There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.
Wallace Stevens, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’,
Part I: ‘It Must Be Abstract’
IF YOU ARE old-fashioned enough to be reading this in book-form, you are holding a codex. Even if you are reading this electronically, the device on which the page appears nonetheless imitates the codex – that is, the sort of book where you turn pages. That is the form in which most of us have read the Bible, though we might have attended services at a synagogue in which the revered Jewish Law, the Torah, was carried about to glorious chants in its scrolls, texts which are so venerated that they are often encased in exquisite containers.
For a Jew, the Torah is the Law of God. It is a word which we translate as Law, and which also refers to the first five books in the Bible – sometimes called the Books of Moses. Many Jews would think it strange that I am writing a book about the Bible and concentrating not on the Torah, but on Wisdom.
If you’d opened the bookshelves in an old synagogue, before the codex was invented, and long before there was a Christian Bible, you would have found they had arranged the scrolls in three sections. Indeed, the very word given by Jews for their Hebrew Bible is an acronym of these three sections: Tanakh – standing for Torah (the Law), Nevi’im (the Prophets) and Kethuvim (the Writings). First, the Torah, the Books of Moses. These were the works which were recited all the time. Another shelf would be reserved for the Prophets (Nevi’im). These scrolls would contain not only the three major prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel – and the twelve minor ones, but also the works we know as histories – Joshua, Judges and the two double books of Samuel and Kings. These ‘Prophets’ would only have been read very selectively, some of them hardly at all.
There was a third section, known as the Writings, or simply as the Scrolls. These would contain the Psalms, which were well known and often used as the hymnbook of the synagogue, but also the parts of the Bible sometimes referred to as the Wisdom Literature. Some of these writings are very ancient. The Book of Job, for example, dates probably from the sixth or late fifth century BC. Other parts of Wisdom Literature, especially some of those books which were not included in the finished canon of the Hebrew Bible, such as ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’, possibly dates from as early as 100 BC, but could be later.
The cult of ‘Wisdom’ in the period when this book was composed grew up in parts of Jewry which had been Hellenized. In ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’ the worship of ‘Lady Wisdom’ bears analogy with Greek prose poems celebrating the Egyptian goddess Isis, the patron of Wisdom. The pursuit of Wisdom, the worship of Wisdom, the personification of Wisdom as a beautiful lady, are all central to this book, but also to a particular way of reading the Bible.
Let us leap ahead half a millennium, after the composition of ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’, to the point where Europe meets Asia, the high promontory which juts out above the Bosphorus and looks towards the Sea of Marmara, where Jason once sailed with the Argonauts.
It is one of the most stunning places in the world. A city was here in pre-Roman times, named Byzantium, but it was only with the decline of Rome, and the decision of the Emperor Constantine to rebuild this Rome of the East as Constantinople, that the origins of the modern city were founded. It was here, in the beginning of the sixth century, that the Emperor Justinian built his astounding church, dedicated to Holy Wisdom – Hagia Sophia in Greek, Aya Sofya in modern Turkish.
It was for many centuries the largest building in the world. Its huge dome was an architectural miracle. Procopius, the Greek historian who wrote in the middle of the sixth century, said that ‘whenever one enters the church to pray, one understands immediately that it has been fashioned not by any human power or skill but by the influence of God. And so the mind is lifted up to God.’ When the Russian Prince Vladimir of Kiev attended the liturgy in this place, he recorded that ‘we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it.’
In the century after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Divine Liturgy of the Church underwent many embellishments and changes, including a newly composed Communion chant which would have been performed with unmatched pomp in this building; and, on the annual celebration of the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday, after the Bread and Wine had been transformed by the Holy Spirit into the Body and Blood of Christ, the choir now sang, ‘At your mystical supper, Son of God, receive me today as a partaker, for I will not betray the sacrament to your enemies, nor give you a kiss like Judas, but like the thief I confess you: remember me, Lord, in your kingdom.’ There could be few more vivid illustrations of the way in which building and liturgy grow organically out of Scripture.
