Synesius and the Bonds of Philosophical Friendship

Synesius addresses Hypatia not merely as an instructor but as 'Mother', 'Sister', and 'Instructress' — titles that Toland takes as evidence of a relationship exceeding ordinary tutelage. Her disciples called themselves Companions, bound to one another by a loyalty that outlasted the classroom, a pattern Toland compares to fellowship at Athens and in the colleges of his own day.

The most striking letters come after Synesius loses his children. Rather than turning to scripture or to his fellow bishops, he writes to Hypatia — confessing an anguish he cannot separate from bodily sickness, and asking only that she remember him. Toland presents this as the truest measure of what she was to her students: not a dispenser of doctrines but a confidante whose good opinion structured a life.

Toland does not let the irony pass unremarked: Synesius accepted the bishopric of Ptolemais while privately denying several of Christianity's central articles, and continued, by his editor's own account, to write 'as very a Heathen as ever' after his consecration. For Toland — a critic of clerical pretension throughout his career — the discrepancy is less a scandal than a demonstration that philosophical conviction runs deeper than institutional office.

Drawn from Chapters VI, IX, and X of Toland's Hypatia, which reproduce and discuss several of Synesius's surviving letters to his teacher.