The Philosopher's Tarot: Hypatia, Augustine, and the Decline

Look, I think about the Roman Empire just as much as the next guy.

(other draws, buy the deck from the publisher)

Here’s today’s random draw:

Guess it’s time to talk about the ongoing decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Hypatia and Augustine were born within a few years and less than 2,000 miles apart, and both were nominally citizens of the Roman Empire. They were both prominent philosophers with overlapping interests. And yet, it’s unlikely they ever met, because the tower was crumbling.

Augustine was born in 354 CE in what is now Algeria, in Northwest Africa. At the time of his birth, this was the Roman province of Numidia. Hypatia was born in Egypt, somewhere from 4 to 24 years later (unlike Augustine, we don’t have her autobiography to reference). Egypt was considered part of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern/Western distinction mattered different amounts at different times—sometimes formally independent, sometimes still calling themselves united.

Augustine was a witness to, and victim of, one of the more overt markers of the Decline. In his seventies, and already in ill health, he died while the Vandals were laying siege to Hippo, the city in which he’d spent most of his adult life. The Vandals went on to sack the city of Rome itself, which is a popular choice if you’re looking for a single event to mark the collapse.

Hypatia is involved in what feels like in some ways an even more important marker. She didn’t make it to her seventies. She was murdered in Alexandria by a mob, one that had been influenced by the local bishop Cyril. Like William of Orange and his ilk, Cyril had it both ways—he denied any involvement with the mob, while identifying with their beliefs and using the murder to consolidate power. The Eastern Roman Empire tried to punish him, but eventually gave up after he incited a mob to try to storm their capital building, as one does. (Today Cyril’s venerated as a saint in most organized branches of Christianity.)

The ability of the Vandals to sack cities with impunity is the exclamation point at the end of the Pax Romana, the age where imperial power dramatically reduced the amount of large scale conflict. The ability of Cyril to (apparently) just have his most prominent political opponent murdered and benefit thereby is a similar proof of the end of the age of Civis Romanus sum, where across the Empire, just saying those magic words (“I am a citizen of Rome”) was enough to invoke legal protection with actual teeth.

Deconstructing Law

So far, I’ve only been invoking the Tower card for its original Rider-Waite meaning—destruction of mighty institutions (the Tower is being destroyed in the original art as well). But this is the philosopher’s tarot, so the Tower has been punningly renamed to Deconstructionism.

This term was coined by Jacques Derrida, a 20th-century philosopher born, like Augustine, in Algeria, at the time part of the French Empire after an incident with a poorly-aimed flyswatter. Like that of his own favorite philosopher, Nietzsche, Derrida’s worldview is more nihilistic in popular imagination than in the actual text. “Deconstructionism” is … well, I’m not going to pretend to know it well enough to be able to accurately summarize what it is in a few sentences, but what it’s not is the act of picking apart a concept until nobody cares about it anymore. I think of it as a type of analysis (analysis itself being derived from the Greek work for deconstruction), that considers all concepts to be fluid, defined by their context and in particular by their elements of opposition to other concepts.

Laws sure are concepts defined by their opposites. A typical law consists of a description of how to break it, plus maybe a bit at the end about what happens if you do. (There’s something called “legal deconstruction”, but I don’t know what it is, so I’m just winging it here). You can only tell whether a law still exists when somebody breaks it. Do the specified consequences apply, or not?

To illustrate: I feel like I’ve seen a lot of lists of “silly laws” over the years, most of which are written so as to imply that all of these laws are still on the books. “It is illegal in Alabama to wear a fake moustache that causes laughter in church,” for example, often makes these lists (near the top, because of alphabetical order and also the mental image). Is it actually? You could try to answer that question by reference to our written body of law—was that ever a law? If so, was it ever formally repealed, or its legal context formally dissolved? But you can’t get a definitive “yes, it’s still a law” that way, because police may refuse to arrest, district attorneys might refuse to prosecute, jurors might refuse to convict, judges might declare it unconstitutional. If people think the odds of actually getting punished for it are very low, it’s not really a law, until they test and disprove their hypothesis. The only way to know for sure is to wear Groucho Marx glasses to an Alabama church, and see what happens.

Laws, and law-like things like the Bill of Rights, have a fixed, ideal form, the literal words, and a fluid form, its edges defined and redefined by transgression and enforcement. I’m on record in this space as very pro-First Amendment, but the ideal form of it isn’t the reality, and isn’t what I’ve been celebrating. The text begins “Congress shall make no law” and then goes on to list a bunch of things that Congress definitely does, and often should, make laws doing. The fluid form of the First Amendment lives wherever it’s successfully invoked: in an argument to the Supreme Court, in a rhetorical appeal to principle, in the minds of people drafting laws that won’t be struck down.

In the same way, when studying history, we can watch Pax Romana and Civis Romanus sum grow and shrink by looking for violations and their consequences. When Vandals sack a city in Roman Africa with impunity, we know the Pax has shrunk, and when they sack Rome itself, we know that it’s shattered. A violation without reprisal is diagnostic to historians, and can be safely assumed to be part of a snowball effect, where the weakness displayed emboldens more violators. Hypatia was a prominent celebrity—and she was a woman, which people had believed afforded her even more protection under common law. When Cyril’s faction got away with killing Hypatia, it meant that you could kill pretty much anyone, Roman citizen or no, if you had enough support.

