The Jews were among the first to suffer. The population of Jews in Alexandria was large and, according to the legend, had itself benefited from the city’s bibliomania. Ptolemy II—or so the charming story goes—had been desperate to find scholars who could translate the mysterious but highly respected Jewish writings for him so that they could be added to the library’s collection. However, no Greek could fathom the script in which they were written. So Ptolemy had asked the Jewish leaders for help. They had agreed to send him some elders as translators—but there were terms. In return, they wanted the 100,000 or so Jewish prisoners of war held in the city to be set free. It was a vast number. Ptolemy thought for a moment, then agreed. He got his translators—seventy or so of them; the Jewish prisoners gained their liberty; and the Great Library got its translation—which became known, in the translators’ honor, as the Septuagint.23
There was little interest in Hebrew writings by now. According to the hectoring sermons being preached by a new generation of intolerant Christian clerics, the Jews were not a people with an ancient wisdom to be learned from: they were instead, like the pagans, the hated enemies of the Church. A few years earlier, the preacher John Chrysostom had said that “the synagogue is not only a brothel . . . it also is a den of robbers and a lodging for wild beasts . . . a dwelling of demons . . . a place of idolatry.”24 St. John Chrysostom’s writings would later be reprinted with enthusiasm in Nazi Germany.
At that moment in Alexandria, the smoldering Christian dislike of Jews burst into outright violence. A Christian attempt to regulate the dancing and theatrical displays—apparently much enjoyed by the city’s Jewish population—started a complicated chain of reprisals that climaxed in a Jewish attack on some Christians. Some were killed in the attack—and Cyril was provided with the pretext he needed. Mustering together a mob of the parabalani, as well as some of the merely brutal and enthusiastic, Cyril set out. He “marched in wrath to the synagogues of the Jews and took possession of them, and purified them and converted them into churches.” “Purified” in such texts is often a euphemism for stole, self-righteously. The Christians then completed their work by purifying the Jewish “assassins” of their possessions: stripping them of all they owned, including their homes, they turned them out of the city into the desert.25
Orestes looked on in horror. He was an educated man, and one who—much like his good friend Hypatia—refused to live his own life along sectarian lines, despite the increasingly hysterical atmosphere of the time. Ostensibly the most powerful man in the city, he was nonetheless unable to stop this uprising: a mere governor’s retinue was no match for eight hundred marauding, muscular parabalani. Moreover, Orestes knew well how determined Cyril could be: the bishop had previously tried to set his spies on Orestes, ordering them to follow the governor as he went about his business around the city—and presumably as he called on Hypatia, too. Surrounded by informers, powerless to retaliate, Orestes took the only action he could in the face of Cyril’s aggression: he wrote to the emperor to complain about it.
Cyril, in turn, went to see Orestes. If Orestes had expected an apology from this belligerent man, he was to be disappointed. What he received instead was piety. When he approached the governor, Cyril held out a copy of the gospels towards him, “believing”—or so the chronicle says—“that respect for religion would induce him to lay aside his resentment.” It was an infuriatingly ostentatious act and, unsurprisingly, did little to end the quarrel.26
The atmosphere in the city darkened; the numbers of Cyril’s militia swelled. Around five hundred monks descended from their shacks and caves in the nearby hills, determined to fight for their bishop. Unwashed, uneducated, unbending in their faith, they were, as even the Christian writer Socrates admits, men of “a very fiery disposition.”27 One day, as Orestes rode in his chariot through the city, these monks in their dark and foul-smelling robes suddenly surrounded him. They began to insult him, accusing him of being a “pagan idolater.”28 He protested that, on the contrary, he was a baptized Christian. It made no difference. One of the monks threw a rock and it struck Orestes on his head. The wound started pouring with blood. Most of his guards, seeing what they were up against, scattered, plunging into the crowd to get away from the monks.
Orestes was left almost entirely alone, his robes covered in blood. The monks drew closer, forming a black crowd around him. He was outnumbered, and almost certainly afraid; yet he refused to give in. Helped by some locals who rushed to his aid, he got away. Once again, intimidation only seems to have made him more determined, as his next act was to capture then torture to death the monk who had hurled the rock. Everything about this episode would have been abhorrent to a cultured citizen like Orestes: cities should not be dictated to by the whims of bishops or terrorized by lynch mobs. They should be ruled by the law of the government that was administered by imperial officials. Anything less was the behavior of savages. Many of the city’s aristocrats, perhaps repelled by the Christians’ violence, supported him in his defiant stance towards Cyril. So too, crucially, did Hypatia.29
And then the whispering began. It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn. It was she, they murmured, who was standing between Orestes and Cyril, preventing them from reconciling. Fanned by the parabalani, the rumors started to catch, and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (“bestial men—truly abominable” as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of mathematics and philosophy, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of hell. It was she who was turning the entire city against God with her trickery and her spells. She was “atheizing” Alexandria. Naturally, she seemed appealing enough—but that was how the Evil One worked. Hypatia, they said, had “beguiled many people through satanic wiles.”30 Worst of all, she had even beguiled Orestes. Hadn’t he stopped going to church? It was clear: she had “beguiled him through her magic.”31 This could not be allowed to continue.
