In the third year of the reign of the Bablyonian king Belshazzar, the Book of Daniel tells us, the captive Jewish seer Daniel had a vision. A ram with two long horns dominated all the beasts around it and grew ever stronger. But a billy goat with a single massive horn came from the west and charged the ram with savage ferocity, breaking its horns and trampling it in the dust. ‘Then the goat grew exceedingly great; but at the height of its power, the great horn was broken, and in its place came up four prominent horns toward the four winds of heaven.’ Out of one of them grew a little tiny horn, which nevertheless increased in size until it threw down angels and stars, stopping all sacrifices and desecrating the temple.
As Daniel was puzzling over all this random horniness, the angel Gabriel appeared to him. ‘Understand, O mortal, that the vision is for the time of the end,’ Gabriel told him. The ram, Gabriel explained, stood for the Persian empire, with its two horns symbolising the Medes and the Persians. (The Persians, who would quickly supplant the Medes as rulers of the new empire, got the longer of the two horns.) The goat from the west was the nation of the Greeks, who would overthrow the Persians; the goat’s single horn was their fierce king and the smaller horns his less powerful successors. The tiny horn symbolised ‘a king of bold countenance’ who would emerge and ‘destroy many and shall even rise up against the Prince of princes. But he shall be broken, and not by human hands […] ‘As for you,’ the angel concluded, ‘seal up the vision, for it refers to many days from now.’
That’s one of the many stories we’re told in Daniel, the first apocalyptic narrative. It remains the gold standard, arguably edging out its nearest rival, the Christian visions of the Book of Revelation, when it comes to subsequent influence, literary and otherwise. The ‘king of bold countenance’ was the notorious Greek monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes, whose prohibition of Jewish ritual sparked the Maccabean revolt, boosted the Jews’ incipient anti-Hellenism and possibly pushed them farther along the road to exclusive worship of YHWH. Scholars believe the Book of Daniel was composed during Antiochus’s oppressive reign, incorporating oral narratives dating from the Babylonian captivity and, in the prophetic parts, leveraging the earlier setting for emotional effect and verisimilitude. On historical accuracy, a very different measure, Daniel does not receive high marks. Belshazzar, for example, was not the king of Babylon. The intended audience, it seems likely, would not have cared much.
In his 1993 book Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, the British scholar Norman Cohn traced this enormously influential genre to its ancient roots in Persia. While Daniel is the first full-fledged apocalyptic work, Cohn sees Second Isaiah as a prototype. And Second Isaiah, in turn, found inspiration in the Zoroastrian religious tradition of the Persians, which shaped Jewish attitudes in a way that would be taken up by Christians later, in different form but still recognisable.
As for the single horn of the western goat, hundreds of books have been written about Alexander the Great, starting with the writers who accompanied him on his campaigns. Those campaigns were themselves inspired by earlier writers such as Herodotus and Xenophon, who had written about battles between Greeks and Persians – a case of writers inspiring historical events, which other writers would use to inspire other exploits, and so on down through the ages. New books about Alexander come out every year, based on all the earlier books.
Before Alexander, Greeks warred constantly in an area the size of New York state. After him, they controlled a land mass nearly the size of the United States. Accompanied not just by writers but also by scientific and ethnographic researchers, Aristotle’s most famous student stomped through Egypt, duly extinguished the seemingly eternal Persian empire, absorbing the Jews among many other peoples, then struck deep into India and Central Asia before his troops finally mutinied and refused to go further. From the Nile to the Indus, he founded some seventy cities, named many of them after himself, and filled them with Greek settlers. Then he declared himself a god and promptly binge-drank himself into an early mausoleum at thirty-two. Two decades of upheaval followed, as his less brilliant but equally narcissistic generals battled over who would rule all this new territory. Antiochus was descended from one of these smaller horns.
