Philo and Hillel

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Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch Presentation 38 of 54 Philo and Hillel Presented by Roger Weir Tuesday, August 27, 1985 Transcript: This Tuesday evening lecture by Roger Ware was delivered at the Whirling Rainbow School on August 27th, 1985. This is Philo and Hillel. Hillel. H I L L E L. We're trying to understand, as conscientiously as we can, something that's very important to us. And we've talked about it several times. And perhaps again tonight, we should emphasize that what we're engaged in is a very practical, very pragmatic process of review. The old Pythagorean process of retrospection is germane here. We're at the close of a day. One would try to reconstruct the day working backwards, starting with the very process of beginning to remember and then going back as one reviews the day in reverse, back to the beginning. And this process of recollection was to train oneself, to become attentive to the personal life, to the fact that the personal life has a structure, and that every day in a personal life has a shape, has a particular shape. The shape of the day. That after one got acclimated to seeing the shape of the day, that one could begin to sense that shapes of days reoccur, that you have seen days like this, or you have seen days like what was yesterday and then days like today following. And that that seems some sort of little vignette that has played before. And so progressively, one would become used to the fact that not only do days have shapes, but that there are patterns in lives. And as one moved, one sensibility amplified it, enlarged it so that instead of just being sensitive to a day, one was sensitive to patterns which might only occur once every three months or once every six months. Or one might notice that given a couple of years experience, it's something like this, that there is a patterning which reoccurs under certain conditions and under other conditions it doesn't reoccur. And so you might learn to experiment and play with creating conditions and thus recreating those patterns and large. This, of course, is the esoteric geometry. It's not the geometry of Euclid. It's not the geometry that one puts on paper, but it's the geometry of one's own life. And it is of this geometry that is one life that Pythagoras said that this is history. Geometry is history. And history in this way is not merely the record of what happened, but is the conscious recognition of the archetypal patterns which happen. That is to say that events in the past are not just in the past, but that they are part of segments of reoccurring themes, re-emergent, epochs, and so forth. And in this way, retrospection, training the memory to spirituality, he lifts the individual out of his mundane experience into an esoteric field. And it's in this esoteric field. Then that discovery can happen. As to meaning. So what we have been doing here. In this recollection of ancient Alexandria, is to go back and try and experience coming forward again the events that happened roughly from about 300 B.C. to about 300 AD, and we're trying to focus those events in the city of Alexandria as much as we can. We keep coming back to it as a touchstone, and we've discovered that we have to talk about Jerusalem. We have to talk about Rome, about Athens, about many other places, as well as Alexandria. And we've also discovered that because we have never been told the basic traditions, we've had to go back and reconstruct for ourselves, more or less the patterns of what actually occurred. And because no one has ever done this in a comprehensive way, we've tried to weave these patterns together. And we noticed right away that at the very core, the fulcrum, the median point of this time scale, 300 BC to 300 A.D., falls right about what we would say was zero A.D. and that, in fact, there was a qualitative change shortly after zero A.D., which allows for us now to proceed with our plan, which was quite ineffective. Previously. Our plan was to try and understand consciously the patterning. And we found that in the BC centuries that we were not understanding, patterning, that what we were getting again and again were traditions which were separate. And in order to understand the whole scene, we had to fall into comparing traditions they didn't actually meet. But we mechanically would pick them up and juxtapose them. And we noted that this was rather like, um, a legal, legalistic type of a concern where one just gathers up and one has a lot of fibers and a lot of traditions, but they're just they're held in the grass. And of course, if this is all that one ever experiences, one then says that the comprehension in life is in the grasp of a man or the grasp of a woman, that it's our mind that does the synthesizing and it does synthesizing through contrast and comparison. And this, of course, if one believes this leads one, then to develop a whole logic, a whole theology, a whole politics based upon this human capacity. But we've seen that this capacity changed that after the first half of the first century AD, instead of just picking up all the various threads of traditions which were always separate, the threads by themselves seemed to now interpenetrate that instead of having a collection of traditions, one had an interpenetration of all traditions, and so one got a patterned fabric of meaning to life, and that it was a disservice to call the synchronistic to say that people were just stuffing traditions together, gluing them together, that in fact, it was not so much that people were gluing