Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 63 of 288 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Greeks had expressed this insight in their doctrine of the Incarnation and deification of Christ. The Hasidim developed their own form of Incarnationalism. The Zaddik, the Hasidic Rabbi, became the avatar of his generation, a link between heaven and earth and a representative of the divine presence. As Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl (1730–1797) wrote, the Zaddik “is truly a part of God, and has a place, as it were, with Him.”59 Just as Christians imitated Christ in an attempt to draw near to God, the Hasid imitated his Zaddik, who had made the ascent to God and practiced perfect devekuth. He was a living proof that this enlightenment was possible. Because the Zaddik was close to God, the Hasidim could approach the Master of the Universe through him. They would crowd around their Zaddik, hanging on his every word, as he told them a story about the Besht or expounded a verse of Torah. As in the enthusiastic Christian sects, Hasidism was not a solitary religion but intensely communal. The Hasidim would attempt to follow their Zaddik in his ascent to the ultimate together with their master, in a group. Not surprisingly, the more orthodox Rabbis of Poland were horrified by this personality cult, which completely bypassed the learned Rabbi who had long been seen as the incarnation of Torah. The opposition was led by Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797), the Gaon or head of the academy of Vilna. The Shabbetai Zevi debacle had made some Jews extremely hostile to mysticism, and the Gaon of Vilna has often been seen as the champion of a more rational religion. Yet he was an ardent Kabbalist as well as a master of Talmud. His close disciple Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin praised his “complete and mighty mastery of the whole of The Zohar … which he studied with the flame of the love and fear of the divine majesty, with holiness and purity and a wonderful devekuth.”60 Whenever he spoke of Isaac Luria, his whole body would tremble. He had marvelous dreams and revelations, yet always insisted that the study of Torah was his chief way of communing with God. He showed a remarkable understanding of the purpose of dreams in releasing buried intuition, however. As Rabbi Hayyim continues: “He used to say that God created sleep to this end only, that man should attain the insights that he cannot attain, even after much labor and effort, when the soul is joined to the body because the body is like a curtain dividing.”61

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  It is the centerpiece of the Black prophet-mystic’s lifelong attempt to bring the harrowing beauty of the African-American experience into deep engagement with what he called “the religion of Jesus.” Ultimately his goal was to offer this humanizing combination as the basis for an emancipatory way of being, moving toward a fundamentally unchained life that is available to all the women and men everywhere who hunger and thirst for righteousness, especially those “who stand with their backs against the wall.” Stating his central intention in a slightly different way, early in the book Thurman said that he had written for “those who need profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity.” Still, the great teacher, preacher, and sage never strayed far from his basic urgent metaphor of the wall. Repeatedly he announced that he was attempting to explore and explain “what the teachings of Jesus have to say to those who stand at a moment in human history with their backs against the wall… the poor, the disinherited, the dispossessed.” In essence he was surveying the world of the oppressed and asking how it might be possible for human beings to endure the terrible pressures of the dominating world without losing their humanity, without forfeiting their souls. For Thurman this project was no distanced, merely intellectual task. (Of course, no work of his ever took on that character.) At the outset he made it clear that his interest in the issues “has been and continues to be both personal and professional.” Born into the Black community of Daytona Beach, Florida, at the beginning of the century, he was carefully nurtured by a maternal grandmother who had come through the fierce crucible of slavery while “leaning on the Lord.” So Thurman possessed an intimate knowledge of the harsh contours and consequences of America’s walls as well as a profound appreciation for the amazing inner resources of those people who had stood firmly against the hardness without losing their humanity or betraying their souls. And there was never any doubt in his mind that the life and teachings of Jesus, “the poor Jew” of Nazareth, the disinherited, threatened subject of Roman power, were especially relevant to the ever-present contingent of Black men and women who lined the serrated, cutting surfaces of the wall called America. So he could unhesitatingly declare that “the striking similarity between the social position of Jesus in Palestine and that of the vast majority of American Negroes is obvious to anyone who tarries long over the facts.” Thurman had been tarrying over and wrestling with these urgent matters for most of his adult life. He took the concerns with him when he left Florida in 1919 to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta, and was able to discuss them with fellow students such as Martin Luther King, Sr., faculty members such as Benjamin E. Mays and E. Franklin Frazier, and the visionary president of the school, John Hope.

