The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  In fact, Philo was a star pupil of both Moses and Plato. His great feat was to allow them to speak to each other. For Philo, philosophy was a way of preparing to search for the highest truth. And philosophy was only the “handmaiden” of theology, which depended not on unaided reason, but on divine revelation and inspired prophets. He strengthened the case for theology by making Greek philosophy a way station toward understanding man’s role in the Creation. If the Greeks were creators of philosophy for the West, so Philo and the Church Fathers who came after him, all creatures of the Hellenistic world, were founders of theology as the study of God and the effort to give a consistent statement to a religious faith. Theology developed with the rise of Christianity. For reasons we have already seen, there was not the same need or opportunity for theology in the great Eastern faiths of Hindus, Confucians, or Buddhists. Of course they found their own paths to study the nature of reality, of humanity, and of society. But the Creator-God of Jews and Christians invited speculation. And He was a point of departure for countless notions, theories, and dogmas about the nature of man, the governance of the world, salvation, and the First and Last Times.

  Theology, a Western creation nurtured in Hellenistic Alexandria, was both a producer and a by-product of Christianity. Plato, and Aristotle after him, talked about God and the gods. But for Plato it was not a respectable subject, since he identified theology with myth, which could only mislead men from rational pursuits. So he expelled poets—those who made myths plausible and appealing—from his ideal Republic. Ironically the weakness of this antiseptic rationalism would be revealed in the works of Plato himself, whose myths persuaded the generations who would not follow his reasons.

  As a technique for finding meaning in sacred Scripture and sacred lore, theology was born in Allegory. From the Greek meaning “other” and “speak out” (allos—agoreuein; literally, speaking otherwise than one seems to speak), Allegory describes a way of saying something more, and quite different, from what appears on the surface. Wyclif (1382) later explained Allegory as that which is “said by ghostly [spiritual] understanding.” Philo gave the Books of Moses spiritual meanings that stirred the imagination and reinforced the faith of later centuries. Enriched by Allegory, the Scriptures became infinitely adaptable to the needs of future generations. On Allegory, Philo’s greatest work, in eighteen surviving titles (besides some nine titles that have been lost) is an extended, meandering, imaginative exploration of the biblical text, finding levels of meaning deep below the surface.

  On the Creation, the Septuagint reads “and God finished on the sixth day His works.” But, Philo wrote, “It is quite foolish to think that the world was created in six days or in a space of time at all.” (The Septuagint said six, while the Hebrew had said, “on the seventh day.”) “Six,” according to Philo, meant “not a quantity of days, but a perfect number,” which showed that the world had been made according to a plan. This also showed that Philo had become a disciple of Pythagoras. Influenced by Plato, Philo offered his own allegorical version of the Creation in Genesis. On the first day God created the whole intelligible world of ideas. But while Plato had treated the essential primordial ideas as “eternal” and “uncreated,” according to Philo God Himself had created the ideas, which were seven (a favorite Pythagorean symbolic number). First (following Plato) was the idea of the “receptacle” into which all the other ideas would fit, then the idea of the four elements, the idea of the celestial bodies, and the idea of mind and soul. Then God created concrete copies of the receptacle and the four elemental ideas, which became the four elements.

  During the next days God fulfilled the creative possibilities—on the second day the heavens; on the third day the lands, the seas, trees, and plants; on the fourth day the sun and moon and stars; and on the fifth day fishes and birds. Then on the sixth day He created land animals and the mind of the ideal man (Genesis 1:27). “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them,” and finally the embodied man (Genesis 2:7). “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

  Besides making philosophic sense of the scriptural passages, Philo finds hidden meanings in commonplace scriptural events. What of the Garden of Eden? Was it not a garden, Philo reminds us, that surely did not need cultivating? Yet Adam was put there to cultivate it. Why? “The first man,” he explained, “should be as it were a sort of pattern and law to all workmen in future of everything that ought to be done by them.” And why “coats of skins” for Adam and Eve? (Genesis 3:21) To show the virtue of frugality—that “the garment made of skins, if one comes to a correct judgment, deserves to be looked upon as a more noble possession than a purple robe embroidered with various colors.” Abraham’s marriage to Sarah and to Hagar was meant to show that philosophy was sterile without the inspiration of theology. Here Philo adapted a current allegory of the Odyssey in which Penelope’s suitors, who had only the rudiments of education, were successful with her handmaidens but could rise no higher. The Egyptian whom Moses smote and hid in the sand of course had a higher meaning. The slain Egyptian stood for two false doctrines of the Epicureans: “the doctrine that pleasure is the prime and greatest good, and the doctrine that atoms are the elementary principles of the universe.”

  Philo’s way of reading Scripture was original and powerful in his time. Before him, the Stoic philosophers had found ways of reading the poets to confirm the philosophers. But for Philo the “other reading,” the Allegory, was the real significance of the revealed text. Still, the power of the “other meaning” does not necessarily void the literal truth of the plain meaning. Even after his elaborate Allegory of the six days of Creation he declares that the biblical words themselves are “considered with strict truth.” As a believing Jew he warns against making Allegory an excuse for not observing the rituals prescribed in the Pentateuch.