The great church, with its huge spaces, was once encrusted with gold mosaics, only very few of which survive. It suffered dreadful spoliation from the oafish, vandalistic soldiers who arrived from Western Europe on the Fourth Crusade, and in 1453, after the conquest of the city by Muslims, it was not long before it lost its status as a church. The covering up of the mosaics, the stripping of the interior splendours, the addition of carpets, all did much to diminish the glory of the building, and the hanging of huge Islamic calligraphic discs at each corner of the dome prevented the eye soaring, and the mind dreaming. These texts announced that the People of the Book had arrived, and the church, one of the finest creations inspired by the Book of the People, sat uneasily beneath its Islamic manifestation. The subsequent addition of minarets outside is an interruption to the building’s domed outline.
When Turkey was defeated in the First World War, Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, wanted Hagia Sophia to be reconverted to a Christian church. I wonder if he hoped, in the process, to bring it into line with the Church of England. The dream of hearing Stanford’s Magnificat in C echo through those vast spaces and waft upwards to the enormous dome, was never realized. In the early 1930s, in accordance with Ataturk’s secularization of Turkey, the mosque itself became a museum. Such is its status to this day. In order to see it in anything approaching peace, you must be first through the door in the morning, before the tourists arrive in their thousands. Such is the size and splendour of the building, however, that it is still possible for it to speak to us, though with less eloquence than when it so bowled over the Byzantine worshippers of the past, and the Russian visitors whom it converted to Orthodoxy.
Many years had passed since my visit to Nablus with R. We had been married a long time. We had a twelve-year-old child. Visiting Istanbul for a week, we had devised the perfect means of passing the day. Because I wake early, I sat on the roof of the small hotel, reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when there was still cool in the air. Behind the hotel, the immense dome of Hagia Sophia was seen against the blue sky. Ahead, shimmering in morning mist, was the Sea of Marmara. After breakfast, there was sightseeing. And then, when the heat of the day began to get up, we would go down to the docks at the Adalar terminal in Kabataş, and take one of the regular ferry-boats out to the Princes’ Islands, for an afternoon of swimming.
Hagia Sophia can only be partially imagined from photographs. It is a spatial wonder. Even after the first busloads have disgorged their hundreds, you can find peace in the vast galleries, where patient restorers have managed to uncover some of the most glorious mosaics you will see anywhere in the world. And from the marbled galleries, it is almost possible to imagine the elaborate ceremonials which went on there for the first nine hundred years of its existence. Nine hundred years is a very long time, and the numbers of worshippers in that space of time must be counted in the millions. If we listen to them, they are telling us something of central importance about the Bible. And when we come down from the gallery and stand in the South Porch, looking up at the beautiful mosaic of Justinian, Constantine and the Mother of God, we understand why the Church is dedicated to Holy Wisdom. We understand, moreover, the whole starting point of the Christian Bible, and of the Christian view of the world.
The church was dedicated on Christmas Day, 538, and this mosaic tells us why.
To our left, the Emperor Justinian is offering his church to the Mother of God. The dolls’-house-sized version of the great church which he holds in his hands is clearly recognizable as the mighty domed structure we see today. To our right the Emperor Constantine is offering the Mother of God the city itself. Here we see the whole of Byzantine civilization, from Constantine to Justinian, from the fourth to the sixth century, dedicating itself to Mary and her Child.
Why to them, and why on Christmas Day? Because the Holy Wisdom, or the Word of God, interchangeable terms in the Greek version of the Scriptures, became flesh on Christmas Day. Holy Wisdom is another word for Jesus.
The Church of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul is one of the great readings of the Bible. It would not exist had there not been a particular telling and retelling, working and reworking of Biblical texts. We think that our way of presenting narratives, through ‘straight’ reportage, through linear and apparently dispassionate chronicling of ‘facts’, is the only way of telling a story. But the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and the Bible which enshrines an idea of Holy Wisdom, teaches otherwise.
