An excerpt from From Jesus to Christ by Paula Fredriksen

Index

• The Legacy of Alexander
• Hellenistic Paganism
• Hellenistic Judaism

Hellenistic Paganism

By the first century A.D., popular Hellenistic philosophy was itself a kind of koine, a flexible and syncretistic blend of Stoic ethics and Platonic metaphysics. The Stoics held that the cosmos (the Greek word for both "world" and "order") was permeated by an immanent, divine, rational force, the logos spermatikos, which ordered the universe according to law (nomos). Man through his own logos could recognize in the beauty of the universe the effects of divine law. By conforming himself to the logos, man could lead a virtuous and therefore happy life. Platonists saw the material universe as the imperfect reflection or image of the divine world. This sensible cosmos, they held, was imperfect and unstable by nature given its mutable substratum, matter. The material lacked reality; the real was the eternal, the changeless, that which was perceived solely through the intellect. The intelligent realm ordered matter but did not interpenetrate it, as in Stoicism. Rather, the One, the Ultimate Being, was totally other than matter. Perfect, good, immutable, ineffable, impassive – these attributes defined the Platonic High God.

How then did the intelligible order the sensible? The fact of the physical universe, with its myriad imperfections, had always been something of an embarrassment to philosophy, given its definition of divinity as perfect and changeless. Plato himself had been reduced, in the Timaeus, to telling a "likely story," the myth of the demiurge. This was a divine craftsman who ordered the sensible realm, an enterprise that the High God could never be directly involved in. By the beginning of the common era, the Platonic demiurge and the Stoic logos had merged, because their function was identical: they organized the world according to divine forms or principles, while at the same time (for the Platonist) attenuating God's involvement with such a flawed enterprise. Thus the answer to the question, how does a perfect God relate to such an imperfect world? was, through an intermediary, at a distance.

How did man living in the material world relate to such a god? The imagined architecture of the cosmos, the mental picture of the universe inherited from Aristotle and the Hellenistic astronomers, both set the question and suggested various answers. For ancient man placed himself on a continuum of being prejudiced in favor of what was higher. Reality, be it material, moral, or metaphysical, was ordered on a vertical axis: the better something was, the higher it stood, ontologically and even spatially, in the order of things.

What did man behold when he looked up? The luminous realm of the fixed stars, infinitely removed, enveloped in the rarified matter of fiery ether. Below this, more substantial matter and motion: the five planets (often identified with the gods of the classical pantheon), the sun, and the moon. The moon marked the boundary of the permanence, stability, and harmony which characterized the astral spheres. In the sublunar realm, matter grew thick and sinister; the air between the moon and the earth held demons and various spirits; chance, change, and fate ruled life on earth. And when man turned his gaze inward, he saw recapitulated in microcosm the contrasts that described his universe: his spiritual self, drawn to reason and virtue, set in a body whose demeaning urges recalled him to his corporeality. Surely the body was not the natural home of the soul. The soul's point of origin must lie beyond the moon, in the spiritual realm, closer to the Divine for which it yearned. How then should the soul cope with its life in the body? And how could the soul, once free of the body, go home?

Astrology and magic, philosophy and religion all worked to provide answers to these questions. Astrologers were particularly concerned to know the position of the "heavenly elements" (stoicheia), the stars and planets, at the moment of the individual's birth, for celestial configurations marked the path that the soul had taken in its descent into the body. These same celestial forces had accordingly exerted and would continue to exert an influence on the soul, perhaps even determining its experiences. Furthermore – and here astrology coincided with magic – the soul must know the secret names of the cosmic forces and astral intelligences intervening between it and God in order to pass by them once again on its ascent after death.

Magicians attempted to deal with these powers, especially those in the realm below the moon, on a friendly basis. Named variously in ancient texts as aiones (beings), archai (principalities), and dunameis (forces), these powers could communicate vitally important information about life outside the body and also might heal or sicken the body on earth. Initiation into a mystery cult might further protect the soul, as membership in a cult held out the promise of a happy afterlife, and a release from hostile powers in this one. The cult's ceremonies – baptism, communal meals, group worship – ritually recapitulated for the individual the foundational experience of the divine savior (Mithera, Serapis, Isis/Osiris) who had overcome cosmic adversity. So too, then, would the initiate.

Philosophers tended to scorn such beliefs, which were popular expressions of the same concerns, set by the same cosmic geography, that motivated philosophy. More austerely intellectual, philosophers held that access to the divine Father was available to everyone, not just the adept or the astrologer, provided he exercise virtue. Against the fears of certain forms and moods of Hellenistic religion, the sense that astral forces oppressed and imprisoned the soul, philosophers counterposed feelings of piety and a curious sort of fellowship with the stars, which they viewed as the sensible expression of the beauty of the intelligible realm.

But the nature of life beneath the moon put a fundamental challenge to philosophical monotheism, with its definition of a god that was both all-good and all-powerful. If God were such, then why was there evil in the world? The Stoics argued that evil was only apparent, a question of perspective. The divine Logos had organized the best of all possible worlds. If man could perceive the whole, he would see that what seems to him to be evil actually expressed divine providence. The Platonists also maintained that evil was only apparent, but in a different way. What truly exists is the Good; therefore evil, its opposite, does not truly exist: it lacks ontological status, since it is really the absence of Good. Only God, absolutely without change, is completely good. Accordingly, anything other that God – and the further from him, the more "other" it was – is contingent upon God for its existence. Correspondingly less real and more mutable, it is also less good.

Evil, by this definition, was built into physical existence, since the visible cosmos depended on inherently unstable matter. But the human soul, contingent and hence unstable, was also involved in moral evil. Through the exercise of his free will, however, man could train his soul to regard the higher things – this was the function of philosophy. Once the body was shed, the soul, liberated, could return to those higher realms, closer to the One. The organization of the physical cosmos, properly understood, thus expressed the goodness of God like a huge, animated allegory. Man, the lonely sublunar outpost of the spirit, tormented by the problem of evil and buffeted by circumstance, could read through the cosmos as through a text, and so see beyond its terrifying multiplicity and heartbreaking arbitrariness the serene, divine Unity that it actually expressed.

The Legacy of Alexander | Hellenistic Paganism | Hellenistic Judaism

• Read more in From Jesus to Christ by Paula Fredriksen
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
3/11/2008 2:20:36 PM - -76.30.20.161
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
1/19/2008 2:37:16 PM - -76.30.20.161
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
3/11/2008 2:20:36 PM - -76.30.20.161
Christianity through the influence of Greek culture
1/19/2008 2:37:16 PM - -76.30.20.161