them together. This is a misapprehension carried over from the naive world order from before that, it was man's grasp and man's mind that put things together. And indeed, this naivete has carried up to our own time. There are many people, perhaps. Who knows, maybe almost 100% of people who believe that the human mind puts it together. This is naive. We have seen over the last two months, increasingly, that the traditions themselves bent, and instead of maintaining their straight, isolated lineages, all of them began working together and interpenetrating and producing this fabric of meaning, so that instead of having a tradition which one believed in or did not believe in, more or less one now had a field of consciousness which one could experience a new quality that had not been there before, and that this new quality, this field of consciousness, was in the strongest sense of the word, a solution to history. That it dissolved all the traditions that the lineages and the traditions of Judaism, of the Greeks, of the Romans, of the Egyptians, of the Chaldeans, you name it, all melted in the first century AD into each other, and that instead of having these, uh, stiff strands of spaghetti like traditions, you now had them melt in and become a broth, a tremendously enriched creative broth of human experience. Those who were still, depending upon the strength of their traditions, were haunted by this experience because they felt that they were going crazy. They felt that their traditions were dying, that the Greek gods were dead, that the Roman gods of the state no longer worked, that ancient oracles no longer were operative, that the ancient mystery traditions were now ridiculous and silly. That the, uh lineages in the Jewish tradition, whether Sadducees or Pharisees, simply were a matter of personal choice and nothing obtained beyond that. It was across the board, in every single tradition, that this melting took place in the first century AD, so that if we look in the long range at the first century AD, we can see that the human psyche no longer carried with it the static structure which was available to it before. But all the capacities which had been distributed in a static way in these structures before the first century AD, were now committed into a new, transformed medium that operated rather like what we now know to be the function of liquid crystals that the inner psyche of human beings was able to work upon new bases of projection, and instead of remembering a tradition, there now was a reflection and a projection and a diffraction of human capacities, which produced a, um, cosmic kind of envisioning. So that the creation of a world vision became the preoccupation of people, rather than the remembering of the rules of behavior. And those who were unable to make the change, unable to get into the new technique of envisioning a world order, experience the vacuousness of their tradition and soon became capable of leading the most destitute lives. Immorality on the colossal scale. Violence on a scale which we have only seen again in our own time. Um. Anger and selfishness. Neurotic breakdowns. Belief in demons and practicing of just any type of rite. In order to curtail oneself, one's own energies or other people's selves, other people's energies. And that this, um, primitivism of trying to go back to archaic rites, archaic rituals to curb human beings. Was being paralleled at the time by the development of an ethical religious consciousness which was transcendental in its capacity but required for its operation the ability to create a world envisioning, a cosmos envisioning. And we've seen that the person that seems most to focus this change was Jesus Christ. That regardless of what one believes or does not believe, the overall pattern change the overall evidence, the overall experience of a vast transformation on every level of life at just this time would lead us to posit some colossal, uh, individual or some colossal group of individuals, if you like, at just this time. The transformation that happened was in a two fold manner. There was the transformation of the individual away from this world, away from the static, structured world that had been engendered that may well have worked for thousands of years, but was no longer valid, that the individual should turn away from that world and should turn inward, and that the second part to this was that in turning inward, one should re-envision the relationship which this transformed person, this transformed self had to the largest possible context, so that instead of fitting into a static mold given by a tradition, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of years along one now was a dynamic individual who fit into a eternal universe rather than a temporal, limited world. And the first century AD was a monumental shifting. Um, the turn that's been used apropos of this has been an enantiodromia, a complete transversal of all values, a turning upside down so that whatever static structures held before they now emptied, and whatever was being emptied before, now collected. So it was a complete turning over in Alexandria, more than any other place in the classical world. There was a fairly sizable population of people much like ourselves, individuals who were somewhat confident in their ability to live their lives fairly well, intelligently, but who sense that there were larger patterns that should be investigated, and therefore one should come into contact with like minded people. Similar spirits. And this drive, this instinct, this quality for amplifying the possibility of