But besides the consensus there is another sort of revelation of Truth--namely, the “Word of God,” in a perfectly definite and purely Magian sense of the phrase, which is equally remote from Classical and from Western thought, and has, in consequence, been the source of innumerable misunderstandings. The sacred book in which it has become visibly evident, in which it has been captured by the spell of a sacred script, is part of the stock of every Magian religion.[425] In this conception three Magian notions are interwoven each of which, even by itself, presents extreme difficulties for us, while their simultaneous separateness and oneness is simply inaccessible to our religious thought, often though that thought has managed to persuade itself to the contrary. These ideas are: God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. That which is written in the prologue of the John Gospel--“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”--had long before come to perfectly natural expression as something self-evident in the Persian ideas of Spenta Mainyu,[426] and Vohu Mano,[427] and in corresponding Jewish and Chaldean conceptions. And it was the kernel for which the conflicts of the fourth and fifth centuries concerning the substance of Christ were fought. But, for Magian thought, truth is itself a substance,[428] and lie (or error) second substance--again the same dualism that opposes light and darkness, life and death, good and evil. As substance, truth is identical now with God, now with the Spirit of God, now with the Word. Only in the light of this can we comprehend sayings like “I am the truth and the life” and “My word is the truth,” sayings to be understood, as they were meant, with reference to substance. Only so, too, can we realize with what eyes the religious man of this Culture looked upon his sacred book: in it the invisible truth has entered into a visible kind of existence, or, in the words of John i, 14: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” According to the Yasna the Avesta was sent down from heaven, and according to the Talmud Moses received the Torah volume by volume from God. A Magian revelation is a mystical process in which the eternal and unformed word of God--or the Godhead as Word--enters into a man in order to assume through him the manifest, sensible form of sounds and especially of letters. _“Koran” means “reading.”_ Mohammed in a vision saw in the heaven treasured rolls of scripture that he (although he had never learned how to read) was able to decipher “in the name of the Lord.”[429] This is a form of revelation that in the Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures is not even the exception,[430] but it was only from the time of Cyrus that it began to take shape. The old Israelitish prophets, and no doubt Zarathustra also, see and hear in ecstasy things that afterwards they spread abroad. The Deuteronomic code (621) was given out as having been “found in the Temple,” which meant that it was to be taken as the wisdom of the Father. The first (and a very deliberate) example of a “Koran” is the book of Ezekiel, which the author received in a thought-out vision from God and “swallowed” (iii, 1-3). Here, expressed in the crudest imaginable form, is the basis on which later the idea and shape of all apocalyptic writing was founded. But by degrees this _substantial_ form of reception came to be one of the requisites for any book to be canonical. It was in post-Exilic times that the idea arose of the Tables of the Law received by Moses on Sinai; later such an origin came to be assumed for the whole Torah, and about the Maccabæan period for the bulk of the Old Testament. From the Council of Jabna (about 90 B.C.) the whole word was regarded as inspired and delivered in the most literal sense. But the same evolution took place in the Persian religion up to the sanctification of the Avesta in the third century, and the same idea of a literal delivery appears in the second vision of Hermas, in the Apocalypses, and in the Chaldean and Gnostic and Mandæan writings; lastly, it underlies, as a tacit natural basis, all the ideas that the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Platonists formed of the writings of their old masters. “Canon” is the technical expression for the totality of writings that are accepted by a religion as delivered. It was as canons in this sense that the Hermetic collection and the corpus of Chaldean oracles came into being from 200--the latter a sacred book of the Neoplatonists which alone was admitted by Proclus, the “Father” of this Church, to stand with Plato’s _Timæus_.

Originally, the young Jesus-religion, like Jesus himself, recognized the Jewish canon. The first Gospels set up no sort of claim to be the Word made visible. _The John Gospel is the first Christian writing of which the evident purpose is that of a Koran_, and its unknown author is the originator of the idea that there could be and must be a Christian Koran. The grave and difficult decision whether the new religion should break with that which Jesus had believed in clothed itself of deep necessity in the question whether the Jewish scriptures might still be regarded as incarnations of the one truth. The answer of the John Gospel was tacitly, and that of Marcion openly, no, but that of the Fathers was, quite illogically, yes.

It followed from this metaphysical conception of the essence of a sacred book that the expressions “God speaks” and “the Scripture says” were, in a manner wholly alien to our thought, completely identical. To us it is suggestive of the Arabian Nights that God himself should be spellbound in these words and letters and could be unsealed and compelled to reveal the truth by the adepts of this magic. Exegesis no less than inspiration and delivery is a process of mystical under-meaning (Mark i, 22). Hence the reverence--in diametrical opposition to the Classical feeling--with which these precious manuscripts were cared for, their ornamentation by every means known to the young Magian art, and the appearance again and again of new scripts which, in the eyes of their users, alone possessed the power of capturing the truth sent down.