The Holy Wisdom, or the Christ, of God were there first, as concepts. It was these concepts of which the New Testament writers availed themselves when speaking of Jesus.
In the Greek Bible, in the twenty-fourth chapter of the Book of Sirach, there is an exquisite poem in which Wisdom, a female personification, speaks. She says that she came forth out of the mouth of God and covered the earth like a mist [Sirach 24:3]. She speaks of herself, whose dwelling was heaven, seeking a place to live on earth: ‘Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose the place for my tent. He said, “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance”.’ [Sirach 24:8]
The book was probably first written in Hebrew in Jerusalem some time in 180 BC. It would seem to have been written by a man who had a circle of students, meditating upon the significance of the Jewish religious tradition. Some fifty years later, the original author’s grandson translated the book into Greek. It was written at a time when the Hebrew Bible as we know it today was coming into being, and the Jews who compiled the Biblical books were reflecting on the accumulations of story, imagery and wisdom which had found their way into their holy books.
The chapter draws upon the touching story in Genesis about the wooing of Rebekah. In Sirach, Wisdom is an emanation of God who looks round for somewhere to dwell, and finds that place in the tents of Jacob, in the Jewish inheritance. In Genesis, we find versions of the same story being written by at least two of the authors of these traditions. Old Abraham is about to die and wants a wife to be found for his son Isaac. He does not want Isaac to marry ‘out’, as Jews would later put it. Rather than finding a wife for him among the people of Canaan, where Abraham has settled, he asks a trusted servant to go back to his own country, to Aram-naharaim, to the city of Nahor. Laden with treasure and camels, the servant is commanded to offer to the chosen woman the chance to return to Canaan to marry Isaac. (In one version of the story, she is Abraham’s niece, so Isaac would be marrying a cousin.) So the servant sets out, and when he reaches the city of Nahor, he makes the camels kneel down beside the well, as the women of the city are coming out to fetch water. Then he prays, ‘Let the girl to whom I shall say, “Please offer your jar that I may drink,” and who shall say, “Drink, and I will water your camels” – let her be the one whom you have appointed for your servant Isaac. By this I shall know that you have shown steadfast love to my master.’ [Genesis 24:14] Steadfast love, Hebrew besed, signifies the loyalty growing out of a friendship. God is asked to remember his side of a covenant with Abraham and with his people.
Before he has finished speaking, ‘there was Rebekah, who was born to Bethuel son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham’s brother, coming out with her water jar on her shoulder. The girl was very fair to look upon, a virgin, whom no man had known.’ [Genesis 24:15–16]
This beautiful, and virginal, woman was probably, for at least one of the authors of Genesis, J, already seen as a symbol of the Heavenly Wisdom visiting God’s People. She was destined to become the mother of Israel, or, to give him his other name, of Jacob. In one of the versions in Genesis, written by E, the servant of Abraham goes to search for her, in the company of an angel.
The two stories – in Sirach and Genesis – are linked. Wisdom looks about for a place to dwell and finds it in Israel. Abraham, the father of the people of faith, looks about for a woman who will be willing to undertake the momentous task of becoming the mother of Israel, the Mother of the Faithful. She is, on the one hand, a simple virgin girl; on the other hand, she is Wisdom.
When two of the Gospel writers came to describe the coming of Jesus into the world, they drew on these two older stories, which had perhaps been written down two hundred years or so earlier, one a folk-tale shimmering with meaning, the other a Platonic myth about the arrival in the world of Wisdom itself. Luke speaks of the angel going to the virgin, Mary, and – as in the case of Rebekah – asking her to consent. This is so unlike the many stories in pagan antiquity of a young woman being raped by Zeus, either in his own person or in that of an animal. In this myth – and by using the word myth I do not mean to imply that it is untrue, but that it is a story carrying meaning – Mary is promised that if she consents, she will give birth to one who will be called the most high, ‘He will reign over the house of Jacob forever’ [Luke 1:33].
In the Fourth Gospel, the Prologue alludes to the tradition in Sirach of the Divine Logos, the Wisdom of God seeking lodgings among the human race, and coming among us.