• From A History of God (1993)

  12 If, for example, the earth revolved on its axis at only one hundred miles per hour instead of one thousand miles per hour, night would be ten times longer and the world would be too cold to sustain life; during the long day, the heat would shrivel all the vegetation. The Being which had contrived all this so perfectly had to be a supremely intelligent Mechanick. Besides being intelligent, this Agent had to be powerful enough to manage these great masses. Newton concluded that the primal force which had set the infinite and intricate system in motion was dominatio (dominion), which alone accounted for the universe and made God divine. Edward Pococke, the first professor of Arabic at Oxford, had told Newton that the Latin deus derived from the Arabic du (Lord). Dominion, therefore, was God’s essential attribute rather than the perfection which had been the starting point for Descartes’s discussion of God. In the “General Scholium” which concludes the Principia, Newton deduced all God’s traditional attributes from his intelligence and power: This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.... He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done.... We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfection; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. 13 Newton does not mention the Bible: we know God only by contemplating the world. Hitherto the doctrine of the creation had expressed a spiritual truth: it had entered both Judaism and Christianity late and had always been somewhat problematic. Now the new science had moved the creation to center stage and made a literal and mechanical understanding of the doctrine crucial to the conception of God. When people deny the existence of God today they are often rejecting the God of Newton, the origin and sustainer of the universe whom scientists can no longer accommodate. Newton himself had to resort to some startling solutions to find room for God in his system, which had of its very nature to be comprehensive.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But Diirer does not seem to have made much of the corresponding concept of the absolute sinfulness of man; and where Luther looked inwards, praising his fellow Germans over the hated Italians, Diirer was a citizen of Nuremberg, open to global commerce and exchange, who knew how much he had learnt from his journeyman years in Italy. He also collected objects from around the world — feathers, weapons, ‘Indian cocoanuts and a very fine piece of coral’, curiosities of all kinds that found their way into his art.* Luther, by contrast, barely ever mentioned Africa, India or the New World, either in his writings or his conversations. While he envisaged the Reformation as the struggle of the true Christians against the Pope and the Devil, for Diirer it meant the future coming together of all the religions and people of the world in peaceful unity. For Johann Eberlin von Giinzburg, a Franciscan monk in southern Germany, Luther’s central message was his attack on monasticism. His three heroes were Erasmus, Luther and Karlstadt, the trio who 418 MARTIN LUTHER battled the monks and priests. Convinced that evangelical freedom must mean social liberation, he imagined a fictional land, Wolfaria, where there would be social justice and support for those in need. He wrote a series of pamphlets in support of the Reformation, the most famous of which was The Fifteen Confederates, where fifteen characters from various social estates explained why they supported Luther. When it came to monasticism, Giinzburg wrote with extraordinary insight: it is probable that he had acted as confessor to a convent. His work went far beyond Luther’s simple insistence that nuns were sexual beings subject to lust, and he diagnosed what he saw as their miser- able lives and twisted spirituality. It was the insecurity of the monks, Ginzburg argued, that shackled the nuns’ intellectual and devotional capacities, ‘for coarse, unlearned, foolish monks are assigned to the convents; for them it would be painful if the nuns know more than they do, and so they don’t tolerate those who are more knowledgeable than they are. This they justify under the cover of claiming that studying is not appropriate for nuns, that it places obstacles in the way of humility, piety, and so on.’ Like Luther, he thought that convents would only deform a young woman’s desires and develop- ment. He understood, too, the bitterness of relationships in a closed institution: ‘If she has a vindictive abbess or prioress or if she angers a sister especially beloved by her superiors, she will never have rest or peace.” For a time, excited by the radical potential of the Reformation, Giinzburg became a supporter of Karlstadt, but without losing his original admiration for Luther. This drew him to Wittenberg where he spent 1522-3, and in the end he returned to the Lutheran fold. He eventually found a position with the duke of Wertheim, at first preaching in the small village of Remlingen, and then in Wertheim itself.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Finally, almost as an afterthought, Marduk created humanity. He seized Kingu (the oafish consort of Tiamat, created by her after the defeat of Apsu), slew him and shaped the first man by mixing the divine blood with the dust. The gods watched in astonishment and admiration. There is, however, some humor in this mythical account of the origin of humanity, which is by no means the pinnacle of creation but derives from one of the most stupid and ineffectual of the gods. But the story made another important point. The first man had been created from the substance of a god: he therefore shared the divine nature, in however limited a way. There was no gulf between human beings and the gods. The natural world, men and women and the gods themselves all shared the same nature and derived from the same divine substance. The pagan vision was holistic. The gods were not shut off from the human race in a separate, ontological sphere: divinity was not essentially different from humanity. There was thus no need for a special revelation of the gods or for a divine law to descend to earth from on high. The gods and human beings shared the same predicament, the only difference being that the gods were more powerful and were immortal. This holistic vision was not confined to the Middle East but was common in the ancient world. In the sixth century BCE, Pindar expressed the Greek version of this belief in his ode on the Olympic games: Single is the race, single Of men and gods; From a single mother we both draw breath. But a difference of power in everything Keeps us apart; For one is as nothing, but the brazen sky Stays a fixed habituation for ever. Yet we can in greatness of mind Or of body be like the Immortals.4 Instead of seeing his athletes as on their own, each striving to achieve his personal best, Pindar sets them against the exploits of the gods, who were the pattern for all human achievement. Men were not slavishly imitating the gods as hopelessly distant beings but living up to the potential of their own essentially divine nature.