Deconstructing Empire

Empire, being built out of many concepts and laws, is even more fluid than any of its components. Casablanca (one of my favorite movies, which I know makes me basic) depicts another northwest African city, caught in the ebb and flow of imperial tides. In the movie, Casablanca is where refugees come trying to escape the Third Reich. The Reich has many borders, but they come to Casablanca because it lies on a conceptual borderline too: the Reich considers it officially part of the Reich, so you can travel there freely, but the local government isn’t particularly loyal, so you can sometimes bribe someone to let you leave. This point of weakness exists because France was conquered in the wrong order: its political center, Paris, surrendered and was occupied before France’s outlying colonies. This means the city, personified by Claude Rains’s Captain Louis Renault, is part of the Reich only to the extent that he expects the Nazis to be able to punish him for disobedience, which in turn depends a great deal on perception—as he puts it, which way the winds are blowing. When people singing the French anthem drown out people singing the German one, it’s a symbolic victory with tangible consequences.

Casablanca, written and produced as propaganda based on stories from refugees, doesn’t get all the details of its ongoing situation right, but this dynamic really was at play in the region. Derrida’s Algeria is an example. The Algerians, who had been on the verge of a war of independence against the French anyway, were not enthusiastic supporters of Vichy France and the Reich. They complied only to the extent they believed they had to, which is part of how Derrida, a Jew, survived. The 120,000 Jews in Algeria were stripped of rights, exiled, some sent to Algerian work camps where many died. But they were never, as far as I know, systematically killed. From this, we see that Algeria was on the outskirts of the Reich, in every sense.

This is why it’s difficult to say when the Roman Empire actually fell, if ever. Had it already fallen when Saint Cyril confiscated all Jewish property, denying them their rights as citizens? Or was it much later, when people stopped thinking of it as real? Historians eventually start calling the Eastern Roman Empire the Byzantine Empire instead, but they always called themselves Roman. The first Reich called itself the Holy Roman Empire (and created the Princes of Orange as a way of pacifying its conquered subjects, incidentally).

To me, the names don’t matter. The Empire is its laws, principles, and customs. It lives, fluidly, in the places, times, and minds influenced by those customs. When we describe the Pax Romana as desirable, it shows that it still lives on, weakly. When we celebrate a modern international state of peace, it means the Pax is strong. The stronger the casus belli needs to be before a country can go to war, the stronger the Pax. And, separately, the rights and liberties of citizens ebb and flow. Whenever someone is attacked with impunity, Civis sum declines. Whenever someone successfully invokes their rights as a citizen, Civis sum rises.

Other aspects of the Empire should be overthrown. The principle that a state has a duty to expand its power, which we could call Carthago delenda est, lives on in constructs like Manifest Destiny and the CIA. “Carthage must be destroyed” must be destroyed. I’m glad on practical grounds that we mostly ditched Roman numerals (it’s probably too late to replace the alphabet, though, like Hangul or another Saint Cyril’s script did elsewhere).

Also, the architecture of governmental seats of power often imitates, and therefore kind of is, the architecture of Roman power. Or, more specifically, the ruins of it—we don’t paint our pseudo-classical marble, because on the ruins it’s imitating, all the paint has long ago been worn away. We should be more intentional about the ghosts we summon.

Prefer Summoning Spirits of the Ages to Ghosts of Martyrs

In discussing Augustine and Hypatia, I’ve centered their deaths over their lives. This is typical of discussion of Hypatia, little to none of whose original writing survived the ascension of the Church. Instead of saving her work, multiple groups claimed her as a martyr, with pagans spinning her as a victim of Christianity. This tactic may have backfired, by persuading everyone that Christians could kill pagans now.

It’s been atypical of me to do this to Augustine. His writing survived, so there’s more to talk about. Also, the Vandals weren’t targeting him specifically, and it’s hard to get too dramatic about The Fall of Hippo. But, you know, balance. If Hypatia was silenced by a saint, I can get a petty scrap of misplaced justice by briefly silencing Saint Augustine.

I try not to do this sort of thing. Deaths are dramatic and often important, so it’s hard to resist sometimes, but I’d rather focus on lives and ideas. When Lisa Kudrow guest starred as Hypatia in the afterlife on The Good Place, I liked that nobody mentioned the circumstances of her death.

I can at least describe a little bit of Hypatia’s philosophy by describing its opposition. Hypatia called herself a Platonic Idealist, but historians tend to pull a Byzantine switch and call her a Neoplatonist instead. Hypatia’s neoplatonic school taught that there was a fundamental, unifying divinity at the base of all reality, and that we could come to understand this divinity, The One, through mathematics. Augustine flirted with this, but recognized, correctly, that the neoplatonist approach could never lead in any principled way to Christianity, where he wanted to go. It might be possible to lock yourself in a room, reason from first principles, and correctly derive the existence of God. But it’s definitely not possible to lock yourself in a room, reason from first principles, and figure out which one of the many putative Messiahs was telling the truth, or that the ancient Hebrews needed to add blue fringes to their prayer shawls. It’s a matter of information theory—you can only get specific conclusions out if you put specific evidence in. Mathematics is too pure to ever bring you to Jesus.

Hypatia was indeed not a Christian, although many of her students and friends were. She was a polytheist. She believed that pure reasoning would bring us to The One, while living in the world would bring us to many gods, and she valued both perspectives. I…kind of endorse this? I think it pushes your intuition to a better place. The world is messy and contingent. Ideas, institutions, religions, animals, and mountains are, in one of my favorite phrases, accidents of history. But the world might not be fundamentally messy. Science and philosophy may still take us to simple truths, hidden below, above, and within the mess.

So here’s the manifesto from today’s reading. We will overthrow parts of the Roman Empire, while serving others, with intention. We will notice when we are free, and not obey the monstrous demands of a power distant in space or time. And we will summon Hypatia to our modern age—not as a martyred saint, but as a teacher and a citizen.