“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the Moon, clear as the Sun, and terrible as an army with banners?”
Song of Solomon 6.10
We have seen Homer describe in glorious language that ripples on the page how the gods intervened in battle.
He describes the gods intervening in other ways too. In the Iliad he has a wonderful description of Paris, whose elopement with Helen had brought about the ten-year siege:
Paris quickly put on his shining, bronze armor and ran down from his house high in the walls. He ran through the town like a stallion that has broken away and gallops across the fields in triumph toward his favorite bathing place. He tosses his head so that his mane flows back over his shoulders, and off he goes, running so fast his hooves barely touch the ground. And Paris arrived like this, awesome in his armor, shining like the sun and laughing, and he knew that he was beautiful.
Paris and Helen belonged together because they were beautiful. He had visited the court of her husband, Menelaus. He had looked into her eyes and seen his destiny there.
In this era, at the beginning of what historians call the Iron Age, the Venus serpent inside the human body began to thrash with unredeemed sexual energy. We saw in Chapter 3 how the cosmos was put together so we would crave happiness. The story of Moses is the description of how we came to have another great desire running through us in an unstoppable torrent—the craving for justice, for fairness.
In the stories of Helen, David and Solomon, we see these two great cravings clash.
Worldly beauty is not a tranquil thing, even though a beautiful person may look tranquil and composed. “Beauty is not only a mysterious thing,” said Dostoyevsky, “it is a terrible, frightening thing.” Beauty is where all the contradictions clash, “where God and the devil contend—and the field of battle is the human heart.” Great beauty attracts demonic powers.
We live in a paradoxical world, a world of opposites yoked together so that they can be hard to distinguish. Beauty can make us happy. Somewhere deep inside us, it stirs a vision of creation as it could, perhaps should, be. It can charge us with a sense of purpose and meaning. It can lead us to a feeling of being at home in the world. The ecstasy in physical love that beauty can inspire can be very like a mystical experience.
But if we are deceived by it, beauty can bring about the fall of empires.
Good people, even very great people, can behave badly.
* * *
Like his contemporary Odysseus, David slew a one-eyed giant. He grew up to become the first king to unite the settled tribes of Israel in one kingdom. He was a great king, but a flawed one—loving Bathsheba, he sent her husband away to fight in a war so he could have her to himself.
David and his son Solomon both reigned for forty years. Solomon would build the temple his father had promised to build.
One night Solomon had a dream in which God asked what He should give him. Solomon considered the question before giving his reply. If I ask for gold, silver, jewels and so on, he thought, God will give them to me and that will be that. But if I ask for wisdom, I will be able to earn riches myself and much more besides . . .
So he said, “Lord, give to your servant an understanding heart.”
When he awoke, he wandered in the fields. He heard the chatter of the birds, the crowing of the rooster, the braying of the ass, and he found he could understand what they were saying.
* * *
Solomon is traditionally said to be the author of what theologians call the “wisdom books” of the Bible: Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. This “wisdom literature” is not primarily concerned with spiritual matters. Proverbs give practical rules for a happy and successful life. This is what proverbs from any tradition are doing when they advise you to look before you leap or make a stitch in time. In his dream Solomon acted prudentially, and when he awoke he continued in this vein. The Talmud says that he had the power of understanding nature, the properties of trees and plants, and that he taught “concerning the beasts, the fowls and concerning the creeping things, and concerning fishes.” (I Kings 4.33) In the Koran he was able to bend the world to his will in many ways, including controlling the jinn.1
Solomon’s reign brought his people unprecedented wealth and prosperity. Trade opened up new channels for wealth to flow in and also new ideas. Solomon built his palace and then four years into his reign he began to build his Temple. A thousand laborers cut down cedar and juniper trees. They hauled logs down from the Lebanese mountains and over to Jerusalem. Thousands more workers quarried the local limestone and carved rough ashlars into perfectly cut stones.
Solomon’s Temple was not as massive as you might expect of a building that looms so large in the collective imagination. According to the measurements recorded in the Bible, it was only the size of a small country church. But what awed people about it was that in its Holy of Holies, in its thick darkness, lived God Himself.
The Temple was made to be God’s body. Like the temples of Egypt and the Christian cathedrals of Europe, it was built according to ideal human proportions—not just the shape and proportions of the physical body but also the qualities of the higher, spiritual bodies. The four, seven and eightfold shapes found in temples and cathedrals work on our soul and spirit and through them our physiology. It is possible to feel this when walking into even a small country church. Craftsmen of earlier generations had absorbed this working, spiritual knowledge.
Martin Luther wrote about the threefold structure of the Temple that revealed itself as you moved from the vestibule through the long hall to the Holy of Holies. This, he said, reflected the threefold nature of the human being—physical body, soul and spirit. Then the light of God was revealed in the seven-branched candelabra that stood in front of it, so that the rays of the seven Thoughts of God were working as one.