Awe

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 12 of 217 · 20 per page

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  But magnificent as all that is, Moses is not satisfied, and this most fateful interaction takes place: Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you, ’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM .” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you .’” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors…has sent me to you. ’” (3:13–15a) As you study that interchange, focus on those three terminal phases “has sent me to you” (italicized for emphasis). You realize that two divine names are held together in tensive interplay. In the center is the name “I am who I am ,” and it is framed by the twice repeated other name, “the Lord God of your ancestors.” Who is sending Moses and by which name? The primary and fundamental name of God is a verbal paradox just as the burned-but-not-burned bush is a visual one. God’s reply to Moses’s question is, in effect: “My name is the unnameable one.” But that is a contradiction in terms. It both gives and does not give a name—it is a bush that both burns and does not burn—at the same time. In other words, it is a warning to Moses and us that we cannot ever fully, adequately, or completely name the Holy One. God is fundamentally unnamable. And yet we must always try—the unnameable name must be named, the unburnable bush must be burned, the sacred ground must be walked on—but unsandaled. That is why, despite that warning, God actually gives Moses a nameable name. That secondary or operational name of God is the God of past, present, and future, the God of tradition and deliverance, indeed, of tradition as deliverance and deliverance as tradition. God is the one who saves God’s people from the bondage, misery, and suffering imposed on them by “taskmasters.” There must always be, however, a tension between the primary name—the Unnameable One—and all other names given to God, even that of Deliverer and Savior of God’s people. Even that of Father or Householder. On the one hand, we cannot ever name the Holy and think we have it done. On the other, we cannot ever not name the Holy and think we have it made. That mysterious paradox of God’s primary name both produces and subverts, both demands and mutates all of God’s other names. How we think a deliverer should deliver and a savior save may not be exactly how God delivers and God saves. And that is why we, like Moses, must keep standing on holy ground and must also keep removing our sandals. Not one act or the other, but both together.

• From Come As You Are (2015)

  [image "An anatomical illustration of the external and internal structures of the clitoris and surrounding vulvar anatomy, including the corpus cavernosum, crus clitoris, bulb of vestibule, labia minora, urethral opening, and vaginal opening." file=image_rsrc64E.jpg] The anatomy of the clitoris. The cultural meaning of “clitoris” is often limited to the external part, the glans. The biological meaning includes a vast range of internal erectile tissue that extends all the way to the vaginal opening. [image "An anatomical illustration of the male reproductive system." file=image_rsrc64F.jpg] The anatomy of the penis. As with the clitoris, the cultural meaning of “penis” is limited to the external part—the glans and shaft. And, like the clitoris, the penis has internal erectile tissue. All the same parts, organized in different ways. Description 2 The clitoral hood covers the head of the clitoris, as its homologue, the foreskin, covers the head of the penis. And the male frenulum—the “Y-spot” near the glans, where the foreskin attaches to the shaft—is the homologue of the female fourchette (the French word for “fork”), the curve of tissue on the lower edge of the vagina. This is a highly sensitive and undervalued piece of real estate on all bodies. meet your clitorisIf you’ve never met your clitoris “face-to-face,” now is the time. (Even if you’ve had some good chats with your clitoris in the past, feel free to take this opportunity to get reacquainted.) You can find it visually or manually. After you’ve read the next two paragraphs, put down the book and try either method. To find it visually, get a mirror, spread your labia (the soft, hairy outer lips of your vulva), and actually look at it. You’ll see a nub at the top of your vulva. Or you can find it with your fingers. Start with the tip of your middle finger at the cleft where your labia divide. Press down gently, wiggle your finger back and forth, and scoot your fingertip slowly down between your labia until you feel a rubbery little cord under the skin. It might help to pull your skin taut by tugging upward on your mons with your other hand. It might also help to lubricate your finger with spit, commercial lube, some allergen-free hand cream, or even a little coconut oil. I have a specific reason for asking you to actually look at your clitoris: A student came up to me after class one night and told me that she had been Skyping with her mom, talking about her classes that semester, including my class, “Women’s Sexuality.” The student mentioned to her mom that my lecture slides included actual photos of vulvas, along with diagrams and illustrations. And her mom told her the most astonishing thing. She said, “I don’t know where the clitoris is.” The mom was fifty-four. So my student emailed her mom my lecture slides.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And there, at the focal point of the grandiloquence sat the fabled young emperor himself, duly elevated upon a dais. What did the elegant grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain make of this crude, impertinent monk? Portraits of Charles from this time give the unmistakable impression of a perfect twit, a cruel victim of spoiling and aristocratic inbreeding. But Charles V was very far from that. What must it have felt like for Luther to come into the presence of such worldly power? That he smiled seems evidence of equanimity born of his deep faith. When he came to the designated spot in the room where he was to stand, he beheld a table piled high with his own books, some forty in all. They were the Basel editions of his works, especially bound for the occasion. The man now charged with being Luther’s interlocutor—as the emperor’s spokesman—was Johannes von der Ecken, who is not to be confused with Luther’s Leipzig opponent, Johannes Eck. This Johannes von der Ecken was the secretary to the archbishop of Trier, who was one of the seven electors, and von der Ecken had himself been the one to