Ideas
Page 33
Clement thought that all knowledge–gnosis, philosophy, reason–was preparation for Christianity. Worship of the heavenly bodies, for example, was given to man at an early stage, ‘that he might rise from these sublime objects to worship of the creator’.46 The Father, he said, was the Absolute of the philosophers, whereas the Son was the reason (the Word) of God. It followed for him that a Christian life involved an inevitable conflict between the downward pull of the passions and the discipline of the disciple. Man is made for the contemplation of God, all knowledge was a preparation for this, all behaviour directed to this end.
This early world of Neoplatonic Christianity in Alexandria was engulfed at least twice by vicious quarrels. The first time arose in the second century as a result of a treatise, The True Word, by the pagan philosopher Celsus, who could not understand why so many Jews had left the Law of their fathers and converted to the new religion. Celsus turned his wrath on the Messiah, pointing out that he was born in a small village, to a poor woman whose husband had divorced her after she committed adultery with a soldier. This, he remarked sarcastically, was an unlikely beginning for a god. He then went on to compare Jesus’ so-called healing powers with the ‘wizards of Egypt’, who performed similar tricks to the Messiah ‘every day in the market place for a few obols’. ‘We do not call them the Sons of God. They are rogues and vagabonds.’47 Celsus insisted that the universe was no more made for man than it was made for lions or dolphins, that the view among Christians that they alone had possession of divine knowledge was ludicrous, and that the ‘promise’ of salvation and bliss was a delusion. But Celsus was not only a clever polemicist–he was an able researcher too: he showed where the idea of Satan had originated, he showed that the story of Babel was a plagiarism of early Greek ideas, and he showed that heaven itself was derived from a Platonic notion. Christianity was a collection of ‘borrowed’ and intellectually bankrupt ideas.
His charges went unanswered for more than a century until one of Clement’s followers, Origenes Adamantius, better known as Origen, took it upon himself to do so. He was careful not to try to refute the irrefutable, arguing instead that religion, faith, will always be more rewarding, more emotionally satisfying, more morally uplifting than philosophy, and that insofar as Christians led moral and productive lives the religion justified itself.
But even Origen did not think that the Father and the Son were the same essence, part of the same Trinity. In fact, he thought there was an immense difference between them, that the Son was so far beneath the Father that he should not be worshipped. This view found echoes–more than echoes–in the second great controversy to shake the early Church, the so-called Arian heresy. It is not certain whether Arius was born in Libya or in Alexandria but he certainly lived his adult life in the city. He appears to have been a quarrelsome man, who was twice excommunicated by the bishop of Alexandria, but his most famous and troublesome assertion was to question the divinity of Christ, arguing that Jesus was ‘a created being’ and therefore thoroughly dissimilar–and inferior–to God the Father. This became the subject of passionate debate on the streets and in the shops of Alexandria–blood was shed. For Arius, Jesus was a middle being between God and the World, who pre-existed before time, before all creatures, and was the executor of His thoughts. But he was made, said Arius–not in the essence of the Father–but out of nothing.48 Jesus was therefore not eternal and not unchangeable. In his own defence, Arius noted that in the scriptures Christ had said: ‘The Father is greater than I.’
The first ecumenical council of the church was called at Nicaea in 325 AD to decide this very question. The council decided against Arius, affirming that the Son was the same substance (homoousios) as the Father. Arius refused to accept this decision but even so was allowed back into Alexandria. On his return, however, on his way to the church, for the ceremony of readmission, he was seized with stomach cramps, his bowels were voided and extruded, he suffered a ‘copious’ haemorrhage, and expired almost immediately. For years afterwards, Alexandrians avoided the spot where Arius died.