This rapid burst of Greek cultural and political hyperinflation created an immense rambling cultural patchwork, a crazy quilt of vibrant, distinctive oral cultures held together by sinuous literary Greek stitching that we call the Hellenistic world. Yet Greeks had been aware before this that their ways were different; the epicentre of change in the preceding classical age was Athens. ‘Our city has so far surpassed other peoples in thought and speech,’ wrote Plato’s contemporary, the Athenian rhetorician Isocrates, ‘that its students have become the teachers of others, and the city has made the name “Greek” seem to be not that of an ethnicity but of a way of thinking; and people are called Greeks because they share in our education rather than in a common birth.’
Though he does extol Athenian contributions to philosophy, Isocrates doesn’t rehearse the other familiar glories of Athenian culture: science, drama, literature, art, architecture, politics. When he says it’s ‘thought and speech’ that interest him, we have no reason not to take him at his word. I believe he was responding to an actual change in thinking and talking, as Athenians and other Greeks became literate in his lifetime courtesy of the new Greek invention of alphabetic writing: the ‘way of thinking’ he meant is the one that comes with what we now recognise as literary culture anchored by an actual readership. I’ve written elsewhere about the handful of modern scholars, such as Eric Havelock and his virtuoso protégé Adam Parry, who explored this transformation, starting in the 1960s. In Havelock’s controversial alphabetic thesis, readers play the central role, with the Greek language expanding as new expressions and ideas came into use among writers, then spread from this first critical mass of readers to the rest of the population. Havelock insisted that education and alphabetic literacy go hand-in-hand in shaping how we think. Isocrates, I imagine, would have agreed.
Isocrates wrote those words decades before Alexander, but they anticipated the cosmopolitanism of the Hellenistic age, which was indeed based not on nationality but on education, paideia in Greek. The direct ancestor of the modern liberal arts education, Greek paideia spanned music, mathematics, grammar, rhetoric, geography, natural history, philosophy and athletics. Later, it was envisioned as an encircling education, an enkyklios paideia, or so I’m told by my trusty enkyklios paideia Britannica, which also gave me the list of subjects above. What the entry doesn’t say is that the word itself comes from the Greek paides, meaning children, so a literal translation is ‘the children’s thing’, or that the Roman version would be known simply as humanitas, from which we get humanism and the humanities.
The children’s thing was two-tiered. Elementary education was saturated with Homer, which was the Fun with Dick and Jane of the ancient world, but also much more. This means that children learning to read would have had the classic polytheistic pantheon (Zeus, Apollo, Athena etc) always before their eyes, and in their ears. As Plato tells us, Homer had also been the basis of the earlier oral paideia, which included athletics, music and dance along with poetry, so that when reading took over paideia around Plato’s time, the Iliad and the Odyssey naturally retained pride of place in the new system. From that point forward, however, education would largely be about reading. It was on the secondary level that students were exposed to the One God of the philosophers, as their reading widened to embrace the areas listed above. This meant that from Spain to India, anyone who learned to read and write Greek shared this exposure; there was simply no other way to learn it. On the deepest level, then, paideia shaped the minds of the most influential individuals and social groups in each and every one of these disparate cultures. Almost overnight, the only way for anybody in one of these cultures to get ahead was by learning Greek and studying Greek writers. The world’s first body of original literature was also a multicultural career ladder.
By this time Greek had expanded, in the way other languages would in the future after transitioning from orality to alphabetic literacy. It had become a supple and expressive instrument, eminently practical yet at the same time compellingly gorgeous. Called koin-ē, ‘the common tongue’, this literary and spoken language was based on the Athenian dialect of Plato and Aristotle, which now went viral among Alexander’s soldiers. It opened wide and as yet unmatched vistas of nuance and articulation. There were new words for things in Greek that didn’t exist in other languages. Many were abstract ideas. Only in Greek could one enlarge upon philogeorgia (a love of country life), inform a reader about one’s metanoia (change of mind), or hope to antidemagogein (to rival someone as a demagogue). A person leading a coup might conceivably do all three at once. The Hellenistic king handed a quiet note by a formerly loyal bodyguard could sound these words out, break them down (analysis in Greek), and get a prudent grip on them before retiring to the countryside. Imagine if that note held only consonants, like the most advanced of the previous writing systems. Phlgrg? Mtn? Ntdmggn! In real life, when an Egyptian, a Babylonian, a Roman and a Jew decided to write the first histories of Egypt, Babylon, Rome and Judaism, they wrote them in Greek. These were not choices; there was no choice. Only consonants and vowels together could offer such an efficient tool. Out of this scintillating world came not only Rome, but also Christianity, Byzantium, Islam and the caliphate, Charlemagne and medieval Europe. Each was inconceivable without Alexander, and they all looked back to him – testimony to the power of writers and this new writing technology.