self-preservation by finding a community of like mindedness, however temporary, whether it was just in a school or whether it was in a religious commune, or whether it was in some later on, some monastic condition, or whether it was just a friendship strata, whatever it was, the transformation of the individual and the creation of a an eternal universal vision needed to be mediated by the community, by the development of the spiritual community. And it was the development of the spiritual community that took all of the ingeniousness of organization in the time, because the powers that were, especially the Roman Empire or the Jewish religious structure, or the Greek, uh, intellectual mind or the Egyptian, uh, mystery tradition, whatever structures were there were not jeopardized by individuals becoming interiorized, nor were they jeopardized by individuals coming to cosmic visions, but they were all jeopardized by the development of communities of people who were no longer participating in that worldly structure and therefore could not be manipulated. And further, that those communities seem to answer a crying need in that time for many, many people, and that those religious communities in the first century AD were the ones that were growing very, very fast. So that by 100 AD, it was quite apparent that if left unchecked in another century, these religious communities were going to take over the show. In fact, it took two centuries. But they did. So we're trying to understand now how this happened. And our focus is always, you know, for ourselves. How did the individual actually make the transformation, what was involved in it and were, of course, in a corollary way, interested in what was the vision, what was the universal verities? What was the eternal, uh, triumph that they identified and they saw? But all the time we're also having to keep track of this medium ground of the community. And it's extremely difficult when one looks at Christianity or one looks at the Roman world to understand what happened to religious community, it's almost impossible to focus upon it because of the vicissitudes in Christianity. We just don't have enough evidence. We don't have enough experience. In the second century AD, we begin to have enough experience in evidence, and we'll be able to see that quite clearly. For the Roman world, there was so much official obfuscation that one cannot tell what was happening, and also the breakdown of the official Roman mind. It had a nervous breakdown about 50 to 60 to 70 AD, the whole Roman psyche broke down. So it's almost impossible to tell just exactly what happened. But the area where we can look is to the Jewish experience. And the Jewish experience in the first century AD is our clearest guide to the way in which this essential medium ground the religious community. Faced with the problem of people transforming within as individuals, of envisioning new worldviews, uh, in the larger context, and all of this vis a vis power structures which were overwhelming the two individuals in the first century AD who make this difference came right at the beginning of that century. One of them is Philo from Alexandria, and the other is Hillel, who was originally from Babylonia and who went to the Land of Israel and became the head of the Pharisee party. Hillel's dates are roughly 50 BC to about ten AD, and Philo is roughly about 40 BC to about 40 A.D.. These two individuals are a study in contrast from Hillel. We get Rabbinical Judaism, and from Philo we get the Hellenistic Hermetic tradition. Platonic Hermetic tradition. And so two of the great opposing structures that will now interweave for the next 2000 years in history both occur at the very same time and in related places. We've done enough investigating for you to realize that Alexandria was like Los Angeles, and Israel was like Baja California. And whatever Alexandria did was extremely important to what actually was able to go on in Israel. Just like whatever happens in Los Angeles can't help but affect what goes on in Baja California. The population differential was about the same. Um, the distances were, um, roughly the same. So we have this experience, and I think I should take us now to to this statement. This is from a volume called Alien Wisdom The Limits of Hellenization. And we'll get, uh, probably next week into alien consciousness forms, because this became a real problem at the time. This is written by an Italian, and he writes here of the consequence. Of the Greek intelligence coming into contact with the Jewish religious tradition. The consequence must now be faced. About 300 BC, Greek intellectuals presented the Jews to the Greek world as philosophers. As legislators and wise men. That is early on in the first Greek contact, which had happened as early as about 800 BC, and intermittently through the five hundreds of BC. There was the development of the sense that the Jewish wisdom was that of wise men and sages. Nobody could speak Hebrew, and nobody really knew the tradition. But the sense was, is that they were they were wise. Um, rather like the popular estimation of Solomon in our day. Solomon as a wise man. So in 300 BC, the Jews were philosophers and wise men. A few decades later, the alleged philosophers and legislators made public in Greek their own philosophy and legislation, that is, the Old Testament was translated into Greek. The Septuagint. In Alexandria. The Gentile world remained indifferent to this. Other Semites, the Phoenician Zeno of Citium, who as we saw, was the founder of stoicism. He was a Phoenician, and Chrysippus of Soli, who was the next teacher