oversee the burning of Luther’s books in that city. Because some in the room understood Latin, while others understood German, everything must be spoken in both languages. Most to the point, Emperor Charles himself spoke German rather poorly, so it might have been mostly for his benefit that everything was also spoken in Latin. So von der Ecken now addressed Luther—first in Latin and then in German—saying that the emperor had summoned him here to answer but two questions. The first was whether all of these books, bearing his name, had indeed been written by him. The second was whether he wished to recant anything from them. That was all and that would be all. Luther’s appointed legal counsel at Worms was Hieronymus Schurff, a professor of law from Wittenberg who had already been at Worms since February, at the behest of Frederick. But Schurff now leaped up and demanded that the books’ titles be read aloud. Thus von der Ecken now read from the long list to the assembly. The sheer number of books and the titles themselves must have rung through the chamber and the minds of all who listened. They went on and on. These were the writings that had caused this revolution, that had been printed and that had been disseminated throughout most of the known world and translated into many languages—and that had been read and discussed and read and discussed. One by one, the names of these works were announced. The long list of volumes itself spoke volumes. How the world had already changed as a result of them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The book is a masterpiece of the bookmaker’s art, in large part because of Luther’s extensive clarifying commentary and margin notes. It can hardly be seen by us as it was first seen, because thanks to Luther so many are today familiar with the Bible and what is in it. But if we imagine a population that had never seen the Bible in a language they could read and had no idea of what was in the book, we may understand it as a revelation to almost all who first saw it, as not less than historic and indeed as revolutionary. Luther’s commentary prefaces in front of each book were for many Germans the very first explanations they had of what was in this book that had been for centuries hidden from them. There are innumerable examples of simple clarifying explanations that would have forever changed how people viewed things. In the beginning of the New Testament, for example, Luther explains the meaning of the word “gospel” as “good news,” and he explains that although the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are all the stories of Jesus’s life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, nonetheless the actual and true Gospel is to be found all through the New Testament. The whole of the story is the Gospel. Luther’s view of this was so central to his reading of the New Testament that he gave that precedence over all else, meaning that whereas he considered the Word of God sacred, he nonetheless felt comfortable ranking things in accordance with how closely they hewed to this central message of the Gospel. So Luther did not consider all of the books of the Bible equal, as one might expect. In fact, he even had his doubts whether the books of James and Revelation ought to be considered canonical and apostolic. At the end of the New Testament, he wrote, John’s Gospel and St. Paul’s epistles, especially that to the Romans, and St. Peter’s first epistle are the true kernel and marrow of all the books. They ought properly to be the foremost books, and it would be advisable for every Christian to read them first and most, and by daily reading to make them as much his own as his daily bread. For in them you do not find many works and miracles of Christ described, but you do find depicted in masterly fashion how faith in Christ overcomes sin, death, and hell, and gives life, righteousness, and salvation.21

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Trip to Rome, Aetatis 27It was Staupitz who elected Luther to make the trip to Rome. The official reason he sent Luther (and presumably his fellow Erfurt brother Nathin, who was his senior in the order) was that there was at that time a certain controversy among the Augustinians that needed resolution. One branch of the Augustinian monks was called the Observant Augustinians, who held very strictly to the rule of the order, whereas the rest of the Augustinian monasteries were generally more lax. The Erfurt monastery was among the Observant group. As vicar-general of the entire order, Staupitz insisted that the Erfurt monastery—and the eighteen other Observant monasteries—should come under his authority and lose its relative independence. It was Staupitz’s intention—and the desire of his superior in Rome—to bring all Observant monasteries under his jurisdiction so that he could then bring the more lax monasteries closer to the higher standard of the Observant monasteries. But the Erfurt brethren strongly opposed the idea of losing their independence. Luther attended an initial meeting that fall in Nuremberg, and the Observant monasteries flatly refused to submit to Staupitz’s idea. In fact, they felt so strongly about this that they chose to appeal directly to Rome, which was their right. Staupitz acceded to this and thought that sending Luther to Rome to appeal the judgment would help the situation. But again, we must assume there were other reasons Staupitz chose Luther to make this significant and long journey. For one thing, Staupitz surely believed that a break from the monastic routine would have been a good idea for his intense protégé. Surely a sixteen-hundred-mile round-trip journey on foot to Rome and back would be helpful in distracting young Martin from his excruciating confessional navel-gazing. Luther’s journey to Rome commenced in November 1510. Amazingly, this would be the only trip in his lifetime that strayed beyond the borders of his small world, for after the Diet of Worms, in 1521, when he was branded a heretic and outlaw in the empire, his movements would necessarily be limited to Saxony. Luther and his colleague Nathin would have walked the entire journey. One of Luther’s first stops on the long journey was the city of Nuremberg, 140 miles south of Erfurt. There Luther beheld the recently completed Männleinlaufen, an impressive mechanical clock at the top of the fourteenth-century Frauenkirche. Luther must have been stunned to look at this darling and marvel of the clockmaker’s art. At the center of the clock face is seated the Holy Roman emperor, resplendently painted in golden costume. At noon each day, the bells sound and the two trumpeters hoist their long trumpets up, followed by bell ringers ringing their bells and drummers banging their drums, all to herald the awaited entrance from a door of the seven electors, whose figures deferentially process around the emperor before disappearing into the left door. They make this circuit three times before the magical movements cease until twenty-four hours later.*