One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a “multitude of believers in God.”32 They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious.
As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter—“a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ”33—surged round and seized “the pagan woman.” They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body and, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the “luminous child of reason” onto a pyre and burned her.34
Chapter Ten
* * *
To Drink from the Cup of Devils
We, if wise, shall take from heathen books whatever befits us and is allied to the truth, and shall pass over the rest.
—St. Basil, Address, IV
NEAR THE BEGINNING of Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, an erudite medieval abbot turns to a monk who has just arrived in his monastery in Italy. “Monasterium sine libris,” he declaims, in Latin, naturally, “est sicut . . . hortus sine herbis, pratum sine floribus, arbor sine foliis.” A monastery without books is like a garden without herbs, a meadow without flowers, a tree without leaves. The abbot continues this explanation (or, less charitably, exposition) of monastic life in the vernacular. His order of monks, the Benedictines, he explains, “growing up under the double command of work and prayer, was light to the whole known world, depository of knowledge, s
alvation of an ancient learning that threatened to disappear in fires, sacks, earthquakes, forge of new writing and increase of the ancient.”1
It is a powerful image, this: Christianity as the inheritor and valiant protector of the classical tradition—and it is an image that persists. This is the Christianity of ancient monastic libraries, of the beauty of illuminated manuscripts, of the Venerable Bede. It is the Christianity that built august Oxford colleges, their names a litany of learnedness—Corpus Christi, Jesus, Magdalen. This is the Christianity that stocked medieval libraries, created the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre and the sumptuous gold illustrations of the Copenhagen Psalter. This is the religion that, inside the walls of the Vatican, even now keeps Latin going as a living language, translating such words as “computer,” “video game” and “heavy metal” into Latin, over a millennium after the language ought to have died a natural death.
And indeed all that is true. Christianity at its best did do all of that, and more. But there is another side to this Christian story, one that is worlds away from the bookish monks and careful copyists of legend. It is a far less glorious tale of how some philosophers were beaten, tortured, interrogated and exiled and their beliefs forbidden; it is a story of how intellectuals set light to their own libraries in fear. And it is above all a story that is told by absences: of how literature lost its liberty; how certain topics dropped from philosophical debate—and then started to vanish from the pages of history. It is a story of silence.
The intellectual world was changing. Some years before Hypatia’s murder, an elderly Christian bishop named Basil wrote an anxious address to young men advising them on “The Right Use of Greek Literature.”2 It was a brisk and starchy work intended to show youthful readers which classical authors made for acceptable reading material—and which did not. As Basil warned, young readers should not “surrender to these men once for all the rudders of your mind . . . and follow them whithersoever they lead; rather, accepting from them only that which is useful, you should know that which ought to be overlooked.”3
In Basil’s eyes there was a lot to overlook. Today, in a world in which the very word “classical” hints at something revered to the point of dullness, it is hard to understand quite how alarming many of these works were to the Christians. But to Christian eyes the classical canon had the power to horrify. It was replete with sins of every kind. Open Homer’s Iliad and you might find your eyes falling on a passage about how the god Ares seduced golden Aphrodite—and how they were both then caught in flagrante delicto. Open Oedipus the King and you might find a declaration that “the power of the gods is perishing.” Even works by the most stuffily august of authors were not without danger: open a work by the tediously virtuous Virgil, and you might find Dido and Aeneas up to no good in a cave in a rainstorm.4 Idolatry, blasphemy, lust, murder, vanity—every sin was there. That was what made them so enjoyable and, to the Christians, so damnable.