in stoicism, came to Athens and they were both Semitic, came to Athens, and easily established themselves as masters of wisdom in the very center of intellectual life in Greece. And this underscored the Oriental wise man, not Oriental in the sense of India or China, but Oriental in the sense of, um, Judaism, because they accepted polytheism and made the traditional language of Greek philosophy their own. They were extremely successful. But the contrast was glaring. The failure of the Septuagint, the Old Testament, translated into Greek to arouse the interest of the pagan intelligentsia of the third century BC, was the end of the myth of the Jewish philosopher. Increasingly, it was discovered by the Greek intellectual world that there was no philosophic content of the kind that the Greek mind was used to in the Old Testament, that the that whatever wisdom was there was not in the content. Because the stories of, um, the Chronicles and the kings, the stories of the Exodus, the stories of the Genesis and so forth, had none of the associations which we have today and have had for several thousand years. None of those associations were there whatsoever. We can get a parallel, somewhat, uh, Mahatma Gandhi, when he first read the Old Testament, was appalled by the violence there and could find no religion in it whatsoever, and could not understand how people could base a religion on this, what is religious in it compared to the Bhagavad Gita, etc., etc. compared to the Upanishads, the same thing happened with the Greek mind. There was no content that was religious to them. That was intellectually apprehensible. And so the emphasis went instead of to the content, to the form, that there must be something in the form that was esoteric, that was intellectual, and that the content was secondary. The content was only the clothing that was presenting the form. And this is why you have in the early semantic philosophers like Zeno of Citium, in stoicism, an emphasis in both stoic physics and stoic ethics upon formal structure and not upon content. And this is why one finds in Philo the emphasis upon allegorical interpretation, because it's only the use of allegorical form that unveils the secret hidden meaning that what was prosaic and mundane now becomes esoteric and arcane through the correct application of the form, which is like a key which unlocks the structure. And so the mind of the earlier Greeks was seen to be naive, that it was seen to look only in terms of content, and to be insufficient in terms of labyrinthian esoteric form, that the Greek mind did not have the true esoteric keys. And so with Philo comes not only the emphasis on allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament, but the denigration of the Greek mind as being naive, only able to look at shallow things, not to look at the deeper, arcane, esoteric things. Or we should just we should make a differentiation here that the shallow mind looks at things, but the esoteric mind understands relations, which is different. And this of course, we've seen by last week, by leaping ahead to Clement of Alexandria, was just the way in which Christians at the end of the second century AD accepted the world, accepted the whole notion of history, that in fact, the whole Greek tradition was borrowed second hand and rather naively, from the esoteric Hebrew tradition that the whole Greek mythological chaos was due to the fact that they didn't understand the esoteric of covenant sequences in Genesis. But the whole development of Greek philosophy led one more and more to the materialistic world, as encapsulated in Aristotle. But there was no real understanding because the Greeks had copied, or rather had mis copied their Hebrew teachers had not learned their lessons. And so what began with Philo would become, in about 150 years, the intelligence of the Western world. At the same time that Philo was developing this in Jerusalem was the famous figure of Hillel, who was a contemporary of both Jesus and Philo. They all occur about the same time. When we come to the figure of Hillel. We have almost nothing to work with except pure tradition. The normal presentation of Hillel in the Jewish tradition is that he is the original presenter of the um, of the forms which came down to be the Talmud and the Mishnah, that instead of basing Judaism upon the Old Testament, that Rabbinical Judaism is now placed upon the interpretation of the Old Testament, and that the interpretation of the Old Testament is based upon a very complicated series of logical analyses and critical examinations, which are developed in the Talmud and the commentary on the Talmud. The Mishnah is. There are originating in Hillel, or perhaps not so much originating in Hillel, but coming to a focus first in Hillel three techniques of allegorical analysis, which can be applied to Scripture, which opened them up, which divulged esoteric meaning. The first of these structures, the first of these ways, was called the um uh in Hebrew the call the Homer q a l v e h o m e r call the homer. And this is a way of arguing, a way of thinking through in a logical way. And this, uh, call the Homer says if a rule applies in an unimportant case, it will apply all the more in an important one. So that if you have trouble finding meaning in a very large, complicated case and you can't come to a decision, go to a small, simple case, or if that's too complex, go to a simpler case, etc., etc. until one gets to a case so simple that one can see all of the essential elements, and whatever applies in that case will apply all along the line, even to the most