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So the point is made. C. S. Lewis more elegantly said that life in this world was merely “the Shadowlands,” but Luther predictably phrases it much more bluntly and earthily. This life is “a shit house” compared to the glories of heaven, and Luther was marveling at God’s extravagant generosity in bestowing upon us such glorious and heavenly things as music here, where we shouldn’t expect them, where they were but foretastes of what was to come. So Leppin’s point, that Luther thought of this life in such terms, means that when he referred to the cloaca, he was speaking tongue in cheek and seriously at the same time, as he so often did. The cloaca was not only literally that place in the tower where he went to the bathroom but also the essence of this world, a world not merely begrimed with but filled with and consisting of sin and shit and misery and death. For God to come into this foulest world is for him already to come most of the way into hell. This world is the antechamber to hell and eternal death, and unless we allow the God of life to come here, we do not allow him to redeem us. He cannot redeem and resurrect what is not foul and dead, but we are both. The power of this insight—this “Reformation breakthrough” or “tower experience” or “cloaca experience”—is profound. It is indeed as though every medieval mountain were uprooted and the whole Potemkin range of them cast into the heart of the sea. The hypocrisy of works and human righteousness was forevermore revealed. The curtain was whisked back and the papal Oz exposed as a fraud, frantically pulling his ecclesiastical levers. There would never be any going back. If ever there was a moment when the future as we have come to know it was born, this was it. According to this Reformation breakthrough, all the marmoreal and golden splendor of the Vatican was nothing more or less than a monument to mankind’s efforts to be as God—indeed was a monument to the very devil of hell. It was our attempt to be good without God, to impress God and be like him without his help. It was all far worse than excrement could ever be, for it pretended to be good and beautiful and true and holy, and in reality it was not just not these things but the very bitterest enemy of them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  showing his calculated mastery of visual symbolism and costume, matched his own appearance to the time and season. He now very deliberately abandoned the louche splendors of his knight’s costume, in favor of his dramatic black monastic habit, cutting off his jaunty cavalier’s beard, and having his skull shaved to restore his monk’s tonsure, emphasizing once more the power of his austere cephalic structure.3 One doubts whether Luther was indeed conscious of the “power of his austere cephalic structure” or that he was even conscious of the austerity of his “cephalic structure.” Are not most severely shorn heads inherently “austere”? Nor does Cranach’s earlier rendering of Luther’s facial hair support the adjective “jaunty.” In any case, the moment was pregnant with drama, and it seems likely the clean-shaven speaker knew it. There can be no doubt that the atmosphere in the church was electric. What would the man say who had been taken from their midst this longest of seasons? He was like one returned from the realm of the dead, but here he was again, our Luther, come back to us. Even if the congregation had been as indifferent to him as they were attentive, his first words would have fixed their attention as a pin fixes a beetle in a specimen display case. “The summons of death comes to us all,” he said, “and no one can die for another.” Who could fail to be drawn in by that, whatever the speaker’s “cephalic structure”? How these first startling words from the man thought dead himself must have echoed in the ears of the congregation. “Everyone,” he went on, “must fight his own battle with death by himself alone. We can shout into another’s ears, but everyone must himself be prepared for the time of death, for I will not be with you then, nor you with me.”4 In some ways, these words may well stand as a summation of the entire Reformation to come: that we may not rely upon nor blame others for our relationship with God—and all things related—and must take our new-found freedom in this not as license, but as the gravest and most sacred of responsibilities. And so, with this most provocative of opening salvos, Luther began the first of his octave of now famous “Invocavit Sermons.” In preaching them, he was clearly taking authority over the broken situation, and in a way that only Luther seemed able to do, he definitively and clearly explained the issues that were dividing people and corrected the excesses that had crept in under Karlstadt and Zwilling. Luther never rebuked Karlstadt in these sermons. Still, it must have been embarrassing and even at times stinging for Karlstadt to listen to Luther theologically dismember his previous bold and public assertions. No one doubted whom Luther was criticizing in these sermons. But the old hands of Wittenberg were thrilled. Hieronymus Schurff happily wrote to the elector that

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  LUTHER DEPARTED WITTENBERG for Worms* on April 3, the Wednesday after Easter. Charles had sent his summons to Luther via his imperial herald, Caspar Sturm, and now he—along with his servant—would ride at the head of the procession along the three-hundred-mile journey, guaranteeing Luther’s safe-conduct. On his sleeve he wore the imperial eagle, which would have alerted any troublemakers along the way that to molest this party in any way was as if they had attacked the emperor personally. Wittenberg understood the importance of Luther’s trip and appearance and wanted to play its part. The wagon in which Luther would travel was provided by the Wittenberg city council and the goldsmith Christian Döring. The university kicked in twenty gulden for traveling expenses, to which Duke John—Frederick’s brother—added his own contributions, as did Luther’s friend Johannes Lang. [image file=image_rsrc6KY.jpg] Cranach’s 1521 profile portrait of Luther wearing