Why Name a Journal after Hypatia?
In her March 29th Hypatia article, “In Defense of Transracialism,” philosopher Rebecca Tuvel made the case that arguments that support transgenderism also reasonably extend to transracialism. The article explicitly invokes the 2015 pop culture debate about the extent to which the famous and contemporaneous cases of Caitlyn Jenner (gender transition) and Rachel Dolezal (racial transition) are comparable. Armed with the methods of her discipline, Tuvel waded into a heated public discussion about the definition of social categories and the logical implications of ethical principles.
The general response was diverse, but a negative backlash quickly gained momentum. In less than a month, an open letter and petition calling for an apology and retraction of the article — signed by more than eight hundred academics — was circulating. The authors of the letter produced a list of alleged misrepresentations and methodological flaws, on the basis of which they argued that there must have been a failure in the editorial process. A “majority” of the Associate Editors responded with an apology in early May, but on May 6th the Editor-in-Chief of Hypatia, Sally Scholz, issued a defense of the journal’s decision to publish, and on May 18th the Board posted on the journal’s website a carefully-worded official statement reprimanding the Associate Editors’ initial (and unofficial) response, and affirming the journal’s commitment to the article.
The controversy has raised concerns among many academics about the publication, reception, and censorship of peer-reviewed scholarship that risks or provokes public backlash. But it should matter to classicists in particular because the journal’s namesake, a late antique Greek philosopher (ca. 355–415), is a figure who has long been important for popular conceptions of the thought world of Mediterranean antiquity, female intellectuals in premodern societies, and the “end” of antiquity. Yet many people familiar with the basic facts of her life (and tragic death) may not be aware that Hypatia also had some experience of her own in peer review and publishing controversial writings.
For all of the punditry and acrimony that they inevitably provoke, public debates about highly politicized issues such as gender, race, free speech, and academic integrity offer us a chance to reflect more slowly upon our own values and institutions. Feminism has of course taught us much about the implications of valorizing or seeking essence in origins — think “Founding Fathers.” Nonetheless, when they chose the name Hypatia in 1986, the journal’s founders deliberately, or at least unavoidably, tied their own story to that of a well-known ancient woman. Since that journal’s peer reviewing practices — and by extension, all academic peer reviewing practices — have come under closer scrutiny, now seems like a fitting time to examine the role that the original Hypatia played in publishing the work of her fellow intellectuals.
The aspects of Hypatia’s scholarly life foregrounded below have not received much attention in her popular reception or modern scholarship (they are, for instance, largely absent from her Wikipedia page at the time of writing). This silence seems louder in the context of recent events. In order to fully understand Hypatia’s scholarly and editorial practice, we must also get to know her student, Synesius of Cyrene. (Synesius is a very copious, if indirect, source of information about Hypatia) Considering her relationships with her students, I suggest, is also a worthwhile exercise for our particular present moment, when many of our academic campuses are being viewed as ideological battlegrounds — or worse.
Hypatia, the daughter of a mathematician and philosopher named Theon, was perhaps just learning the alphabet as a young girl in Alexandria when the Roman emperor Julian’s death prematurely ended his Persian campaign in 363. Julian (r. 361–363) represented the last credible resurgence of paganism in the empire since Constantine (d. 337) had thrown open the door to Christianity in Roman public life. With Julian had died the hopes of many devotees of the old gods that the rise of the new religion could be reversed or at least held at bay. In 391, after an escalation between rival Christian and pagan groups, the patriarch of Alexandria oversaw the destruction of the Serapeum, the city’s equivalent of the Athenian Parthenon.
Hypatia was probably already actively teaching in her father’s school by then. She would have been taking her male students through a philosophical curriculum which included Euclid, Plato, Ptolemy, Porphyry, and the Chaldean Oracles. She was an acknowledged expert in geometry and astronomy, which were effectively branches of philosophy, and may have edited the text of some one thousand pages of ancient mathematical treatises — an intellectually demanding task which also involved providing careful explanatory glosses and diagrams.
Around 404, Synesius, then resident in his native Cyrene in Libya, sent her a trio of philosophical essays, with a cover letter (#154) asking her to review them. Like many of Hypatia’s students, Synesius came from a Christian family. By then, he had already made an impressive start to his career, going to Constantinople in 397 as an ambassador for his home province to seek an audience with the emperor. His credentials from studying with Hypatia had opened a pathway for him at court: she helped him design and produce a celestial map (possibly an astrolabe) in silver and gold, which he brought with him from Alexandria. He presented it as a gift to the man who would introduce him to some of the most powerful officials in the East. It was so complex that he wrote the recipient a short essay explaining how to use it. This essay, often called “On the Gift” (De Dono) was one of the three pieces Hypatia was to find attached to letter 154. Another was an essay on the psychology and interpretation of dreams.