  Allegory was needed because of the gulf between Creator and creatures. And it was a clue to the mysteries of Creation. The plain surface message in the Sacred Scriptures had been scaled to man’s understanding. Allegory, elaborated and developed by Philo, became more than a technique of scriptural exegesis. It founded a new discipline, theology, that, as we have seen, explored a new penumbra between man and his Creator. Passages in the Pentateuch and the Prophets had given hints of a Messiah. In Philo’s day, rabbis were speculating on when the Days of the Messiah would come, what were the preconditions, and how long the Days of the Messiah would last. The growing power of Rome suggested the realistic need to postpone fulfillment of these hopes into the indefinite future.

  Philo’s Allegories opened countless new possibilities. His Logos brought an appealing vehicle between Creator and creature. Arcane in its beginning, in its Christian transformations the Logos would be one of the most potent ideas in history, touching intimately the lives of the West. Logos, a familiar word in Greek philosophy, meant “word,” “reason,” or “plan.” A name for the deepest mysteries, it suggested what man might know and how much he could not know about the processes of Creation. Countless volumes by philosophers and theologians have not exhausted its subtleties.

  Early Greek philosophers used the idea of Logos to describe the orderly processes in nature. Eastern religions had similar terms for nature or god or the cosmic plan. Plato’s Timaeus described a process of creation in which the world was fashioned from eternal models. Philo went on to encompass the archetypal forms in his idea of God. Logos is his name for them. Ideas are God’s thoughts, created by God, yet one with God from eternity. His God, then, is not a mere Platonic artisan creating after eternal models but the original Creator of the models. The Logos, or the divine plan and reason and word, is one with God. Here Philo signaled another liberation from patterns and eternal archetypes. The Logos, the link and the affiliation between God and his cosmos, was God’s instrument of creation, somehow visible to his creature, man.

  Even Philo
himself, the Master of Allegory, could not have imagined the theological creations elaborated from his Logos. Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and lesser sects in Alexandria and elsewhere found their own meanings and new clues. Christian elaboration of the idea of Logos, which Philo’s work began, would suggest the indefinable dimensions of man’s creative powers. According to Philo, the Logos is somehow a “second God,” the first-begotten Son of the uncreated Father, the pattern of the Creation, the model of human reason, and “the man of God.” The Logos, model of the human mind, is “the heavenly Adam.” The Logos is God’s viceroy, mediating between Creator and creatures, and manna for the creature. Yet God appeared through the Logos in the burning bush, and in Moses himself.

  In the Old Testament Logos, the word of God, was a name for divine revelation, sometimes also meaning wisdom or reason. Sometimes, too, it is personified (Proverbs 8) to mean not what is spoken but the speaker. But in the Gospel according to Saint John, the Word, or Logos, carries a new meaning:

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.… And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. [John 1:1–14]

  In this latest of the Gospels (generally dated between A.D. 70 and 105) Christian theologians hear the accents of Philo. He reverberates also in the style of Paul’s writings and in the Epistle to the Hebrews.

  Others imitate Philo’s style of Allegory to make Bible stories into theological principles. It was through the Logos, Saint John explains, that men were created, that man shared the qualities of God, that man could apprehend the truth of God. The Logos was the water of life, the bread of life, the door of the fold, the Good Shepherd, the Resurrection and the Life, the Way, the Truth, the Life, and the way to Eternal Life. Philo had provided the vernacular in which the Christian message reached the Hellenistic world. Incidentally he supplied the central concept in which Christianity restated the story of Creation, the relation of Creator to creature, and the role of the Christ in history. By making Moses into a philosopher, he marked off a new arena for philosophical speculation, and added revelation to the Greek resources. Theology became something quite different from mythology. No realm of poetic fantasy, theology would be a new cartography of the paths between the Creator and his creatures.

  At the same time Philo opened a new way of thinking about novelty in history. The foundations of Christian thought would be the Gospels—Good News. When Philo showed Holy Scripture to be an “inspired cryptogram,” he made the Good News more plausible. We can know, Philo declared, that God is, but we cannot know what He is. So, too, man, with his godlike power of creation, could not know what he might create, nor where the novelties of history might lead him.

  7

  The Innovative God of Saint Augustine

  CHRISTIANITY, turning our eyes to the future, played a leading role in the discovery of our power to create. The ancient Greeks, adept at poetic and philosophic speculation about the past, seldom speculated about the future. And the typical Greek thinker has been called a “backward-looking animal.” The dominant figure in this modern Christian story, after Jesus and Saint Paul, was Saint Augustine. He would help us to Janus-Vision.

  We have seen how Hesiod’s myth of a Golden Age, popularized by poets and dramatists, had depicted the decline of practically everything. His Paradise Lost was a tale of man’s fall from the primitive Age of Innocence down into the present Age of Iron. Empedocles’ cycles of creation, destruction, and re-creation also made progress inconceivable.