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret. Suhrawardi was attempting an imaginative explanation of those symbols that have had a crucial influence on human life, even though the realities to which they refer remain elusive. A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute their insights. As in art, the most effective religious symbols are those informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding of the human condition. Suhrawardi, who wrote in extraordinarily beautiful Arabic and was a highly skilled metaphysician, was a creative artist as well as a mystic. Yoking apparently unrelated things together—science with mysticism, pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion—he was able to help Muslims create their own symbols and find new meaning and significance in life. Even more influential than Suhrawardi was Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), whose life we can, perhaps, see as a symbol of the parting of the ways between East and West. His father was a friend of Ibn Rushd, who was very impressed by the piety of the young boy on the one occasion when they met. During a severe illness, Ibn al-Arabi was converted to Sufism, however, and at the age of thirty he left Europe for the Middle East. He made the hajj and spent two years praying and meditating at the Kabah but eventually settled at Malatya on the Euphrates. Frequently called Sheikh al-Akbah, the Great Master, he profoundly affected the Muslim conception of God, but his thought did not influence the West, which imagined that Islamic philosophy had ended with Ibn Rushd. Western Christendom would embrace Ibn Rushd’s Aristotelian God, while most of Islamdom opted, until relatively recently, for the imaginative God of the mystics.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But the Catholic party had not achieved very much. Aleander might remark waspishly that by the time Luther appeared in public at Worms, people already knew he was a drunkard and a scoundrel, his ‘many overstep- pings in looks, attitude and comportment, in word and deed’ having I90 MARTIN LUTHER 35. This portrait of Luther faces the title page of an account of his actions at Worms, Acta et res gestae, D, Martini Lvtheri and it was printed in Strasbourg in May or June 1520. This image may well have been the one that annoyed Aleander so much. It is clearly based on Cranach’s original (see p. 157), but the artist, Hans Baldung Grien, has added a halo to make Luther appear as a saint, and a dove to indicate that he is inspired by the Holy Spirit. robbed him of all respect. And although he described how Luther had gorged himself on food offered him by various princes and dignitaries before leaving, and had washed this down with a good deal of malmsey wine, this kind of gossip was hardly likely to dent Luther’s image as aman of the people.® The Catholics had, however, secured the support of the emperor, which they had been unable to take for granted: Aleander’s account of what transpired at the Diet betrays his relief that Charles had not been fooled by Luther. THE DIET OF WORMS I9I But what should be done with Luther himself? Some at the Diet had insisted that the monk, as a heretic, did not merit a safe conduct. On these same grounds, Jan Hus’s imperial safe conduct had been breached and he had been executed in 1415 at the Council of Constance. Fortunately for Luther, this was not the line Charles V took. The emperor kept his promise and granted Luther a safe conduct back home.” The simple friar who proclaimed the Word of God had become a hero. A pamphlet that appeared not long after the Diet depicted the events as a replay of Christ’s Passion: In 1521 Luther crossed the Rhine at Frankfurt to continue on to Worms. He and his disciples assembled for the evening meal where they broke bread together. Luther warned them that one of their number would betray him, and they all denied that they would. But the very next day, Saxo,” who had been firmest in his protestations, denied him three times. The Romanists howled for Luther’s blood, worst amongst them, the bishops of Mainz and Merseburg. Luther, in the house of Caiaphas, remained calm. The bishop of Trier considered what to do: Luther was a pious Christian and he could see no reason to condemn him.

• From A History of God (1993)

  1346) and Dame Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–1416). Some of these mystics were more advanced than others. Richard Rolle, for example, seems to have gotten trapped in the cultivation of exotic sensations, and his spirituality was sometimes characterized by a certain egotism. But the greatest of them discovered for themselves many of the insights already achieved by the Greeks, Sufis and Kabbalists. Meister Eckhart, for example, who greatly influenced Tauler and Suso, was himself influenced by Denys the Areopagite and Maimonides. A Dominican friar, he was a brilliant intellectual and lectured on Aristotelian philosophy at the University of Paris. In 1325, however, his mystical teaching brought him into conflict with his bishop, the Archbishop of Cologne, who arraigned him for heresy: he was charged with denying the goodness of God, with claiming that God himself was born in the soul and with preaching the eternity of the world. Yet even some of Eckhart’s severest critics believed that he was orthodox: the mistake lay in interpreting some of his remarks literally instead of symbolically, as intended. Eckhart was a poet, who thoroughly enjoyed paradox and metaphor. While he believed that it was rational to believe in God, he denied that reason alone could form any adequate conception of the divine nature: “The proof of a knowable thing is made to either the senses or the intellect,” he argued, “but as regards the knowledge of God there can be neither a demonstration from sensory perception, since He is incorporeal, nor from the intellect, since He lacks any form known to us.” 59 God was not another being whose existence could be proved like any normal object of thought. God, Eckhart declared, was Nothing. 60 This did not mean that he was an illusion but that God enjoyed a richer, fuller type of existence than that known to us. He also called God “darkness,” not to denote the absence of light but to indicate the presence of something brighter. Eckhart also distinguished between the “Godhead,” which was best described in negative terms, such as “desert,” “wilderness,” “darkness” and “nothing,” and the God who is known to us as Father, Son and Spirit. 