The third essay, entitled Dio, or Life According to his Model, is an elaborate work more difficult to categorize. This was what Synesius wanted Hypatia’s particular attention on. He spent most of his rather long cover letter explaining (!) to her what it was actually about and the circumstances that provoked him to write it. Some unnamed but richly caricatured detractors had impugned Synesius’ philosophical seriousness because he pursued a literary career, writing poetry as well as playful, intertextually dense quasi-philosophical essays.
The Dio can be best described as a defense of classical literature. In the cover letter 154 (which is by the way one of seven of his letters to her), Synesius suggests that Hypatia will recognize the identity of the opponents pretty well. They probably included some Christians, but if so, their objection was not so much that classical Greek literature was “too pagan” but that it was not truly “philosophical.” The Dio begins with a learned analysis of the career of the imperial Greek philosopher-orator Dio Chrysostom, correcting Philostratus’s description of him (in the Lives of the Sophists) as an eloquent philosopher who got carried away and ended up being a sophist. Synesius moves on after a few pages to outline a program of literary and rhetorical self-discipline (paideia) as a part of the holistic cultivation of virtue which he thought best deserved the name of “philosophy.” He contrasts his own views with competing contemporary visions of “philosophy” — including Egyptian anchorite monks. These ascetic desert fathers, he acknowledges, represented a legitimate path to a kind of divine knowledge, but he worried it was too demanding for most people, and thus he urges his readers to stick to the more traditional method that he has chosen.
For Synesius, defending Dio’s philosophical credentials amounted to defending his own: his reputation was at stake. Was Hypatia’s too? Synesius tried to make the message more universal, for he probably sensed that this particular splash of criticism he had faced was part of a wave of larger cultural forces moving through the cities of the eastern empire. At the end of his cover letter, he writes: “About all these things, we will wait for you to judge. And if you decree that it should be made public, it will be laid before rhetors together with philosophers […] But if it does not in your view seem worthy of the audience of the Hellenes, […] then a thick and deep darkness will cover it and humans will never know that it was composed.” He clearly hoped she would circulate it to the intellectual network radiating from her school in Alexandria — if, of course, she approved. That she did is suggested by the fact that Synesius did not carry out his thundering promise to condemn the Dio to darkness.
To what extent might a student mold his or her character after a teacher of the opposite gender? Trying to think about Hypatia through Synesius brings this additional complexity to the perennial question of how much the disciple might (or should) resemble the master. How spiritually similar to Socrates was Plato? For Hypatia, we don’t have the equivalent of a “Xenophon” to counterbalance Synesius — but then again, none of the Socratic writings we possess were ever actually presented to Socrates for his approval. How might Synesius and Hypatia have felt when reading the second half of Socrates’ famous “palinode” in Plato’s Phaedrus (the origin of our expression “platonic friendship”)? He explicitly compares his Dio to that text — another of his favorites, which he certainly read at her school.
Much rides on how strong we imagine their intellectual kinship to be. Scholars are usually comfortable making educated guesses based on Synesius’ works (and other evidence) about the purely philosophical doctrines Hypatia taught — probably Porphyrian Neoplatonism. But what were her politics like? What did she read for fun? Synesius takes pains to defend Old Comedy in the Dio — Aristophanes’ Clouds was his favorite play. Did he pick up this taste in school? Did the “mistress of mysteries” (as he called her once) have a raunchy sense of humor that she occasionally showed glimpses of to her students?
(This hypothesis might lend some credence to Damascius’ often doubted story that she tossed one of the first-attested menstrual rags at a besotted student in order to discourage his affections. Here’s the Greek, in indirect discourse: αὐτὴν δὲ προενεγκαμένην τι τῶν γυναικείων ῥακῶν αὐτοῦ βαλλομένην καὶ τὸ σύμβολον ἐπιδείξασαν τῆς ἀκαθάρτου γενέσεως, τούτου μέντοι, φάναι, ἐρᾷς, ὦ νεανίσκε, καλοῦ δὲ οὐδενός.)
We may find confirmation that Hypatia shared her own version of Synesius’ hopes for a culturally expansive philosophy (and Christianity) in some of her better-attested activities. I have already alluded to the fact that she taught a religiously diverse student body. She also served as a friend and informal advisor to the Christian prefect of the city, Orestes — as ancient philosophers often did with the powerful. Synesius was the only of her students whose writings survive, but his letter collection allows us to “meet” several others, at least through letters addressed to them. He kept in touch with old schoolmates such as a Syrian Christian named Olympius and an Egyptian named Herculian. He mentions their teacher in several of these letters and in one instance uses her to forward a letter on to an addressee whose current whereabouts he does not know — for she would know.
