Michael A.B. Deakin > Quotes

“Hypatia’s case then was this. She lived in a time when her intellectual heritage, a seven-hundred-year-old tradition, was crumbling. The supports that had once seemed so secure—the Museum and the libraries—had all been swept away by the swell of ignorant dogmatism. Almost alone, virtually the last academic, she stood for the intellectual values, for rigorous mathematics, ascetic Neoplatonism, the crucial role of the mind, and the voice of temperance and moderation in civic life.”
― Michael A.B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr

“Thus it happened that a crowd of Christian zealots, led by one Peter the Lector, blocked the homeward path of the carriage in which Hypatia was riding, dragged her from it, and (as if to seek divine sanction for their act) hauled the hapless woman into a church where they stripped her naked and battered her to death with roofing tiles. This done, they continued their frenzy by tearing her corpse limb from limb, orgiastically transporting her body out through the church portals and burning its fragments.”
― Michael A.B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr

“Midway through the fourth century the council of Laodicea outlawed divination, the attempt to use thaumaturgical means to the end of knowing the future. The thirty-sixth canon of that council forbade priests to be mathematicians.”
― Michael A.B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr

“Cyril, upon learning of this, got hold of the body and placed it in a position of honor and veneration in one of his churches. He conducted over it a ceremony of canonization, bestowing on the would-be assassin the title of Saint Ammonius Thaumasius (Saint Ammonius the Admirable) and publicly declaring him to be a martyr for the Christian faith.”
― Michael A.B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr

“Moreover, historians, then as today, record opinion in the same breath as fact. They select what facts they deem relevant to their purpose, and indeed present their judgments under the guise of fact. Doubtless when John of Nikiu wrote: “[Hypatia] beguiled many people through her Satanic wiles,” he saw himself as reporting fact; we, however, may demur.”
― Michael A.B. Deakin, Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr