No Christians Killed Hypatia
Toland's argument is deliberately provocative: the men who murdered Hypatia were, in every way that matters, not practising the religion they claimed. He cites Socrates Scholasticus's own verdict — that the killing brought infamy on the whole Alexandrian church, since violence of this kind is 'foreign to the Christian Institution' — and then pushes past it, arguing that neither the doctrines nor the ceremonies of Cyril's church were ever taught by Christ or his apostles.
for Slaughters, and Fightings, and such like Things, are quite foreign to the Christian Institution.
Three Sorts of Saints
Toland then generalises from Cyril to a taxonomy of canonization itself. Most saints, he argues, fall into three categories, none especially deserving veneration: writers who prostituted their talents to magnify Church authority, wealthy or powerful men who bought sanctity with donations and persecutions, and self-mortifying visionaries mistaken for the pious. Sainthood, on this account, tracks institutional usefulness far more than virtue.
First, Men have been dubbed Saints, for promoting the Grandeur of the Church by all their Endeavours, especially by their Writings
A Verdict Framed as History
The pamphlet ends by naming what killed Hypatia not as mob fury alone but as 'that Antichristian Spirit' — clerical power protecting itself from a laywoman more learned, more trusted by the civil magistrate, and more admired than the men who claimed spiritual authority over the city. Toland's history is, by design, also an argument about his own century's church-state entanglements.
Drawn from Chapters XX through XXII of Toland's Hypatia, the pamphlet's closing indictment of Cyril's canonization.
Related Concepts