And, if you insist, of soldiers, who played their part too. It was mostly his veterans whom Alexander settled in the easternmost foundations, cities such as Alexandria Arachosia (better known today as Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the name of which one still recognises the original); Alexandria Eschate, ‘Farthest Alexandria’, east of Samarkand; Alexandria on the Indus; or Alexandria in the Caucasus. At the other end, the most famous Alexandria was founded on the western edge of the Nile delta, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, during Alexander’s conquest of Egypt. It rapidly became the centrepiece of the Hellenistic patchwork; by the first century BCE, it was the most populous city in the world, until surpassed by Rome.
Alexander’s tutor Aristotle had possessed the earliest library reported by ancient sources, and it’s thought that all or part of it ended up forming the nucleus of Alexandria’s Great Library. However, when I say ‘earliest library’, I don’t include the royal archives commonly counted as such, like those of, say, Ashurbanipal, the ruler of the Assyrian empire in the seventh century BCE. The thousands of clay tablets and writing boards of his archives, written in cuneiform and excavated in the nineteenth century, are about evenly split between legal documents and texts having to do with divination and oracles, an urgent royal preoccupation. There are a hundred or so collections of proverbs and fables, and fewer than fifty works like The Epic of Gilgamesh, a sophisticated and gripping poem that survives in several ancient Mesopotamian scripts. Though it’s currently heretical to say so, if not for much longer I hope, such offerings reflect the sorts of things non-alphabetic writing is best suited for: keeping records, spelling out terms and conditions within a clear and predictable context, or relating curses, blessings, proverbs or a small slice of oral epic, like Gilgamesh, with which people were already familiar.
What the alphabet can do very well, Eric Havelock noticed, is to relay entirely new and unpredictable information and ideas. This is why it allowed the beginning of science, philosophy, history and all the other forms of original literature – that is, literature that didn’t tread over familiar ground but instead struck off into undiscovered country. Greek scientific discoveries to this day make up our mental firmament, though few remember where they came from. A partial list of Greek ideas spread by the alphabet and now familiar to little children everywhere might include the following: moonlight is reflected sunlight; eclipses are shadows not demons; the earth is an object floating in space; that object is a sphere; it rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. And these ideas are merely the tip of the Greek iceberg.
The Great Library of Alexandria wasn’t just a repository of revolutionary discoveries, it was an active centre of research, with several dozen scholars working there by the middle of the third century BCE, pushing back the frontiers of understanding in a way no civilisation had done before. Here was the Greek tradition of rational inquiry writ large, as the balance of human culture began to shift its centre of gravity – slowly and ever haltingly – from preserving knowledge to improving it. After the rise of Rome the library slowly declined, and it’s not known how much was left to be burned, famously, by Julius Caesar in 48 BCE.
By Caesar’s day, Alexandria had the largest Jewish population anywhere in the ancient world, but Jews had begun settling there early in the city’s history. They rapidly took to Greek koinē, and within a few generations enough spoke it exclusively that the first Greek translation of the Torah appeared, the fabled Septuagint. One of paideia’s most fascinating alumni and most penetrating critics was Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenised Jewish philosopher and theologian who was Jesus’s older contemporary. It was Jews like Philo who some scholars think brought the idea of a single unitary god into Judaism from Greek philosophy. Well-versed in Platonic and Stoic thought, and a pioneer in using allegorical interpretations of scripture – allegoria being a Greek term of rhetorical art, literally ‘other speechifying’ – Philo wrote numerous works in polished Greek. ‘God is One,’ he affirmed, in Greek, ‘but he has around him numberless potencies …’ Philo’s ‘potencies’ would soon become the angels and demons whom early Christians would equate with the traditional gods of Greek polytheism as Christianity split off from this evolving Jewish tradition.
