Pagan Martyrs, Murderous Monks: Agora Hits US Shores

Nathan Schneider
Nathan Schneider is a senior editor in the magazine on the Internet killed the religion of Buddha and the founding editor of the blog to launch non-violence. Visit his website in a boat and row.
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It is not long before one gets the sense that there is nothing outside the Agora, which is not quite true. Chances are it when Rachel Weisz, because the trick is the fourth and fifth-century philosopher Hypatia Neoplatonism, drops a piece of cloth stained with menstrual blood at the foot of a student who is seeking to attract her husband's pattern of abstinence-only education advocates today might do well to copy. Despite every indication that what you see is the standard Hollywood epic, to begin to doubt that he will ever love to the scene due. If you happened to Hypatia in reading the Wikipedia page on the way to the theater, you can even begin to fear the lack of vision was stripped of his clothes until the end, when the inventory is torn to pieces by Christian mafia brutality.

Alejandro Amenábar's 73 million, the film is in English (which opened only in the U.S. is limited in New York, on June 4, Los Angeles) and the explosion of the layers have informally. In two hours crammed in that overwrought sex appeal, groups of city size, and bloody battle scenes and political intrigue and religious intolerance, and enough visits the greatest Neoplatonism to give us a sense of what is supposed to be permanent for Hypatia. This last part, while being difficult to reconcile, for reasons not the least of Hypatia and uncomfortable, and celibacy is also the best hope in the Agora. Also comes as a welcome contrast to, for example, to Rome in higher vocational education, which makes figures such as Cicero, Cato sissies in the muscles compared to Mark Antony, and without any mention of the exploits of the intellectual as we know them better. The ancient world or this one, and big ideas do not compete on the screen easily with the power of conflict and chaos, bodies shiny. But it's worth a try.

"I believe in the philosophy of" Hypatia declares, despite all odds.

"Philosophy," growls a reasonable political. "Just what we need in times like these."

Amenábar stands with the heroine, and that it did not make this movie only on his health. Since Voltaire and Edward Gibbon, The Story of Hypatia was the preferred cluster of the narrative of the Enlightenment: her death at the hands of a crazed monks marks the end of the Greek high culture and the beginning of a fixed asset in the Dark Ages. It is assumed that the story to stand as a beacon, such as the Lighthouse of Alexandria, which towered over Hypatia, and the threat posed by the religious feelings of all that wisdom and tolerance for the human spirit.

At the appropriate time to teach my childhood special (and one I am reluctant to innocent) and reiterated that Carl Sagan as saying in a television soap opera Cosmos. Sagan followed Gibbon in linking the killing with the destruction of Hypatia of Alexandria's famous library, with her body, and went away in the literature of the ancient world, and lost forever. Hypatia now to remember to take a stand for freedom against the faith. (At least two newspapers of feminist thought bearing its name.) This is the cloak seems to be in the Agora, inheritance and this message, our time of fanaticism and intolerance, which show would bring. Ideas are supported to fight like gladiators, with the belief in one corner and reason in the other.

I wonder whether there was ever Amenábar's film that could incite violence against the clergy ...

Hear about the success of the Agora in Spain last year, the film is the highest number of awards in this year, most of the awards, couldn't help but bring to mind a blank insides of this large number of churches in this country, still charred after the various anti-clerical crowds of the past few centuries. I was not the only one who make this assembly. With ressentiment, predictable and open to the message came from an observatory Amenábar against religious defamation, a Catholic agency in Spain, warning him: "Your movie is going to awaken the hatred against Christians in today's society."

U.S. Roman Catholic missionary "" Father. Robert Baron, he says in his review of the Catholic New World, "and I wonder whether there was ever Amenábar's film that could incite violence against religious people, and Christians in particular." One can only hope it's not the movie good enough to get people to the streets.

In an interview with The New York Times, despite Amenábar turned the tables on his critics and pious. "Basically, this is a movie on the life of the Christian martyr," he explained. "Jesus would not have agreed to what happened to Hypatia, and that is why I say that Christianity is not a good feel offended by this film." In this regard, at least, of his feelings and a historical basis.

