Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  Euclid in his fussy orderliness, however, was the exact opposite of a celebrity personality, and because of this only a single anecdote has survived him. When one frustrated reader, Ptolemy Soter himself, high-handedly demanded a shortcut to understanding the difficult Elements, Euclid replied tersely that there is “no royal road to geometry.” And so the life of Alexandria continued on its parallel tracks, the one royal, the other intellectual.

  Other Alexandrian scholars of the third century B.C. were hardly less enterprising than Euclid. The physician Erasistratus practiced vivisection certainly on animals, possibly on human criminals, and came close to discovering the circulation of the blood. Long before Freud, he recognized that nervous breakdowns usually had a sexual component. The geographer Eratosthenes, a younger contemporary of Euclid, was certain that the earth was round; and by measuring shadows at midsummer in various locations, he was able to calculate the circumference of the globe, coming within fifty miles of the actual figure. His Map of the World, though inexact, shows three continents and names everything from Ireland to Sri Lanka. His successor, Claudius Ptolemy (perhaps a relative of the royal family), is responsible for the “Ptolemaic theory” that the sun revolves around the earth, the theory that would be held as dogma by the medieval church and against which the great Galileo would come to grief. Another scientist, Aristarchus of Samos, who collaborated with Claudius Ptolemy at Alexandria, suggested that, just possibly, the earth might revolve around the sun. Unfortunately and accidentally, Aristarchus’s works perished, while Ptolemy’s survived and so came, in time, to be awarded quasi-scriptural authority, an honor attained in the Middle Ages by a fair number of surviving Greek treatises.

  But however important scientists were to the look and pleasure of the city, general philosophers were the quintessential Alexandrian intellectuals. They were all of them children of Plato, the great philosopher who had taught at Athens in the early fourth century B.C., a lifelong bachelor who never engendered a child of his body but had philosophical children everywhere. Plato has made chapter-length appearances twice before in this seriesb because his influence on the Western world is unequaled. Here we must at least acknowledge his principal disciple, Plotinus of Alexandria, who lived in the third century A.D. and whose philosophy, dubbed “Neoplatonism,” was a guiding light to an immense variety of thinkers, both pagan and Christian.

  Though Plotinus studied at Alexandria and moved to Rome in midlife, he was born in neither place. He would never tell anyone where he was born, and no one could ever discover it. He said that his birth, that is, the occasion of the descent of his immortal soul into his embarrassingly corruptible body, had been—like all human births—a moment of ineffable catastrophe and would not bear discussion.

  Despite the high esteem in which Plotinus was held in the ancient world, much of what he had to say is hard to sit still for today. Like Plato and most of the later Greek philosophical tradition, Plotinus believed that all the Greek stories about the multiplicity of gods were no better than nursery tales. If the universe was to make sense, God must be (somehow) One. And Plotinus believed, along with Plato and many others, that we would all be better off without our bodies, which are made of matter, which is the principle of unintelligibility. The immortal soul, however, that spark of divinity imprisoned in the foul mud of materiality, yearns to shuffle off this mortal coil and fly back to the One.

  Though many things may be posited of Plotinus, nittygrittyness is not one of them. He is more lofty, more abstract than Plato, just about as sublime as sublime can be—and his prose, unlike Plato’s, can be virtually impenetrable. Still, he’s clearly in the Platonic tradition. When we read in Plato those gorgeously sensuous passages that scorn the material world—“beauty tainted by human flesh and coloring and all that mortal rubbish”—we can easily identify the magisterial source of Plotinus’s antimaterial loftiness. Even though Plato’s belittling of the flesh is in tension with his love (and perhaps even craving) for fleshly realities, and even though such tension is bleakly absent from the writings of Plotinus, there can be no question that Plato is Plotinus’s intellectual father.