Greek paideia had been fundamentally shaped by the unprecedented perception that nature is regular and at least somewhat comprehensible. Represented by public institutions like the Great Library of Alexandria and the Athenian schools, it was backed by the imposing but emotionally and epistemologically disruptive presence of Greek science. This newfangled ‘way of thinking’ bothered Philo, who repeatedly insisted reason’s claims could never stack up against scripture when it came to revealing the truth, a statement that feels less routine when we realise he may have been the first to make it.
Reasonable types have commonly assumed that science’s presence made the Greeks more ‘rational’. With the same sunny optimism, secular humanists in ages of scientific progress habitually proclaim the triumph of reason to be just around the corner. This tendency always makes me reach for the Irish classicist ER Dodds, whose insight is invaluable when it comes to avoiding such pitfalls. ‘Looking at the picture as a whole,’ Dodds wrote in his seminal 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, ‘an intelligent observer in or about the year 200 B.C. might well have predicted that within a few generations the disintegration of the inherited structure would be complete, and that the perfect Age of Reason would follow. He would, however, have been wrong on both points …’ Woe betide the careless critic who underestimates the powers of both continuity (the old gods carried on for centuries more despite their weakened state) and backlash (Philo was as rational as they came at the turn into Anno Domini, as the Christians would reckon it, but there he is surrounded by angels and demons). Nor is it necessary to understand science in order to react against it, as true believers remind us every day.
In Periclean Athens, as I’ve reported in a previous essay in these pages, when the brand new scientific earth floated through space to throw the first shade on the old gods, outrage ensued: ‘Revenge for the injured gods!’ The reaction now was less direct, but no less familiar, and, as we’ll see shortly, it retained the core of revenge. Instead of avenging the weakened gods of ‘the inherited structure’, however, just as they do today people emotionally traumatised by the idea of nature’s regularity looked, in the short term, to new and more thrilling powers, Philo’s potencies among them: demons and spirits, yes, of course, but likewise miracles and wonders, mysteries and magic, seances and astrology.
Such balms also soothed other anxieties created by new ideas filtering outward from the Athenian schools. Next to God, chief among them was an immaterial and immortal soul that crystalised one’s inner identity, itself a new idea. The oral soul in whatever culture was always breath – psyche in Homeric Greek, anima or spiritus in Latin, a thin and wispy thing, like smoke. Plato had taken that and breathed mysterious, endless life into it, endowing it with the lustre of the equally unprecedented individual self, autos in Greek. Just as the old psyche was a wisp, the old autos was just the body. In Homer, transactions with the self were limited to things like washing it, and excluded anything like pondering it, searching for it, being true to it, or reinventing it. Ancient Hebrew has no word at all for the self. The individual self and its immaterial soul were an alphabetic battleground for which the old oral gods, YHWH included, were simply not equipped. In some ways, this was Philo’s self-appointed task, but ultimately he would find more of a readership among Christians than among Jews.
A century ago, scholars saw rising occultism as an alien influence that came from outside to infect the pure, rationalistic Greeks. Dodds’s mentor and predecessor as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the classicist Gilbert Murray, was one of them, famously calling it a ‘failure of nerve’ on the part of Greek rationalism. Dodds quotes him somewhat regretfully as writing that astrology, for example, ‘fell upon the Hellenistic mind as a new disease falls upon some remote island people’. Curiously, the two shared an interest in ‘psychical research’. Was that a failure of nerve too? The idea has interest, though Murray applied it perhaps somewhat sideways. Dodds himself wrote in this connection about ‘the fear of freedom’, a psychological insight pooh-poohed by his classicist colleagues but echoed in the work of more recent observers of totalising ideologies like Robert Jay Lifton, who died this year.