his doctor’s biretta. Although Luther had been absolved of his obedience to the Augustinians by Staupitz, he nonetheless followed their tradition of traveling wherever he went with a fellow brother, and so an obscure member of the Wittenberg monastery—Johann Petzensteiner—was assigned to be his companion on this trip. But Luther would hardly lack for company. His friend Nicholas von Amsdorf would be along for the ride in the wagon, as would Peter Swawe, a nobleman from Pomerania, who had become sufficiently enamored of Luther in Leipzig that he had moved to Wittenberg, where he studied under him. Much of the way, Luther edified his wagon companions by teaching a Bible study on the book of Joshua and sometimes entertained them by gaily playing his lute. Everywhere their party traveled, Luther was greeted by throngs of admirers. How his writings and teachings had spread could never have been fully known to him until now, and there is no doubt that it was a stunning and humbling revelation. If he had ever doubted it before, he had by this time become a celebrity, although there was no such thing at that time in the world. But whatever he was, everyone knew the details of his case and wanted to see the man who was defying the pope in Rome and who would now stand before the emperor himself.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The next day Luther met with Conrad Peutinger, whom he had inappropriately greeted as he entered the previous day’s session. Peutinger was a high official in Augsburg who was there at Worms representing the free imperial cities, of which Augsburg was one. He later reported that when they met, Luther was in good spirits. There was likely a full meeting of the diet the next day, so more were in attendance and they met in a much larger chamber. To be there ahead of the appointed time—again four o’clock—Luther was led by Pappenheim and Sturm to the bishop’s residence. But because this meeting with Luther had not been planned, it was tacked onto the end of the official meeting of the diet, and it so happened that the emperor and the German estates were not finished with their business until six. So Luther waited two hours, standing in a warm crowd of people. Although the chamber was vast, it was nonetheless extraordinarily crowded. It seems fitting that not merely a part but all of the empire’s representatives should be here to witness what was about to transpire. But many others had come here too, and it was so crowded that many who wanted to enter could not. By the time Luther was at last summoned before the emperor, it was dark. All was therefore lit by torches, whose flickering lent an undeniable drama to what has since been acknowledged to be one of the seminal meetings in history. Von der Ecken began by once more dressing down the reprobate before him, reminding Luther that he had had no right to the extra time he had been given, inasmuch as he knew very well why he had been summoned and also because he was a theologian who was expected to be able to answer in matters of faith. Aleander so approved of this masterful and somewhat sarcastic belittling of Luther that he later recommended von der Ecken be rewarded with a papal promotion. So after putting Luther in his place, von der Ecken at last asked the previous day’s second question a second time: Did Luther stand by all of these many books, or was there something in them he wished to retract?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The 1532 comments mentioning this illuminating and life-changing moment are much briefer than his own commentary of it is. In fact, they are just a single sentence, recorded from his Table Talk by Johannes Schlaginhaufen. The German is simply “Diese Kunst hat mir der Spiritus Sanctus auf diss Cloaca eingeben.”* The meaning of this famous phrase is “The Holy Spirit gave me this art in [or upon] the cloaca.” But the word “cloaca” presents the difficulty. This is because Luther—who couldn’t resist making a joke and who often made terribly serious points while joking—was implying that God had given him this insight while he was sitting on the toilet. Cloaca was the ancient Latin term for “sewer” and at the time of Luther had come to mean “outhouse.” Not only this, but whereas many English writers incorrectly translate “auf” as “in,” most Germans would take “auf” to mean “on” or “upon”—which in concert with “outhouse” or “toilet” makes perfect sense. But we now know that the heated room that was Luther’s study for decades—and where he therefore did his biblical exegesis—was in that part of the monastery located in the tower. It so happened, however, that in the base of this tower there was an outhouse. Thus this tower was always referred to as the Cloaca Tower, probably by the many monks who went there only when that particular duty summoned them. So even if Luther got the tremendous insight not precisely while indisposed upon the commode but upstairs in his heated study, he nonetheless would have said the “cloaca,” as was the general habit. But in this 1532 comment, Luther was deliberately playing upon the ambiguity by using “auf”—which is to say “upon.” He clearly meant half in jest to convey something along the lines of “while on the john.” But here is the longer version of that moment, which Luther wrote in 1545, the year before his death, and which tells us precisely what he meant by “this art” when he said “diese Kunst” in that 1532 sentence:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The next day the elector’s body was laid upon a bier to be taken home to Wittenberg. The wagon was drawn in a cortege for fifty miles through the Saxon towns and villages where he had ruled. Bells were rung and people gathered to see and pay their respects to the man who had irenically ruled over them since his own father’s death, forty years before. On the tenth, Frederick’s body arrived in Wittenberg, where he would be buried in the Castle Church. Eight pallbearers from the nobility carried the bier, while other notable figures and citizens walked alongside. Thus was he borne into the town he had built. Lucas Cranach and Christian Döring stood at the doors of the church handing coins to the poor, as was customary at such times. Twenty men carrying torches and coats of arms accompanied the elector’s bier as it was carried into the Castle Church and placed in the center of the great nave. Melanchthon and Luther both spoke. Spalatin had inquired of them what would be appropriate for his funeral on the following morning, because no Saxon prince had ever had a funeral except in the Catholic church. What should the