Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/261

Rh 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 Mandaran 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