WARNING – SPOILER ALERT
For 2+ hours today, I spent a late afternoon with one of my best friends in Oxford, watching Alejandro Amenabar’s recent film, Agora. I was prepared to see something akin to Alexander, a film I felt lacked a good storyline and featured more CGI effects than true acting talent, but what I saw was more than a two-hour return to ancient Rome, seeing the founding years of Christianity from a different perspective.
Perhaps the most powerful part of Amenabar’s film is perhaps one that he intended as such – the repression of women by religious opportunists who saw them as a political threat in the early years of monotheism.
The main character of Agora is based on the historic figure of Hypatia of Alexandria, an atheist astronomer and philosophy professor during the last years of the Roman Empire. Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), the way she is depicted in the film, is an influential woman of great intellect with hunger for knowledge and curiosity to find out the relationship between the Sun and the Earth. She’s empathetic to her slave, interested in imparting her knowledge to students who will become influential leaders as the film progresses. The film is true to the story of Hypatia as reported by Socrates Scholasticus, who wrote that Hypatia’s influence on the Roman prefect was perceived as a threat by the increasingly powerful Christian bishop Cyril, marking the beginning of the attacks on intellectual knowledge:
She fell victim to the political jealousy which at that time prevailed. For as she had frequent interviews with Orestes, it was calumniously reported among the Christian populace, that it was she who prevented Orestes from being reconciled to the bishop. Some of them, therefore, hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.
Amenabar does not let us see this aspect of the cruelty of human nature, perhaps because he cares too much for Hypatia’s character. He picks a painful, but a more respectful death for her, as a former slave-turned-into-a-Christian strangles her lovingly, if one can ever do that. The director nevertheless lets the viewer get a taste of this poisonous environment, the nature of Alexandria overrun by religious zealots, Christians suppressing any opposition, opposing Jews who counterattack and, as a result, pay a hefty price of being forced out of the city. This is the rise of Christianity told from a very different, negative point of view. I am not sure I know enough about it to comment, but what struck me is something else – the position of women at such an early period of monotheism.
In the film, the Christian bishop Cyril orders that Orestes, the Roman prefect, publicly accept Christianity by affirming his faith in scriptures stating that women must dress modestly and must sit and stand silently. Cyril quotes this as the word of God, though it is difficult to take it as such. Amenabar paints him as a man hungry for power who will use any means at his disposal to remove obstacles to his reaching the top – Hypatia represents an important obstacle, as she influences Orestes’ decision-making on Christians in Alexandria.
It is incredibly unfortunate and sad for humanity that women, at a moment when they could have led the world toward progress and change, were [and in some ways, still are] confined to the shadow of men. More than anything, I was saddened at the sudden realisation that the world today would have been a different place had women been the equals of men, as religion preached. Think of the perspectives that would be represented in war and peace – contrary to the beliefs of some feminists, I don’t think the world would have been a more peaceful place if women had ruled it. To make such an assumption would be to ignore the role of some prominent female leaders who led their countries into conflict, i.e. Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, and why not, Tansu Ciler and Benazir Bhutto. But to have that view represented would have made such a difference in human progress.
As I watched the film, I kept thinking of the discoveries that would have been expedited with their help. Surely, two minds are better than one, and two minds thinking in different ways would have certainly led to more positive progress in less time than it took the male-dominated fields of history, science, philosophy, and literature. Amenabar symbolically illustrates this absence as he depicts Hypatia discovering the Earth’s revolution around the Sun 1200 years before a male astronomer made the realisation (it has not been confirmed that Hypatia actually discovered this fact – most of the information present on her is in the form of letters by her students and philosophers who wrote after her death).
For the last three hours since I saw the film, I couldn’t help but think “what if…? what if…? what if…?” What if women had been treated as men’s equals from the beginning? What if they had been treated the way scriptures (including the Bible and the Qur’an) intended them to be treated, as equal to, but different from men? What would the world be like today if women had not been cut off from public presence? What would the world be like today if women had not been burnt at the stake for conducting research, for asking questions, for doubting?
Women’s informal influences on the way men handled the world should not be underestimated, and we will perhaps never know to what extent men’s actions have been affected by Hypatias of the world. However, we will never know how the world would have looked today if women had been treated as men’s intellectual equals.
As I walked home with my dear friend, a young woman whose high level of intelligence and wisdom continually dwarves mine, I remembered Fatima-al-Fihri, who, in the nascent days of Islam, founded the first and oldest degree-granting university in the world in year 859. A single woman, a historic moment.
My friend, when asked what she thought of the film, responded that she thought it was bad because it conveyed a dangerous message proposing that religion produced discrimination against women. But to see it this way is to deny Agora’s true objective, that of showing how threatened religious leaders felt by the presence of women. I walked on and did not say anything, though in my mind, I kept thinking of one of the most memorable quotes of the film, uttered by Hypatia in one of her most desperate moments: “Synesius, you don’t question what you believe, or cannot. I must.”
