Agora - Movie Review

Agora: A Movie Review

 

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Copyright Fabio Pagani

 

Written by Dan McDonald

 

Agora (2009) with Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Ashraf Barhom, Michael Lonsdale, Sami Samir and others. Directed by Alejandro Amenabar.

 

            In the most Conservative days of my life I might not have watched “Agora”. I would have treated the movie as an attack on my Christian faith. I would have yearned, not to have to think of a time when people motivated by a commitment to the Christian faith could resort to mob activity where they destroyed their opposition, both plundering and murdering people in disputes. I might have understood this part of history as something to be forgotten or not believed. But the story of what happened to Hypatia is a story too important for Christians to ever forget. The Psalmist spoke on an occasion of sins of his youth that distressed him unto old age. In our day there is a tendency to believe that no one should be ashamed. But there is a shame over our former activities both personal and corporate that likely should never be forgotten unto the day when a Savior wipes the tears from our eyes and tells us that the former things are no more. We cling to forgiveness for such sins but they grieve us when we think back upon them. Perhaps our Christian sins, which we have done as a Christian community also need to impact us, not that we might make rants against people that have not learned what we have learned, but that we might remember what others of our own ilk have done if we forget. I would like to forget what happened in Alexandria during the days when a woman named Hypatia taught a philosophy class.

            The movie “Agora” seeks to portray the dark times of Hypatia’s Alexandria at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century leading up to Hypatia’s death in 415 AD. Rachel Weisz presents the movie’s picture of Hypatia. She is a respected philosopher, who teaches students regardless of creed and maintains that while the Christian is obligated to believe what they cannot see, that she as a philosopher is expected to question everything she can see as well as what she cannot see. She would prefer to teach a class where all the members of her class whether pagan, Jew, or Christian see one another as equals and worthy of respect. But Alexandria’s turmoil will affect all of them. The city’s turmoil grew as Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, protector of his Christian flock vies with Orestes, the Roman Empire’s prefect in the region, who seeks to govern equitably over all persons living in Alexandria. As the varied people groups turn on one another Hypatia as an advisor to Orestes becomes a symbol of the non-Christian opposition and threat to Alexandria’s Christians. It is the story of how Hypatia becomes hated by the mob, a Christian mob, which will murder her, hew her body into pieces and drag her through the city streets. It is a history we who are Christians want to forget, but perhaps for that reason we must never forget it.

I suspect that the producers of this movie saw application from the history of Hypatia’s time with that of our own. Rome’s culture wars were real, and were often wars fought to the death. It would have been a foreign and strange idea to Romans, that one’s religion was primarily the expression of their individual faith and beliefs. The Roman idea of religion was more rooted in civic realities. The idea of Rome was that it was an eternal empire. Religion was an expression of the state, a nationally recognized meaning for the citizenry of the empire that would be forever. In essence the gods and goddesses were ideas that represented the eternality of Rome. Perhaps this is why it became easier for Rome to change its gods and goddesses to that of the Holy Trinity than it was for Rome to imagine that one day its empire might be no more. Rome could still exist if the old city on the Tiber was abandoned in favor of a new one on the Bosporus. Gods and capital cities were temporary ways of imagining the empire that would never end. Perhaps that is the reason why when Christians became the privileged religion of the empire it so quickly became capable of eradicating every group and every individual conscience not under its command. Rome changed the fashion of its religion, but the empire remained intact for its last centuries.

This is a movie where we are reminded of how our religious principles which seem sacred to us can become words twisted into instruments meant to terrorize others. For those of us living in modern times, these ancient disputes resulting in riots killing hundreds seem like strange events serving mere abstract principles. “Agora” shows these struggles in their very human context until we are forced to recognize that culture wars whether in Rome, in a polarized American Republic, or in the terrors of the Middle East all have similarities with one another and with what took place in ancient Alexandria. In every culture war there are those who are privileged and those whom the privileged believe must be controlled and marginalized.

For me the sobering reality of which I was reminded by “Agora” is that it took so little time for Christians in Rome to move from being the persecuted people suffering for their convictions to becoming the ones capable of oppressing and slaughtering their enemies. It makes me try to increase my grip on the words of him who once said, “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” That, it seems to me, is wisdom to be cherished both by those being persecuted and those who have been granted both power and privilege. For as much as our faith is tested when enduring persecution, it is probably more tested when enduring eras of power and privilege.