Criamon was the founder who had the farthest to travel from his home. Born in the deserts of Syria, Criamon had journeyed from India to beyond the Pillrs of Hercuels seeking wisdom. He had finally settled in the Alps, at the Caves of Twisting Shadows, seeking his own brand of wisdom. While those outside this House ofen insult the learning of the Criamon, Criamon himself came from distinguished tradition of hellenistic learning, descending from Bar Daysan of Edessa (154-222 CE).
The biography of Bar Daysan of Edessa reflects the eclectic quality of intellectual and religious life in late antiquity. He is said variously to have been educated in the Edessan royal court with the future king Abgar the Great, where, in the traditions of the Parthian nobility, he learned to excel in archery. Other stories have him receiving his training at Hierapolis, from a priest who instructed him in the esoteric knowledge of the pagan traditions.
According to the Chronicle of Michael Syrus, he was converted to Christianity and began composing anti-pagan treatises, but unable to conform to church doctrine, he eventually apostatized from his new faith. Credited with works on astrology and ethnohistory as well as more than 150 hymns, Bar Daysan was, according to Eusebius, a "most able man" and "powerful disputant in the Syriac Language." Ephrem remarked upon the "the dirt of the wiles of Bar Daysan." But also conceded that he was "found to speak with subtlety." His various interests reveal the increasingly blurred distinction between religion and philosophy, for Ephrem reports that he founded his own sect whose members gathered in caves to sing psalms and study texts. According to Ibn al-Nadim, who claimed that there were still scattered communities in China and Khurasan, Bar Daysan's followers had been settled in the marshlands between Wasit and Basra.
Bar Daysan's world view must have been reflective of the general character of at least one branch of Greek philosophy at that time, for it is reported that he sent his son to study at the academies in Athens. It was clear to at least some of his critics that Bar Daysan had learned his heresy from Hellas, and that Ephrem still found it necessary to attack his views more than a hundred years after the philosophe's death points to the continued vitality of the tradition.
Bar Daysan was credited by the Catalog of Ibn al-Nadim with a number of works, including The Light and the Darkness and The Spirituality of the Truth. His Book of the Laws of Countries as well as some fragments preserved in Ephrem and the eighth century Christian theologian Theodore bar Konai provide the clearest expositions of his teachings. Pointing to the parallels that can be drawn between Bar Daysan and the Hermetic tractate Poimandres, Drijvers has argued convincingly that the soteriology, cosmology, anthropology and theology of Bar Daysan are all consonant with the Hermetic world view. An interesting point is that Bar Daysan argued that at the creation of the world, the seven planets were assigned fixed places and put in charge of its governance.
Not all the followers got deported. Some settled in Harran where they found common cause with the people there. Daysan had a son, that son had a son, and that son had a son. The name of that man was Criamon.
Must the gods mean what they say? The question runs like Ariadne’s thread throughout Greek culture. Set in the frame of the centuries-long reflection on the ambivalent nature of religious language, this question bears upon conceptions of truth and its expression in the ancient world. Plutarch quotes a well-known saying of Heraclitus, "to the effect that the Lord whose prophetic shrine is at Delphi neither tells nor conceals, but indicates." (De Pyth, or. 21, 404e) The god’s answer is not clearly expressed, but only hinted at, and its understanding requires an interpretative effort. Greek philosophers and grammarians had strived, since the fifth century BC at least to make sense of their religious and cultural tradition, to interpret it. Their need to interpret (hermeneuein) the Homeric myths stemmed from the intellectual impossibility to accept these myths at their face value.
This effort intensified under the Roman Empire, when thinkers living in a world in deep transition had developed a keen and new interest in religious topics. The interpretations of myth by these thinkers and their understanding of the nature of religious language represent a major aspect of their attempt to reclaim the Hellenic legacy. Their understanding of myths as riddles (ainigmata) is the topic of this article. Myth and enigma would seem to be poles apart. While the myth is a story told in detail, usually publicly, and in words clear to all, the riddle or enigma hides as much as it reveals, alluding to the truth rather than telling it.
This traditional approach had gained added urgency from the second to the fourth centuries CE, when the Hellenic tradition was competing more and more with the fast-growing sophistication of Christian hermeneutics. The hermeneutics developed around the myths of old was profoundly different in its goals -- although not always in its means -- from the exegesis of Holy Scriptures in Judaism or in Christianity. The very concept of Scripture established on divine revelation is quite alien to Greek culture and religion. An important part of this, for our purposes, is the concept of ainigma.
In classical definitions, ainigma (the word means "riddle") referred exclusively to a literary trope. "The very nature of a riddle (ainigma) is this, to describe a fact in an impossible combination of names," wrote Aristotle (Poetics, 22, 1458a). This definition and its literary connotations were echoed by Quintilian when he defined ainigma as allegoria, quae est obscurior (Inst. 8.6.52).
Plutarch in chapters 24 to 26 of the Oracles at Delphi offers a fascinating reflection on the radical transformations of Greek culture from its early stages. The text begins with considerations of the nature of speech (logos), the value of which, like that of currency, evolves with time. The argument, developed in Plutarch’s dialogue by Theon, aims to show that this change, willed by divine providence, has been for the better. His is an optimistic view of cultural transformation in history. In early times, he writes:
Men used as the coinage of speech verses and tunes and songs, and reduced to poetic and musical form all history and philosophy and, in a word, every experience and action that required a mere impressive utterance. This aptitude for poetry, rare nowadays, was then shared by most people, who expressed themselves through lyre and song, using myths and proverbs (muthois kai paroimiais), and besides composed hymns, prayers, and paeans in honor of the gods in verse and music. . . . Accordingly, the hod did not begrudge to the art of prophecy adornment and pleasing grace, even providing visions. (Trans from F.C. Babbitt, Plutarch’s Moralia, 1936)
At some point, however, "Life took on a change along with the change in men’s fortunes and their natures; usage banished the superfluous." In a surprisingly modern fashion, Plutarch insists that the transformation was originally of a cultural nature, reflecting a change in ways of life and economic behavior. People began to dress and adorn themselves more soberly, "rating as decorative the plain and simple rather than the ornate and elaborate." According to him, this cultural transformation was also felt on the linguistic level: "So, as language also underwent a change and put off its finery, history descended from its vehicle of versification, and went on foot in prose, were by the truth was mostly shifted from the fabulous."
