Hypatia [Hardcover]

Crippled by chronic and often severe depression, the author became captivated by Hypatia around 1980, when he first heard of her on Carl Sagan’s award-winning PBS series, Cosmos. Although she was arguably the greatest figure in history — and certainly the most tragic — the author wondered why it was, that almost nobody had ever heard of her. He resolved at that time to set matters right by writing a book about her. But the task proved daunting, for history has recorded little about her, and on first sight her story seemed too depressing to dwell upon. When his depression reached suicidal proportions, in 1991, the author decided to write his long-intended tribute to Hypatia as his swan song. As an agnostic humanist and a lover of astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy, he felt uniquely qualified to reconstruct the story from the point of view of this last great pagan natural philosopher — history's first female mathematician and astronomer. The intensive historical and philosophical research that he devoted to the project was the only thing that got the author through those times, and in the course of those dark years, his research brought him into contact with classical Greek culture, of which Hypatia was the last defender — and he was smitten. He wondered: what made these noble, brilliant, free-thinking people so creative, so alive, so in love with life? They, too, were without faith — unwilling to deceive themselves for the sake of comfort — yet they were happy. What was their secret, that died with them? This book reveals the author’s answer to this question, arrived upon after nearly a decade devoted to disinterring the essence of pagan culture, which the Christians plowed under to pave the way for the Dark Ages. The message is one of hope, but hope derived from Reason, not mindless self-deceptive Faith. Over the years, one anti-depressant after another failed to alleviate the author's melancholia, and so he has long stopped taking them, but where psychotropic drugs have failed, philosophy may have succeeded: the lessons that Hypatia has taught him seem to have diminished his capacity for dysphoria, for ever since he finished writing the book in 1999, he hasn’t been able to be properly depressed. Perhaps Hypatia’s gift can similarly stimulate, comfort, and inspire other free-thinking spirits in their search for a new system of values, and help light the way to new hope and meaning. This, at least, is the author’s hope.