61 As a Westerner, Eckhart liked to use Augustine’s analogy of the Trinity in the human mind and implied that even though the doctrine of the Trinity could not be known by reason, it was only the intellect which perceived God as Three persons: once the mystic had achieved union with God, he or she saw him as One. The Greeks would not have liked this idea, but Eckhart would have agreed with them that the Trinity was essentially a mystical doctrine. He liked to talk about the Father engendering the Son in the soul, rather as Mary had conceived Christ in the womb. Rumi had also seen the Virgin Birth of the Prophet Jesus as a symbol for the birth of the soul in the heart of the mystic.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Few thinkers have made such a lasting contribution to Western Christianity as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), who attempted a synthesis of Augustine and the Greek philosophy which had recently been made available in the West. During the twelfth century, European scholars had flocked to Spain, where they encountered Muslim scholarship. With the help of Muslim and Jewish intellectuals they undertook a vast translation project to bring this intellectual wealth to the West. Arabic translations of Plato, Aristotle and the other philosophers of the ancient world were now translated into Latin and became available to the people of Northern Europe for the first time. The translators also worked on more recent Muslim scholarship, including the work of Ibn Rushd as well as the discoveries of Arab scientists and physicians. At the same time as some European Christians were bent on the destruction of Islam in the Near East, Muslims in Spain were helping the West to build up its own civilization. The Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas was an attempt to integrate the new philosophy with the Western Christian tradition. Aquinas had been particularly impressed by Ibn Rushd’s explication of Aristotle. Yet, unlike Anselm and Abelard, he did not believe that such mysteries as the Trinity could be proved by reason and distinguished carefully between the ineffable reality of God and human doctrines about him. He agreed with Denys that God’s real nature was inaccessible to the human mind: “Hence in the last resort all that man knows of God is to know that he does not know him, since he knows that what God is surpasses all that we can understand of him.”35 There is a story that when he had dictated the last sentence of the Summa, Aquinas laid his head sadly on his arms. When the scribe asked him what was the matter, he replied that everything that he had written was straw compared with what he had seen. Aquinas’s attempt to set his religious experience in the context of the new philosophy was necessary in order to articulate faith with other reality and not relegate it to an isolated sphere of its own. Excessive intellectualism is damaging to the faith, but if God is not to become an indulgent endorsement of our own egotism, religious experience must be informed by an accurate assessment of its content. Aquinas defined God by returning to God’s own definition of himself to Moses: “I am What I Am.” Aristotle had said that God was Necessary Being; Aquinas accordingly linked the God of the Philosophers with the God of the Bible by calling God “He Who Is” (Qui est). He made it absolutely clear that God was not simply another being like ourselves, however. The definition of God as Being Itself was appropriate “because it does not signify any particular form [of being] but rather being itself (esse seipsum).”36 It would be incorrect to blame Aquinas for the rationalistic view of God that later prevailed in the West.

• From A History of God (1993)

  We have seen that Aristotle’s discussion of the nature of God had been dubbed meta ta physica (“After the Physics”) by the editor of his work: his God had simply been a continuation of physical reality rather than a reality of a totally different order. In the Muslim world, therefore, most future discussion of God blended philosophy with mysticism. Reason alone could not reach a religious understanding of the reality we call “God,” but religious experience needed to be informed by the critical intelligence and discipline of philosophy if it were not to become messy, indulgent—or even dangerous—emotion. Aquinas’s Franciscan contemporary Bonaventure (1217–74) had much the same vision. He also tried to articulate philosophy with religious experience to the mutual enrichment of both spheres. In The Threefold Way, he had followed Augustine in seeing “trinities” everywhere in creation and took this “natural trinitarianism” as his starting point in The Journey of the Mind to God. He genuinely believed that the Trinity could be proved by unaided natural reason but avoided the dangers of rationalist chauvinism by stressing the importance of spiritual experience as an essential component of the idea of God. He took Francis of Assisi, the founder of his order, as the great exemplar of the Christian life. By looking at the events of his life, a theologian such as himself could find evidence for the doctrines of the Church. The Tuscan poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) would also find that a fellow human being—in Dante’s case the Florentine woman Beatrice Portinari—could be an epiphany of the divine. This personalistic approach to God looked back to St. Augustine. Bonaventure also applied Anselm’s Ontological Proof for the existence of God to his discussion of Francis as an epiphany. He argued that Francis had achieved an excellence in this life that seemed more than human, so it was possible for us, while still living here below, to “see and understand that the ‘best’ is ... that than which nothing better can be imagined.” 37 The very fact that we could form such a concept as “the best” proved that it must exist in the Supreme Perfection of God. If we entered into ourselves, as Plato and Augustine had both advised, we would find God’s image reflected “in our own inner world.” 38 This introspection was essential. It was, of course, important to take part in the liturgy of the Church, but the Christian must first descend into the depths of his own self, where he would be “transported in ecstasy above the intellect” and find a vision of God that transcended our limited human notions. 39 Both Bonaventure and Aquinas had seen the religious experience as primary. They had been faithful to the tradition of Falsafah, since in both Judaism and Islam, philosophers had often been mystics who were acutely conscious of the limitations of the intellect in theological matters.

