Fantastic Metropolis

But perhaps not. Perhaps Abelard would have moved past this ancient argument, transmitted through Orphism into Manichæanism and gnosticism and the Bogomils and Cathars, and instead come to a similar conclusion as the Druze: there is one source of wisdom, one God, and it is large, it contains multitudes. Perhaps Abelard’s God might have quoted Whitman, perhaps it would have read the Book of Job.

It was that vision of the universe precisely reflected in the wonderful name, which is “yes and no”—not “or” or “instead of” or “not” or anything else that would suggest that there was a single view, that clear divisions or dichotomies existed because one proposition was self-evidently right or good and the other was to be discarded. For Abelard, and for many of his students, the possibility, perhaps even the necessity, of contradiction clearly existed in God’s perplexing and often difficult universe. With his insistence that faith needed to be subject to rigorous rational scrutiny, a novel and threatening idea in his circles at that time, Abelard almost uncannily anticipated the intellectual upheaval that came to dominate Europe a few years later. The Latin Christian Europe, in which Abelard seemed quite unique (unicus, “the unique one”, is how his learned lover, Heloise, referred to him), could hardly have imagined that in a very few years it would have available the vast Aristotelian corpus in an accurate Latin translation.

—Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World

We already discussed the contrast between the Manichæan outlook of both the Cathars and their enemies (as personified in the previous part of the essay by Hildegard of Bingen, that most fiery of anti-Cathar agitators, a woman and a visionary of tremendous mental and spiritual gifts… I often wonder what fate would have made of a Hildegard who went to the University of Paris instead of to a crazy anchoress on the banks of a river) and the Blakean view which most closely resembles that of pre-Manichæan Zoroastrianism: God is good and so are all things, spirit and matter, within his creation. In fact, you can take it even further, and mirror the Qabalistic ideal using Zurvan: all matter and all spirit are one, energy and matter are one, and an all-knowing, all seeing omnipotent God is both positive and negative, Good and Evil, matter and spirit, Ormazd and Ahriman, and even Yahweh and Asherah. The alchemical ideal (and we remember that alchemy is al-kīmiya, brought into Europe via that al-Andalusian interaction that also brought us Gerbert’s astrolabe, by which the intellect pierces the heavens, and that Aristotelian corpus that just barely missed Peter Abelard, who stood ready for it) of male and female in one body, the rebis, is as divine as it is mundane. One recalls the gnostic tale of the Demiurge Yaldabaoth or the Ophite serpent who is matter and energy in one form, Michael and Samael… and then one remembers another sect of pure ones who attempted, despite their purity, to affect the politics of a small but important region.

The king of the Kittim shall enter into Egypt, and in his time he shall set out in great wrath to wage war against the kings of the north, that his fury may destroy and cut the horn of Israel. This shall be a time of salvation for the people of God, an age of dominion for all the members of His company and of everlasting destruction for all the company of Belial. The confusion of the sons of Japheth shall be great and Assyria shall fall unsuccoured. The dominion of the Kittim shall come to an end and iniquity shall be vanquished, leaving no remnant: for the sons of darkness there shall be no escape.

—Geza Vermes, trans., The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English

It was Augustin Calmet who mentioned in his Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits that the seven angels who sat before the throne of God in the Old Testament might be an allusion to the seven principal officers who were allowed in the presence of the Persian Emperor, in effect an example of Persian culture affecting that of the Jews following their Babylonian Captivity and Cyrus’ ending of that tenure of captivity which earned him the title the anointed one. We know that before the captivity and the teachings of the prophet Jeremiah that Judaism was a monotheism of choice—that they chose and were chosen by their God, that there was a covenant between them. There was nothing to indicate that no other gods existed, merely that the God of Abraham and Isaac had singled out the Hebrews as his people. Following the captivity, Jeremiah brought forth the tale of the bridegroom whose wife had turned away from him, and insisted that the reason Babylon had crushed them and taken them into captivity was not that their gods were stronger, as would normally be assumed to be the case, but rather that the God of Abraham and Isaac, the seventy-two fold name encoded in the book of Exodus in chapter 14 within verses 19–21 had allowed it to happen. Indeed, Jeremiah insisted, all that happens is due to the will of God, for there is only one God, and the Babylonians merely served as his instruments in correcting the recalcitrant bride that was Israel. As a result, when Cyrus freed the people of Israel and seized Babylon to make it part of his growing Persian Empire (a conquest remembered in the message of Daniel interpreting the burning letters on the wall while Nebuchadnezzar was away at conquest: mene, mene, tekel, upharsin) Cyrus is the anointed one because he is the instrument of Israel’s liberation, the literal tool of God. Perhaps it should not surprise us, then, that later writers imagined the court of God to resemble that of Cyrus. What is interesting is that Cyrus himself, as well as later successors like Darius, were deliberately imitating Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, and his seven Amesha Spentas. Therefore, in emulating the Persian king while writing of God, the later redactors of scripture were literally inserting Zoroastrian thought into Judaism.