There is a final Alexandrian idea to consider: empiricism. Ancient Egypt, we know, ‘teemed’ with doctors, though at the time being a doctor was mainly a job for theorists (iatrosophist was the technical term). That is to say, doctors had many theories about what caused illness, and what treatments might be effective, but they did no experimentation to test their theories. Such an idea had yet to occur to anyone. But it seems that in Alexandria, at the turn of the third century BC, at least two doctors, Herophilus and Erasistratus, were allowed to perform autopsies on the bodies of criminals, supplied ‘out of prison by the king’. The experiments shocked many of the citizens but the vivisections led to so many discoveries that ‘the Greek language was simply unable to name them all’.49 Both owed a considerable debt to Aristotle, the man who–with the Stoics–had in effect achieved the secularisation of the corpse, the idea that ‘things’ are ‘morally indifferent’.50
Herophilus made two advances. One was to establish, in a medical context, the culture of smallness, an appreciation of the small structures of the body. He discovered the existence of nerves, accurately distinguishing motor and sensory nerves, the ventricles of the brain, the cornea and the retina of the eye, he made the first accurate description of the liver, the first investigation of the pancreas, the ovaries, the Fallopian tubes, and the uterus, in the process demystifying the womb and the idea that, in some way, in hysterics, it had moved.51 His second achievement was the mathematisation of the body, noting that there were stages in the development of the embryo, periodicity in ailments (such as fevers) and providing a quantitative theory of the pulse. This, he maintained, varied at different stages of life, each phase having a characteristic ‘music’ or rhythm. There was first the pyrrhic pulse in infancy , a trochaic pulse in adolescence , a spondaic in the prime of life (– –) and finally an iambic rhythm in old age . He devised a portable clepsydra to calibrate the pulse of his patients.52 He also noted the geometry of wounds–round wounds heal more slowly than others.
In a sense, and to our modern way of thinking, Erasistratus went further down the mathematical route than Herophilus, maintaining that the body was a form of machine–that all physiological processes are explicable in terms of their material properties and structures.53 Blood and air, he said, were distributed mechanically from the heart and the liver through the arteries and psychic pneumata are radiated from the brain through the nerves. The heart, he thought, was a form of bellows, with valves to prevent backward flow. At this time, Ctesibious had devised a water pump with two chambers in it, though whether Erasistratus borrowed from Ctesibious or Ctesibious from Erasistratus isn’t known. Erasistratus did, however, feel that the body had a purpose: he wasn’t a complete mechanist as were, for example, the French physiologists in the Enlightenment.54
Despite its shocking nature and its astounding results, experimental medicine–experimental anything–does not seem to have caught on. It would be another 1,400 years before the experiment was taken seriously as a method.55
On the other hand, although experimentation didn’t catch on, another form of empiricism did. This was founded by Philinus of Cos, who broke away from Herophilus. We don’t know much about Philinus and what we do know comes from Galen, the famous Greek doctor of the second century AD. Philinus wrote several books about medical empiricism in Alexandria and tells us that they abandoned theory (which was then understood as what one could see with ‘the mind’s eye’), and argued instead that true insight could only be achieved as a result of observation and seeing what circumstances were attached to any given condition (such a cluster of observations was known as a ‘syndrome’). Moreover, for Philinus there were three ways this experience could be gathered: teresis, or careful vigilance; metabasis tou homoiou, or analogical inference, which enabled a doctor to say, tentatively, that what applied to one part of the body might well apply to another part; and historia, research among earlier scrolls and codices. In this way
, the writings of the Hippocratic tradition came to be regarded more or less as a research tool (as we would say) which added to, rather than detracted from, their authority. It was left to Galen, in the second century AD, to rediscover the importance of practical investigation. But he too was a literary type, often resorting to libraries, or haunting booksellers who specialised in medical books. It would be many centuries before medicine opened up to the empiricist tradition that has brought so much benefit in our own day.56
By the time of the Year 0 Alexandria had changed in two important ways. In 48 BC there had been a terrible fire which had destroyed at least part of the great library. Some accounts say that most of the books were lost, others that it was mainly the Serapeion that suffered, still others that the bulk of the library was destroyed much later by the Arabs in the sixth century of the common era. Since, as we shall see, the Arabs went to great lengths to preserve Greek and Near Eastern materials wherever they found them, it seems unlikely that the Muslims deliberately destroyed the library. But certainly, the destruction of the library in Alexandria was one of the ways by which the ideas of antiquity were lost, and not recovered for many centuries.
