| Prickett, Stephen. “Purging Christianity of
its Semitic Origins: Kingsley, Arnold and the Bible,” in Juliet John and
Alice Jenkins (eds.). Rethinking Victorian Culture (London: Macmillan,
2000): 63-79.
Prickett examines the role of pagan civilization and the Church in Hypatia. Kingsley is favorable to neither. Rather, his theory of history leads him to admire the Teutonic races who are civilization’s future. The Catholicism of fourth-century Alexandria is as doomed as the pagan world it supplanted. It is merely a proto-Christianity that is “saved only by the presence within it of certain forward-looking characters who dimly foreshadow, as it were, the coming age of Teutonic Protestantism a thousand years in the future” (68-9). Hypatia; Religion; Racial Prejudices; Anti-semitism; Arnold, Matthew. |