Hypatia
The invaluable and irreplaceable Michael Flynn has taken time away from writing his sequel to his famous WRECK OF THE RIVER OF FIRE-STARDANCERS IN THE COUNTRY OF BLIND FALLING ANGELS to pen an illuminating and overdue infusion of truth to the bogus agitprop that passes for history in our post-Christian and post-rational post-literate society.
Presenting “The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria”. Here are the links:
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
The august David B. Hart, surely the most erudite and eloquent of theologians it has been my pleasure to read, also weighs in on the Saganistic myths about Hypatia. http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/06/the-perniciously-persistent-myths-of-hypatia-and-the-great-library
Also, the scholarly and irascible Fabio Paolo Barbieri, sums up in a sentence the absurdity of Sagan style myths:
Hypatia, most recently and most crazily resurrected by Alan Moore in the worst comics series he ever wrote, was almost certainly a Christian, and the majority of her students were; at least one of them, Synesius of Cyrene, became a Bishop.
http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/4166.html
My comment:
Most memorably Carl Sagan in his otherwise fine show COSMOS, but many others as well, have decided to deride Christianity by erecting the ancient scholar Hypatia as a martyr to a war between enlightened pagan science and obscurantist Christian dogmatism which, for some reason, is a war that only Carl Sagan and those of his ilk are able to perceive.
Those of us paying slightly more attention to history have noticed a remarkable coincidence between Christendom and Christian institutions, such as a the University system, Christian metaphysics (which proposes created objects with an innate and rationally comprehensible nature) and the growth and development of the industrial, scientific, and technological revolution revered by the inattentive as being the antithesis of Christendom.
Those proposing the theory of war have yet to explain why Greek philosophers produced no figure like Francis Bacon nor Copernicus nor William of Occam nor Albertus Magnus: or why literate, lawful and highly civilized places like China and India, before the coming of the West, had little or no technical progress even equal to the so-called Dark Ages; or why the allegedly significant contributions of the Muslim natural philosophers and astronomers of the Eleventh Century were, for the most part, people living in recently-conquered Christian cities in Spain, North Africa, and the Near East — all of which was terrain that had been civilized by the Roman Empire, Eastern division, since the time of Caesar, and had been Christian since the time of Constantine.
If Christianity were such a drag and hindrance to science, one would expect zealously Christian nations founded by Pilgrims like America to be groaning under burdensome science-deterring laws and customs, whereas atheistic nations like the Soviet Union would be the centers of the next technical revolution, instead of merely parasites stealing from the West, or fools dabbling with pseudo-scientific Lysenko rubbish, like the plan to interbreed humans and apes to produce an unstoppable ape army of supersoldiers. I kid you not: this was indeed one of the scientific projects of Stalin’s government.
If your theory is that A opposes, hinders or stops B, one would expect that more A meant less B, not the exact opposite. If you say ‘low taxes’ discourages ‘capital investment’ and the data support the very opposite correlation, you at least have to look for some other factor tilting your results away from what you predict.
Now, history is not an exact science, but at least the question should be discussed as to why the correlation between Christianity and Scientific Progress admits of few or no exceptions.
But no matter. Despite being an allegedly rational and scientific movement, the new antichristianity feels the need for martyrs and saints, just like any other heresy, and where none can be found, must be invented.
One invention was Giordano Bruno, magician and alchemist, burned as a heretic in 1600 for preaching Gnosticism, is retroactively remembered as a scientist because he first proposed that the heavens were infinite and contained infinite worlds. It is conveniently forgotten that he meant heaven contained an infinite number of spiritual worlds or after-lives, and that the Pleroma, or the dwelling place of the Divine, was infinite.
A more famous invention was that of the trial of Galileo, where indeed the Heliocentric as opposed to Geocentric model was discussed, but it is conveniently forgotten that the trial was really about Galileo insulting the Pope, and claiming the right to interpret and reinterpret scripture. To those who think religion is a matter of private taste, the issue seems small, but at that time, it was the most contentious of issues, since such interpretations redefine what the Church, as a corporate and social international body, was obligated to teach.
Hypatia is just such an invention. Sagan soberly reports her death by rioters to be the act of book-hating and misogynistic Christians offended that a pagan female should be teaching and reading. All of this is as bogus as a three-dollar bill, merely the bias of modern philosophes being projected backward into an alien time and culture.
A real martyr to science does indeed exist, but he was slain not by the Church, but by anticlerical revolutionaries during the Reign of Terror: I mean Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the father of chemistry. Lavoisier had intervened, asking an exception be made of the mandate stripping all foreigners of their property and possessions, to allow certain foreign scientists, including Lagrange (after whom the Lagrage points, such as L-5, are named).
He was branded a traitor and condemned to the Guillotine. There was no Galilean house-arrest for Lavoisier. The judge cut short his appeal with the cold words that the Revolution neither needs scientists nor chemists.