new protocol be? They determined that no masses should be held, nor black vestments worn, nor black altar cloths laid. In the letter on this subject to Spalatin, Luther wrote, “Death is oh so bitter—not so much to the dying as to the living whom the dead leave behind.”4 That night the elector’s body, now six days dead, lay in the silence of the church, guarded by sentinels. Some time before dawn, a grave was dug near the altar, and at 7:00 a.m., after Matins were sung, the church bells rang to summon the people. Luther now preached a second sermon, and the body was lowered into the ground as the choir sang the Nicene Creed. “I Will Not Marry”The previous fall, before the peasants’ rebellion had spread into full fan across Germany, Luther was puzzling over the issue of marriage and parrying not a few attempts to corral him into that noble institution. In November, however, he remained adamantly against the idea. Argula von Grumbach, a dedicated supporter of Luther’s and one of only a handful of notable women of the Reformation, had written to Spalatin, eagerly inquiring after Luther’s marital status. She felt strongly that he must move forward. On hearing of her letter, Luther wrote to Spalatin,

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Saint Martin lived in the fourth century. He was born in what is today Hungary; grew up in what is today Pavia, Italy; and spent most of his adult life in what is today France, all three of which at that time were within the borders of the Roman Empire. He became a Christian at an early age, despite his father’s disapproval, and was enlisted in the Roman army. One day while in the Gallic provinces—it was in the town of Borbetomagus, in what is today central Germany—the future saint was ordered to participate in a battle. But in the belief that shedding blood was not consonant with his deep Christian convictions, Martin bravely declared, “I am a soldier of Christ. I cannot fight.”1 For this shocking refusal to submit to this duty assigned him, he was imprisoned and charged with cowardice, but he turned this charge on its head by then volunteering to go to the front lines unarmed, because he did not fear for his life, only that he might take the life of another. In the end, the battle did not take place, and he was released from duty, shortly thereafter becoming a monk. The Roman city called Borbetomagus where this Martin took the death-defying stand for his faith that set him on his path of sainthood would in the future become known as the German city of Worms. Thus, eleven centuries from when this first Martin took his Christian stand against the Roman Empire, the second Martin would take his Christian stand against the Holy Roman Empire—in precisely the same place. So on the second day of his life, Martin Luther was linked with both the distant historic past and his own historic future. The world into which Luther was born was the world that had existed unchanged for many centuries. It was a world separated by an infinite ocean from the vast continents we know now as the Americas. Christopher Columbus was during this time sailing and trading along the West African coast, with no idea that within a decade he would daringly set out across the Atlantic in three caravels. The printing press was in its earliest infancy, having been invented some forty years earlier by Johannes Gutenberg, and although the great schism of 1054 had separated Eastern Christianity from Western, the idea that the vast seamless universe of the Holy Catholic Church led by the pope might be challenged and then riven forever was perfectly nonexistent.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Who then knows whence it has arisen, Whence this emanation hath arisen, Whether God disposed it, or whether he did not,— Only he who is its overseer in highest heaven knows. Or perhaps he does not know!27 The religion of the Vedas did not attempt to explain the origins of life or to give privileged answers to philosophical questions. Instead, it was designed to help people to come to terms with the wonder and terror of existence. It asked more questions than it answered, designed to hold the people in an attitude of reverent wonder. By the eighth century BCE, when J and E were writing their chronicles, changes in the social and economic conditions of the Indian subcontinent meant that the old Vedic religion was no longer relevant. The ideas of the indigenous population that had been suppressed in the centuries following the Aryan invasions surfaced and led to a new religious hunger. The revived interest in karma, the notion that one’s destiny is determined by one’s own actions, made people unwilling to blame the gods for the irresponsible behavior of human beings. Increasingly the gods were seen as symbols of a single transcendent Reality. Vedic religion had become preoccupied with the rituals of sacrifice, but the revived interest in the old Indian practice of Yoga (the “yoking” of the powers of the mind by special disciplines of concentration) meant that people became dissatisfied with a religion that concentrated on externals. Sacrifice and liturgy were not enough: they wanted to discover the inner meaning of these rites. We shall note that the prophets of Israel felt the same dissatisfaction. In India, the gods were no longer seen as other beings who were external to their worshippers; instead men and women sought to achieve an inward realization of truth. The gods were no longer very important in India. Henceforth they would be superseded by the religious teacher, who would be considered higher than the gods. It was a remarkable assertion of the value of humanity and the desire to take control of destiny: it would be the great religious insight of the subcontinent. The new religions of Hinduism and Buddhism did not deny the existence of the gods, nor did they forbid the people to worship them. In their view, such repression and denial would be damaging. Instead, Hindus and Buddhists sought new ways to transcend the gods, to go beyond them. During the eighth century, sages began to address these issues in the treatises called the Aranyakas and the Upanishads, known collectively as the Vedanta: the end of the Vedas. More and more Upanisbads appeared, until by the end of the fifth century BCE there were about 200 of them. It is impossible to generalize about the religion we call Hinduism because it eschews systems and denies that one exclusive interpretation can be adequate. But the Upanishads did evolve a distinctive conception of godhood that transcends the gods but is found to be intimately present in all things.

