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 13 of 217 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  All the shadows of doubt were dispelled.” 31 God could also be a source of joy, however: not long after his conversion, Augustine experienced an ecstasy one night with his mother, Monica, at Ostia on the River Tiber. We shall discuss this in more detail in Chapter 7 . As a Platonist, Augustine knew that God was to be found in the mind, and in Book X of the Confessions , he discussed the faculty of what he called Memoria , memory. This was something far more complex than the faculty of recollection and is closer to what psychologists would call the unconscious. For Augustine, memory represented the whole mind, conscious and unconscious alike. Its complexity and diversity filled him with astonishment. It was an “awe-inspiring mystery,” an unfathomable world of images, presences of our past and countless plains, caverns and caves. 32 It was through this teeming inner world that Augustine descended to find his God, who was paradoxically both within and above him. It was no good simply searching for proof of God in the external world. He could only be discovered in the real world of the mind: Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. 33 God, therefore, was not an objective reality but a spiritual presence in the complex depths of the self. Augustine shared this insight not only with Plato and Plotinus but also with Buddhists, Hindus and Shamans in the nontheistic religions. Yet his was not an impersonal deity but the highly personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. God had condescended to man’s weakness and gone in search of him: You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain that peace which was yours. 34 The Greek theologians did not generally bring their own personal experience into their theological writing, but Augustine’s theology sprang from his own highly individual story. Augustine’s fascination with the mind led him to develop his own psychological Trinitarianism in the treatise De Trinitate , written in the early years of the fifth century.

• From A History of God (1993)

  62 It would be a painful process. Since God was Nothing, we had to be prepared to be nothing too in order to become one with him. In a process similar to that Jana described by the Sufis, Eckhart spoke of “detachment” or, rather, “separateness” ( Abgeschiedenheit ). 63 In much the same way as a Muslim considers the veneration of anything other than God himself as idolatry ( shirk ), Eckhart taught that the mystic must refuse to be enslaved by any finite ideas about the divine. Only thus would he achieve identity with God, whereby “God’s existence must be my existence and God’s Is-ness ( Istigkeit ) is my is-ness.” 64 Since God was the ground of being, there was no need to seek him “out there” or envisage an ascent to something beyond the world we knew. Al-Hallaj had antagonized the ulema by crying: “I am the Truth” and Eckhart’s mystical doctrine shocked the bishops of Germany: what did it mean to say that a mere man or woman could become one with God? During the fourteenth century, Greek theologians debated this question furiously. Since God was essentially inaccessible, how could he communicate himself to mankind? If there was a distinction between God’s essence and his “activities” or “energies,” as the Fathers had taught, surely it was blasphemous to compare the “God” that a Christian encountered in prayer with God himself? Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Saloniki, taught that, paradoxical as it might seem, any Christian could enjoy such a direct knowledge of God himself. True, God’s essence was always beyond our comprehension, but his “energies” were not distinct from God and should not be considered a mere divine afterglow. A Jewish mystic would have agreed: God En Sof would always remain shrouded in impenetrable darkness, but his sefiroth (which corresponded to the Greeks’ “energies”) were themselves divine, flowing eternally from the heart of the Godhead. Sometimes men and women could see or experience these “energies” directly, as when the Bible said that God’s “glory” had appeared. Nobody had ever seen God’s essence, but that did not mean that a direct experience of God himself was impossible. The fact that this assertion was paradoxical did not distress Palamas in the least. It had long been agreed by the Greeks that any statement about God had to be a paradox. Only thus could people retain a sense of his mystery and ineffability. Palamas put it this way: We attain to participation in the divine nature, and yet at the same time it remains totally inaccessible. We need to affirm both at the same time and to preserve the antimony as a criterion for right doctrine .

• From A History of God (1993)

