The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (9 page)

In earlier times circumcision was performed (as in much of the world today) at puberty or perhaps (as in some Muslim communities) just before marriage. But, God told Abraham (Genesis 17:7–13), “a token of the covenant betwixt you and me” was the rite of circumcision (Genesis 17:11). “And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child
in your generation … and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:12–13). The covenant with God, first sealed when the male child received his name and his identity in the community, affirmed every man’s godlike qualities, his share in the processes of creation.

Between God and the children of Israel, another symbol of man’s relation to his Creator was the Sabbath, which had precedents in the Babylonian Sabbath and their seven-day week. But for the Hebrews the Sabbath, like circumcision, became a sign of the Covenant. The Commandment to keep the Sabbath and its meaning came through Moses.

These were the words that the Lord spoke to Moses and then affixed on the “two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18).

The ideas of a Creator-God, of the Covenant, and of man’s godlike qualities were woven into a single texture of belief. In a popular table-hymn for the Sabbath by the Spanish-Jewish philosopher Abraham Ibn Ezra (c.1050–1164), “I keep the Sabbath, God keeps me: it is an eternal sign between Him and me.” Biblical scholars suspect that the Hebrews did not observe the Sabbath until Moses brought God’s Commandment to them. And it was Moses who made the idea of Sabbath inseparable from the Covenant between God and man, and from the belief in a Creator-God. As Martin Buber puts it, the Sabbath enjoined by Moses affirmed “the God who ‘makes’ heaven and earth and in addition man, in order that man may ‘make’ his own share in the creation.”

In the Jewish tradition, the Sabbath began at sundown on Friday and lasted till sundown on Saturday, in the pattern of the biblical days. “And the evening and the morning were the sixth day” (Genesis 1:3). During the Babylonian exile and in later generations, the Sabbath became a binding custom, sustaining the community sense of the Jews even when they were dispersed, far from Temple or synagogue. For the Sabbath observance was moved into the home, and the covenant with the God of Moses was celebrated
in every family. The differing attitudes toward observance of the Sabbath have become a touchstone of the different sects of Judaism, and have divided the community of modern Israel. At times the commandment to rest on the Sabbath was interpreted so strictly that Jews refused to take up arms to defend themselves on that day. And they became an easy target for enemies who knew their customs. Those in the Jewish community who refused such a suicidal interpretation of the Sabbath insisted that “the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath.”

Through the five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch) Moses led Western man’s effort to understand the Creation and find a human share in its processes. The Bible reports that Moses “wrote all the words of the Lord” (Exodus 24:4), but some modern biblical scholars credit Moses with recording only a fifth of the text. This would still include crucial parts—the Ten Commandments, the Covenant, and its interpretations.

Moses’ heroic role in our story of creators was as prophet of the single Creator-God. The Mosaic God probably contained some Egyptian elements, including perhaps the belief in a single creator as well as elements of the word and idea of Yahweh. There were also relics of the earliest Hebrew beliefs—the special contractual relationship between this God and his people, the revealing of the god in storms and mountains, and the idea of the God of the Fathers. But by insisting on a single Creator-God, Moses was himself a kind of creator. A messenger of the new. “To believe in ‘One God,’ ” Josiah Royce observes, “means, in general, to abandon, often with contempt or aversion, many clear beliefs, fears, and customs relating to the ‘many gods,’ or to the other powers, whose place or dignity the ‘one God’ tends henceforth to take and to retain.” Historically it cannot be shown that monotheism always comes after polytheism. And there is little foundation for the self-serving belief, popular in Britain in the nineteenth century, that monotheism is everywhere the product of human progress.

Belief in one God plainly makes it easier to imagine a Creator. If there are no divine competitors, the Creation can more readily be conceived as a single rational product. At the same time, if there is one all-beneficent Creator-God, it is harder to explain the origin of evil, which in polytheism is the work of special gods. The one God who has created the universe surely has not abandoned His creation. Then history, no longer a vector of divine wills or whims, expresses the divine will. As the one God appears in place of all others, religions of one God tend to be intolerant. This jealous God inspires awe before His holiness, before the mystery of the Creator and the Creation. He also is personal, not as a vague all-pervasive entity but as a person who can be addressed. Then man’s role in history becomes more obvious and more conspicuous.