Plutarch presents the mutation as entailing a change in patterns of thought: whereas the poetic style was well fitted for the telling of tales (muthoi), prose, leaving ot all ornaments, takes away "the mythical" or the fabulous, and retains only the kernel, unadorned truth, aletheia, which is no revealed or discovered.
Philosophy, too, was transformed, when philosophers opted for the unequivocal character of common language and abandoned the vagueness of poetic style: "Philosophy welcomed clearness and teachability in preference to creating argument, and pursued its investigations through the medium of everyday language."
The birth of a new kind of philosophy, conceived as an effort of intellectual honesty and simplicity, was directly related to the emergence of prose as the common way of expression. Language was also affected by such a dramatic change. Heralded by Apollo himself, the new age also meant the end of metaphor:
The god put an end to having his prophetic priestess call her own citizens "fire-blazers," the Spartans "snake-devourers," men "mountain-roamers," and rivers "mountain-engorgers." . . . When he had taken away from the oracles epic versifications, strange words, circumlocutions, and vagueness, he had thus made them ready to talk to his consultants as the laws talk to states, or as kings meet with common people, or as pupils listen to teachers, since he adapted the language to what was intelligible and convincing.
Yet, the most important consequence of the transformation of language occurred in the field of knowledge, in particular of religious knowledge: "The introduction of clearness was attended also by a revolution in belief, which underwent a change along with everything else."
Thus, according to Plutarch, the transformation of language entailed a radical change in the very conception of religion. This religious revolution meant disenchantment with all strange, uncanny, or grandiloquent expressions, which had been considered in the past as so many manifestations of divine power. Now religious truth must also be expressed in clear and simple prose:
As a result, people blamed the poetic language with which the oracles were clothed, not only for obstructing the understanding of these in their true meaning and for combining vagueness and obscurity with the communication, but already they were coming to look with suspicion upon metaphors, riddles and ambiguous statements, feeling that these were secluded nooks of refuge devised for furtive withdrawal and retreat for him that sould err in his prophecy.
In other words, Plutarch claims here that in the religious world of the high Roman empire -- and in contradistinction with early times -- the deliberate use of high style and various forms of polyvalent or metonymic expressions all too often hid fraud. He mentions "the tribe of wandering soothsayers and rogues that practiced their charlatanry about the shrines of the Great Mother and of Sarapis." It is these prophets, according to Plutarch, "that most filled the poetic art with disrepute."
But religious charlatans, despite their high visibility, should not be considered the main cause of the general discontent with poetic style. This lies, rather, in the cultural changes which brought men to "banish the superfluous" and to "adorn themselves with economy" -- again, changes approved by Plutarch.
Moving to the political level, Plutarch speculates on another reason for the ambiguity of classical religious language. The god of Delphi could not lie, but he did not want to reveal too much, through the oracle, to greedy rulers who would have misused knowledge of future events in their waging of unjust wars.
Hence, the obvious solution was that the god should speak through the oracle -- that is to say, in a vague and ambiguous language. Only the wise leaders whould understand the message precisely, while it would remain opaque for the less philosophically-minded rulers. Thus the god is not willing to keep the truth unrevealed, but he caused the manifestation of it to be deflected, like a ray of light, in the medium of poetry, where it submits to many reflections and undergoes subdivision, and thus he did away with its repellent harshness. There were naturally some things which it was well that despots should fail to understand and enemies should not learn beforehand. About these, therefore, he put a cloak on intimations and ambiguities which conceals the communication so far as others were concerned, but did not escape the persons involved nor mislead those that had need to know and gave their minds to the matter.
This analysis of the political reasons for the ambiguity in divine revelation refers to what we would probably call esotericism: divine oracles, presented in enigmatic garb, hide as much as they reveal. We are back at the saying of Heraclitus with which we began: in the old days, the god neither told nor concealed, but indicated. These early days have passed for good and we should not regret them, concludes Plutarch:
Therefore anyone is very foolish, who, now that conditions have become different, complains and makes unwarranted indictment if the gods feels that he must no longer help us in the same way, but in a different way. Nowadays, history has found ways [through its use of prose] to sift facts [’truth’] from legend [’myths’], while philosophy has learned to avoid grandiloquence and to seek precision and communicability.
Plutarch refers here to the consequences of a radical cultural transformation, which has left a cognitive dissonance of sorts, a gap in the relationship of intellectuals in the Roman empire to their classical heritage. The civilization of the empire, particularly in late antiquity, can be called a civilization of hermeneutics: the sense of distance from the cultural past is matched by the urge to relate to its fundamental classical documents -- that is to say, mainly, the Homeric poems and the works of the early philosophers.
For later Greek intellectuals, the writings of the wise authors must express truth, although in quite different ways from the Jewish and Christian scriptures. If such truth is not apparent to us, it must be looked for on a deeper level: this is the task of the homo interpres.