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.[1] The solemn formula for this in Jerusalem was "Let it come over me! So have I heard it from my teacher."[2] 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
- ↑ In the West, Plato, Aristotle, and above all Pythagoras were regarded as prophets in this sense. What could be referred back to them, was valid. For this reason the succession of the heads of the schools became more and more important, and often more work was done in establishing — or inventing — them than was done upon the history of the doctrine itself.
- ↑ Fromer, Der Talmud, p. 190.