• From A History of God (1993)

  All our thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams and visions corresponded to realities in the alam al-mithal . The Prophet Muhammad, for example, had awakened to this intermediate world during the Night Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of the divine world. Suhrawardi would also have claimed that the visions of the Jewish Throne Mystics took place when they had learned to enter the alam al-mithal during their spiritual exercises of concentration. The path to God, therefore, did not lie solely through reason, as the Faylasufs had thought, but through the creative imagination, the realm of the mystic. Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not . 39 Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret. Suhrawardi was attempting an imaginative explanation of those symbols that have had a crucial influence on human life, even though the realities to which they refer remain elusive. A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute their insights. As in art, the most effective religious symbols are those informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding of the human condition. Suhrawardi, who wrote in extraordinarily beautiful Arabic and was a highly skilled metaphysician, was a creative artist as well as a mystic. Yoking apparently unrelated things together—science with mysticism, pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion—he was able to help Muslims create their own symbols and find new meaning and significance in life. Even more influential than Suhrawardi was Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), whose life we can, perhaps, see as a symbol of the parting of the ways between East and West. His father was a friend of Ibn Rushd, who was very impressed by the piety of the young boy on the one occasion when they met.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The gods were extremely important to the city, and it was believed that they would withdraw their patronage if their cult were neglected. Jews, who claimed that these gods did not exist, were called “atheists” and enemies of society. By the second century BCE this hostility was entrenched: in Palestine there had even been a revolt when Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid governor, had attempted to Hellenize Jerusalem and introduce the cult of Zeus into the Temple. Jews had started to produce their own literature, which argued that wisdom was not Greek cleverness but the fear of Yahweh. Wisdom literature was a well-established genre in the Middle East; it tried to delve into the meaning of life, not by philosophical reflection, but by inquiring into the best way to live: it was often highly pragmatic. The author of the Book of Proverbs, who was writing in the third century BCE , went a little further and suggested that Wisdom was the master plan that God had devised when he had created the world and, as such, was the first of his creatures. This idea would be very important to the early Christians, as we shall see in Chapter 4 . The author personifies Wisdom so that she seems a separate person: Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded before the oldest of his works. From everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning, before earth came into being … when he laid the foundations of the earth, I was at his side, a master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere in the world, delighting to be with the sons of men. 70 Wisdom was not a divine being, however, but is specifically said to have been created by God. She is similar to the “glory” of God described by the Priestly authors, representing the plan of God that human beings could glimpse in creation and in human affairs: the author represents Wisdom ( Hokhmah ) wandering through the streets, calling people to fear Yahweh. In the second century BCE , Jesus ben Sira, a devout Jew of Jerusalem, painted a similar portrait of Wisdom. He makes her stand up in the Divine Council and sing her own praises: she had come forth from the mouth of the Most High as the divine Word by which God had created the world; she is present everywhere in creation but has taken up permanent residence among the people of Israel. 71 Like the “glory” of Yahweh, the figure of Wisdom was a symbol of God’s activity in the world. Jews were cultivating such an exalted notion of Yahweh that it was difficult to imagine him intervening directly in human affairs. Like P, they preferred to distinguish the God we could know and experience from the divine reality itself.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In his treatise Why God Became Man, which we considered in Chapter 4, he relies on logic and rational thought more than revelation—his quotations from the Bible and the Fathers seem purely incidental to the thrust of his argument, which, as we saw, ascribed essentially human motivation to God. He was not the only Western Christian to try to explain the mystery of God in rational terms. His contemporary Peter Abelard (1079–1147), the charismatic philosopher of Paris, had also evolved an explanation of the Trinity which emphasized the divine unity somewhat at the expense of the distinction of the Three Persons. He also developed a sophisticated and moving rationale for the mystery of the atonement: Christ had been crucified to awaken compassion in us and by doing so he became our Savior. Abelard was primarily a philosopher, however, and his theology was usually rather conventional. He had become a leading figure in the intellectual revival in Europe during the twelfth century and had acquired a huge following. This had brought him into conflict with Bernard, the charismatic abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Clairvaux in Burgundy, who was arguably the most powerful man in Europe. Pope Eugene II and King Louis VII of France were both in Bernard’s pocket, and his eloquence had inspired a monastic revolution in Europe: scores of young men had left their homes to follow him into the Cistercian order, which sought to reform the old Cluniac form of Benedictine religious life. When Bernard preached the Second Crusade in 1146, the people of France and Germany—who had previously been somewhat apathetic about the expedition—almost tore him to pieces in their enthusiasm, flocking to join the army in such numbers that, Bernard complacently wrote to the Pope, the countryside seemed deserted. Bernard was an intelligent man, who had given the rather external piety of Western Europe a new interior dimension. Cistercian piety seems to have influenced the legend of the Holy Grail, which describes a spiritual journey to a symbolic city that is not of this world but which represents the vision of God. Bernard heartily distrusted the intellectualism of scholars like Abelard, however, and vowed to silence him. He accused Abelard of “attempting to bring the merit of the Christian faith to naught because he supposes that by human reason he can comprehend all that is God.” 32 Referring to St. Paul’s hymn to charity, Bernard claimed that the philosopher was lacking in Christian love: “He sees nothing as an enigma, nothing as in a mirror, but looks on everything face to face.” 33 Love and the exercise of reason, therefore, were incompatible.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Look here, my dear Sibyl, you are like an impudent wild animal, and you think yourself so smart that you want to interpret Holy Scripture yourself.’