Callow Christians, then, could not be allowed to make their way through the classical canon unrestrained. It was far too dangerous, lest, as Basil warned, a soul “through our love for letters . . . receive some contamination unawares, as men drink in poison with honey.”5 The classical writers should also be ignored, he felt, whenever they wrote too rapturously about the pleasures of great banquets, or when they enjoyed a wanton song. Even to speak such works out loud was to pollute oneself. The famously learned St. Jerome, himself an inveterate reader, weighed in advising against “adultery of the tongue.” Do not pollute yourself by reading out such words. How could one recite such filth and then go on to read Christian works? “How can Horace go with the psalter, Virgil with the gospels, Cicero with the apostle?” One should not, he said, warming to emphatic climax, “drink the cup of Christ, and, at the same time, the cup of devils.”6
For every classical work that sat comfortably with Christian minds and morals, there was another that grated unbearably on them. “Carmen 16” by the poet Catullus was a particular thorn. This poem opens with the infamously bracing line: “I will bugger you and I will fuck your mouths”—hardly the sort of thing to gladden the heart of Basil.7
“Epigram 1.90” of Martial was little better: this little verse attacks a woman for having affairs with other women. Or, as Martial put it:
You improvised, by rubbing cunts together,
And using that bionic clit of yours
To counterfeit the thrusting of a male.8
Open a work by Ovid and the trembling young reader might find the poet explaining how to seduce a married woman over dinner by writing secret messages in spilled wine. Dip into a later poem and they might read an account of Ovid’s lunchtime lovemaking (“Oh, how the shape of her breasts demanded that I caress them!”), and a detailed description of his lover’s body: her flat belly beneath those breasts, her youthful thighs . . .9
Enough, said Basil. Good Christians, he advised, should entirely omit the bawdier classical works. If by chance your eye alighted on a classical passage that portrayed depraved men, then, said Basil, you “must flee from them and stop up your ears.”10 The Christian reader should, he warned, always be on guard against Ovidian naughtiness. “We shall not,” he wrote sternly, “praise the poets . . . when they represent fornicators and winebibbers.”11 Not all classical writers were so dangerously lusty—the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, for example, had treated sex with the sort of disdain of which a Christian might approve. But even his language was a little too precise for Christian comfort. Where Christian writers frequently resorted to the safety of abstract nouns (“lust,” “desire,” “wantonness” and similar) to describe the demon of sexual desire, Marcus Aurelius, with queasy precision, described sexual intercourse as “the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus.”12 In an extended simile that would have been at home in that heathen Homer, Basil therefore advocated caution. Young men should read classics much in the manner that bees visit flowers, “for the bees do not visit all the flowers without discrimination . . . rather, having taken so much as is adapted to their needs, they let the rest go.”13
Most of all, though, it was felt that Greek and Roman authors should be ignored when they talked about their gods “and especially when they represent them as being many”—which was basically all the time.14 Almost everything about these gods caused Christian readers to shift anxiously in their seats. Not only were they demons, but their behavior was deplorable. Unlike the Christian God, these gods did not merely traverse the more dignified divine emotions of wrath, pity and love. They ran the gamut of all the lesser ones too, indulging every feeling from lust to wantonness to jealousy—and then back to lust again. These gods were, one Christian writer felt, an “utter absurdity.”15 Far from being a distant, omniscient presence, they were shamefully and disagreeably human: they squabbled, they wept, had sex, got drunk and behaved badly to everyone, even—perhaps especially—their own family.
In the Greco-Roman pantheon, not only did brother fight against brother but, worse, brother sometimes did quite unmentionable things with sister. Or with anyone else they could get their hands on. Zeus was infamous among Christian authors as he had lusted “with a disgraceful passion for his sister.”16 Indeed he was so badly behaved that Basil was unable to bring himself to describe what “the one they call Zeus” had got up to; it was impossible to speak of Zeus’s adulteries “without blushing.”17 Such things, wrote the Christian apologist Tertullian, “should not have been invented by god-fearing people.” Classical comedies, in which everyone, including the gods, had flapped about in phalluses, were even worse: “Is not the majesty of your gods insulted and their godhead defiled by your applause?”18
Classical literature not only questioned the reality of divine beings, it frequently laughed at them too. The works of Greek and Roman philosophy were full of punchy one-liners poking fun at religion. In one famous story, the Greek philosopher Diogenes finds himself standing next to a wall co
vered in temple inscriptions left by grateful sailors saved at sea. Noticing a man marveling at the inscriptions, Diogenes remarks: “There would have been far more, if those who were not saved had set up offerings.”19 In another story, Diogenes is watching some temple officials arrest a man who has stolen items from a temple treasury. Look, he says: “The great thieves are leading away the little thief.”20 In yet another yarn—one whose punch line hit even closer to the mark—a philosopher named Antisthenes finds himself listening to a priest of Orphism, a Greek cult that believed in an afterlife. The priest explains at length how initiates to his religion would enjoy great advantages in the afterlife. Why then, asks Antisthenes bluntly, “don’t you die?”21
Better, Basil wrote, to avoid dangerous works altogether. “Just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious.”22 As Basil explained, such ecclesiastical censorship was not illiberal; it was loving. Just as Augustine advocated the beating of heretics with rods out of fatherly care, so Basil advocated the removal of great tracts of the classical canon as an act of “great care” to ensure the soul was safely guarded. Sometimes this editing process might be even more intrusive and scribes were asked to report suspicious works to the authorities so they could be censored. In Alexandria, Cyril conducted house searches to hunt out works by the loathed pagan emperor Julian “the Apostate.”23
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