Yet the believer in one God is not always strictly a monotheist. The First
Commandment, “Thou shalt have none other gods before me,” is consistent with the existence of competing gods who should not be equally honored (Deuteronomy 5:7). It even suggests a hierarchy of gods. Moses preferred his one God, the God of Israel, to all others. And this could be monolatry, the worship of the one God. But to deny the claim of other gods to be worshiped did not necessarily deny their existence. There are many variants of monotheism. The monotheism of Israel, stemming from Moses, affirms a single Creator and righteous ruler of the world. This later becomes the ethical monotheism of the Hebrew prophets. Greek philosophers espoused a kind of monotheism in their belief that God was somehow immanent in the world. When Aristotle was asked whether God was related to the world as the “order” is to the army, or as the “general” is to the army, he answered that God was both, “although rather the general.” Some even see Hinduism, too, as a bizarre kind of monotheism with all the Hindu gods being aspects of a single universal entity (the only reality), while the world itself is unreal.

The special character of Mosaic monotheism began in limitation. God’s unique relation to His “chosen people,” the children of Israel, whom He led forth from bondage in Egypt, made Him real and personal. And it was this Covenant between Yahweh and His people that sealed man’s godlike qualities, man’s capacity to imitate God as a creator. Even as the Jews affirmed the unity and uniqueness of their God, the special relation of God to Israel long remained. “I am the Lord, your Holy One, the creator of Israel, your King” (Isaiah 43:15). But, they believed, the God of Israel will one day become the universal God, when all people accept the God of Israel for their own. “And the Lord shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one Lord, and his name one” (Zechariah 14:9). Israel’s exclusive possession of the one God was only a step toward that God’s universal dominion.

While the Hindus never ceased to be dazzled by the Creation and its wonders, for the Jews it was not so much the creativity of Yahweh as His justice that kept them in awe. “Torah,” the Hebrew word that became a synonym for the Five Books of Moses, which recounted the story of Creation, means “law.” God’s grand gift to Israel, transmitted through Moses, was the Torah, including the Ten Commandments, which were the law by which they lived. This was the law that sealed the Covenant, the relation between Yahweh and His people, and man’s potential as a creator.

The elaboration of Jewish learning, which became the Talmud in the early centuries of the Christian era, was largely the exposition of the traditions and distinctions of the law by which Jews were expected to live. The tradition remained that God had not ceased His creative activity when the world had been made. Or, as a modern commentator observes, God kept
on talking after His Book had gone to press. At this very moment He is creating the events of our time. While schools and synagogues debated the fine points of the Law, there continued an awed reticence before the Work of Creation. Rabbis cautioned against public debate of the mystery of Creation, which was to be discussed only privately and to a single listener. It was permitted to expound what, as Genesis explained, took place on the six days of Creation, and what is within the expanse of heaven. But what was before the first day of Creation or what is above, beneath, before, or behind, was not to be publicly discussed. “With what is too much for thee do not concern thyself,” warned Sirach (second century
B.C.
), “for thou hast been shown more than thou art capable of.” Still, the Jews, almost alone among believers, could joke about their God. Since they could converse (and covenant) with Him, why not joke with Him too?

T
HE
struggle of Western man toward belief in his creative powers was, oddly enough, a struggle against the seductive charms of the Greek philosophers. They made their epic cycles irresistible. The eloquent images of Plato’s
Timaeus
, telling how the world had been compounded of the pure eternal ideas and the impure material substances, were not soon forgotten. But these proverbially creative people never ascribed to man the creative powers that their own civilization revealed. They could not envisage a Creator who brought a world into being
ex nihilo
, nor could they imagine man escaping from the cycles of re-creation. Or, perhaps, like the Chinese after their exposure to these ideas through contact with Islam and Nestorian Christianity in the seventh and eighth centuries, they did not find the ideas appealing, considered them, and turned away. Still, their efforts would not be lost. The astonishing beauties of Greek philosophies, and even their over-simplified versions of the world’s processes, would be way stations (and sometimes targets) toward answering the riddle of creation.

