Hypatia

Hypatia, by Charles Kingsley

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Title: Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face
Author: Charles Kingsley
Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6308] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on November 23,

2002]
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HYPATIA
OR
NEW FOES WITH AN OLD FACE
by Charles Kingsley

PREFACE
A picture of life in the fifth century must needs contain much which
will be painful to any reader, and which the young and innocent will do
well to leave altogether unread. It has to represent a very hideous,
though a very great, age; one of those critical and cardinal eras in the
history of the human race, in which virtues and vices manifest
themselves side by side--even, at times, in the same person--with the
most startling openness and power. One who writes of such an era
labours under a troublesome disadvantage. He dare not tell how evil
people were; he will not be believed if he tells how good they were. In
the present case that disadvantage is doubled; for while the sins of the
Church, however heinous, were still such as admit of being expressed

in words, the sins of the heathen world, against which she fought, were
utterly indescribable; and the Christian apologist is thus compelled, for
the sake of decency, to state the Church's case far more weakly than the
facts deserve.
Not, be it ever remembered, that the slightest suspicion of immorality
attaches either to the heroine of this book, or to the leading
philosophers of her school, for several centuries. Howsoever base and
profligate their disciples, or the Manichees, may have been, the great
Neo-Platonists were, as Manes himself was, persons of the most rigid
and ascetic virtue.
For a time had arrived, in which no teacher who did not put forth the
most lofty pretensions to righteousness could expect a hearing. That
Divine Word, who is 'The Light who lighteth every man which cometh
into the world,' had awakened in the heart of mankind a moral craving
never before felt in any strength, except by a few isolated philosophers
or prophets. The Spirit had been poured out on all flesh; and from one
end of the Empire to the other, from the slave in the mill to the emperor
on his throne, all hearts were either hungering and thirsting after
righteousness, or learning to do homage to those who did so. And He
who excited the craving, was also furnishing that which would satisfy it;
and was teaching mankind, by a long and painful education, to
distinguish the truth from its innumerable counterfeits, and to find, for
the first time in the world's life, a good news not merely for the select
few, but for all mankind without respect of rank or race.
For somewhat more than four hundred years, the Roman Empire and
the Christian Church, born into the world almost at the same moment,
had been developing themselves side by side as two great rival powers,
in deadly struggle for the possession of the human race. The weapons
of the Empire had been not merely an overwhelming physical force,
and a ruthless lust of aggressive conquest: but, even more powerful still,
an unequalled genius for organisation, and an uniform system of
external law and order. This was generally a real boon to conquered
nations, because it substituted a fixed and regular spoliation for the
fortuitous and arbitrary miseries of savage warfare: but it arrayed,

meanwhile, on the side of the Empire the wealthier citizens of every
province, by allowing them their share in the plunder of the labouring
masses below them. These, in the country districts, were utterly
enslaved; while in the cities, nominal freedom was