NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS: THE GOSPEL AS ENIGMA

JONATHAN Z. SMITH

Crito: In what way shall we bury you? Socrates: In any way that you like, if you can catch me and I don't elude you. Phaedo 115C

On July 24, 1854 the famous magician, Eliphas Levi, began his most impor• tant "evocation". He had meditated upon the dead man for a period of twenty-one days during which time he ate no meat. For the last seven days he had fasted. Clothed in ritual garments in a specially prepared room marked with the sign of the Pentagram, Levi began to chant the Magic Philosophy of Patricius which he believed contained the secret teachings of Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus and the Nuctemeron of Apollonius. Chanting in Greek, he concluded by invoking the name of the dead man whose presence he wished to evoke: "O Apollonius, 0 Apollonius, 0 Apollonius". According to Levi's report: The mirror which was behind the altar seemed to brighten in its depth, a wan form was outlined therein which increased and seemed to approach by degrees. Three times, and with closed eyes, I invoked Apollonius. When again I looked forth there was a man in front of me, wrapped from head to toe in a species of shroud, which seemed more grey than white. He was lean, melancholy and beardless, and did not altogether correspond to my preconceived notion of Apollonius. Levi experienced cold, numbness, swoon and fear and finally the figure departed: The consequence of this experience on myself must be called inexplicable. I was no longer the same man ... I felt a singular attraction towards death ... Am I to con• clude from this that I really evoked, saw and touched the great Apollonius of Tyana? .. .I do not explain the physical laws by which I saw and touched; I affirm solely that I did touch, apart from dreaming .... After the evocation I have des• cribed, I re-read carefully the life of Apollonius, who is represented by historians as an ideal of antique beauty and elegance, and I remarked that towards the end of his life he was starved and tortured in prison. This circumstance, which perhaps remained in my memory without my being aware of it, may have deter• mined the unattractive form of my vision.' While there are many elements worthy of comment by an historian of religions in Levi's seance, I will call attention only to the function of the Vita Apo/lonii in Levi's account. The account of Apollonius' life in the Vita inspired Levi with the desire to meet and gain wisdom from Apollonius. But Levi's "experience" of Apollonius did not accord with his expectation as to NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS: SECRECY IN LATE ANTIQUITY 67 the character of Apollonius. This drove Levi to a reexamination of the Vita in the light of his experience and to a new understanding of this experience in light of his reconsideration of the Vita. We often speak of sacred biographies (gospels, hagiographies, etc.) as being reenacted or imitated by members of the tradition which cherishes them. The example of Levi requires that we complicate this simple model. This devotee does not passively imitate. Rather he has an experience which both validates and challenges the model proposed by the biography and through a process of double-reflection, his understanding of both his experience and the biography requires reinterpretation. We cannot ignore the interplay of text and experiential context and the fact that both are changed by this process. I should like to utilize this reformulation of the well-known "hermeneutic cir• cle" to argue for a definition of one crucial element in the genre Gospel. A Gospel is essentially a riddle which elicits misunderstanding. In a collection of studies now being completed, I have tried to relate this notion to the "prehistory" of the Gospel in paradoxographical literature, to the role of the joke, riddle and aporia in hellenistic popular religious narrative and to the implications of this research for contemporary scholarly interest in relating Gospel and Aretalogy. In this paper I should like to reflect more generally on the role of understanding and misunderstanding in the Vita Apollonii by Philostratus and the complex Vita Pythagorae tradition as represented by lamblichus and relate this to some current research on the Gospels of Mark and John. Apol/onius of Tyana. The historical Apollonius lived in the first century A.O. He was a Pythagorean who was variously described as a god, a divine man, a sage, a philosopher, a prophet, a cult reformer, a magician, a political revolutionary and a fraud. As in the traditions concerning Jesus (Christian, Jewish, Roman), these are synonymous terms describing the same religious phenomena depending on whether one stood inside or outside the tradition. From the scattered references in second and third century literature, it would appear that Apollonius played the same role in Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition that Simon Magus played in Christian rhetorical tradition, i.e. the archetypal magician, the author of heresy and discord, the sign of a religious and social undesirable. It is this outsider's portrait that is challenged in the Vita Apollonii attributed to Philostratus (c. 170-249 A.D). The work is an obvious polemic. It is an apologia for Apollonius, a careful defense of Apollonius against out• sider's charges that he was a magician (a goes) and against his devotees sincere misunderstanding that he was only a wonder-worker. The Vita is thus parallel on the one hand to works such as the Apologia of Apuleius in which he defends himself against the charge of being a magician or lamblichus' De mysteriis Aegyptiorum which makes the same defense by redefining magic;