It is true that most (but not all) such traditions did originally come from outside – although outside now meant places under Greek colonial sway. Astrology offers a diverting example, and the others are just as much fun. Astrology goes back to the Babylonians, but Babylonian astrology was a straight dry twig. As Dodds observed, it was the Greeks who turned it into the lush titillating hothouse orchid we know today. Or, as he put it more rationally, a pseudoscience. The first such, I’d add, as science, by definition, must come before pseudoscience.
Like the Babylonian setting in the Book of Daniel, astrology’s Babylonian background lent exotic antiquity and verisimilitude to something fundamentally new. It became a template. ‘Oriental’ mystery cults, Persian mages, Chaldean prophecies, Sybilline oracles, Hermetic wisdom – Greeks (by which I really mean writers of Greek) picked up on colourful oral traditions from across the Hellenistic world, put them on alphabetic occult steroids, pointed them towards salvation of the soul, and re-exported them, all the while having themselves created a waiting market. Academics call it Hellenistic syncretism, a desiccated phrase that rather misses what was happening. Christianity repeated this pattern in spades.
In the year 51 CE or thereabouts, the Christian convert formerly known as Saul of Tarsus arrived for a stay in Athens, part of an odyssey he was making around the Greek cities of the Aegean. Earlier, in Antioch, he had begun going under his Roman name, Paul, marking the start of his mission to the Gentiles. Or so we gather from The Acts of the Apostles, written perhaps forty or fifty years later and the main source for Paul’s life, aside from the letters he wrote on this journey, with which it occasionally disagrees. From Antioch – where Acts says the name Christian was first used, during the year Paul spent there – he voyaged northwestward through Anatolia, crossing into northeastern Greece near the Hellespont. He had then travelled through Philippi and Thessalonica before coming south to Athens. His next stop would be Corinth, where he would pen the earliest surviving Christian text, his First Letter to the Thessalonians, addressed to the fellow Christians he had recently visited in Thessalonica.
The story of how St. Paul strode boldly into the Athenian marketplace and confronted the philosophers calls to mind Daniel in the lions’ den. The resemblance may not be entirely coincidental. Paul, many modern scholars believe, stood squarely in the apocalyptic tradition the Book of Daniel had inaugurated some two centuries earlier. Indeed, so did Jesus himself, the same scholars argue. This tradition, Norman Cohn observes, had always been marginalised by Jewish authorities. As the Jews were themselves marginalised in Greco-Roman culture, the apocalypticists were doubly marginal figures. Slowly this would change. If the scientific world was a rock floating in space among other rocks, the whole shebang stark and made of matter, the apocalyptic world was shaping up to stand against it. It would be Paul’s achievement to repackage that vision for mass consumption.
Traditionally, the flat table-top world of oral culture had been an ordered place, but its divinely sanctioned stability was constantly under threat from chaos. Staving off the serpent-monsters of chaos was the job of heroic warrior-gods. From the Norse Thor to the Vedic Indra, Indo-European warrior-gods share a common ancestry, and Semitic warrior-gods in the Middle East possess a similar set of combat myths. For thousands of years, this was the basic outlook of orality: we live in a comfortable world of order, with unsettling chaos posing a threat from the outside. It is not, however, our outlook, at least not historically. Its impact on how we perceive the world has been the alphabet’s broadest legacy – though not always in terms the early Greek scientists would recognise.
As Norman Cohn has shown, the Persian prophet Zoroaster had long before adapted the combat mythology common to oral cultures, moralising order and chaos into good and evil powers (dualism) and suggesting that, instead of being static, the conflict between them is moving towards a great final confrontation in which the good powers in the world will once and for all repel the invading evil powers. Salvation, heaven, hell, the devil, an afterlife, bodily resurrection, final judgment, a last battle and the transformation of the world in the End Times – it’s all there in Zoroastrianism, Persia’s national religion when Cyrus freed the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity.
Well-disposed to Cyrus and Persia as liberators, Second Isaiah picked up on these plot points, Cohn suggests, in prophesying the downfall of Babylon at Cyrus’s hands. Second Isaiah’s fervent message fused religious exclusivity and awesome divine power into a cosmic revenge fantasy against the Jews’ worldly enemies, which for him are the forces of evil. Like Zoroaster, Second Isaiah predicted a great future victory in which the world will be utterly transformed.