In all three stories – Genesis, Sirach and Gospels – a gentle and feminine principle is introduced. The Wisdom, or the Word, is not simply something which comes to birth as a result of arid study, or of human effort. Likewise, those who respond to Christ are born, ‘not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’ [John 1:13]. ‘And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.’ [Luke 2:7]
It is appropriate that the mosaic in Hagia Sophia shows us the two emperors paying homage to the Virgin Mary. Constantine was the emperor who made the empire Christian. He convened the Council of Nicaea in 325, and it is from this Council that the Creed derives, subsequently recited in Christian liturgies, asserting that Christ was ‘consubstantial’ with the Father.
Justinian, two hundred years later, was a no less ardent champion of Orthodoxy, and a defender of the great Church Councils – Nicaea and Chalcedon. It was at Chalcedon that the Humanity of Christ was once again reasserted, against the many strange-minded groups who preached that the Divine Logos or Word had been no more than a Spirit, pretending to inhabit human form. No, said these Councils, he was a man, but a man who was of one being with the Father. This meant that the woman who bore him was the God-bearer, the Theotokos.
If the Gospels were what destructive fundamentalists might wish to make of them, historical writing of the post-Enlightenment era – that is, writings which could be ‘verified’, proved true or false – we should be astonished that so much honour is given by Christians to the Virgin Mary. After all, we ‘know’ so little about her. Are there not other women in history who are equally admirable? Only a few words, written in Greek on old papyrus, describe this Jewish girl. Compare that with the thousands of words we have to describe the achievements of, let us say, the Empress Catherine the Great, or the scientist Marie Curie, or Eleanor Roosevelt! About Mary we know almost nothing. The idea of Jesus being worshipped could inspire the same reaction. The implication is that Mary was called, by later generations, ‘Mother of God’, as a reward for being more ‘impressive’ than any of the other women of classical antiquity; or that Jesus was such an admirable man that it was not good enough to call him a saint or a great prophet.
This is not, historically, how the praise and worship of Jesus and his Mother are found to evolve. On the contrary, the ‘simple prophet’ of Galilee does not really make an appearance in the pages of history until the late eighteenth century in the writings of Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson. The New Testament writings start with the Hebrew stories of Wisdom, or the Word looking for a dwelling-place among men, among Israel. Similarly, Mary is honoured and revered throughout the Christian world, because the Word was made flesh at a particular moment in history, and as the result of a particular assent by a particular woman.
We will never know why the writers of the New Testament books thought it was appropriate to believe these things about Christ and his Mother, or to believe that the idea of the in-dwelling Wisdom of God, foreshadowed in the Genesis story of Rebekah or in the myth of Wisdom coming to dwell in Jacob’s tent in Sirach, should have been chosen as the best way of describing the birth of Jesus.
The most extreme modern ‘explanation’ is to be found in the writings of those scholars who think that Jesus and Mary are simply literary constructs; that they never really existed at all. That they are, as it were, a pious piece of scissors and paste.
This idea, boldly outlined by a minority of New Testament scholars, has the attraction of simplicity. Since we cannot get behind the text, let us be content with – simply – the text. In a sense not intended by the Fourth Gospel, in the beginning was the Word – and the Word is all we have. (There is a much fuller discussion of this in the seventh chapter of this book, when we come to read the New Testament.)
Istanbul was a good place to be reading Gibbon. His mockery of the controversialists who squabbled about Christian doctrine, from Nicaea to Chalcedon and beyond, invites the civilized reader, from the comfortable position of modern rationalism, to collude in his contempt for their mental processes. ‘The Logos is no longer a person, but an attribute; and it is only in a figurative sense, that the epithet of Son can be applied to the eternal reason which was with God from the beginning. . . Thus, after revolving round the theological circle, we are surprised to find. . . that the incomprehensible mystery which excites our adoration, eludes our inquiry.’
