In his third novel, Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face, Charles Kingsley seemingly departed from his previous focus on his own era to produce a historical romance. However, as the title indicates, he still dealt with contemporary issues. The book first appeared in serial form in Fraser’s Magazine from January 1852 to April 1853. As a radical Christian, Kingsley hoped to villainize Catholicism through historical fact. He suggested certain Catholic leaders of his own time through characters such as Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, who proved far more interested in political expediency than humanitarianism. For contrast, he borrowed an additional real-life character in Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, a figure who more closely shared Kingsley’s own ideology, an affinity for sports, and the belief that priests should be allowed to have families.

Set in fifth-century Alexandria, the novel features a pagan prefect who governs his city with ineptitude. The novel’s heroine, Hypatia, daughter to the learned mathematician Theon, represents the teachings of Neoplatonists and comes into conflict with the strong forces of developing Christianity, led by Cyril. The lovely Hypatia struggles to maintain a philosophical academy devoted to the old Greek model, representing the transcendentalism that Kingsley so despised in his own age. Kingsley implies that the freedom afforded women by an education and the right to withhold sex will always conflict with the male need for power over females. Hypatia struggles to pit wisdom against passion, while Kingsley calls readers’ attention to the similarity between her ideals and those of ascetic Christians, whose denial of the human need for love disgusted Kingsley.

When a Christian monk, Philemon, arrives, he finds his fellow Christians’ fanaticism repugnant and campaigns against their mindless devotion. He falls in love with Hypatia’s humanitarian approach and her desire for moderation in all things. While he appeals to his fellow Christians to be more reasonable, he finds the extreme skeptical intellectualism of Raphael Aben-Ezra unpalatable. Kingsley modeled Raphael, the most interesting character, on a Jewish friend who had left his own beliefs to join the Church of England. He manages to create brilliant parallels between Alexandria and his own Victorian London, picturing both cities as commercial centers with all the cultural advantages such centers offer, including the theater and halls of learning, shadowed by decrepit slums filled with violence and turmoil. Forces get out of control when Hypatia is falsely accused of turning the prefect against the Christians. A mob captures her and literally rips her to pieces, after which Philemon leaves the city in total disillusionment.

Critics find brilliant Kingsley’s representation of the many cults of classic times, as well as his mob scenes, but his plot becomes difficult to follow with the myriad of unnecessary characters and their convoluted esoteric arguments. Philemon seems to be the male protagonist but remains an observer, too uninvolved to be heroic. Kingsley hoped to reveal Christianity as superior to transcendentalism but managed to avoid characterizing either one as purely good or evil. In order to remain true to history, he had to acknowledge that any philosophical or religious movement, however humanitarian, could fail its followers if it had a poor or corrupt leader and followers too blind by irrational passions to question those leaders. Many Christians felt Kingsley should have villainized all creeds other than Christianity, a failure which ironically lost him the very readers he sought to vindicate. Charges of immorality resulting from his description of sexual excesses marked him so strongly that Kingsley was denied an honorary Oxford degree a decade later. The book moved John Henry Newman, a lifelong adversary of Kingsley, to interrupt his theological studies and write a novel in response, Callista (1856).

While not widely read in later generations, Hypatia stands as an excellent example of fiction written for a specific purpose, as well as an impeccably researched novel that remains true to history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stubbs, Charles William. Charles Kingsley and the Christian Social Movement. 1899. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1974.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 1852, 1853, 19th century fiction, Alexandria, Alexandria parallels, Analysis of Charles Kingsley Hypatia, Analysis of Charles Kingsley Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face, Bishop of Alexandria, Bishop of Cyrene, Callista, Catholicism, Charles Kingsley, Charles Kingsley Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face, Charles William Stubbs, Christian fanaticism, Christian social movement, Christian superiority, Cyril, Fraser’s Magazine, Historical Romance, Hypatia, Hypatia criticism, Hypatia novel, intellectualism, John Henry Newman, Kingsley biography, Neoplatonism, Philemon, radical Christian, Raphael Aben-Ezra, religious movements, Synesius, theological response, Theon, transcendentalism vs Christianity, Victorian London