The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (10 page)

To accomplish this the Ptolemies used the authority of their office. Ships anchoring in Alexandria harbor, Galen reported, were required to hand over their books to a library official so that a copy could be made for the collections. Special rapid-copying shops did this work, and such books were labeled “From the ships.” The collection was miscellaneous, cosmopolitan, unorthodox, and comprehensive. It included the philosophers of all schools, along with cookbooks, books of magic, natural history, drama, and poetry. Perhaps never before or since has the whole literary culture of a vast and cultivated region of the world been so conveniently displayed. Of course, there were no
printed
books, and probably not yet anything like a “codex” or volume of stitched sheets. Their books were in the form of foot-wide scrolls, each of which unrolled was about twenty feet long. Each roll would contain only about sixty pages of a modern book. Many were written on both sides. At its height the Alexandria library probably contained some half-million such scrolls.

Ptolemy II enlarged the library, adding a museum and research center. Here was the seedbed of the ancient Greek Renaissance, which came to be known as Hellenistic culture. Plato and Aristotle were revived and elaborated in new schools. Mathematicians Eratosthenes and Euclid, the physicist Archimedes, the poet Theocritus, and the philosophers Zeno and Epicurus nourished a new circle of culture around the Mediterranean.

The grandest consequence of the project was a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, which from its beginning was enshrouded in legend and folklore. Ptolemy brought together seventy-two Jewish scholars, and reportedly asked each of them individually to translate the whole Hebrew Bible. The astonishing result, according to Jewish legend, was that the seventy-two versions were identical. Jews may have spread this legend to persuade Gentiles of the divine inspiration of the original, but the Jewish community became a victim of its own advertising. According to tradition, the translators had been sent to Alexandria at Ptolemy’s request by Eleazar, then the chief priest in Jerusalem. This Greek version, called the Septuagint (from Latin
Septuaginta
, seventy; abbreviated LXX), became the Bible of
the early Christian Church, in which the Messianic prophesies of the coming of Christ were to be found. When the Jews saw that this text could be used to defeat their missionary purposes, the Jews themselves ceased using the text.

Meanwhile the Greek Septuagint became the Old Testament of the Christian Church as it expanded around the Mediterranean in the Age of Jesus and the Church Fathers. This was the Old Testament that Saint Paul knew, although he seems also to have known and used the Hebrew. From the Septuagint, not from the Hebrew original, translations were made into Old Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, and other languages, and it has remained the authoritative Old Testament for the Greek Church. In the first Christian centuries Jews around the Mediterranean fasted on the anniversary of the day in the time of Ptolemy II when the Books of Moses were first written in Greek. On that day, they said, darkness came over the world for three days. And they believed it was a dark day for their missionary hopes.

But no one can doubt that the seventy-two anonymous translations of the Septuagint, by re-creating the Books of Moses in Greek, had unwittingly opened wide avenues to an uncertain future. Perhaps, some scholars now suspect, the translation was made not for Ptolemy’s library but for the use of the Jews of Alexandria, who were no longer at home in Hebrew. One of the brilliant and productive members of this community who gave the Books of Moses a new life was our Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus). Outwardly Philo lived the privileged life of a wealthy Alexandrian but inwardly he nurtured a self-conscious Jewish soul. In the society but not wholly of it, he spent his life in search of latent meanings. Following Moses, he was one of a long line—through Maimonides (1135–1204), Spinoza (1632–1677), Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847), to Marx, Freud, and Einstein among others—who brought the insights of the outsider. He would be a very model and prototype of countless Jewish creators in the next two millennia.

Born to a Jewish family only recently moved from Palestine to Alexandria, Philo tasted the delights of patrician society. At the time of Jesus, Alexandria, not Rome or Athens, was the cultural center and philosophical resource of the Roman Empire. Here Platonism was transformed into Neoplatonism, and here grew the generations of late-flowering Greek science that would become the canon of medieval Europe. Philo’s family were the Rothschilds of their age. And his brothers bore conspicuously Gentile names. Alexander was one of the richest men of the city, and of the ancient Mediterranean world. When Herod Agrippa, king of Judaea, needed money, Alexander lent him the enormous sum of two hundred thousand drachmas, perhaps because Alexander admired Agrippa’s wife. As chief tax collector he was reputed to have provided the gold and silver for covering the grand gates of the temple in Jerusalem. He had influence in Rome, too,
as an old friend of Emperor Claudius and steward for the emperor’s mother. Another of Philo’s brothers, Tiberius Alexander, abandoned Judaism, became Roman procurator in Palestine, and then Nero’s prefect of Egypt, where, during a riot, he was said to have commanded a massacre of Jews.

Philo himself recorded his enjoyment of Alexandria’s parties, its theater (he reported the enthusiasm of the audience for a now-lost play of Euripides), and its concerts. An aficionado of sports, he distinguished between the boxers who were really skillful and those who were simply tough enough to take the punishment. He saw chariot races where the excited spectators were killed when they ran onto the racecourse. And he reported complacently those banquets where he managed to leave without being stupefied by food or drink. A local celebrity, he was so well known for his style of life that people were puzzled that his wife, unlike other socialites, did not wear the fashionable heavy gold jewelry. According to gossips, she explained, “The virtue of the husband is sufficient ornament for the wife.”

He made himself spokesman and champion of several hundred thousand members of the Jewish community of Alexandria. They needed him. Although Roman rulers were indifferent to arcane doctrines of religion, they insisted on an outward show of loyalty and had no patience with people who disturbed the peace. Citizens of the empire, of whatever religion, were expected to sacrifice to the Roman gods and worship the emperor as a god. For a turbulent century (166–63
B.C.
) the Maccabees in Palestine had led the Jews’ struggle for independence, and Palestine remained unruly. The Jews threatened to revolt rather than allow a statue of Caligula to be set up for worship in the Temple.

The wealth and influence of Jews in Alexandria fed envy and anti-Semitism, and nourished wild rumor of their disloyalty. Philo wrote a series of tracts attacking Flaccus, a Roman governor of Egypt, and even Caligula himself for their persecution of the Jews. He argued that rulers prospered only so long as they protected the Chosen People of God. And he showed how divine retribution (with the help of Caligula) had forced the persecuting Flaccus into exile. After a pogrom in Alexandria (
A.D
. c.39–40), Philo led a delegation to Rome for the purpose of asking Caligula to restore the rights that Alexandrian Jews had long enjoyed under the Ptolemies, and he himself recorded his audience with the emperor. Just as Philo was about to answer the malicious charges of Apion, the vocal anti-Semite, he was stopped by the emperor. Still, Philo said, God was on their side, and would punish Caligula soon enough. The Praetorian Guard murdered Caligula the very next year.

Philo might have been described as a nonobservant Orthodox Jew. Despite his assimilated way of life, he professed to believe in all the traditional rituals. His faith and his passion for orthodoxy were at the heart of his
being. But his education was thoroughly Hellenistic. Greek was the language of instruction for him, like other cultivated citizens of Alexandria. Education in his mind was so identified with Greek that he even assumed that Moses must have had a Greek tutor. His own “general education” in one of the Greek “gymnasiums” would have included, among the “liberal” arts, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, grammar, rhetoric, and logic (all of which he puts into his own account of Moses’ education), Greek literature and philosophy were the core. While he never learned Hebrew, he must have felt that he did not need to, for the Bible was now available in a divinely inspired translation, the Septuagint. Greek literature was an inexhaustible treasure. He believed, too, that the Greeks had copied their truths from Moses.

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.”