• From A History of God (1993)

  People were beginning to ask what exactly the artist was painting when he painted Christ. It was impossible to depict his divinity, but if the artist claimed that he was only painting the humanity of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism, the heretical belief that Jesus’ human and divine natures were quite distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to ban icons altogether, but icons were defended by two leading monks: John of Damascus (656–747) of the monastery of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and Theodore (759–826), of the monastery of Studius near Constantinople. They argued that the iconoclasts were wrong to forbid the depiction of Christ. Since the Incarnation, the material world and the human body had both been given a divine dimension, and an artist could paint this new type of deified humanity. He was also painting an image of God, since Christ the Logos was the icon of God par excellence . God could not be contained in words or summed up in human concepts, but he could be “described” by the pen of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy. The piety of the Greeks was so dependent upon icons that by 820 the iconoclasts had been defeated by popular acclaim. This assertion that God was in some sense describable did not amount to an abandonment of Denys’s apophatic theology, however. In his Greater Apology for the Holy Images , the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons were “expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the ineffability of a mystery that transcends being. Without ceasing and without speech, they praise the goodness of God in that venerable and thrice-illumined melody of theology.” 23 Instead of instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church and helping them to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons held them in a sense of mystery. When describing the effect of these religious paintings, Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music, the most ineffable of the arts and possibly the most direct. Emotion and experience are conveyed by music in a way that bypasses words and concepts. In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater would assert that all art aspired to the condition of music; in ninth-century Byzantium, Greek Christians saw theology as aspiring to the condition of iconography. They found that God was better expressed in a work of art than in rationalistic discourse. After the intensely wordy Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, they were evolving a portrait of God that depended upon the imaginative experience of Christians. This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949–1022), Abbot of the small monastery of St. Macras in Constantinople, who became known as the “New Theologian.” This new type of theology made no attempt to define God.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  I gathered from various reports as well as the hasty running of the people that the great master of heretics was making his entrance. I sent one of my people out, and he told me that about a hundred mounted soldiers . . . had escorted him to the gate of the city; sitting in a coach with three comrades, he entered the city [at ten in the morning], surrounded by some eight horsemen and found lodgings near his Saxon prince. When he left the coach, a priest embraced him and touched his habit three times, and shouted with joy, as if he had had a relic of the greatest saint in his hands. I suspect that he will soon be said to work miracles. This Luther, as he climbed from the coach, looked around in the circle with his demonic eyes and said: “God will be with me.” Then he stepped into an inn, where he was visited by many men, ten or twelve of which he ate with, and after the meal, all the world ran there to see him.7 After his arrival, Luther had lunch with the Hungarian delegation to the diet, but while they were eating, the door had to be guarded and blocked, because a crowd decided it would try to force its way in to see the great man up close. After lunch, because there was no room for Luther to lodge in the place where Frederick was staying, he stayed in another place, not without its charms. It was the quarters of the Knights of St. John, an order that cared for the sick. Still, Luther’s quarters were far from grand. He was obliged to share a bedroom with Hans Schott and Bernhard von Hirschfeld, who were officials of electoral Saxony. But while there, Luther entertained one impressive guest after the other. A number of counts and lords came, along with several princes. Everyone who was in town wanted a few moments with the fabled monk who had come to stand before emperor and pope.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The true sage, in his opinion, excelled in both philosophy and mysticism. There was always such a sage in the world. In a theory that was very close to Shii Imamology, Suhrawardi believed that this spiritual leader was the true pole ( qutb ) without whose presence the world could not continue to exist, even if he remained in obscurity. Suhrawardi’s Ishraqi mysticism is still practiced in Iran. It is an esoteric system not because it is exclusive but because it requires spiritual and imaginative training of the sort undergone by Ismailis and Sufis. The Greeks, perhaps, would have said that Suhrawardi’s system was dogmatic rather than kerygmatic . He was attempting to discover the imaginative core that lay at the heart of all religion and philosophy and, though he insisted that reason was not enough, he never denied its right to probe the deepest mysteries. Truth had to be sought in scientific rationalism as well as esoteric mysticism; sensibility must be educated and informed by the critical intelligence. As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God. It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable, yet was also the most obvious fact of life in the world: totally self-evident, it required no definition but was perceived by everybody as the element that made life possible. It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged to material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves. In Suhrawardi’s emanationist cosmology, the Light of Lights corresponded to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs, which was utterly simple. It generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending hierarchy; each light, recognizing its dependency upon the Light of Lights, developed a shadow-self that was the source of a material realm, which corresponded to one of the Ptolemaic spheres. This was a metaphor of the human predicament. There was a similar combination of light and darkness within each one of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit (also known, as in Ibn Sina’s scheme, as the Angel Gabriel, the light of our world). The soul longs to be united with the higher world of Lights and, if it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of the time or by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this here below. Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat . He had been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but could make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him. Then he had a vision of the Imam, the qutb , the healer of souls: Suddenly I was wrapped in gentleness; there was a blinding flash, then a diaphanous light in the likeness of a human being. I watched attentively and there he was.… He came towards me, greeting me so kindly that my bewilderment faded and my alarm gave way to a feeling of familiarity.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Three or so days later, he and his companion came to Ulm, where they goggled at the monumental Ulm Minster, whose 530-foot steeple made it the tallest church in the world. Five hundred years later, it still holds the title. The interior of the church is 400 feet long and 160 feet wide, and the central nave soars to a height of 136 feet, making it something incomprehensibly vast for that time. Before pews were introduced, it was able to accommodate twenty thousand people. Luther had certainly never seen anything that approached it. But he later remarked that the immensity of this church, as well as of the Cologne Cathedral and St. Peter’s in Rome, rendered them appallingly unsuited to preaching, which for him, of course, was more than a mere pity; it was a fatal flaw and a monumental tragedy. Luther felt that the impressiveness of the structure sacrificed the spiritual lives of the people who would come there. If feeding the Word of God to hungry flocks was the point of it all, and not mere shock-and-awe splendor, then these cavernous interiors would never do. What was the point? Luther’s journey then took him through Swabia and Bavaria and then on through the majestic silence of the snowy Alps. When they at last arrived in the great city of Milan, Luther discovered that he was unable to say Mass, although this time the difficulty had nothing to do with his own sense of worthiness. It was because of something that had happened more than one thousand years before, when in the fourth century Saint Ambrose was the bishop of that city. All through those eleven centuries the so-called Ambrosian rite held sway there, as it still does today. Like most priests outside the Milanese region, Luther was familiar only with the Roman rite. From Milan they continued to Bologna, home to the world’s oldest university, founded more than four centuries earlier, in 1088, and there in this extremely cold December they encountered what one rarely finds in that venerable city: snow. From snowy Bologna, Luther and his companion continued southward through Florence. There, only twelve years earlier, Savonarola had been condemned as a heretic and burned at the stake. Undoubtedly, Luther here took in the astonishing David of Michelangelo, completed just seven years before. The mammoth, nearly eighteen-foot-high masterpiece then stood outside the Palazzo della Signoria,* but somehow Luther made no mention of it in his commentary. It has been said that Luther went right through Italy in the middle of the Renaissance but somehow missed it.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Denys was also the heir of the Cappadocian Fathers. Like Basil, he took the distinction between kerygma and dogma very seriously. In one of his letters, he affirmed that there were two theological traditions, both of which derived from the apostles. The kerygmatic gospel was clear and knowable; the dogmatic gospel was silent and mystical. Both were mutually interdependent, however, and essential to the Christian faith. One was “symbolic and presupposing initiation,” the other “philosophical and capable of proof—and the ineffable is woven with what can be uttered.”47 The kerygma persuades and exhorts by its clear, manifest truth, but the silent or hidden tradition of dogma was a mystery that required initiation: “It effects and establishes the soul with God by initiations that do not teach anything,”48 Denys insisted, in words that recalled Aristotle. There was a religious truth which could not adequately be conveyed by words, logic or rational discourse. It was expressed symbolically, through the language and gestures of the liturgy or by doctrines which were “sacred veils” that hid the ineffable meaning from view but which also adapted the utterly mysterious God to the limitations of human nature and expressed the Reality in terms that could be grasped imaginatively if not conceptually.49 The hidden or esoteric meaning was not for a privileged elite but for all Christians. Denys was not advocating an abstruse discipline that was suitable for monks and ascetics only. The liturgy, attended by all the faithful, was the chief path to God and dominated his theology. The reason that these truths were hidden behind a protective veil was not to exclude men and women of goodwill but to lift all Christians above sense perceptions and concepts to the inexpressible reality of God himself. The humility which had inspired the Cappadocians to claim that all theology should be apophatic became for Denys a bold method of ascending to the inexpressible God. In fact, Denys did not like to use the word “God” at all—probably because it had acquired such inadequate and anthropomorphic connotations. He preferred to use Proclus’s term theurgy, which was primarily liturgical: theurgy in the pagan world had been a tapping of the divine mana by means of sacrifice and divination. Denys applied this to God-talk, which, properly understood, could also release the divine energeiai inherent in the revealed symbols. He agreed with the Cappadocians that all our words and concepts for God were inadequate and must not be taken as an accurate description of a reality which lies beyond our ken. Even the word “God” itself was faulty, since God was “above God,” a “mystery beyond being.”50 Christians must realize that God is not the Supreme Being, the highest being of all heading a hierarchy of lesser beings. Things and people do not stand over against God as a separate reality or an alternative being, which can be the object of knowledge.