But Zoroaster had stuck to the traditional polarity: the world is controlled by the forces of good and the forces of evil are the invader. Second Isaiah, seeking to explain a situation in which the forces of good have been defeated, flipped the polarity of this vision, if only temporarily: the world has fallen briefly under the control of the evil power and the forces of good are the invader. I believe this reversal represents a small but momentous mutation, like the very first time a sea creature flopped up onto land with flotation sacs that would also be useful for breathing air. A trick handy for one thing may find a whole new role when circumstances change.
The Book of Daniel took up this dark polarity, marshalling the powers of good to overthrow the evil powers ruling the Hellenistic world. The evil powers controlling the world were still temporary, and temporal – that is, still equated with the worldly enemies of the Jews, in this case the oppressive Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes.
But after Daniel something remarkable begins to happen, as paideia and its blunt rocky earth floating in space under the laws of nature start seeping into the Jewish consciousness. New iterations of the vision slowly shift the grounds of the conflict. Like Daniel, books such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees use characters and settings from the remote Biblical past and deploy hosts of angels against hosts of demons in a great final battle against the evil powers ruling the earth. But now they begin to anticipate Philo, in ranging the forces of good not just against earthly rulers but, implicitly, against a new kind of enemy as well: the ‘alien wisdom’ of the Greeks. Their authors, writes Norman Cohn, ‘never doubted that they possessed an understanding of the world that was superior to that of the Greeks – and they were intent on proving it.’ Against a material cosmos governed by impersonal natural laws, these fevered writings depict instead a cosmos ruled by divine will, but one that has temporarily fallen under the sway of evil powers in the form of the Greek gods. As Cohn observes, they ‘were not so much attempts to imitate Greek wisdom as exercises in emulating and surpassing it’.
So when Paul came to Athens, the world headquarters of materialism, he was carrying more baggage than just his suitcase. And who does Acts show him besting in debate there? None other than Epicureans and Stoics, the two leading materialist schools of philosophy, both mentioned by name right there in the scripture. It’s equally significant that they are the only ones singled out. It’s as if the author of Acts wishes to provide the starkest contrast possible, and thinks that bringing up Platonists and Aristotelians might only muddy the waters.
Where earlier apocalyptic writers had opposed Greek science implicitly, Paul spelled it out. It was a long time coming, but in peeling the sensible from the insensible the early Greek scientists didn’t just invent reason, they also made it psychologically necessary for someone to invent faith as well. We can draw a direct line from Thales of Miletus, the first Greek scientific theorist who saw God in nature, through Plato, whose God shapes the seen in the image of the unseen, to Paul, who denounced Greek philosophy and pointedly defined faith as ‘the conviction of things not seen’. Paul thus embraced the split between seen and unseen. Where Plato and Aristotle had tried to close the gap, the new faith would own it. If Thales sensed God’s presence in the seen, and Plato and Aristotle used God to try to mediate between the seen and the unseen, Paul triumphantly proclaimed God as the definitive victory of the unseen over the seen.
Writing in Greek not Hebrew, he framed this triumph as a dark cosmic revenge drama. Just as evangelicals today fume about scientists and secular humanists, Paul despised the know-it-all Greek philosophers, who rebuffed him when he visited Athens. Stung, he managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, like a wrestler executing a swift reversal. He was the first to spin the Greek word for trust or credulity, pistis, into ‘faith’. ER Dodds tracked this development in a later book, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (1965). Before, pistis was used by philosophers to imply a sort of feckless gullibility, ‘the lowest grade of cognition’, as Dodds put it, standing for ‘the state of mind of the uneducated, who believe things on hearsay without being able to give reasons for their belief’. Through a neat piece of rhetorical jujitsu, of precisely the sort mastered by modern political consultants and PR operatives, Paul turned a flight from reality into a righteous campaign to restore the true kingdom, organising the resistance against science and its claims of sway over nature.