* Although she was not easily cowed, the increasingly conservative environment after the defeat of the peasants in 1525 was inimical to women like her. She remained a pious Lutheran wife and mother, but in the new religion there was no role open to her as pastor, author or religious authority. Albrecht Diirer, Johann EBberlin von Giinzburg and Argula von Grumbach stand for the many thousands of men and women whose lives were transformed by Luther's ideas. What each of them under- stood by his message was different. For Durer, it was a vision of a global union of religions; for Giinzburg, it was about a new social 420 MARTIN LUTHER order; for Grumbach, it was an issue of justice and fairness. It was Luther’s genius that he could appeal to them all, and that each could take different things from his words. All of them were so deeply moved by evangelical ideas, and by Luther as a person, that they did things which they would not otherwise have dreamed of, and overturned the expectations of their upbringing. * By the time Luther died, he had definitively accomplished a split in the Church. He had established a new Church, closely aligned with secular authorities, where monasticism was abolished. A new married clergy were creating dynasties of Protestant clerics who would dominate the intellectual culture of Germany for centuries to come. The shy monk had stood up to the forces of the Pope, Church and empire, and had inspired others with a message of ‘freedom’, including peasants who risked all to rise against their feudal overlords. Luther’s political legacy was double-edged. The political theory he had developed in 1523 in his tract On Secular Authority had distinguished between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God, which enabled him to argue that the Pope should not enjoy any temporal power. Because the power of princes belonged to this world, however, Christians should obey them, while it was the ruler’s duty to prevent the godless from attacking their fellow men. Luther clung to this neat apposition throughout his life. But it also left him without a positive account of what the state can do and how it might help its citizens, and it did not allow for a situation where a Christian or a Christian ruler would have to resist a superior authority. When the formation of the Schmalkaldic League finally forced him to consider that the emperor might have to be resisted, he abdicated responsibility, and left the matter for jurists to decide, eventually moving to a position that tacitly accepted the arguments for resistance.*° At the same time, however, he was consistently disrespectful to princes himself, listing them in the same breath as beadles and hangmen, and mocking those he did not like at every opportunity, with brilliant insults.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Faylasufs were attempting a more thoroughgoing merging of Greek philosophy and religion than any previous monotheists. The Mutazilis and the Asharites had both tried to build a bridge between revelation and natural reason but, with them, the God of revelation had come first. Kalam was based on the traditionally monotheistic view of history as a theophany; it argued that concrete, particular events were crucial because they provided the only certainty we had. Indeed, the Asharis doubted that there were general laws and timeless principles. Though this atomism had a religious and imaginative value, it was clearly alien to the scientific spirit and could not satisfy the Faylasufs. Their Falsafah discounted history, the concrete and the particular but cultivated a reverence for the general laws that the Asharis rejected. Their God was to be discovered in logical arguments, not in particular revelations at various moments in time to individual men and women. This search for objective, generalized truth characterized their scientific studies and conditioned the way they experienced the ultimate reality. A God who was not the same for everybody, give or take inevitable cultural coloration, could not provide a satisfactory solution to the fundamental religious question: “What is the ultimate meaning of life?” You could not seek scientific solutions that had a universal application in the laboratory and pray to a God who was increasingly regarded by the faithful as the sole possession of the Muslims. Yet the study of the Koran revealed that Muhammad himself had had a universal vision and had insisted that all rightly guided religions came from God. The Faylasufs did not feel that there was any need to jettison the Koran. Instead they tried to show the relationship between the two: both were valid paths to God, suited to the needs of individuals. They saw no fundamental contradiction between revelation and science, rationalism and faith. Instead, they evolved what has been called a prophetic philosophy. They wanted to find the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of all the various historical religions, which, since the dawn of history, had been trying to define the reality of the same God. Falsafah had been inspired by the encounter with Greek science and metaphysics but was not slavishly dependent upon Hellenism. In their Middle Eastern colonies, the Greeks had tended to follow a standard curriculum, so that though there were different emphases in Hellenistic philosophy, each student was expected to read a set of texts in a particular order. This had led to a degree of unity and coherence. However, the Faylasufs did not observe this curriculum, but read the texts as they became available. This inevitably opened up new perspectives. Besides their own distinctively Islamic and Arab insights, their thinking was also affected by Persian, Indian and Gnostic influence.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Besides being intelligent, this Agent had to be powerful enough to manage these great masses. Newton concluded that the primal force which had set the infinite and intricate system in motion was dominatio (dominion), which alone accounted for the universe and made God divine. Edward Pococke, the first professor of Arabic at Oxford, had told Newton that the Latin deus derived from the Arabic du (Lord). Dominion, therefore, was God’s essential attribute rather than the perfection which had been the starting point for Descartes’s discussion of God. In the “General Scholium” which concludes the Principia , Newton deduced all God’s traditional attributes from his intelligence and power: This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.… He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done.… We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfection; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. 13 Newton does not mention the Bible: we know God only by contemplating the world. Hitherto the doctrine of the creation had expressed a spiritual truth: it had entered both Judaism and Christianity late and had always been somewhat problematic. Now the new science had moved the creation to center stage and made a literal and mechanical understanding of the doctrine crucial to the conception of God. When people deny the existence of God today they are often rejecting the God of Newton, the origin and sustainer of the universe whom scientists can no longer accommodate. Newton himself had to resort to some startling solutions to find room for God in his system, which had of its very nature to be comprehensive. If space was unchangeable and infinite—two cardinal features of the system—where did God fit in? Was not space itself somehow divine, possessing as it did the attributes of eternity and infinity? Was it a second divine entity, which had existed beside God from before the beginning of time? Newton had always been concerned about this problem.