And yet the rallying cry of such revolution, voiced by Thomas Paine and others, was that the overthrow of the Church was a necessity to inaugurate the Age of Reason.
The cry was repeated again, by Marx, who pretended he had discovered the scientific laws guiding human history; and again by German intellectuals from Nietzsche onward, who pretended the scientific theory of Darwinism proved that cruelty and bloodshed were the natural engine by which the race improves itself, and wars fought not for gain or glory, but for the efficient, hygenic and scientific extermination of the weak.
It was the cry again of intellectuals like HG Wells, who traveled to the court of Stalin, there to abase himself in homage and kiss the bloodstained hands of a monster who had turned a continent into a human abattoir.
Why it is that the Age of Reason always ends in a Reign of Terror, I leave for students of history more adroit at discerning the darkness of the human heart or the tangle skein of fate than I.
If I were unwisely to venture a guess, mine would be that those who cry for the onset of the Age of Reason have not actually dismissed the religious impulse from their hearts, merely taken their faith, worship, zeal and affection away from the Divine Being and affixed them on shiny earthly things that happen to strike their fancy, egalitarianism, progress, science, hygiene, and most of all wealth and security: or, in other words, they practice idolatry.
Good things on earth when worshiped and given divine honors get corrupted, and turn into bad things.
No idol at first is an ugly or unnatural thing. No sane man bows and adores something ghastly. So the idol always starts as something natural and normal. Zeus starts as the personification of the sky, the god of law and order, and only later becomes the pederast of Ganymede. Conservationist start as folk with a perfectly honest wish to preserve wilderness to allow future generations to enjoy the beauty of nature, and only later become obsessed with global warming frauds, or daydreams of earth without mankind. Feminists start as honest folk urging a natural equality of rights between the sexes, and only later get corrupted into bloodthirsty servants of Moloch screaming for the slaughter of thousand and tens of thousands and millions of innocent babies in the womb, to heap up a pile of tiny corpses even an Aztec would blench to witness.
Whatever they start out asking for, what those who cry for the onset of the Age of Reason end up wanting is not reason, but the opposite. The opposite of Reason is power. Since their conclusions follow from an atheist ergo false premise, their theories never work. Human nature always confounds them. Ergo they want to control human nature. They want Caesar. They want force. They want the totalitarian state. They want terror.
The Revolutionaries start by wanting to be rid of God, but step by logical step they find they must end by being rid of Man.
They start by asking for a triumph of liberty. But it is not the rightly ordered liberty they seek, not the liberty of the conscience. They seek the liberty to violate the conscience. The seek the liberty rebel against reality. They end by asking for the triumph of Nothing. They start as idealists and end as nihilists.
Scientific progress is merely one idol among the many, and it starts as a good thing, a triumph of reason over ignorance.
But once you stop reasoning about science and start idolizing science, you have left the path of reason.
Making up flattering lies about Hypatia, like Sagan does, to justify unflattering lies about the Church, is a small enough beginning, but a small hole in the hull can sink the whole boat.
When scientists are willing to forswear the truth in the name of science, they are not scientists any longer: they are members of an Al Gore type cult. Hasn’t East Anglia University and the United Nations proven scientifically that the only way to save the planet from the next Ice Age (or whatever the scare is this week) is to abolish DDT, Alar, Chloroflourocarbines, Green House gasses, Coal, Oil, Capitalism and Human Life on Earth? Environmentalism has been used in recent weeks to justify the inhuman One-Child policies of China. It’s science!
Abolishing the distinction between human and animal is the next step. Didn’t Darwin prove that human beings have no special place or status in the natural world? Discuss this with your pet ape once it gets a degree in biology.
Claiming that every crackpot theory of economics that is based on nothing but sloppy thinking is actually “real science” and that opposition to crackpottery is “unscientific” is the next step. Didn’t Marx prove that all reasoning supporting the free market was merely an ideological superstructure, or a set of rationalizations or excuses, meant merely to support an entrenched exploiter class?
Next comes abolishing the differences between civilization and barbarism in the name of multiculturalism. Hasn’t anthropology proved that Western rules of chastity (and biology) do not operate in Samoa? Is not female genital mutilation and stoning adulteresses merely one of the many rich cultural heritages a pluralistic society must embrace?
Next comes abolishing the difference between right and wrong: has not Freud proven that the conscience is merely a register of suppression psychosexual neuroses?
Next comes abolishing truth and logic in the name of materialism: hasn’t science proven that free will does not exist, after all?
And so on, until you are left with nothing. You are a meat robot or an automaton running on autopilot in a universe where nothing makes sense and nothing means anything, not God, not truth, not man, not law, not civilization, not conscience, not logic.
You are a mechanism designed to serve your genes and then die; but since your mate will abort your child, even that means nothing. The only thing left for you is Internet Porn: momentary and meaningless gratification of impulses that are nothing more than chemicals misfiring in the skull.
And it all starts with one little Sagan like fib about Hypatia.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
