The Pagan Philosopher Who Became a Christian Bishop and Wrote His Old Teacher Letters

Synesius was born around 373 AD into one of the senior Greek aristocratic families of Cyrene, the old Doric colony on the Libyan coast that had stood since the 7th century BC. By the late 4th century the city was past its prime — partly silted up, partly raided by camel-mounted nomads from the southern desert — but the surviving Cyrenean elite still sent its sons to Alexandria for the standard Hellenic education. Synesius arrived there in his early twenties.

His teacher was Hypatia. She was the same age as him, possibly a few years older, and was already running the Neoplatonic school in succession to her father Theon. The relationship lasted twenty years and survives in seven letters from Synesius to her, on subjects from astronomical instruments to family illnesses to philosophical despair. Hypatia’s side of the correspondence does not survive.

Astrolabe

The first letter — Letter 154 in the standard numbering, written around 395 — accompanies a gift of an astrolabe. Synesius had had the instrument constructed by an Alexandrian craftsman to a design Hypatia had taught him; he was sending one back to her as a courtesy gift. The accompanying treatise (De dono, “On the Gift”) is the earliest surviving Greek description of the astrolabe’s construction. Synesius credits Hypatia in it as his source for both the mathematics and the practical construction technique.

The Alexandria of Synesius’s student years was the city in which the Serapeum had been destroyed by Patriarch Theophilus in 391 — a few years before Synesius arrived — and in which the surviving Neoplatonic and pagan-philosophical community was substantially marginalized. Hypatia’s school taught a religiously neutral version of Platonism that could accommodate both pagan and Christian students. Synesius was probably nominally Christian when he arrived; the formal doctrinal questions had not, for him, become important.

The embassy

Synesius left Alexandria around 397 and returned to Cyrene, where he managed his family’s substantial estates. In 399 the Pentapolis (the regional government of Cyrenaica) sent him as ambassador to the eastern Roman court at Constantinople to plead for tax relief and military protection against the nomadic raiding that was destabilizing the coastal economy. The embassy lasted three years.

His surviving address to the Emperor Arcadius — On Kingship, delivered around 400 — was unusually frank. He criticized the emperor’s reliance on barbarian mercenaries, the corruption of the palace administration, the disconnection of imperial policy from provincial reality. Several modern historians have argued that the speech contributed to the Gothic-Roman crisis at Constantinople in 400 that produced the expulsion of the Gothic foederati from imperial service and a substantial shift in late-Roman military policy.

He went home in 402 with limited tax concessions, no useful military support, and a substantially deepened pessimism about the trajectory of the Eastern Empire.

Bishop against his will

By 410 Synesius was the senior local landowner of the Cyrenean coast and one of the few educated Greek-speaking men capable of conducting both military negotiations with the nomads and ecclesiastical correspondence with Alexandria. The Christian community of Ptolemais — the smaller coastal city about 100 kilometres west of Cyrene — had lost its bishop and could not find a suitable replacement. The Patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilus himself, asked Synesius to take the position.

Synesius’s surviving letter of acceptance is one of the most extraordinary documents of late ancient Christianity. He listed his objections at substantial length: he was happily married and did not intend to celibate or send away his wife; he did not believe in the literal resurrection of the body; he did not believe in the literal creation of the world; he wished to continue to philosophize, hunt, and play with his children. He took the position only on Theophilus’s explicit promise that none of these positions would be required to change.

He governed the see for the next three years. The correspondence from the period — about 150 surviving letters — covers everything from diocesan administration to the deteriorating military situation to the deaths of his three sons (all of whom died within an eighteen-month period in 411-412 of an unidentified epidemic).

He died of unidentified illness sometime in late 412 or 413, aged about 40. His wife and surviving daughter are not heard of again.

Hypatia after

Synesius died one or two years before the murder of Hypatia in March 415. The two events are unconnected — Synesius’s death from natural causes, Hypatia’s from the systematic violence of an Alexandrian Christian mob under the next patriarch (Theophilus’s nephew Cyril) — but together they mark the end of the late Alexandrian Neoplatonic tradition that had connected pagan philosophy to early Christian theology through figures like Synesius. The surviving members of the school dispersed to Athens (where it continued at the Academy for another century, until the closure of 529 produced the further dispersal of figures like Damascius) and to private estates in Asia Minor.

The seven Synesius-to-Hypatia letters survive in a single 14th-century Byzantine manuscript family, copied from earlier exemplars now lost. The astrolabe Synesius sent her in 395 has not been recovered.