In the late antique world, a substantial and well-placed interpersonal network was one of the chief things that made a good teacher like Hypatia valuable to her wealthy students. Hypatia’s network was clearly important and keeping it up must have required a great deal of work, talent, and charisma. This was also important for her students’ literary prospects, for ancient text publication tended to flow along the lines of established social and political networks. Pliny the Younger’s audience for his literary compositions included many of the leading Roman elites of his day, with whom he regularly corresponded and conducted important business — amici share hobbies. Thus for Synesius to send his masterwork to Hypatia affirmed not just her intellectual judiciousness, but also her ability to make sure worthwhile ideas were heard among the right audiences.
It was Hypatia’s friendship with the city’s prefect Orestes which cost her her life. When the bishop of Alexandria and the prefect could not reconcile their differences after an escalation in 415, Hypatia became the scapegoat. The mob of ascetics which murdered her in the streets of Alexandria bears a disturbing resemblance to people Synesius had criticized a decade earlier in letter 154 and the Dio (not desert holy men, but some of their less disciplined adherents).
It is impossible to prove that there was any relation between Hypatia’s death and Synesius’ Dio. But one thought provoking, if rather general, point of comparison between the 2017 Hypatia article backlash and the circumstances addressed by the Dio is that both conflicts somehow involve competing discourses of, or even visions of, “philosophy.” At the risk of oversimplifying: Tuvel’s article adopts the tone and methodology of contemporary ethics as practiced in the analytic tradition of “philosophy,” while many of her critics accused her of misusing or neglecting concepts and arguments more current in the critical theory tradition of “philosophy.” By the turn of the 5th century the Christian ascetic tradition had been characterizing itself as “philosophy” for several generations. What is so at stake in this name, and the categories it is associated with — for us and for them?
None of Synesius’ writings mention his beloved teacher’s death or any event after it, and thus it is usually taken as a terminus ante quem for his own death. He would have been about 45, after reluctantly becoming, in 411, bishop of Ptolemais (near modern day Benghazi), the metropolis of the Roman province of Libya Superior. We may count him fortunate, despite an early death, if he did not ever have to hear such news. (It is very doubtful that he would have reacted to the conflict between Cyril, Orestes, and Hypatia the way he is portrayed as doing so in the movie Agora. Though Amenábar’s film is definitely worth seeing, especially with students, Synesius is probably the most unfairly (and inaccurately) portrayed of all the historical characters in the film).
Hypatia has come to symbolize many things to many people. For me, she is a model of building friendship on cultural and intellectual common ground in an age of increasing polarization and intolerance. Hypatia should also be an inspiration not just to female (or male) mathematicians and philosophers, but to classicists as well — for as a publisher and peer reviewer she seems to have played an active role in a campaign to defend the cultural legitimacy of ancient and “profane” letters.
Contemplating her in light of the 2017 Hypatia controversy, we are reminded that, like it or not, a publisher is perceived as sharing agency for the effect of an author’s ideas and words, even if the publisher makes clear that they are not her own. Some of the 2017 public backlash was directed specifically at the editors. This reaction makes sense — publishers, after all, strongly influence the discourse of a community, not just by making ideas available, but by influencing which ideas are given priority. (Remember that the Latin origin of the word “edit”- edere — means to “give out, put forth” and thus figures the essence of an editor’s job as controlling publication rather than simply correcting texts).
Hypatia is a model not just of a woman participating in intellectual life, but of a woman being an intellectual leader — someone who had to make decisions and face their consequences. Long before the logistics of publication were revolutionized by printing presses and digital networks, in the ancient world the nexus between social and intellectual leadership was much tighter. Thus Hypatia’s achievement is all the more impressive. And it makes her eminently worthy of provoking the aspirations of a serious journal.
Despite the fact that we know so tantalizing little with certainty about Hypatia’s intellectual vita activa, one thing that seems abundantly clear is that it was based in forming and maintaining lasting friendships. Perhaps she used her charm to win diverse people over in the way that Synesius argues a complete philosopher should in the Dio. He draws a remarkably positive portrait of Proteus, the shapeshifting divinity, as an allegory of a philosophical gentleman living in a complicated world. Hypatia might have been the one who taught Synesius to admire Proteus. Was she perhaps for him the living fulfillment of the allegory, adapting to situations in a way that seemed beyond the grasp of a mere mortal — able to speak fittingly to “Greek” and Christian, simple and elite, rhetorician and philosopher, man and woman alike? Though we will never know, sometimes inspiration picks up where certainty leaves off.
Author’s note: People interested in learning more about the real Hypatia and her world should check out this brand new biography written by an acknowledged expert in late antique cultural and intellectual history.
Alex Petkas lectures at UC San Diego in the History department, teaches in programs at the Paideia Institute, and is finishing his PhD in Classics. He thanks the E(i)ditorial staff and Richard Hutchins for many improvements on this piece.