• From A History of God (1993)

  870), the first Muslim to apply the rational method to the Koran, was closely associated with the Mutazilis and disagreed with Aristotle on several major issues. He had been educated at Basra but settled in Baghdad, where he enjoyed the patronage of the Caliph al-Mamun. His output and influence were immense, including mathematics, science and philosophy. But his chief concern was religion. With his Mutazili background, he could only see philosophy as the handmaid of revelation: the inspired knowledge of the prophets had always transcended the merely human insights of the philosophers. Most later Faylasufs would not share this perspective. Al-Kindi was also anxious to seek out the truth in other religious traditions, however. Truth was one, and it was the task of the philosopher to search for it in whatever cultural or linguistic garments it had assumed over the centuries. We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself; it never cheapens or debases him who reaches for it but ennobles and honors him. 1 Here al-Kindi was in line with the Koran. But he went further, since he did not confine himself to the prophets but also turned to the Greek philosophers. He used Aristotle’s arguments for the existence of a Prime Mover. In a rational world, he argued, everything had a cause. There must, therefore, be an Unmoved Mover to start the ball rolling. This First Principle was Being itself, unchangeable, perfect and indestructible. But having reached this conclusion, al-Kindi departed from Aristotle by adhering to the Koranic doctrine of creation ex nihilo . Action can be defined as the bringing of something out of nothing. This, al-Kindi maintained, was God’s prerogative. He is the only Being who can truly act in this sense, and it is he who is the real cause of all the activity that we see in the world around us. Falsafah came to reject creation ex nihilo , so al-Kindi cannot really be described as a true Faylasuf. But he was a pioneer in the Islamic attempt to harmonize religious truth with systematic metaphysics. His successors were more radical. Thus Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakaria ar-Razi (d. ca. 930), who has been described as the greatest nonconformist in Muslim history, rejected Aristotle’s metaphysics and, like the Gnostics, saw the creation as the work of a demiurge: matter could not have proceeded from a wholly spiritual God. He also rejected the Aristotelian solution of a Prime Mover, as well as the Koranic doctrines of revelation and prophecy. Only reason and philosophy could save us. Ar-Razi was not really a monotheist, therefore: he was perhaps the first freethinker to find the concept of God incompatible with a scientific outlook.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It would be difficult to imagine a Roman Catholic expert on Thomas Aquinas at this time showing a similar enthusiasm for a religion that was not even in the Abrahamic tradition. This spirit of tolerance and cooperation was strikingly demonstrated in the policies of Akbar, the third Moghul emperor, who reigned from 1560 to 1605 and who respected all faiths. Out of sensitivity to the Hindus, he became a vegetarian, gave up hunting—a sport he greatly enjoyed—and forbade the sacrifice of animals on his birthday or in the Hindu holy places. In 1575 he founded a House of Worship, where scholars from all religions could meet to discuss God. Here, apparently, the Jesuit missionaries from Europe were the most aggressive. He founded his own Sufi order, dedicated to “divine monotheism” ( tawhid-e-ilahi ), which proclaimed a radical belief in the one God who could reveal himself in any rightly guided religion. Akbar’s own life was eulogized by Abulfazl Allami (1551–1602) in his Akbar-Namah (The Book of Akbar), which attempted to apply the principles of Sufism to the history of civilization. Allami saw Akbar as the ideal ruler of Falsafah and the Perfect Man of his time. Civilization could lead to universal peace when a generous, liberal society was created by a ruler like Akbar who made bigotry impossible. Islam in its original sense of “surrender” to God could be achieved by any faith: what he certainly called “Muhammad’s religion” did not have the monopoly of God. Not all Muslims shared the vision of Akbar, however, and many saw him as a danger to the faith. His tolerant policy could only be sustained while the Moghuls were in a position of strength. When their power began to decline and various groups began to revolt against the Moghul rulers, religious conflicts escalated among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. The emperor Aurengzebe (1618–1707) may have believed that unity could be restored by greater discipline within the Muslim camp: he enacted legislation to put a stop to various laxities like wine-drinking, made cooperation with Hindus impossible, reduced the number of Hindu festivals and doubled the taxes of Hindu merchants. The most spectacular expression of his communalist policies was the widespread destruction of Hindu temples. These policies, which had completely reversed the tolerant approach of Akbar, were abandoned after Aurengzebe’s death, but the Moghul empire never recovered from the destructive bigotry he had unleashed and sanctified in the name of God. One of Akbar’s most vigorous opponents during his lifetime had been the outstanding scholar Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624), who was also a Sufi and, like Akbar, was venerated as the Perfect Man by his own disciples. Sirhindi stood out against the mystical tradition of Ibn al-Arabi, whose disciples had come to see God as the only reality. As we have seen, Mulla Sadra had asserted this perception of the Oneness of Existence ( wahdat al-wujud ). It was a mystical restatement of the Shahadah: there was no reality but al-Lah.