[Published on the website of St Catherine’s Greek Orthodox Church, Mascot NSW, 30/11/2018.

It can be read
online at http://stcatherine.org.au]

St Catherine, Hypatia, and Tradition vis-à-vis Historiography

By Mario Baghos

For Vika (Katya)

The great late fourth/early fifth century Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia cuts an impressive
figure. She exceeded her male peers in the philosophical sciences of late antiquity—
surpassing them in astronomy and mathematics—or so we are told. In truth, we do not have
many sources that point towards her literary output, the Suda Lexicon, composed in
Byzantium in the tenth century AD, being the foremost.
That she was an outstanding woman of her era is attested to in the available sources;
but attempts to create a detailed profile of her from these are problematic. Elsewhere, I have
demonstrated that the sources that blame her tragic death on St Cyril of Alexandria are a
modern construct—the result of the prejudice of Enlightenment thinkers against the Roman
Catholic Church of their time.1 Seeking a paragon of wisdom from the past to demonstrate
their own liberal rationality, while at the same time looking to denigrate the Church of their
own day, they chose—and artistically embellished—the profiles of Hypatia and Cyril to suit
their needs. The former represented the final flickers of classical wisdom, to which the
Enlightenment ‘savants’ believed they were the rightful heirs; a wisdom that was
extinguished by the ‘arrogant’ Cyril. But as I have shown, these portraits are constructs that
display the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality and anti-Christian bias; they have no basis
in reality.
The ‘Cyril versus Hypatia’ construct points to a problem inherent in our
reconstruction of the past. Since the past has to do with history, then it is a problem inherent
in historiography as an academic discipline, which has its contemporary, secular roots in
Enlightenment thinking: to what extent do we read our own agendas into the persons of the
past? There is, in fact, a temporal chasm between past events and the people involved in
them, and the present vantage point from where the contemporary writes. The historian, as an
active subject/interpreter attempting to bridge this chasm, takes with them all of the
conditions of the present, as well as their own mind, in this endeavour. The result is that
sources are chosen according to the historian’s bias—itself conditioned by the zeitgeist of the
times—which are brought to bear on sources stemming from epochs that are lost to us, and to
minds that we cannot penetrate. In fact, the past, through archaeological, cultural, and literary
fragments that might themselves be partial, incomplete or biased—thereby not revealing the
whole truth—is refracted through a contemporary lens that is influenced by the extent to
which the historian can approximate to that distant context: to understand its language,
culture, etc. But the historian can never know everything. The past will remain forever to him
or her a representation…