However, the main change that occurred in Alexandria during the second and first centuries BC was that the dominant form of scholarship evolved. It became less concerned with natural knowledge (natural science, as we would say) and more concerned with literature, literary criticism and ‘custodial scholarship’.57 ‘By the beginning of the common era, Alexandria was a place where what could be known of Babylonian, Egyptian, Jewish and Greek thought was strenuously collected, codified, systematised, and contained. Alexandria became the foundation of the text-centred culture of the western tradition.’58 It was the notes, or scholia, written chiefly in the margins of Alexandrian books, that gave rise to our words scholar and scholarship.
In India, as elsewhere, dating depended on the religion followed. Pandit Nehru, writing in 1953, claimed there were over thirty calendars in use even then.59 The Vedas refer to a calendar of twelve months of thirty days each. The year was divided into two parts, the uttarayana, when the sun moves north, and the dakshinayana, when the sun moves south, and into six seasons: Vasanta (spring), Grishma (hot), Varsha (rainy), Sarad (autumn), Hemanta (cold), and Sisira (dewy). Several astronomical works (the Siddhantas) were composed in the first century AD, and they show the influence of Babylon and Greece, notably in the division of time into ever smaller components of sixty, and in the names for signs of the zodiac.60
Before the first century BC, many Indians calculated time by regnal years though Buddhists took their dates from the attainment of nirvana (as opposed to the birth) of the Buddha: traditionally, 544 BC. The Jains did likewise, marking the death of Mahavira in 528 BC. After the first century BC, the Hindus used one of two systems. The Vikrama era began in 58 BC, and is said in the Jain text Kalakakaryakathanka to have been founded after the victory of King Vikramaditya over the Shakas. When this chronology is employed, Hindus use the word vikramasamvat, or simply samvat. But the most widespread chronology of all, still in use in India, is that which dates from the Shaka era itself, which began in AD 78. Kanishka, with whose accession the era began, was a great Kushan king/emperor, who ruled over vast distances and had his capital at Purushpar, or Peshawar, where there still exist the remains of a colossal monument, nearly a hundred metres in diameter and reported to have been 200 metres high. The Shakas are thought to have been incomers from Scythia, that area of the Caucasus that was west of the Volga and north of the Black Sea.61
By the time of Jesus Christ there were many links between the Mediterranean world and northern and western India. By Kushan times–the middle of the first century AD–Indian coins were minted with a mixture of Greek, Persian and Indian gods.62 In the late first century BC there was an upsurge in the number of Indians travelling to Egypt and beyond, with several references in literature, including an ode by Horace in 17 BC, which mentions Indians and Scythians in Rome.63 The anonymous Alexandrian sea captain who produced the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written some time between AD 50 and 120, gave an account of various ports of the Red Sea and round the Indian coast, including many details of western Indian harbours.64 Several texts of ancient Indian literature mention the Greeks, using the word Yavanas, a term said to be derived from ‘Ionian’.65 Masses of red-glazed Arretine pottery were discovered in India, together with Roman coins which, because of their precious metal content, were much sought after. Other travel information was a weird amalgam of fact and romance. Megasthenes, who visited India as ambassador of the Seleucid king c. 300 BC, reported that some Indian tribes had dog’s heads and barked instead of speaking; he said others had feet that turned backwards, or had no mouths, and that gold was sometimes to be found in the rivers.66 But he also reported, accurately enough, on their special commissioners whose job it was to maintain the rivers, or to protect foreigners, and that there were pillars placed along the roads at regular intervals to indicate distances.67