  The Greek-sponsored philosophy of scorn for the flesh, articulated by Plato and further aerated by Plotinian sublimities, will leave indelible marks first on Jewish, then on Christian, attitudes. For both Jews and, later, Christians will come to live within the prevailing Greco-Roman cultural context; and it is virtually impossible for minority cultures to avoid absorbing and internalizing the principal values of the majority culture in which they move and breathe, whose language they speak and whose vocabulary becomes the currency of daily life. At the same time, it should be noted that the Greeks and the Romans (who took over the Greek philosophical inheritance more or less intact), though dismissive of the philosophical value of human flesh, reveled in the full panoply of its fleeting pleasures in ways that would remain markedly alien to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The statues of nude Eros that stood up everywhere in Alexandria and the lubricious lyrics about him were testimony to a god whose presence everyone took for granted. Sex, sex of all kinds, was everywhere. Give in. What, for heaven’s sake, would be the point of battling a god? You can’t win, so go where your desire takes you. Just bear in mind that—at the philosophical level—such rencontres have no Ultimate Significance.

  The Jewish moral tradition, like its younger sibling, the Christian, could not easily embrace this strange dichotomy that gave centrality to Eros in art and song while trivializing its importance philosophically. For Jews and Christians, all human actions were consequential, brimming with moral implications. At the same time, many Jews of the last centuries B.C. found themselves exceedingly attracted to Greek culture and especially to the novel idea of the soul that had its origin in Plato and his predecessors.

  The Jewish worldview, like other primeval worldviews, assumed that death was the end: when the body died, you died. Period. Both ancient Jews and ancient Greeks left room for a shadow world beneath the earth, where the insubstantial shades of what were once living men and women drifted like smoke. The Hebrews called this underworld Sheol, the Greeks Hades, but it was in essence the same place. Both cultures may have adapted their “Hell” from a similar shadow world that the even more ancient Mesopotamians had imagined; or it may simply be the normal way for early peoples to envision the shadowy existence of those who have been buried underground. What was important to the Jews was life, not death (which no one can do anything about, anyway). Live according to the laws of God, and you will live well and long.

  What then of the martyr, the one whose life is artificially shortened by his devotion to God, the one who is, say, executed by a God-hating tyrant? Are death and the gloom of Sheol his only rewards? Surely not. Out of such concerns arose the later Jewish idea of bodily resurrection—one’s return “in the flesh” by an act of God at “the end of days”—which would become central to primitive Christianity.

  But if we are to look forward to physical resurrection at the end of time, what may we say about the personal identity of the dead person in the meanwhile? If he cannot have utterly ceased to exist, where is he? It is here that the Plato-sponsored idea of the soul comes in so handy. “The souls of the just are in the hands of God,” concludes the Book of Wisdom, written by an Alexandrian Jew in the century before Christ, written not in Hebrew, the sacred language of the Jews, but in lively, contemporary Greek. This Book of Wisdom, which masqueraded under the title “The Wisdom of Solomon,” wrapped itself in the mantle of tradition, even though it was very much of its moment, the granddaddy of all spirituality books, a sort of “How to Love God and Still Be Cool by the Pool,” a book that shows you how to be faithful to Judaism while impressing your hip Greek neighbors with the right lingo.

  The Jewish community at Alexandria, probably as old as the city itself, boasted the largest Jewish population in the ancient world. In the third century B.C., under the second Ptolemy—Ptolemy Philadelphus (or Loving Brother)—a historic assembly of Jewish s
cholars had been convened on Pharos Island. Their task was to make a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures for deposit in the great Library. Thus would the insights of this singular monotheistic religion begin to be shared with the whole world. Several legends would afterwards accrue to this unusual enterprise: there were seventy-two scholars who took seventy-two days to complete their translations; and each, working separately, came up with the exact same translation.