Not for nothing does Christianity, like its apocalyptic beta versions, emerge from yet another story of worldly defeat and humiliation. But while Jewish apocalypticism incorporated grandiose supernatural elements into its revenge stories, it always remained ostensibly focused on the Jews’ worldly enemies. Paul’s apocalypse 2.0 widened the scope to explicitly target worldly thinking itself, as embodied in the sceptic, the unbeliever. ‘Blessed are those who believe without seeing,’ Jesus told Doubting Thomas, planting a seed for Paul. This exquisitely succinct put-down of the scientific outlook barely conceals something that feels quite a bit like resentment. Paul weaponised it.
He did so by solemnising the marriage between the two different traditions, Jewish apocalypticism and Greek supernaturalism. It would turn out to be a match made in heaven, if you will, seductive, compelling and, to many, still irresistible. Paul repackaged Christianity in comprehensively supernatural terms that perfectly addressed the new alienation of humanity from nature and the world that came with deep literacy and that has plagued us ever since. Christianity succeeded because, alone among the many competing religious traditions, it offered a coherent and emotionally compelling vindication of all the instincts science threatens. Paul’s invention of missionary faith – not coincidentally also the world’s first totalising ideology – thus fixed in place the temporary reversal of polarity we saw in Jewish apocalypticism. The world, now seen in a fallen state, is permanently under the sway of the evil power. Nature, the realm of science, is demoted and the pagan gods of nature are literally demonised. Paul made the world itself into an object of hate, or at least suspicion.
For Jewish, Christian and Muslim millenarians alike, the apocalypsis or ‘unveiling’ in Greek (revelatio is the Latin equivalent) has come to stand for the ultimate payback, when the unseen will literally come out of hiding to annihilate the seen in a final act of cosmic revenge. Yet, as Norman Cohn stressed, all the drama around ‘the end of the world’ tends to distract attention from what this sort of thinking has always been about, starting with Second Isaiah: the complete and total vindication of those who feel marginalised. The end is just the means. The title of the bestselling Left Behind series betrays the rage behind the preoccupation with the End Times. We’ll show you who’s gonna be left behind! That could have been Paul, seething at the smug Prius-driving, New-York-Times-reading, latte-sipping Athenian philosophers. Today, as the internet has marginalised us all, it might be alienated young men who themselves feel unseen, mouldering at the gaming console, casting about online for new totalising comforts, possibly reaching for the long gun.
Christianity will always be the OG, the type specimen of such evolutions, as Paul’s alchemy magicked a bespoke earthly chip on the shoulder into a one-size-fits-all metaphysical chip on the shoulder. This sense of grievance, transmuted, is the true legacy of Judaism, and it has nothing to do with monotheism per se, already widespread in the Greco-Roman world. Given the unflattering optics, however, one can understand how Jews and Christians might prefer to conjure a hazy ‘monotheistic faith tradition’ stretching back into the always-convenient mists of time. Sceptics need not be beguiled. Instead, we may press further. Because once we scratch faith’s veneer of love and fellowship and good works and prayer, this inborn sense of grievance always seems to glint out from under the surface, in one way or another, sometimes soft, sometimes violent, every time familiar.
If my interpretation explains faith’s broad appeal after science arose, it also accounts for the way entire cultures could adopt an apocalyptic outlook, which on the face of it presents a puzzle. We can easily see how apocalyptic visions appealed to the earliest Christian converts, marginalised groups such as the poor, or women, or the enslaved, who might with good reason resent the cultivated patriarchy with its chilly Stoicism and Epicureanism. But how could a sense of marginalisation come to resonate with the mainstream, which by definition isn’t marginal at all? Well, all cultures have religion, which goes hand-in-hand with our instinctive affinity for supernatural thinking, part of orality’s biological inheritance. Apocalypticism’s message of ultimate vindication for the marginalised could resonate with cultural mainstreams because the inherent authority of sceptical, naturalistic explanation threatened to discredit religion itself, and religion stands squarely in those cultural mainstreams.
