Hypatia and Silent Dogmatism
Last night I hosted the Agora movie night fundraiser for Cherry Hill Seminary and was moved by the intensity of the film. If you haven’t yet had a chance to view the film, do yourself a favor and watch Agora. It is available on Netflix, Amazon, or itunes.
The movie’s epicenter was Hypatia, a Neoplatonist philosopher who refused to give up her questioning nature and blindly accept the Christian faith that was sweeping through Europe. The pivotal line in the movie, at least to me, occured when Hypatia said the following:
You don’t question your religion, you can’t. I must.
That struck a deep and resonating chord within me. Hypatia was torn to pieces for her passion to question and seek out the truth of her own experience and intuition. It is the ability to follow our own hearts, our intuition, our intellect that makes the human experience so individualized and experiential. I often hear people say, “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” Religion, for many, has come to symbolize rigidity, dogma, and the un-questioning acceptance of truth. The Abrahamic religions are all “revealed religions” and it is antithetical to question that which has been divinely revealed.
During our post-movie discussion, I asked those present about the need for religion to be a living, breathing thing that changes, adapts, and grows to fit the needs and experiences of the person and the times. During the movie, one of the Christian priests reads a passage from the 1st Book of Peter in the Bible.
I desire that everywhere men should lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger and without disputing. In like manner, I desire women to dress modestly, to display decency and propriety. I require that a woman inquire quietly and with full submission. I do not permit women to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.
One of the women at our discussion pointed out that women are becoming more prominent leaders in some sects of the Christian faith and that this might be evidence that some aspects of Christianity are changing. This is an interesting point. The only way a revealed religion can grow and adapt is if it is read metaphorically or if some passages are ignored. The fact that this is taking place, at least in some aspects of monotheistic faiths, is evidence of the need for such change. Ours is not a revealed religion, but I wonder if we don’t have unspoken dogma as well. I observe many new Pagans fretting over whether or not they are performing ritual action correctly – the right way. They get absorbed into picking out only the appropriate correspondences for the elements, only performing ritual steps in a prescribed manner. Is this a form of silent dogmatism?
I suggest that Hypatia’s lesson is of central importance to Paganism. We must question our religion, our practices, our faith. To do so, allows us to bring it into our interiority, to make it uniquely ours, to understand why we believe what we do and why we do what we do. If we do not question and individualize our religious practices, are we really so different from dogmatic Christians?
I often wonder how reconstructionism, as opposed to revivalism, deals with this challenge of making religion a living, breathing, metamorphosing experience that is relevant for today? Should we accept the ancient practices of a given region or people as being more valid or appropriate than our own experience with the divine? Using ancient cultures or even Contemporary Paganism as a framework in which we creatively utilize our intuition and experiential embodiment seems to be at the heart of what Hypatia is telling us about religion.
I challenge us all to question our practices and our beliefs, to know why we choose to do what we do and how it reflects our own needs and experiences as a living creature in the 21st century. I also challenge all of us to consider why people are fond of saying they are spiritual and not religious. Is it because religion has become associated with inflexibility, that it is unable to accomodate the uniqueness of our own embodied experience? How can we ensure that Contemporary Paganism does not fall into a similar trap, whether we be reconstructionists, revivalists, or eclectics?
Men have become the tools of their tools. - Henry David Thoreau
Don’t let the tools and symbols that we utilize, the cultures and the past that we idealize become a silent form of dogmatism that robs you of experiencing your divinely embodied nature in a way that only you can. Remember Hypatia – love and passion are found in the questioning search of our personal experience of God/Goddess. Have the freedom to be yourself.
