived their power from the
Emperor. For Orestes to grow interested in the teachings of Hypatia,
instead of siding with the Bishop, was looked upon by the loyalists as
little short of treason.
Orestes tried to defend himself by declaring that the policy of the
Cæsars had always been one of great leniency toward all schools of
philosophy. Then he quoted Hypatia to the effect that a fixed, formal
and dogmatic religion would paralyze the minds of men and make the race,
in time, incapable of thought.
Therefore, the Bishop should keep his place, and not try to usurp the
functions of the police. In fact, it was better to think wrongly than
not to think at all. We learn to think by thinking, and if the threats
of the Bishop were believed at all, it would mean the death of science
and philosophy.
The Bishop made answer by declaring that Hypatia was endeavoring to
found a Church of her own, with Pagan Greece as a basis. He intimated,
too, that the relationship of Orestes with Hypatia was very much the
same as that which once existed between Cleopatra and Mark Antony. He
called her "that daughter of Ptolemy," and by hints and suggestions made
it appear that she would, if she could, set up an Egyptian Empire in
this same city of Alexandria where Cleopatra once so proudly reigned.
The excitement increased. The followers of Hypatia were necessarily few
in numbers. They were thinkers--and to think is a task. To believe is
easy. The Bishop promised his followers a paradise of ease and rest. He
also threatened disbelievers with the pains of hell. A promise on this
side--a threat on that! Is it not a wonder that a man ever lived who
put his honest thought against such teaching when launched by men
clothed in almost absolute authority!
Hypatia might have lived yesterday, and her death at the hands of a mob
was an accident that might have occurred in Boston, where a respectable
company once threw a rope around the neck of a good man and ran him
through streets supposed to be sacred to liberty and free speech.
A mob is made up of cotton waste, saturated with oil, and a focused idea
causes spontaneous combustion. Let a fire occur in almost any New York
State village, and the town turns wrecker, and loot looms large in the
limited brain of the villager. Civilization is a veneer.
When one sees emotionalism run riot at an evangelistic revival, and five
thousand people are trooping through an undesirable district at
midnight, how long, think you, would a strong voice of opposition be
tolerated?
Hypatia was set upon by a religious mob as she was going in her carriage
from her lecture-hall to her home. She was dragged to a near-by church
with the intent of making her publicly recant, but the embers became a
blaze, and the blaze became a conflagration, and the leaders lost
control. The woman's clothes were torn from her back, her hair torn from
her head, her body beaten to a pulp, dismembered, and then to hide all
traces of the crime and distribute the guilt so no one person could be
blamed, a funeral-pyre quickly consumed the remains of what but an hour
before had been a human being. Daylight came, and the sun's rays could
not locate the guilty ones.
Orestes made a report of the affair, resigned his office, asked the
Government at Rome to investigate, and fled from the city. Had Orestes
endeavored to use his soldiery against the Bishop, the men in the ranks
would have revolted. The investigation was postponed from time to time
for lack of witnesses, and finally it was given out by the Bishop that
Hypatia had gone to Athens, and there had been no mob and no tragedy.
The Bishop nominated a successor to Orestes, and the new official was
confirmed.
Dogmatism as a police system was supreme.
It continued until the time of Dante, or the Italian Renaissance. The
reign of Religious Dogmatism was supreme for well-nigh a thousand
years--we call it the Dark Ages.
[Illustration: SAINT BENEDICT]