  To Plato, too, nothing new seemed possible. Confined by his theory of forms, the only progress he could imagine was to come closer to the ideal models that had existed from eternity. And Aristotle in his own way denied the possibility of the new. His preexisting “appropriate forms” prescribed the limits within which any institution like the city-state could develop. Greek hopes for mankind, imprisoned in the mold of their idealism, prevented their imagining that man’s power to create might be infinite.

  The Greeks saw the advance of civilization bringing new ills. Their sour parable of technological progress was the familiar myth of Prometheus. Punished for affronting the gods by stealing fire for men’s use, Prometheus was chained to a rock so an eagle could feed on his liver, which grew back each night. According to Lucretius, necessity had led men to invent, and then inventions spawned frivolous needs that equipped and encouraged them to slaughter one another in war. Strabo (63 B.C.?–A.D. 24?) complained that cultivated Greeks had brought decadence to innocent barbarians. According to the geographer-historian Trogus, the Scythians had learned more from nature than the Greeks had learned from all their philosophers.

  With meager historical records, the Greeks naturally credited the great inventions to gods or ancient heroes. The benefactors of mankind, they thought, must have been superhuman. But Euhemerus of Messene (c.300 B.C.), in an ingenious travel fantasy, debunked the gods as mere idealized fabrications based on heroes who had really lived. His theory—“Euhemerism”—attracted Roman skeptics, menaced pagan faith, and appealed to pious Christians.

  Then Christian writers themselves opened the ways. The very idea of Gospels (Good News) was new. Early Christian writers attacked the idea of cycles. The Church Fathers reminded people that every day they were witnessing changes and not a mere repetition of earlier events. Origen (185?–254) of Alexandria dismissed the absurd notion that “in another Athens another Socrates will be born who will marry another Xanthippe and will be accused by another Anytus and another Meletus.” “In your clothing, your food, your habits, your feelings, finally even in your language,” Tertullian (160?–230?) told the citizens of Carthage, “you have repudiated your ancestors. You are always praising antiquity, but you renew your life from day to day.” “If you look at the world as a whole, you cannot doubt that it has grown progressively more cultivated and populated. Every territory is now accessible, every territory explored, every territory opened to commerce.” The full Christian armory was targeted on the repetitive view of history.

  But it was one thing to ridicule a simplistic dogma, quite another to create something in its place. This would be the grand achievement of Saint Augustine. He would offer an all-encompassing view of man’s place in the unfolding drama of time, which made plausible man’s own creative powers in a novelty-laden future.

  Augustine came to his faith in mid-life, and his enduring writings were inspired by the traumas of his time. Born of middle-class parents in 354 in Tagaste, a small town on the coast of Algeria, he showed such promise in school that his family sent him to study in Carthage hoping to qualify him for government service. His father was a pagan, but his mother was a devout Christian, who yearned to see Augustine converted to her faith. Teaching rhetoric in Carthage, Augustine became unhappy with his rowdy students and their irregular fees and went to Rome. There Symmachus, the influential leader of the pagan party, was charmed by Augustine’s eloquence and good nature. Symmachus became his patron and secured his appointment as professor of rhetoric in Milan, then the residence of the Western Roman Emperor. When the thirty-year-old Augustine arrived in Milan in 384, where Symmachus was the prefect, his career prospects were bright. As professor of rhetoric he delivered the regular eulogies of the emperor and the consuls of the year, and so had the opportunity to ingratiate himself with men in power. He was the closest thing to a minister of propaganda for the imperial court.

  The young Augustine’s tasks at court were clear enough and challenging. But he was torn by inner uncertainties. His travail during these crucial years Augustine would record in his Confessions, which William James in the twentieth century still found the most eloquent and vivid account of the troubles of the “divided soul.” Although Augustine never was at home in Greek, he was captivated by cla
ssical philosophy and inspired by reading Cicero to turn away from rhetoric. “An exhortation to philosophy … altered my affections.… Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom.” At the same time his mother, Monica (332?–387; later canonized), a woman of simple Christian faith, harassed him with her pleas for his instant conversion.

  In his impatient quest, Augustine had earlier joined the Manichaeans, who had much to attract a young man of twenty. Appealing to “reason” against faith or authority, they offered their own simple dualist dogma. The conflict between the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness, they said, solved the riddle of Creation, the origins of evil, and all other knotty problems. A secret society, with much of the appeal of the Communist Party in the troubled capitalist society of the 1930s, and with cells all over the Roman world, the Manichaeans enjoyed the aura of “the happy few.” Emphasizing self-knowledge, they divided their members into the Elect, who followed a rigorous discipline of fasts and rites and would speedily enter paradise at death, and the Hearers, who supported the Elect and would enter paradise only after reincarnation. Their founder, a Persian sage Mani (or Manes, 216?–276?) claimed to be God’s final prophet. Since the Manichaeans included Jesus among their prophets, Christians treated them as a heresy, while the Manichaeans called themselves the purest of all faiths. They became a religion of their own, the more feared and abominated by both respectable pagan Romans and orthodox Catholics because they had foreign ties and their numbers were never publicly known. Historians have called them the Bolsheviks of the fourth century. For nine years before coming to Milan, Augustine had been a Hearer. But now the Manichaeans’ easy certainties no longer satisfied him.