But such a Koran is by its very nature unconditionally right, and therefore unalterable and incapable of improvement.[431] There arose, in consequence, the habit of secret interpretations meant to bring the text into harmony with the convictions of the time. A masterpiece of this kind is Justinian’s Digests, but the same applies not only to every book of the Bible, but also (we need not doubt) to the Gathas of the Avesta and even to the then current manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle, and other authorities of the Pagan theology. More important still is the assumption, traceable in every Magian religion, of a secret revelation, or a secret meaning of the Scriptures, preserved not by being written down, but in the memory of adepts and propagated orally. According to Jewish notions, Moses received at Sinai not only the written, but _also a secret oral Torah_,[432] which it was forbidden to commit to writing. “God foresaw,” says the Talmud, “that one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of the Torah and would say to Israel: ‘We, too, are sons of God.’ Then will the Lord say: ‘Only he who knows my secrets is my son.’ And what are the secrets of God? The oral teachings.”[433] The Talmud, then, in the form in which it is generally accessible, contains only a part of the religious material, and it is the same with Christian texts of the early period. It has often been observed[434] that Mark speaks of the Visitation and of the Resurrection only in hints, and that John only touches upon the doctrine of the Paraclete and omits the institution of the Lord’s Supper entirely. The initiates understood what was meant, and the unbeliever ought not to know it. Later there was a whole “secret discipline” which bound Christians to observe silence in the presence of unbelievers concerning the baptismal confession and other matters. With the Chaldeans, Neopythagoreans, Cynics, Gnostics, and especially the sects from Jewish to Islamic, this tendency went to such lengths that the greater part of their secret doctrines is unknown to us. Concerning the Word thus preserved only in the minds there was a _consensus of silence_, the more so as each believer was certain that the other “knew.” We ourselves, as it is upon the most important things that we are most emphatic and forthright, run the risk of misinterpreting Magian doctrines through taking the part that was expressed for the whole that existed, and the profane literal meaning of words for their real significance. Gothic Christianity had no secrets and hence it doubly mistrusted the Talmud, which it rightly regarded as being only the foreground of Jewish doctrine.

Pure Magian, too, is the Kabbalah, which out of numbers, letter-forms, points, and strokes, unfolds secret significances, and therefore cannot but be as old as the Word itself that was sent down as Substance. The secret dogma of the creation of the world out of the two-and-twenty letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that of the throne-chariot of Ezekiel’s Vision, are already traceable in Maccabæan times. Closely related to this is the allegorical exegesis of the sacred texts. All the tractates of the Mishnah, all the Fathers, all the Alexandrian philosophers are full of it; in Alexandria the whole Classical mythology and even Plato were treated in this way and brought into analogy (Moses = Musæus) with the Jewish prophets.

The only strictly _scientific_ method that an unalterable Koran leaves open for progressive opinion is that of commentary. As by hypothesis the “word” of an authority cannot be improved upon, the only resource is reinterpretation. No one in Alexandria would ever have asserted that Plato was in “error”; instead, he was glossed upon. It was done in the strictly constructed forms of the Halakha, and the fixation of this exegesis in writing takes the commentary shape that dominates all religious, philosophical, and savant literatures of this Culture. Following the procedure of the Gnostics, the Fathers compiled written commentaries upon the Bible, and similarly the Pehlevi commentary of the Zend appeared by the side of the Avesta, and the Midrash by the side of the Jewish canon. But the “Roman” jurists of about A.D. 200 and the “Late Classical” philosophers--that is, the Schoolmen of the growing cult-Church--went just the same way; the Apocalypse of this Church, commented over and over again after Posidonius, was the _Timæus_ of Plato. The Mishnah is one vast commentary upon the Torah. And when the oldest exegetes had become themselves authorities and their writings Korans, commentaries were written upon commentaries, as by Simplicius, the last Platonist, in the West, by the Amoraim, who added the Gemara to the Mishnah in the East, and by the jurists who compiled the Imperial Constitutions into the Digests at Byzantium.

This method, which fictitiously refers back every saying to an immediate inspired delivery, was brought to its keenest edge in the Talmudic and the Islamic theologies. A new Halakha or a Hadith is only valid when it can be referred through an unbroken chain of guarantors back to Moses or Mohammed.[435] The solemn formula for this in Jerusalem was “Let it come over me! So have I heard it from my teacher.”[436] In the Zend the citation of the chain of warranty is the rule, and Irenæus justifies his theology by the fact that a chain goes back from him through Polycarp to the primitive Community. Into the Early Christian literature this Halakha-form entered so self-evidently that no one remarked it for what it was. Apart altogether from the constant references to the Law and the Prophets, it appears in the superscription of the four Gospels (“_according to_” Mark), each of which had thus to present its warrant if authority was to be claimed for the words of the Lord that it presented.[437] This established the chain back to the Truth that was incarnate in Jesus, and it is impossible to exaggerate the intense reality of this in the world-idea of an Augustine or a Jerome. This is the basis of the practice, which spread even more widely from the time of Alexander onwards, of providing religious and philosophical writings with names,[438] like Enoch, Solomon, Ezra, Hermes, Pythagoras--guarantors and vessels of divine wisdom, in whom, therefore, the Word had been made Flesh of old. We still possess a number of Apocalypses bearing the name of Baruch, who was then compared with Zarathustra, and we can scarcely form an idea of what in the way of literature circulated under the names of Aristotle and Pythagoras. The “Theology of Aristotle” was one of the most influential works of Neoplatonism. And, lastly, this the metaphysical presupposition for the style and the deeper meaning of _citation_, which was employed by Fathers, Rabbis, “Greek” philosophers, and “Roman” jurists, and eventuated on the one hand in the Law of Valentinian III,[439] and on the other in the elimination from the Jewish and Christian canons of apocryphal writings--a fundamental notion, which differentiated the literary stock according to difference of _substance_.