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Agora
May 11, 2013 17:04:36 GMT 10
Post by Deleted on May 11, 2013 17:04:36 GMT 10
I wasn't sure whether to,post this here or religion board as it is appropriate for either.
This 2009 film had limited release in Australia but was shown on sbs a coupe of months back.,I recorded it and watched it last night. It deals with the story of fourth century Hypatia of Alexandria, the female philosopher and astronomer at a time Christianity was become a major religion. The backdrop of the story deals with the unrest ( riots, really) between the Christians, Jews and roman pagans and Hypatia being seen as a sorceress. I thoroughly enjoyed this, and would have loved to have seen this on the big screen.
Anyone manage to catch it?
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Agora
May 12, 2013 9:38:30 GMT 10
Post by Deleted on May 12, 2013 9:38:30 GMT 10
Yes indeed...watched another movie by Alejandro Anenábar last night...The Sea Inside...brilliant and moving.
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Agora
May 17, 2013 10:13:58 GMT 10
Post by pim on May 17, 2013 10:13:58 GMT 10
Grim, I saw Agora on the big screen and again on SBS recently. Great movie. Courageous of the producer to cast the Christians as the bad guys. I do agree that Christianity wasn't necessarily a progressive force in the ancient world. There is a bit of scholarship on this, not much but some: Ramsay McMullin has written some interesting stuff on the interactions of paganism and Christianity in ancient Rome.
If like cats we humans had 9 lives I wouldn't mind spending one of them as a historian exploring historical questions like these: Did the arrival of Christianity find the pagan cultures of the classical mediterranean world in state of degeneracy and decline? Was the triumph of Christianity a case of kicking in a rotting door? To what extent was the triumph of Christianity a victory for obscurantism?
You see, Earl Grey, I don't se the Hypatia story as one of the clash of science and religion. The villain in the story isn't religion per se, but Christianity.
Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Galen ... they were all scientists and they flourished in a pagan environment. There's evidence that during the Hellenistic period the basic principles of steam power had been worked out - in other words they'd worked out the physics - and they even had a working model. If they'd got the economics right then the Industrial Revolution would have happened millennia ago. And this was under paganism.
What was the problem? Well, there were two problems:
1. Ancient Rome which conquered the eastern mediterranean and superseded the hellenistic civilisations. The hellenistic crowd did fight back. There was a guy called Mithradates who gave Rome a very hard time over a long period, caused the Romans no end of strife, had a big impact on their politics and probably was a contributing factor to the eventual end of the Republic and its replacement by an Emperor. Basically what the Romans bought with them was a slave economy on a massive scale. No scope here to go into it but where's the incentive for technological advancement if slaves are plentiful and cheap? So science took a back seat.
2. Christianity was another problem as far as science was concerned. The problem with religions like Christianity - and it's one they share with Islam - is that they have this book that they hold sacred. That's fine as far as it goes, but taken to extremes you get people like, say, Matt who are convinced that this sacred book contains everything that's worth knowing and anything outside that sacred book is the work of the devil and therefore evil. Christianity went through centuries of that sort of stuff and the Hypatia story is a notional example of it. I think it's no accident that Rome fell soon after adopting Christianity. Maybe it was always going to fall because the old pagan culture was in an advanced state of decay anyway. But I suspect that Christianity hastened its fall rather than slowed it. What we do know is that once Rome fell there was a catastrophic collapse of living standards, literacy, public health, standard of housing and life expectancy in western Europe. And all this under Christianity. It took Western Europe a millennium to get back to the level it had once enjoyed under the Roman Empire. And then it began to surpass it and the result is the modern world. This progress was despite Christianity, not because of it.
But in the ancient world, a cosmic view that encompassed gods & goddesses was no barrier to scientific progress. In fact science flourished. The problem was Christianity. And that, to me at any rate, is the message of the Hypatia story.
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Agora
May 17, 2013 11:32:08 GMT 10
Post by Deleted on May 17, 2013 11:32:08 GMT 10
Thanks Pim, fascinating stuff.
Wish we had seen the film on the big screen but it was a limited release movie, meaning we in the Boonies never get to see them.
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