We have the best account of the life and death of Hypatia comes from Scholasticus Socrates, a historian Christian Constantinople, which was among the sources of a pair of priests and pagan refugees from Alexandria. Decimating the whole thing is, exactly, in Amenábar: "Surely nothing could be further from the spirit of Christianity instead of massacres, fights, and transactions of this kind".

Nor did his feelings no such luck; Hypatia was admired widely by Christians in ancient times, and then to her learning, chastity, and witness to the beginning with students Synisius onetime Cyrene, portrayed in the film as a surfer dude trapped in the clothes the bishop. And blacks, and in the tenth century Byzantine (Christian) remembers sadly encyclopedia beauty and eloquence, not reserving his sympathy with fellow Christians who did not have to enter.

From that point on the narrative Gibbon - Sagan only continue to collapse. First, it is not at all clear that was destroyed a large library of Christians at the time of Hypatia, as suggested in the film. Caesar set fire to half a century before the birth of Christ. Perhaps the last straw of the Islamic conquest in Alexandria in 642. What is contained in the agora as sacrifice orgiastic library parts comply with the destruction of Christians, in 391, the structure of the wonderful dedicated to Serapis, the god of essentially political aims to unite the ethnic maelstrom of Alexandria under the rule of the empire. The Library Serapeum does, although it seems to include at least a branch of the library collection. In any case, reminds us that the Agora was provoked by the destruction prior to the attack on Christians and idolatry (raised, in turn, by the Christians, and so on, no end).

Differ from the accounts ahead of time what has already led to the death of Hypatia in the. Black and puts the onus on the Christian Patriarch Cyril (St. Cyril and this to you), which grew jealous of the crowds to lectures that have been collected and sent goons to kill her. Camera Socrates Scholasticus' is a bit more messy: a triangle of political intrigue between Cyril, the governor Orestes the Romanian philosopher and a woman. This scenario is most closely following Agora. Despite the noble effort Amenábar to squeeze in before the end of scientific discoveries, and her death just does not seem to have been about ideas, in the end.

In Alexandria at the time, were getting people who are killed left and right for some reason were not good at all. Scholasticus Socrates tells us, "the public is more than happy to Alexandrian riots than any other people: If at any time be found on the pretext, breaks in the unacceptable excesses at all; because it did not stop trouble without bloodshed." With the Jews, Christians and semi-Christians, philosophers and pagans all fishing for power, may be more in the story of Hypatia for global stupidity than anything else.

As the stars, the streets

The best developed character in the agora, in terms of being a foil against the riots in the streets, and the sky. Amenábar starscape used for calibration to look exactly as it was in ancient times, which represents the central precession. Several times that it juxtaposes stillness stars, and rotate the earth, with the chaos below. Such as the Platonic good, and Hypatia was obsessed with the stars, which held that Plato and Aristotle demigods, Eternal Universe and the engine and prime minister. Considering the system and perfect in terms of philosophy is to lurked. Unfortunately, and other legacies of March Platonic meditation in the Agora: an obsession with the department, which has curtains to elliptical movement of the planets, along with sitting on top of a society based on slavery and gross injustice.

Christians turn out to astronomers, even worse, but they do not get the right things. Parabalani to a group of bodyguards that the involvement of AGORA Patriarch in the murder of Hypatia in fact, and Fellowship chosen from among the poor, primarily to serve the poor. They tend to the sick and bury the dead, and infection risk in this process. Violent scenes between the mob, the film does not at least give a glimpse of what has brought so much in underclasses Alexandrian and wide to wear the sign of the Cross: bread and freedom and the good news of the Beatitudes. Hypatia in the slave Davus is, to them, the slave only, albeit clever, among Christians, and he learns to feed the hungry is better than the full fattening.

Hypatia and the society collapsed around them, and it must be recognized, because the time has come. Of Alexandria was built on the wonders of slavery (Sagan called, in the Cosmos on Hypatia "Cancer in the ancient world"), and those who have at least did not bother to do anything on the streets. But Christians, or at least, in a way, they tried.

The lesson of Hypatia, which is included in the agora as much as in the historical record, not one of the more than one reason to believe, or ask more of intolerance. It is so and we are eager for peace from the stars, we have to take care of our city, too, but we have to make this world only, and thus secured, on philosophy.