When it comes to the basic issue of how we know anything, all believers are marginalised in this world. In pinning its hopes on the next world, what faith ‘reveals’ is the ancestral mark of religion’s marginalisation at the hands of science.
Wait a second, the objection comes, there is more to faith than that! Any one believer might indeed embrace love, fellowship, good works, all the other things we often think of as religious – including items like burning crosses, suicide vests and the assassination of abortion doctors. So, for that matter, might any two believers. True enough. For every peaceful, tolerant teaching, there’s a violent, intolerant one available if you prefer it – that’s how traditions get to be global. But if those two believers share nothing else, they will share a God whose divine power triumphs over nature. Faith can do without love, fellowship, suicide vests, or assassinated abortion doctors. But it can’t do without triumphalist supernaturalism, the common denominator in all religious faith. The rest is optional, an à la carte menu in a marvellous banquet.
Greek and Roman pagans voted with their feet, at first shuffling a bit to be sure – a few perhaps wistfully casting backward glances – before rushing over to Kingdom Come in a full-on stampede. By the second century, Dodds wrote, the beginning of a long period of social and political upheaval, the issue at stake was not whether miracles occurred, but whose miracles were divine, and whose were merely demonic or magical: ‘The ancient debate on miracles was in the main a conflict not between believers and rationalists but between two sorts of believers.’ Naturalistic thinking was overwhelmed by the response it had provoked, a flight into supernaturalism that cut across social lines – and of which Christianity was the prime beneficiary, thanks to Jesus and Paul, who made miracles part of the Christian brand. Certainly, both YHWH and the pagan gods were capable of working wonders. But the scrutinising lens of reason had magnified the miracle to gigantic proportions.
Boosted in the fourth century by the conversion of the emperor Constantine, Christianity became a victim of its own success. The ensuing episodes of abstraction run-amok came mainly in two stages: Christological controversies (Did Jesus have one nature, human? One nature, divine? Two natures, human and divine? Or what?) were followed by Trinitarian controversies (Father, Son, Holy Ghost – is God one? Or two? Or three? Or what?). In the new imperial capital, Constantinople, there were riots in the streets over the relationship between the Father and the Son: Were they of the same substance or a similar substance? Homoousios vs. homoiousios – a difference in Greek that comes down to a single iota or ‘jot’, as Gibbon howled with superb derision. That sort of thing never happened in Hebrew! It might have been enough, one suspects, to make the Greeks regret inventing vowels in the first place.
By Byzantine times the empire was on the defensive, shorn of its richest provinces by the Arab Islamic conquests. The philosophical schools were long closed in Athens and the intimate alliance of emperor and church had tightened its grip on the levers of power. The term Byzantine, though a modern one, is still oddly appropriate, because in a sense the Greeks had turned against Greekness. In this way, a Greek identity crisis lay at the contested centre of a bizarre pattern of continuity and backlash that I like to think would have tickled ER Dodds. To the bitter end in Christian Byzantium, the name Hellene was spurned as denoting polytheism and pagan learning. Instead, Byzantines called themselves Christians or Romans, but they did so in Greek, which sums things up nicely. Conceiving a peculiar grudge against their own past, when they converted to Christianity the Greeks also internalised the anti-Hellenism that went, through Paul, back to the Maccabees – to the extent that, astonishingly, Greeks themselves now referred to Greek science and philosophy as the ‘alien wisdom’.
A contraband faith has no need for uniformity, but an official faith better have its act together. The age of innocence was over. The age of miracles, however, was just beginning.
28/10/2025
Colin Wells writes about history, culture and religion. His books include Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World and A Brief History of History: Great Historians and the Epic Quest to Explain the Past. After graduating magna cum laude from UCLA with a double major in English and History, Wells read Greats (Greek and Latin language and literature) for three years at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His essays have been published in Arion, The Hedgehog Review, the Dublin Review of Books and elsewhere. Links are available at his web site, colinwellsauthor.com. He is currently working on two books, one about the alphabet and another about the origins of religious faith. He follows Bartleby on social media.