The Church of the Holy Wisdom was built to enshrine a liturgy which repeated the testimony. It was built five hundred years after Jesus was born, but it was not built in a vacuum. Between Jesus and the building of the church were five hundred years of human tradition. Some of those who handed on the tradition did so by writing. Others did so by dying, and their names were recorded as martyrs. Some, such as the Emperor Constantine, did so by asserting that the city itself, the polis, the world of human civic and political life, was consecrated to the Wisdom. After his conversion to Christianity, this Roman emperor summoned a Council at Nicaea in 325.
By then, it was nearly three hundred years since the time of the earthly Jesus, and what had begun as a small Jewish heresy, fiercely resisted by the mainstream of Judaism, and as a manifestation of Gentile monotheism half in touch, half uncomprehending of its Jewish roots, had grown to a movement which had spread all over the Mediterranean.
Constantine’s conversion made possible the very existence of the Christian Bible. The Hebrew Scriptures had been collected in more or less the form, and order, which we know today by the second century BC – which is also when the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek – known as the Septuagint because of the legend that seventy-two elders in Alexandria had translated the entire Hebrew Bible into Greek in seventy-two days. But the existence of a Christian ‘canon’ was not really finished until the second century AD, and most Christians studying the Scriptures would only have known a few books. There was not in existence a book with all the Old Testament and all of what we now call the New Testament in one codex. It was St Jerome (342–420) who changed that. He had studied at Rome and from 382 to 384 he was the secretary to Pope Damasus. But he then took off for the Levant, where he learnt Hebrew and lived an ascetic life as a quasi-hermit in the Syrian desert. Eventually, he felt his linguistic skill to be great enough to start work translating the Bible into Latin – the version known to posterity as the Vulgate. This book, which brought together the Hebrew books of the old Jewish Scriptures with the Greek writings of the New Testament, was, as far as the West is concerned, the first Bible. That sense, which so possessed Northrop Frye, of the whole Bible being a single book, with a beginning and an ending, is made possible by Jerome’s endeavour.
I liked the idea of L.’s Book of the People – a perspective of the Bible, not from the angle of the ‘archaeologists’ as she called them, but from those who had used the book, and whose lives had been touched by it. There were more ways of reading than just reading. The Emperor Justinian’s church-building was a good example of this – the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, the wonders of the San Vitale mosaics in Ravenna, where Justinian and Theodora are represented surrounded not only by their councillors and lawmakers, but by the saints. When Dante lived in Ravenna and saw these wonders every day, they suggested to him the appearance of Justinian in the Paradiso.
Cesare fui e son Iustiniano,
che, per voler del primo amor ch’i sento,
d’entro le leggi trassi il troppo e’ l vano
I was Caesar, and am Justinian,
who, by the will of primal love, which I experience here in Heaven,
I purged our laws of emptiness and dross.
Justinian’s achievements were immense – as a patron of great architecture, as a military conqueror. Gibbon and Dante would be united in acknowledgement of Justinian’s genius as a lawgiver. It was he who, in fifty books, digested the miscellaneous laws of the territories and institutions over which he presided, and laid the foundation of ‘Roman law’ throughout Europe.
The vain titles of the victories of Justinian are crumbled into dust; but the name of the legislator is inscribed on a fair and everlasting monument. Under his reign, and by his care, the civil jurisprudence was digested in the immortal works of the Code, the Pandects and the Institutes; the public reason of the Romans has been silently or studiously transfused into the domestic institutions of Europe, and the laws of Justinian still command the respect or obedience of independent nations.
After a day of swimming, it was delightful to repair, not to the great Hagia Sophia, with its armies of tourists, but to the place which has the nickname of the Little Hagia Sophia – the former church of Sts Sergius and Bacchus. Now it is a mosque, with a pleasant garden, set out with tea-tables and shaded by trees. In the cloister, there are even second-hand books for sale, though most of them are in Turkish.
The church was consecrated by the Emperor Justinian and the Ecumenical Patriarch on 27 December 537. Like the great Hagia Sophia, it has (hence its nickname) a tri-level domed core and two-storey niches whose walls open in column screens. On the columns, one sees the monograms of the Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora, surely among the most unusual success stories in the political history of the world.