• From A History of God (1993)

  If we really want to understand God, we must go on to deny those attributes and names. Thus we must say that he is both “God” and “not-God,” “good” and then go on to say that he is “not-good.” The shock of this paradox, a process that includes both knowing and unknowing, will lift us above the world of mundane ideas to the inexpressible reality itself. Thus, we begin by saying that: of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, imagination, name and many other things. But he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be named. He is not one of the things that are. 53 Reading the Scriptures is not a process of discovering facts about God, therefore, but should be a paradoxical discipline that turns the kerygma into dogma . This method is a theurgy , a tapping of the divine power that enables us to ascend to God himself and, as Platonists had always taught, become ourselves divine. It is a method to stop us thinking! “We have to leave behind us all our conceptions of the divine. We call a halt to the activities of our minds.” 54 We even have to leave our denials of God’s attributes behind. Then and only then shall we achieve an ecstatic union with God. When Denys talks about ecstasy, he is not referring to a peculiar state of mind or an alternative form of consciousness achieved by an obscure yogic discipline. This is something that every Christian can manage in this paradoxical method of prayer and theoria . It will stop us talking and bring us to the place of silence: “As we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.” 55 Like Gregory of Nyssa, he found the story of Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai instructive. When Moses had climbed the mountain, he did not see God himself on the summit but had only been brought to the place where God was. He had been enveloped by a thick cloud of obscurity and could see nothing: thus everything that we can see or understand is only a symbol (the word Denys uses is “paradigm”) which reveals the presence of a reality beyond all thought. Moses had passed into the darkness of ignorance and thus achieved union with that which surpasses all understanding: we will achieve a similar ecstasy that will “take us out of ourselves” and unite us to God. This is only possible because, as it were, God comes to meet us on the mountain.

• From A History of God (1993)

  To speak of God’s activity in the world was simply a way of describing the mathematical and causal principles of existence. It was an absolute denial of transcendence. It seems a bleak doctrine, but Spinoza’s God inspired him with a truly mystical awe. As the aggregate of all the laws in existence, God was the highest perfection, which welded everything into unity and harmony. When human beings contemplated the workings of their minds in the way that Descartes had enjoined, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite being of God at work within them. Like Plato, Spinoza believed that intuitive and spontaneous knowledge reveals the presence of God more than a laborious acquisition of facts. Our joy and happiness in knowledge is equivalent to the love of God, a deity which is not an eternal object of thought but the cause and principle of that thought, deeply one with every single human being. There is no need for revelation or divine law: this God is accessible to the whole of humanity, and the only Torah is the eternal law of nature. Spinoza brought the old metaphysics into line with the new science: his God was not the unknowable One of the Neoplatonists but closer to the absolute Being described by philosophers like Aquinas. But it was also close to the mystical God experienced by orthodox monotheists within themselves. Jews, Christians and philosophers tended to see Spinoza as an atheist: there was nothing personal about this God, which was inseparable from the rest of reality. Indeed, Spinoza had only used the word “God” for historical reasons: he agreed with atheists, who claim that reality cannot be divided into a part which is “God” and a part which is not-God. If God cannot be separated from anything else, it is impossible to say that “he” exists in any ordinary sense. What Spinoza was saying in effect was that there was no God that corresponded to the meaning we usually attach to that word. But mystics and philosophers had been making the same point for centuries. Some had said that there was “Nothing” apart from the world we know. Were it not for the absence of the transcendent En Sof, Spinoza’s pantheism would resemble Kabbalah and we could sense an affinity between radical mysticism and the newly emergent atheism. It was the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) who opened the way for Jews to enter modern Europe, however, though at first he had no intention of constructing a specifically Jewish philosophy. He was interested in psychology and aesthetics as well as religion, and his early works Phaedon and Morning Hours were written simply within the context of the broader German Enlightenment: they sought to establish the existence of God on rational grounds and did not consider the question from a Jewish perspective. In countries like France and Germany, the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment brought emancipation and enabled Jews to enter society.