  But however it was actually composed, the translation, called the Septuagint (or Seventy, after the approximate number of translators), turned into a best-selling sensation throughout the Greek-speaking world, not only among the many diaspora Jews who could no longer read Hebrew but even among gentiles in search of a more rigorous and satisfying spiritual way. Though few of the latter underwent circumcision or abided strictly by Judaism’s tedious dietary rules, they were welcomed to Jewish worship and study as “Godfearers” and “sons of Noah.” From their ranks many—probably most—of the first gentile Christians would be recruited. By the time Christianity appeared, editions of the Septuagint usually included the Book of Wisdom as well as a few other late compositions. This expanded version of the Septuagint, its books shuffled somewhat to coincide with Christian presuppositions, would then become known throughout the dawning medieval world as the “Old Testament.”c

  Before we begin to consider the impact that Christianity made on the Greco-Roman mindset, there is one more instance of Greek-influenced Judaism we should have a look at, in many ways the most elegant and influential. Philo Judaeus (Philo the Jew) was born at Alexandria in the last decades of the first century B.C. and died toward the middle of the first century A.D. Unlike his elder contemporary, the anonymous author of the Book of Wisdom, Philo was no popularizer. His extant works—and we by no means possess everything he wrote—run to thirty-five volumes in their annotated French edition. And though he commented on many subjects in the course of his impressive literary career, his main thrust was to expound on the sacred texts of the Septuagint in such a way that their stories and assertions would be rendered immune from Greek ridicule.

  For though there was throughout the late classical world much admiration for Judaism among both Greeks and Romans, Greek tongues were sharp, Greek logic was quick to seize on anomalies and contradictions, and Greek comedians delighted in parodying folkloric inanities and provincial narrow-mindedness. In not a few passages of the Septuagint, translated from exceedingly ancient (and foreign) texts into the sometimes clumsily Semitized prose of immigrant translators—what could sound like Molly Goldberg Greek to an educated ear—critics found considerable material for satire.

  Philo’s main device for turning Greek ridicule to admiration was allegorical interpretation. The talking serpent of Eden, for instance, is not meant to be a snake, silly. Rather, as might be the case in one of Aesop’s fables, it is the evil principle of pleasure. (Were you really so unsophisticated as to misunderstand that?) Moreover, God’s curse upon this principle, claimed Philo,

  is appropriate: “Earth shalt thou eat all the days of thy life” [Genesis 3:14]. For the food of the body brings pleasures of earth; and rightly so, it would seem. For there are two things of which we consist, soul and body. The body, of course, has been formed from the earth, but the soul belongs to the upper air, a shard detached from the Deity: “For God breathed into [Adam’s] face a breath of life and man became a living soul” [Genesis 2:7]. It accords with reason, therefore, that the body, made from earth, has food like unto itself, which earth provides, while the soul, partaking of ethereal being, has, rather, ethereal and divine food, for it is fed by knowledge in its various forms and not by the meat and drink that the body requires.

  The “living soul” of Genesis 2:7 is a literal translation of psychē zōē, the Greek phrase employed in the Septuagint, which is the Hellenic-flavored version of Genesis that Philo is quoting. The words used in the original Hebrew, however, are nephesh hayyah, which mean only “living [that is, moving, breathing] being.” The Hebrews of the period in which Genesis was written down (perhaps ten centuries before Philo) had no notion of a soul—and Philo, so far as we can determine, had no Hebrew. So the Greek of the Septuagint enables Philo to stake out an implicit claim that the very earliest passages of Genesis, the first of the Five Books of the Law of Moses, already employ the lofty Platonic distinctions of body and soul. In Philo’s telling, Moses even becomes the teacher of Plato and of the entire Greek philosophical tradition! For Philo, no proof of this amazing connection was necessary, since the texts themselves reveal that such must be the case. The Greeks, having no way of critiquing this fanciful claim, tended to give it credence.

  Thus, over the course of Philo’s many books, the Hebrew and Greek traditions shed light on one another and become, at last, inextricably intertwined. The extensive Greek vocabulary explicates difficult, sometimes previously inexplicable passages in the scriptures, clothing even barbarous incidents in refined Hellenic draperies. The Hebrew stories and the astonishing assertions of the God of Moses lend their memorable pithiness and rude strength to the airy speculations of the Greeks.