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Thenceforth Christians in Europe regarded Jews and Muslims as the enemies of God; for a long time they had also felt a deep antagonism toward the Greek Orthodox Christians of Byzantium, who made them feel barbarous and inferior.21 This had not always been the case. During the ninth century, some of the more educated Christians of the West had been inspired by Greek theology. Thus the Celtic philosopher Duns Scotus Erigena (810–877), who left his native Ireland to work in the court of Charles the Bold, King of the West Franks, had translated many of the Greek Fathers of the Church into Latin for the benefit of Western Christians, in particular the works of Denys the Areopagite. Erigena passionately believed that faith and reason were not mutually exclusive. Like the Jewish and Muslim Faylasufs, he saw philosophy as the royal road to God. Plato and Aristotle were the masters of those who demanded a rational account of the Christian religion. Scripture and the writings of the Fathers could be illuminated by the disciplines of logic and rational inquiry, but that did not mean a literal interpretation: some passages of scripture had to be interpreted symbolically because, as Erigena explained in his Exposition of Denys’s Celestial Hierarchy, theology was “a kind of poetry.”22 Erigena used the dialectical method of Denys in his own discussion of God, who could only be explained by a paradox that reminded us of the limitations of our human understanding. Both the positive and the negative approaches to God were valid. God is incomprehensible: even the angels do not know or understand his essential nature, but it is acceptable to make a positive statement, such as “God is wise,” because when we refer it to God we know that we are not using the word “wise” in the usual way. We remind ourselves of this by going on to make a negative statement, saying “God is not wise.” The paradox forces us to move on to Denys’s third way of talking about God, when we conclude: “God is more than wise.” This was what the Greeks called an apophatic statement because we do not understand what “more than wise” can possibly mean. Again, this was not simply a verbal trick but a discipline that by juxtaposing two mutually exclusive statements helps us to cultivate a sense of the mystery that our word “God” represents, since it can never be confined to a merely human concept.

• From Satyricon (1)

  “Yes,” Scintilla broke in, “and you’ve not mentioned all of his accomplishments either; he’s a pimp too, and I’m going to see that he’s branded,” she snapped. Trimalchio laughed. “There’s where the Cappadocian comes out,” he said; “never cheats himself out of anything and I admire him for it, so help me Hercules, I do. No one can show a dead man a good time. Don’t be jealous, Scintilla; we’re next to you women, too, believe me. As sure as you see me here safe and sound, I used to play at thrust and parry with Mamma, my mistress, and finally even my master got suspicious and sent me back to a stewardship; but keep quiet, tongue, and I’ll give you a cake.” Taking all this as praise, the wretched slave pulled a small earthen lamp from a fold in his garment, and impersonated a trumpeter for half an hour or more, while Habinnas hummed with him, holding his finger pressed to his lips. Finally, the slave stepped out into the middle of the floor and waved his pipes in imitation of a flute-player; then, with a whip and a smock, he enacted the part of a mule-driver. At last Habinnas called him over and kissed him and said, as he poured a drink for him, “You get better all the time, Massa. I’m going to give you a pair of shoes.” Had not the dessert been brought in, we would never have gotten to the end of these stupidities. Thrushes made of pastry and stuffed with nuts and raisins, quinces with spines sticking out so that they looked like sea-urchins. All this would have been endurable enough had it not been for the last dish that was served; so revolting was this, that we would rather have died of starvation than to have even touched it. We thought that a fat goose, flanked with fish and all kinds of birds, had been served, until Trimalchio spoke up. “Everything you see here, my friends,” said he, “was made from the same stuff.” With my usual keen insight, I jumped to the conclusion that I knew what that stuff was and, turning to Agamemnon, I said, “I shall be greatly surprised, if all those things are not made out of excrement, or out of mud, at the very least: I saw a like artifice practiced at Rome during the Saturnalia.” CHAPTER THE SEVENTIETH.