But it is the affinities between Buddhism and Christianity that are, perhaps, the most intriguing ideas of the time. Given that Buddhism pre-dated Christianity by several hundred years, we may take it that if anyone borrowed from anyone else, it was the Christians. The Tripitaka (‘The Three Baskets’), as the Buddhist scriptures are known, were in existence, at least in some form (possibly oral), by the time of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka, who lived in the third century BC.68 Apart from any specific parallels between the Buddha and Jesus, the most striking similarity is the overall resemblance of their life stories. Jean Sedlar, who has studied both narratives, notes that both figures were born to a woman who was ‘sexually untouched’. At the moment when both came into the world, celestial beings announced the event to an aged saint who prophesied the infant’s future glory. Both were fulfilling an ancient prophecy and when they were grown, both lived as ‘wandering ascetics and preachers’. Both could control the elements and cure the sick and, shortly before dying, each was transfigured. At the end, in both cases, a great earthquake shook the world. Both sent out disciples.69 Some of the specific parallels are striking too. In the Buddhist story, the holy man Asita learned from the gods in heaven that a future Buddha had been born and hurried to see the infant to foretell his destiny. In the gospel of Luke we are told how the Holy Spirit revealed to Simeon that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. Proceeding to the Temple, where–as stipulated by Jewish tradition–Mary and Joseph had taken the baby, to present him to the Lord, Simeon prophesied ‘that Jesus would cause the fall and rising again of many in Israel’. Likewise, as with Peter in the Bible, the Buddhist scriptures describe a certain monk who crosses the river Ashiravati by walking on the water, until his faith deserts him, and he sinks.70 Jean Sedlar, who also notes that both systems share an ethic of love and non-resistance to violence, self-denial, the renunciation of earthly satisfactions and an approval of celibacy, concludes that ‘many of the general resemblances between Buddhism…and Christian ethics must be attributed to the similar other-worldly attitudes of these religions’. In both, for example, the goal of salvation after death was all-important. Though Sedlar believes that both religions borrowed from each other, she says there was more borrowing in the Apocrypha where, in most cases, ‘the Buddhist versions are probably the originals’.71 The similarities may mean less than they appear to at first sight.
The most famous instance of a link between Christianity and India concerns Thomas, one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples. According to a Syriac source, the Acts of Judas Thomas, probably composed at Edessa, in north-west Mesopotamia in the third century AD, Jesus’ disciples divided up the known world for evangelisation after the Crucifixion, and India fell to Judas Thomas.72 Today, on the Malabar coast of south-west India, there exists a community of some 2 million Indian Christians who believe their church was founded by Thomas. According to local tradition, he landed there around AD 50 and built seven churches.73 No one outside the Malabar community itself believes any
longer that the Thomas who initiated the Indian church was the biblical disciple of that name, but the very presence of Christianity in the subcontinent does have some interesting ramifications. In particular, there is Vishnuism, one of the two main divisions of Hinduism, which arose in the second and third centuries. The god who is believed to be Vishnu’s principal incarnation is called Krishna and, as European missionaries discovered in the eighteenth century, in some Indian dialects Krishna is pronounced Krishta, much the same pronunciation as that given to Christ. As Jean Sedlar puts it, ‘the theoretical possibility exists that Krishnaism might be a corrupt form of Christianity’.74 There are parallels between the religions, but the fact remains that the name Krishna goes back to the sixth century BC. Again, we are unlikely ever to find a complete answer.75
In India, in the year we are calling 0, the subcontinent was politically divided. The Mauryan empire had ended around 180 BC and the Guptas would not emerge until AD 320.
The Mauryan era is, in the words of one historian, that ‘to which the word “classical” is as readily applied as to those of Greece and Rome–and with good reason, in that it has since served India as an exemplar of political integration and moral regeneration’.76 With their capital at Pataliputra, in the north, the Mauryas produced two–very different–leaders, and one classic text. The first of these two was known to history for many years as Sandrokottos. It was Sandrokottos’ empire that was described in such fantastic terms by Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador to his court. And it was Sandrokottos who Sir William Jones, a British judge in India in the eighteenth century, realised in a flash of inspiration was the same person as Chandragupta, ‘the Indian Julius Caesar’ who left the greatest empire, stretching from Bengal to Afghanistan.77