A Liminal Space

At the time of this writing, polarities set the tone of American life, and much of life around the world. Heightened, seemingly unbridgeable divisions separate the political Left from the Right, rural and urban dwellers, rich and poor, ethnic groups, religious groups, subdivisions within religious groups. Divides such as these heighten the need for the skills of a particular kind of person: the mediator. Within a legal framework, mediation suggests a kinder and more humane approach to resolving a dispute than a lawsuit. But our riven world could take a lesson from the religions as well, which are full efficacious mediators spanning the gulf between the divine and the human. At the same time, given the intensity of difference between the poles that characterize so much of our common life, no mediation can be expected to suspend all the tensions between us. Instead of seeking unity from a plurality—e pluribus unum—we are better advised to accommodate a rich plurality within whatever semblance of unity we can muster. Mediation will not make of us a circle with a common center; but it can weave a web of connection between a range of differently centered circles. This book offers an alternative and counterfactual vision of how what proved to be one polarity within Western religious history—between Christians and Jews—might have been early on resolved or never even have arisen in the first place. It imagines an unfolding from first century C.E. religious currents within the ancient Middle East that culminated in a single, loosely federated, and internally pluralistic religion of varied strands, rather than the two religions—Christianity and Judaism—that in fact evolved. Because we take the fount of this alternate history of Western religion to be ancient Alexandria, we name this religion, which never existed, for ease of reference: Alexandrism. We base our vision of this counterfactual religion on key, extant texts from the Middle East: the Wisdom of Solomon, the authentic letters of the Apostle Paul, and the collected works of Philo of Alexandria. For at least some scholars of the ancient world, these three together represent a nearly cohesive body of thought that, for want of a better term, we might call Hellenistic monotheism. But we shall call it Alexandrism. Mediation between the divine and the human will prove to be the central idea of this religion. It will make of the religion less a unity than a pluralistic federation of diverse paths to the divine, such as we find in Hinduism. In effect, Alexandrism is the Western, monotheistic analog to monistic/polytheistic Hinduism. Having constructed a vision of this religion based on the writings of Paul, Philo, and Pseudo-Solomon, we will not presume to imagine how Western history would have unfolded under its aegis. We imagine it would have been a very different history from the actual one, likely less violent. For the pluralism endemic to it, we surmise, would have obviated the conflict that follows on absolutist thinking. But tracing such a history is too overwhelming a task for the non-historian this writer is. Instead, we follow a lead from within Alexandrism itself towards the usefulness of the visual and literary arts. For, perhaps unexpectedly, we shall find that, under the guidance of Pseudo-Solomon, Paul, and Philo—even if against what they most directly say—a rich role for the arts emerges in the service of religion. Works of art already inhabit a counterfactual world of their own. They are reconstructions of elements within nature according to what a Kantian philosopher might call aesthetic ideas. They make for a kind of super- or counter-nature, according to alternative visions of reality. So artworks are already by their nature in sync with counterfactual histories. And because they are rife with interpretability—for that is the nature of an object shaped according to an aesthetic idea—they lend themselves to illustrating pasts that never were. A range of artworks from actual history, including sculptures, paintings, poems, plays, novels, stories, and diaries, are marshaled in this book to show the different faces of Alexandrism. Each of these works originates in an artistic sensibility that combines features of both Judaism and Christianity and so only with difficulty can be subsumed under one or the other of them. Other artworks might have served, too. But those interpreted here are especially obvious examples of the type. The artworks that focus the chapters follow in chronological order, from medieval to modern times, to suggest a counterfactual history of religion that shows, for real, in the history of the arts. I take it to be an expression of artistic license—although I prefer to call it generosity—that artworks unintended for the purpose of illustrating a counterfactual religion nonetheless lend themselves to that cause. That subsumes this work under a rubric, perhaps, of theological poetics. It is a reverie. That is how it must be read. It envisions an alternative religious history for the West that would not have resulted in the wall of incomprehension that has existed—and continues to—between Jews and Christians. In that vision of a happier past, the current relations between these two distinct and in many ways different religious sensibilities may deepen and warm.