I am indebted to Revd Father Athanasios Giatsios, parish priest of St Catherine’s Greek Orthodox Church,
Mascot NSW, for suggesting that I write this article.
1
Mario Baghos, ‘Ecclesial Memory and Secular History in the Conflicting Representations of St Cyril of
Alexandria,’ in Alexandrian Legacy: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Doru Costache, Philip Kariatlis, and Mario
Baghos (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 246–80.
 This does not mean that historiography is not worthwhile, but it is not, as has been
emphatically asserted in the academy for over a century, an objective science. Historiography
can instead be construed as a worthwhile approximation that engages in an active, creative
narrative process that tells us just as much about the past as it does our own circumstances.
One might be tempted to think: how can we ever know anything about the past if it is
only simply a construct? Then what would be the point? Well, the past is not simply
constructed, it happened! Everything depends, rather, on how one understands the past’s
impact on the present. The past obviously influences the present in ways that leave concrete,
identifiable traces in cultural artefacts, literature, archaeological remains etc., but the past
also impacts the present through the living memory of the experiences, representations, and
information that are transmitted from generation to generation. This is not to undermine the
work of the contemporary historian, which is incredibly valuable when attempting to create
for us—in a language that we can understand—narratives that present the past in meaningful
ways.
Things become problematic, however, when the historian infringes upon epochs and
persons that are interpreted differently by other meaning-making communities. History
writing becomes more than problematic: it becomes offensive when the historian, using their
own peculiar toolkit, represents Christian saints in ways that are not consonant with the
manner in which these saints have been venerated for centuries by various traditional
communities, like the Orthodox Church (e.g. the case of Cyril). And it is precisely Orthodox
Tradition, which, to evoke its etymology, is a faithful, integral, passing on of representations
from the past within a sacred framework, that represents a corollary—and perhaps even a
corrective—to the historiographical method when it engages with, and misrepresents, holy
persons.
According to the contemporary historiographical method, St Catherine of
Alexandria—while spared the abuse hurled at her fellow Alexandrian, St Cyril—never
existed, and was in fact deliberately modelled on Hypatia as a Christian corollary to the
pagan sage. The argument goes something like this: since there is no evidence for Catherine
in the historical record of antiquity (at least, no evidence outside of the Church’s memory),
and since she is also represented as a great intellectual, versed in the philosophies of her time,
then she must simply have been made up. But St Catherine is venerated in the Orthodox
Church on November 25 as an intercessor to our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, my wife is named
after her, my own parish in Mascot, NSW (like countless others) is dedicated to her, where
just this past week over a thousand people gathered for her feast day, triumphantly parading
her sacred icon around the Church after the liturgy. All this over someone who does not
exist?
So far, our argument runs as such: just because there is no material evidence for the
existence of a person in the past apart from a transmission of their memory from generation
to generation (documents, artefacts, etc., having been destroyed or lost), does not mean that
that person did not exist. Moreover, there are relics of St Catherine in Sinai; but I anticipate
that those outside the Church would be suspicious of these, even though in Orthodoxy the
phenomenon of relic fabrication never really existed in the way that it did for the Catholic
Church in the Middle Ages. Detractors might also respond that human beings have expended
greater energy on beliefs that have no basis in reality. But just like the historian has their
method to verify facts from the past (which, I should reiterate, is a method that I do not
dismiss—I just question the extent of their judgements/narratives based on this method), so
too does the Church have its own method to ‘verify’ the existence of the saints in Christ, and
that is Tradition. For while there is a chasm between the past and the present in the
historiographical enterprise, in the Church the eternal God who is beyond the historical
continuum (i.e. past, present, and future) and yet paradoxically immanent within it, is
manifested in Tradition which is inextricably linked with the Church since its beginnings,
“the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3), and passed down through its
hierarchy appointed by the holy apostles and its saints.2 The Church experiences the saints
directly, those living and those deceased,3 and remembers them as participants in Christ. In
light of this experience, it passes on authentic, divinely inspired representations of the saints
from generation to generation precisely through this divinely inspired Tradition, venerating
them on their respective feast days through commemoration and hymns, and entreating them
to intercede to Christ in our behalf. Catherine happens to be one of these saints, meaning that
even though the historiographical method can find no evidence for her outside of the Church,
nevertheless the very fact of her veneration within the Church for countless generations is
evidence in itself that she existed, and continues to exist in the Lord Christ who eternally
preserves her memory within holy Tradition—the bridge between the past and the present—
and to whom she prays for us unceasingly.
For the Church, Catherine lived towards the end of the third/early fourth century AD.
She was a beautiful and brilliant philosopher and princess, who was converted by an
immediate and real experience of Christ. For the complete details of this, one should read her
hagiography in the Synaxarion, but briefly: she wanted to avoid marriage because of the
social obligations it entails. Instead she wished to continue with her learning and studies,
daring her family to find someone as beautiful and wise as her that would be a suitable
match. Of course, her family was unable to find anyone, but this situation disclosed her pride
and vanity. Catherine then dreamt of the Mother of God holding the Christ child, who
rejected her because of her pride and vanity. Visiting a Christian elder to discover the
meaning of this dream, Catherine discovered and repented of her sinful condition, and
subsequently dreamt again of the Mother of God holding Christ: but this time he accepted her
and placed a ring on her finger, making her his spiritual ‘bride.’
A secular reading of history would dismiss all of this, but in the Church we believe
that Christ fills history with his presence and that he appears to the saints, so why not also to
St Catherine, who from that point onwards dedicated herself to the Gospel and suffered
terrible persecution. Testifying against a pagan sacrifice put on by the emperor Maximinus—
a perpetrator of the Great Persecution against the Church in the early 300s—the latter desired
her, and Catherine promptly rejected his romantic advances. He put her to the test by forcing
her to debate his philosophers, and she elegantly converted them to the true philosophy, the
love of Christ, the “wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). This resulted in their martyrdom.
Various menologia give different accounts in relation to the number of philosophers
(between fifty and one-hundred and fifty),4 but such discrepancies are miniscule and do not
compromise the overall presentation of Catherine’s life. Next, it would be her turn to be
martyred. A wheel interspersed with sharp knives was created as an implement to torture her,
but broke apart when the time came to put the saint to death.

2
Who need not be part of the hierarchy but can be male or female, ordained or unordained, married or
unmarried.
3 Since living saints often encounter, by God’s grace, saints who have long since passed way yet are alive with

Christ in heaven.
4
The Menologion of emperor Basil II, ninth century, mentions fifty philosophers. The Synaxarion used by the
Church of Constantinople, one-hundred and fifty.
 Some might note the unavoidable similarity between iconographic representations of
the crowned St Catherine holding the wheel, the instrument of her torture, along with a
cornucopia, and a palm branch, to images of the Greco-Roman goddess Tyche or Fortuna
who was also depicted as crowned, holding a cornucopia and who was associated with the
Rota Fortunae or ‘wheel of fortune.’ Some might superficially judge these similarities as a
form of cultural appropriation—and indeed, the Church did borrow motifs from ancient
cultures in order to communicate the Gospel message, but it is clear that something far more
nuanced is happening here. Since in the Church we believe that God’s providence arranges
all things for our salvation, and since—in the ancient world—Tyche/Fortuna was associated
with the destiny of peoples and nations, then we may argue that providence arranged things
so that Catherine’s willing assent to be martyred—undertaken freely—would be undertaken
on a wheel, similar to the wheel of fortune, in order to demonstrate the superiority of freedom
in Christ to blind destiny. Thus, the icon of St Catherine shifts the viewer’s attention away
from Fortune, now dethroned, to Catherine’s free embrace of the instrument on which she
was to be killed.
St Catherine was eventually decapitated by the emperor Maximinus. Tradition states
that her body was relocated by angels to Mount Sinai, for according to her wishes she did not
want to be discovered. Relics of the saint are venerated there to this day, and throughout the
world—despite the myth of her non-existence—the faithful continue to venerate her on her
feast day, November 25, and chant her divinely inspired apolytikion:

Let us praise the most auspicious bride of Christ, the divine Catherine,
Protectress of Sinai, our aid and our help,
For she brilliantly silenced the eloquence of the impious
By the sword of the Spirit,
And now, crowned as a martyr
She asks great mercy for all.

Great Martyr and All-Wise Bride of Christ, St Catherine, intercede for us!

Fresco of St Catherine painted by Mr Andrew Boucas. It depicts her protecting the church dedicated to her in
Mascot, NSW, and is located in its narthex.