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In the new book by Silvia Ronchey true story of the heroine of secularism
After 15 centuries, Hypatia is still an open wound. After Amenábar's film, Agora, who arrived last spring in Italy, winning tough and expected vetoes, the tragic heroine of free thought, an icon of secularism, is the focus of new book by Silvia Ronchey, Hypatia. The True Story (Rizzoli, pp. 319, e19). Philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, professor in the Platonic in Alexandria, where he lived between 370 and 415 AD, Hypatia was murdered, literally torn to pieces by the fanaticism of the first local Christian Church, and especially its patriarch Cyril. It was the culmination of a escalation of intolerance (of 391 is another famous crime, the destruction of the Temple of Serapis), after the edict of Constantine in 313 AD, the best hope seemed to have opened up allowing Christians freedom of worship, but now the victims were pagans . The works of Hypatia there is nothing left, and beyond its sad fate we know very little about her: it was aristocratic, in all, and it was beautiful, and he loved his students, but were inexorably rejected. Silvia Ronchey tries to reconstruct the true profile and putting it into the context of the event, in constant reference to ancient sources (in the appendix to the text, "the documentation right," occupies one hundred pages) and putting to compare the different testimonies of Christian origin with the pagan, in a story that no less enjoyable scholar. We propose here the closing pages.
In the fifth century, the death of Hypatia does not mark the end of an era, but as they had guessed both Diderot and Chateaubriand, marked a beginning. Hypatia dies, but passes the torch. The intellectual core of which is wrongly seen as the 'last' exponent is actually the one from which will spring for eleven centuries, the most abundant flowering of Byzantine culture. Where paganism survive not only in its highest sense, Platonism in philosophy, but also in the popular cult Christian, where the Olympus of the ancient polytheism will replace the martyrs and the sinassario, to mythological narratives hagiographic legends, the forest of pagan idols in the crowd of icons.
The fifth century is not the edge of an abyss, as it often led historians and scholars to believe the erroneous perception of the Byzantine millennium as "infinitely protracted decline, whether linked to this largely papist propaganda. Instead, it is the beginning of a turnaround, the eve of a revival of the ancient paideia. The condemnation of Cyril
in Byzantine sources, as opposed to his defense of the popes in Rome, is the litmus test of the continuing willingness of separation between State and Church in Byzantium, secular state, although the state religion, he applied seamlessly. The existence in the heart of Europe in a state of the Church, whose spiritual leader is also the holder of a temporal power, is a unique town. Where this anomaly has not been produced, there was no interruption of ancient culture. The study of ancient texts has continued, along with the manuscript tradition and transmission of ideas, even if they could sometimes appear to conflict with the dominant Christian ideology. The torch bearer in Hypatia was not extinguished, but many other men and women have continued to pass.
Through them, the philosophia of Hypatia of Sines is the ancients, eclectic or not, come to our philosophes of Alexandria Humanism and the Renaissance. And through this, the enlightenment and those other currents of opinion which have broken the silence of the Western Church and the fact of Hypatia the symbol of freedom of thought.
With sprains and strains, because in the modern Western world, which so far has not been enough to Byzantium, the story of Hypatia could hardly be understood in its correct historical terms. You have now updated and adapted to the times, as does the story always, never enough mentioned that according to the Cross so that you do this story only. But on
a point we can not agree: Hypatia is no similarity to anything more, a scholar or a priestess, a teacher or made an aristocratic eccentric and unconventional, that it was young or not, or did not really fall in love with his students, whether or not - it is not impossible - discovered something new that the initiation of teaching she taught so successfully all'inquieta Hellenic aristocracy or not already offered the revelation that a high level theology embraced Platonic Christianity and the tenets of the latter were unlikely tolerated, practicing the art of the Platonic "noble lie," because they are useful to the people as every ancient pagan superstition; has been determined in the stand in the way of the Church to interfere in state and too cumbersome to challenge the strategy of Cyril parrhesia with her, or that his death was just an accident due to the sudden hysteria overshadowed by an influential Christian bishop 'emulation and ambition, besides the temporary confusion of a Roman prefect augustalis embarrassed by a lack of imperial power, but in any case, each time in the history recurs and recurs often, the conflict between Cyril and 'Hypatia, one thing is certain: we are and will always on the side of Hypatia.
http://www3.lastampa.it 15/11/2010