  But Philo, prolix and rambling as he often is—a writer who never met a digression he didn’t love—is ultimately no compromiser. Greek philosophy is all well and good, but only insofar as it can be reconciled to Moses. The softening of biblical stories by means of allegorical interpretation should be taken just so far:

  It is quite true that the Seventh Day is meant to teach the power of the Unoriginate and the nonaction of created beings. But let us not for this reason abrogate the laws laid down for its observance, and light fires or till the ground or carry loads or institute proceedings in court or act as jurors or demand restoration of deposits or recover loans, or do all the things we are permitted to do on [other] days.

  The Sabbath of Moses is to be kept strictly, not allegorically. Circumcision, though it “does indeed portray the excision of pleasure and all passions, and the putting away of the impious conceit under which the mind imagined that it was able to beget by its own power,” is not to be merely symbolic; it requires the cutting of the foreskin. Otherwise, there is no genuine symbol, just empty waffling. Philo is no Jewish Unitarian; he is a deadly serious apologist for his ancient religion, one who understands the Greek context so well that he can use its language fluently and convincingly, while never leaving the central tenets of Judaism unprotected.

  All the same, Philo adopts (and adapts) many Greek philosophical categories. God is indeed the One of which nothing may be known or said—except that he is, which is why he gave his name to Moses as ho on (He Who Is). By his Word (Logos, in Greek), as Genesis tells us, God created the world. Philo even calls the Logos a “second god” and God’s firstborn. And Philo perceives even a third level in God, the Powers by which he acts in the world. Philo’s Logos and Powers, therefore, play the role of mediators between the unknowable One and mankind.

  If Philo, more than any other figure, found the means to reconcile Judaism and Hellenism, he was also—without knowing it—an extraordinary intellectual channel that linked Judaism, Hellenism, and the Christianity that was to come. For the somewhat sketchy Trinity of Persons that Philo discerned in the Hebrew Godhead will cascade into the future, not only influencing the thought of Plotinus but forming the theoretical framework for the Christian Trinity.d Philo’s writings seemed so alien to later Judaism that they had no impact on rabbinical thought and were lost to intellectual Judaism till well into the Renaissance. For Christians, however, Philo would become an honorary “father of the church.” In Byzantine copies of his works, he is often designated as “Bishop Philo,” even though there is no hint in any of his writings that he ever heard of the Palestinian offshoot of Judaism that would come to be called Christianity and that remained in his lifetime a hunted, marginal sect.

  Though Philo lived only into the early first century A.D., we know more of him than of the mysterious Plotinus, who flourished two centuries later. Philo was born to an exc
eedingly wealthy Alexandrian family. His brother Alexander was probably chief customs officer for Egypt’s eastern border and guardian of the empress dowager’s Egyptian properties. Alexander even made a loan to the Jewish king Agrippa I and plated the gates of the Jerusalem Temple in silver and gold. Alexander’s son, who became an apostate from Judaism, served as procurator of Judea, then as imperial prefect of all Egypt, and finally—to his shame—as chief of staff to the emperor Titus during the Roman seige of A.D. 70 that leveled Jerusalem, the sacred city his father had so lovingly adorned.

  Uncle Philo, however, always a protector of his fellow Jews, journeyed in old age to Rome in the year 40e to beg the then-emperor not to outlaw the Jews of Alexandria, who found themselves unable to join in emperor-worship. The emperor in that year was the vindictive, delusional Caligula, who believed himself a god. Plucky Philo was lucky to escape the confrontation with his life. But Caligula seems to have (at least briefly) entertained Philo’s argument—that the Jews of Alexandria were unswerving in loyalty to the emperor even if their religion forbade the worship of a, um, human being—because it was so deftly presented. In the end, however, the god-emperor could not accede to such a demotion of himself. And the pogrom, instigated against the Jews of Alexandria by Greeks who were jealous of the Jews’ soaring financial successes, raged on till Caligula was assassinated the following year. His imperial successor, Claudius, decreed a halt to the violence and affirmed the rights of the Alexandrian Jews, though they would never again find themselves on an equal footing with citizens of Greek ancestry.