The man who pointed the way from the plausible symmetries of Greek philosophy was Philo of Alexandria (c.25
B.C.
to
A.D
. c.50). A devotee of the God of Moses, he was himself both an admirer of and a refugee from the elegant explicit world of Plato. Often called the first Christian philosopher,
Philo was a Jew. Which of course is not surprising, since the Christian Messiah was also a Jew. In his efforts to confirm the truths and widen the foundations of the Mosaic religion, Philo transformed Greek philosophy and Mosaic revelation into a vernacular for Christian theology.

The opportunity for the work of Philo came from his desire to interpret the Books of Moses for the Jews and Gentiles of Alexandria, then the melting pot of Mediterranean culture. The conquests of Alexander the Great (356–323
B.C.
) had spread Greek culture around the Mediterranean and far eastward to the shores of the Indus River in northern India. After occupying Egypt, Alexander founded his namesake city (332
B.C.
), which would be a living legacy, a nursery of the dazzling afterlife of Greek culture. When Alexander’s domain was divided at his death, Egypt was taken over by one of his self-made Macedonian generals, Ptolemy I (305?–283), called Ptolemy Soter (Savior), who founded the Greek dynasty that was to rule Egypt for more than two centuries. Just as his predecessors had been called pharaohs (from the Egyptian “great house”), so his successors called themselves Ptolemies. The dynasty would not come to an end until the death of the romantic and ruthless Cleopatra (69–30
B.C.
), the seventh Ptolemy. The real-life Cleopatra used all her wiles to keep the fading dynasty alive. After a brief period as Caesar’s mistress in Rome (46–44
B.C.
), she returned to Egypt and murdered her brother, with whom Caesar had made her share the throne, but failed to win back Caesar. She did infatuate Antony, whom she married in 36
B.C.
, and then enticed into a futile campaign for an independent Egyptian monarchy. After these hopes were smashed at the decisive naval battle of Actium (31
B.C.
) Antony committed suicide. She undertook a last personal campaign of seduction on the young Octavian (Augustus: 63
B.C.
–
A.D
. 14). When that failed, she gave up. To avoid being exhibited in Octavian’s Roman triumph, she too committed suicide (probably by poison, though legend preferred an asp).

At Alexandria the high renaissance of Greek culture came in the reign (265–246
B.C.
). of the ambitious Ptolemy II (309–246
B.C.
). Son of the founder of the dynasty, he was nicknamed Philadelphus (lover of his sister) because, following the custom of the pharaohs, and to consolidate his power, he married his sister. His Greek subjects were scandalized, but Alexandrian poets were extravagant in his praise. A wily and aggressive monarch, he expanded his father’s realm up the Nile, along the Red Sea, and into northern Arabia. He used the wealth from his conquests to make Alexandria the cultural center of the Mediterranean, whose lights brightened European culture during the following centuries. A wonderfully cosmopolitanized “Hellenistic culture” flourished there. “Other cities,” a Hellenistic scholar boasted, “are but the cities of the country around them; Alexandria is the city of the world.”

Alexander the Great, according to legend, had imagined a great library
in his namesake city. The Ptolemies made his vision a reality, when their royal library became the first ample repository of the West’s literary inheritance. As emissaries of an alien language, they aimed to prove the Greek claim to the respect of the conquered people. And they succeeded better than they had intended. For they made it possible for the Greek currents eventually to be mingled and lost in the widening stream of Christianity. The library of Alexandria was intended to be a kind of “deposit” library. By the early fourth century
B.C.
the written word had become the main vehicle of Mediterranean culture. This library would preserve a reliable text of every work in Greek and a representative collection in other languages.