He was a Bulgarian peasant, whose soldier-uncle Justin became the Emperor. Justinian, who always spoke Greek with a ‘barbarian’ accent, emigrated from Dardania to Byzantium in his youth, and, after ingratiating himself with the court, the army and the Church, he was a good candidate to succeed his uncle. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about him, apart from his multifarious genius, was his choice of bride. He married Theodora, a prostitute and pantomime-performer – the daughter of a bear-feeder in the hippodrome at Constantinople. ‘The satirical historian has not blushed to describe the named scenes which Theodora was not ashamed to exhibit in the theatre. After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of Nature; but her murmurs, her pleasures and her arts, must be veiled in the obscurity of a learned language.’
Yet this unlikely pair were united not only in love but in the desire to promote good and sound laws, imperial peace and Christian Orthodoxy. Theodora became very devout, and founded an institution for the reform of the members of her former profession. (Some of the women were so unhappy that they threw themselves out of the windows into the sea.)
From the mosaic portrait in Ravenna, we can still sense her strength of character, and her allure. The pair reigned together until her death in 547. ‘From his elevation to his death, Justinian governed the Roman empire thirty-eight years, seven months and thirteen days.’
There is a most extraordinary atmosphere of peace and prayer about this place.
Large numbers come each day for the evening prayers. My mind full of Gibbon’s satirical debunking of Christian theology, there seemed to be a great dignity about these Muslim worshippers. ‘Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ Isn’t this enough? These Godfearing men and women who came each day to the mosque bowed down before the Ineffable mystery, but they had not burdened themselves with mythology. They were content to allow the Divine Wisdom to, as it were, float, without all the mess and inconvenience of making the Word take Flesh. There was great calm in the air as they prayed, and as we sipped our mint tea.
I remembered the passage of Gibbon which I had read that afternoon in which the warring factions of theological dispute divided between those who thought that Father and Son were Consubstantial – or of One Substance – homoousios – and those who believed that the Son was merely like the Father – homoiousios. ‘The Greek word, which was chosen to express this mysterious resemblance, bears so close an affinity to the orthodox symbol, that the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians.’ I must have quoted this in a letter to L., perhaps comparing the two factions to the Big-Enders and Little-Enders in Swift’s Lilliput, who dispute about how to eat boiled eggs. And was not the extraordinary thing about so many of these Christian controversies the fact that they so often reach the most furious heat when the matter under discussion is something which could never be demonstrated or proved?
But L. had written – most of the letter is lost, but I have one page of it as a bookmark in my Gibbon –
the Orthodox sound batty when lampooned; and no doubt they were, and can remain, very intolerant. But what would have happened to Christianity if one of the alternative versions had been triumphant? That Christ was a disembodied angel? A cult based on this view would rightly have fizzled out. The mind cannot absorb the Orthodox position – but what sort of pygmy-god do you want? One who can be absorbed and understood by a human mind? Surely the Councils, convoluted as their deliberations seem, and strange as their conclusions were, were trying to be true to the earlier testimony – to the New Testament beliefs, asserted over and over again, that though he was in the form of God, Christ was a man, who suffered under Pontius Pilate?
R., meanwhile, was reading a favourite novel, The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay, with its appropriately Turkish setting.
And this failure of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world. But it is what happens when a magnificent idea has to be worked out by human beings who do not understand much of it but interpret it in their own way and think they are guided by God whom they have not yet grasped. And yet they had grasped something, so that the Church has always had great magnificence and much courage, and people have died for it in agony, which is supposed to balance all the other people who have had to die in agony because they did not accept it, and it has flowered up in learning and culture and beauty and art, to set against its darkness and incivility and obscurantism and barbarity and nonsense, and it has produced saints and martyrs and kindness and goodness, though these have also occurred freely outside it, and it is a wonderful and most extraordinary pageant of contradictions, and I, at least, want to be inside it, though it is foolishness to most of my friends.