[A well-born woman of late 4thcentury AD Alexandria in her early 30s. Austere in style, dress and bearing but somehow all the more magnetic for it. Dressed in a philosopher’s robes, she holds a papyrus scroll which she is slowly rolling back up. She looks up at the audience]
Hypatia: Oh, it’s you. No, I don’t mind if you stay behind. It’s a teacher’s pleasure to talk with her students. We’re philosophers. We know an enquiring mind doesn’t stop when the lesson does. What can I help you with?
[Pause]
Well, there’s something going round in your head. I can tell by the pained expression. My, you’ve been crying, too. Red-rimmed eyes… heavy shadows beneath…
[Pause]
Philosophy is hard, I sympathise. The lectures this week have challenged our best students. Everything we’ve studied until now – the dance of numbers, the perfection of shapes and forms, the precise movements of bodies through angles and curves – these are all just the groundwork. These things may seem pure, but they all still belong to the physical world, do you see? You can touch them, apprehend them, you can…
[Pause]
Touch. Yes, it’s hard, when you’re young, not to value that sense. I remember, as a little girl, how I used to run my fingers through the fur of the great silver-black tabby who lived in the Museum courtyard. I loved it. She loved it too. There was harmony between us. Even then, I would let my fingers trace lines and shapes between the spots on her fur. I felt sure she held a map of the stars on her back and that her purring was the music of the spheres! So I began my studies of astronomy. So you see, my boy, how I was led from the lowest of the senses to raise my sight – the highest – up to heaven. Where the soul strives to be.
[Pause]
Can you do the same? Can you let go of touch? Of sight, even?
[Pause]
Don’t think I don’t know why you’re here. You’re not the first of my students to stand before me, tongue-tied. Every year something like this happens. As the name of Hypatia spreads through the empire, young men come from all its provinces to this school, this city. I flatter myself it’s my philosophy, my teaching, and nothing more. By which I mean nothing… lesser. But I see it when you look at me. When I’m speaking, instructing. Well, many a student has fallen in love with his teacher. Socrates and Alcibiades were merely the pattern. There’s no shame in it. Only in not knowing what it means. What is it that you love, my boy?
[Pause]
I’ve heard it said – many times, from different mouths – that I am beautiful. Is that what you desire? My body? Then you’ve already forgotten today’s lesson. This is outside only. This is wax that bears a seal and to love it is to prefer the wax to the seal, and even that seal is just a shape, an impress, a copy. You can find this kind of love anywhere. [With an exasperated laugh] Can’t you go crazy for some barbarian slave girl, with yellow hair down to her waist? Or a merchant’s daughter, gilded glass all jingling on her neck and breasts? Or what about a priestess of Isis? I hear there’s a gorgeous one who traipses round the Temple of Proserpina – she sends all the men of Alexandria into transports, even the nice Jewish boys…
[Pause]
But I’ve offended you. I think you’re one of my Christians, aren’t you? Very well. Your god commands you to love. Leaving aside the question of choice, that’s a good thing. But the object of that love – that’s no sight to please the eye. A body stripped, torn and tortured – sacrificed to the ignorant hatred of the mob. That’s what you Christians must love – and why? Because of what that body hides – the suffering soul fashioned by its maker.
[Pause; then with increasing rapidity]
That’s a start. But we philosophers go much further. Let us recapitulate today’s lesson. Body is matter, changeable and interchangeable – but the body is made by Soul, a dim image and glimmer of something far greater behind and beyond – and it is our work, our sacred task on this material plane, to free the soul in its return to that greater thing, to escape the body and to reunite with the Mind that produced that Soul – and which can, in turn, with the greatest effort and self-discipline, lead us to glimpse, if only fractionally, the One that made the Mind – and I have glimpsed it, my boy, and not by measurement or calculation, but by an absolute intuition – the One that is neither male nor female but the author of all Beauty – that is beauty above beauty.
[Pause]
I see my words are having no effect. Then, let’s descend back down the scale of being, mind to soul to body. Let me show you what it is you love.
[She reaches under her robe, up between her legs and pulls out a rag freshly stained with menstrual blood]
That which was to be demonstrated.
[She throws it into the audience (choose target carefully!]
[With a sad smile] I hope that’s not the only thing they remember Hypatia of Alexandria for.