complicated cases, so that with this initial, uh, technique, the Talmud, it does not concern itself with universal cosmic circumstances. It concerns itself with, uh, the most mundane and trivial concerns. What kind of candles to burn on such and such an occasion, what kind of napkins should be put out, and how many the most mundane and trivial things, but that the intent was the most serious and most cosmic intent. And it was only in having confidence that if one could discover the structure and the simple, that it would apply in the complex just as well. So this called the Homer, was one of the techniques. The second technique was called gezerah shavah g e z e r a h Gezerah Shavah. Chava gezerah Shavah. Gezerah Shavah. And this was an argument constructed on the basis of the appearance of the same word or the same grammatical construction in two distinct phrases, in which case the rule governing the one applied also to the other. So one looked for parallels in grammatical construction. Or one looked for a, uh, the appearance of the same word. So that if the phrase um in this way should appear in some context, if the phrase in this way appears anywhere else in Scripture. You then have a connection made. Here we have to open our hands and and remind you that this type of thinking came into being across the board in the first century AD and was a complete change in consciousness, absolute transformation, the very structure of human consciousness. Because in order to have something like Gezerah Shavah be a logical form, one had to treat all of Scripture as a unified fabric, as a cosmic meaning in one piece. Otherwise, it would be ridiculous to think that because a phrase occurred in Deuteronomy that it should be related to something that occurs in Ezra, or because it occurs in the Book of Job, and it occurs in Amos that there must be something between them. It is only because one assumes that Scripture is a single unified entity, and in this case it is the revelation of the Word of God, a single word amplified out to so many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. So that these techniques of analysis and exposition assume already that this is operable. Now, in classical Judaism, such an application would be unthinkable. One would never think in this way. One must learn the text. One must learn the text in its exact sequence, and that that's the way one goes. But in this one uses the entire scripture and makes the correlation this way. The third investigation was called Hickock Hakk e S.H. Hickock, and this was an argument by analogy because of the presumed likenesses of two distinct phrases the same rule governing the one applied also to the other. And so because of likenesses of distinct phrases. Now these rabbinical Judaic techniques of development all refer back to interpretation, all refer back to a critical consciousness which is of man's mind. That is man's mind. That is the focus, and that is man's mind with its critical capacity that needs to be taught how to investigate the revelations of the Word of God in its amplification, which is not only then the Scripture, but is the way of life which people would live in, which people did live. And so Judaism was not a religion so much of belief, but was a way of life which was coherent only if one practiced it continuously and assiduously, and only if one were conscious of the fact that the Word of God was unbroken and indivisible, so that any application amplification of the Word of God still had its integrity. And so the amplification still worked as a unity. And all of these techniques of crisscrossing by analogy, by likeness, by simple to complex, would hold without any exceptions. This is indeed a very powerful mental state, but also has its fragility. Hillel is the individual around whom is focused. The development of this and the development happened in Jerusalem through the Pharisee party. And it was against this immediate background that the historical Jesus emerged. One of the central questions that Hillel discussed was about the Sabbath, about how sacrifices, the passion, the sacrifice of the goat in the temple, whether that could take place in a Sabbath. And his ruling was that there is not only one occasion on which the sacrifice could happen, but there might be several hundred different cases. The importance in here was that ritual should be kept up and that the Sabbath structure. Took a back seat to the ritual related to that, and this was very important to the Jews at that time. It seems rather peculiar to non-Jews at our time, but this was extremely important, and you can see why in just a minute. Was the notion that in Deuteronomic law, in mosaic law, every seven years there was a complete remission of debts. And because of this law, towards the end of the sixth year of this cycle, people would not loan anybody money because they wouldn't get it paid back in time. And so Hillel figured out a way to get around this, that the the creditor could submit this debt to the court, to the rabbinical collegium of the temple, and that the law applied to an individual creditor and debtor, but did not apply to a debt which had been turned over to the court. And in this way one could keep on loaning money, and of course, the honest and the accumulation of the burden of debt was unending. All of this happened about, um, zero BC in the time of Herod. Hallel was made the Nabi or Nasi, the head of the Jewish religion in Palestine at this time, and this is a little bit of the character of Hillel. There was a. Law that was lost to the elders of Bethabara. This is a city in northern um