Spencer Heath Archive

Item 708

Taping by Spencer MacCallum during conversation with Heath.

August 12, 1956?

Original is in item 705.

A book that made great impression on me when I was about 25 was Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia. Its basic theme is the fundamental superiority of the Christian religion, even in its crudest expression through dead monasticism and wild fanaticism, above the refined neo-Platonism of the Alexandrian School under Hypatia. To me, however, it had the opposite from the intended effect; it convinced me that the kind of Christianity that Kingsley accepted and approved was a degraded religion far lower in the scale of human values and usefulness to mankind than the idealism of Plato as it flowered in Plotinus.

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