Galilee. One time, the 14th of Nisan. That's a time in the month turned out to coincide with the Sabbath. That was the 14th of Nisan, was the Passover. And they did not know whether the Messiah, the Passover offering, overrides the Sabbath or not. They said, there is here a certain Babylonian, and Hillel is his name, who has studied with Shemaiah and Abtalion. He knows whether the Peshat overrides the Sabbath or not. Perhaps there will be profit from him. They sent and called him. They said to him, have you ever heard when the 14th of Nisan coincides with the Sabbath, whether it overrides the Sabbath or not? He said to them, and do we have only one peshat alone that overrides the Sabbath in the whole year? And do not many peshat override the Sabbath in the whole year? Sometimes 100, and sometimes with continual offerings 100 times, and sometimes 200, with continual offerings and Sabbath additional offerings. And there are times when 300 continual offerings, Sabbath additional offerings, and of festivals, new moons and of the seasons. And they said to him, we have already said that there is with you, prophet. He began expounding for them by means of the arguments based on call them. Ah, and Gezerah Shavah Hashcash. Since the continual offering is a community sacrifice in the Peshat is a community sacrifice, just as the continually offering a community sacrifice overrides the Sabbath, so the community sacrifice overrides the Sabbath and etc. etc. and it goes on in this way. This is based upon a transformation which has a very peculiar nature. It's a transformation away from the old law, but recursively coming back, and re founds itself on the old law with an allegorical interpretive, um, scheme. So that the old tradition still holds, but holds in a new way, so that the transformation that has happened in one's consciousness is rerouted and redirected back to the old way, the old tradition. And what has changed is the interpretive, allegorical, argumentative, logical apperception. Of that tradition. Which means that anyone who just simply knew the tradition in its naiveté was naive. For instance, in our time, many, um, many Protestants who pride themselves upon Old Testament scholarship of go to ecumenical meetings and think that they are going to be really chummy with the rabbis because they have read their Old Testament and they have favorite passages, and they know who's who and what's what, and they are considered totally naive and ridiculous by learned rabbis because they they don't have any understanding or idea of the 2 million ways in which that can be interpreted. You are naive. We don't share a tradition. You're just a kindergartener. You're just beginning. This is in direct contrast to Jesus. It's in direct contrast to the way in which he worked, saying that man is not made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath is made for man. That the whole issue of the law, in any kind of a view and interpretation, now has to be set aside. Because there's a transformation, and it's because of this transformation that everything is now changed, that it has already changed. And so the appreciation of the past is not in terms of a new kind of mentality, but the appreciation now is in terms of an eternal verity, which is different, that to simply change the form of a perception by the mind, to simply, uh, complicate the way in which the mind sees is not a transformation, that this is in fact a false transformation. It is a surrogate transformation. By just changing the structure of the mind, one dupes oneself to thinking that one has transformed. It's like people in the Age of Aquarius saying, well, we got real, real inside scoop now and we're going to put everything together and bring all these traditions in in a new way. No pastiche is new. The pastiche is not new. That the transformed consciousness is different. Totally different is not the same. So the problem that we have, and one that we're going to face next week, is the problem that when people did make the transformation, and it was largely in Alexandria, that there were large enough numbers of transformed people to produce transformed communities, whole communities of people who no longer were living in the old way, no longer dependent upon their minds for interpretation in any way but descended or rather presented themselves with spiritual intuition. This produced a radical change. In Alexandria. The first spiritual communities were the Christian Church, and it was only after the Christian Church began to codify itself, solidify itself in Alexandria, began to take on the trappings of a mental structure, different but still a mental structure that those individuals who had come into the transformed spiritual life within the Christian community began leaving the Christian communities and developing offshoots for themselves. And these first offshoots were the beginnings of Gnosticism. And next week we're going to start to get into the beginnings of Gnosticism, the beginnings into the way in which the Christian transformative communities in and around Alexandria produced a new kind of a worldview, and that when the Christian church structure began to become solidified in the Pauline model, those individuals began to seep away from the Christian communities and found the beginnings of the Gnostic sects, the Gnostic communities. And we'll take a look at the beginning of that process next week, and I think it'll be interesting to you, because we've seen very much the similar events in our time. Well, let's stop there. I think we have some food and we have some root beer. END OF RECORDING