  Gradually, like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast would find that he or she could set rational thoughts gently to one side, the imagery that thronged the mind would fade away and the hesychast would feel totally one with the prayer. Greek Christians had discovered for themselves techniques that had been practiced for centuries in the oriental religions. They saw prayer as a psychosomatic activity, whereas Westerners like Augustine and Gregory thought that prayer should liberate the soul from the body. Maximus the Confessor had insisted: “ The whole man should become God, deified by the grace of the God-become-man, becoming whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole god, soul and body, by grace.” 21 The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be divine. As we have seen, the Greeks saw this “deification” as an enlightenment that was natural to man. They found inspiration in the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, just as Buddhists were inspired by the image of the Buddha, who had attained the fullest realization of humanity. The Feast of the Transfiguration is very important in the Eastern Orthodox Churches; it is called an “epiphany,” a manifestation of God. Unlike their Western brethren, the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and desolation were an inescapable prelude to the experience of God: these were simply disorders that must be cured. Greeks had no cult of a dark night of the soul. The dominant motif was Tabor rather than Gethsemane and Calvary. Not everybody could achieve these higher states, however, but other Christians could glimpse something of this mystical experience in the icons. In the West, religious art was becoming predominantly representational: it depicted historical events in the lives of Jesus or the saints. In Byzantium, however, the icon was not meant to represent anything in this world but was an attempt to portray the ineffable mystical experience of the h esychasts in a visual form to inspire the nonmystics. As the British historian Peter Brown explains, “Throughout the Eastern Christian world, icon and vision validated one another. Some deep gathering into one focal point of the collective imagination … ensured that by the sixth century, the supernatural had taken on the precise lineaments, in dreams and in each person’s imagination, in which it was commonly portrayed in art. The icon had the validity of a realized dream.” 22 Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey information, ideas or doctrines. They were a focus of contemplation ( theoria ) which provided the faithful with a sort of window on the divine world. They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however, that by the eighth century they had become the center of a passionate doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Friedrich ordered his court artist Lucas Cranach the Elder to produce a printed and fully illustrated catalogue of his treasures, a work of art in itself, which appeared in 1509. Albrecht of Mainz copied it two years later, going one better by having the title page graced with a portrait of himself by Germany’s premier artist, Albrecht Diirer.* The relics were shown in the Castle Church, and Friedrich commis- sioned leading artists to provide its altarpieces. Unlike patrons of later periods, he used mainly German artists, not Italian or Dutch painters, which added to the sense that this was a distinctively local, patriotic style, with its own heartfelt devotional simplicity, unlike the rich and beautiful Italian religious art of the period. With its nine works by Diirer, Cranach, and Matthias Griinewald, the church’s collection of altars rivalled any other of the time for artistic quality. Just half a century later, when electoral Saxony was defeated, the collection would be broken up, so it is impossible now for the visitor to the church, remodelled extensively in the nineteenth century, to get a sense of what it looked like in Luther’s day. As a devotional space it must have been electrifying. But it was also the final flowering of a style of painting that would be destroyed by the Reformation itself, its spiritual function lost. The magnificence of the church was all the more remarkable because it dominated a town with just 2,000-2,500 inhabitants.” Polit- ically, Wittenberg was a settlement of new men, which lacked a patriciate and had fairly rudimentary systems of government. All contracts — whether deeds of sale, property divisions, wills, testaments 84 MARTIN LUTHER or marriage licences — were registered before the civic court, the judge’s record serving as the repository for all legal deeds. This system made notaries dispensable, but it could work only as long as there was not enough business to overwhelm the court. For the most part, the old-town elite lacked university degrees or legal training, while the incomers were literate in Latin and skilled in the new learning. Printers like Johann Rhau-Grunenberg soon set up shop right by the monastery and near the new Leucorea. Next door to the university building a perfume shop opened, testifying to the refined tastes of the town’s growing population.” The town council itself was unlike the proud gatherings of citizens in the imperial cities of southern Germany. These cities, subject directly to the emperor, could make their own laws.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This, Symeon insisted, would be presumptuous; indeed, to speak about God in any way at all implied that “that which is incomprehensible is comprehensible.” 24 Instead of arguing rationally about God’s nature, the “new” theology relied on direct, personal religious experience. It was impossible to know God in conceptual terms, as though he were just another being about which we could form ideas. God was a mystery. A true Christian was one who had a conscious experience of the God who had revealed himself in the transfigured humanity of Christ. Symeon had himself been converted from a worldly life to contemplation by an experience that seemed to come to him out of the blue. At first he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually he became aware that he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed into a light that was of God himself. This was not light as we know it, of course; it was beyond “form, image or representation and could only be experienced intuitively, through prayer.” 25 But this was not an experience for the elite or for monks only; the kingdom announced by Christ in the Gospels was a union with God that everybody could experience here and now, without having to wait until the next life. For Symeon, therefore, God was known and unknown, near and far. Instead of attempting the impossible task of describing “ineffable matters by words alone,” 26 he urged his monks to concentrate on what could be experienced as a transfiguring reality in their own souls. As God had said to Symeon during one of his visions: “Yes, I am God, the one who became man for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you see, and I shall make you God.” 27 God was not an external, objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlightenment. Yet Symeon’s refusal to speak about God did not lead him to break with the theological insights of the past. The “new” theology was based firmly on the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. In his Hymns of Divine Love , Symeon expressed the old Greek doctrine of the deification of humanity, as described by Athanasius and Maximus: O Light that none can name, for it is altogether nameless. O Light with many names, for it is at work in all things … How do you mingle yourself with grass? How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible, do you preserve the nature of the grass unconsumed? 28 It was useless to define the God who affected this transformation, since he was beyond speech and description.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther welcomed many visitors during this time, so many in fact that he was worried someone would give his location away. In May, he received Wenceslas Linck and others. Hans Reinecke visited too. Then Argula von Grumbach paid a visit. Among other things, she had advice about weaning their new daughter, Magdalena (Lenchen), which Luther passed along in a letter to Kathie. At the end of June, a few weeks after their father’s death, Luther’s younger brother Jakob stopped by. In September, Luther was visited by the crown prince John Frederick, who was Duke John’s son, and who would become the elector upon his father’s death. But Luther’s beard baffled the young John Frederick, so much so that at first he didn’t recognize Luther at all. Luther sometimes wore glasses now too, to help him read. From Wittenberg, Christian Döring had sent him a new pair of them, which he crankily reckoned “the worst of them all.” It was not until June 15 that the emperor finally arrived at the diet he had called. The procession with which he traveled was like a small city unto itself, flaunting no fewer than one thousand infantry and a phalanx of personal bodyguards. In the rear marched a retinue of “cooks, apothecaries, falconers,” and finally—befitting a Spaniard—a monstrous pack of two hundred Spanish dogs. The emperor himself sat astride a milk-white horse under a golden canopy and was arrayed all in gold and carrying a golden sword. It was transfixing and sobering to witness the majesty—and both the implicit and the explicit might—of the empire in this grandest of grand displays. Those in the small group of Protestants attending who saw it understood what it was they dared to defy. If God was not with them, they were certainly in trouble. A few days hence, Jonas would write, “The emperor is surrounded by cardinals . . . they are in his palace every day, and there is a swarm of priests like bees around him, who burn with hatred against us.”22 But now that Charles and his thousands had at last arrived at Augsburg, the real business of the diet would be attended to with all alacrity. Melanchthon had written what has come to be known as the Augsburg Confession, which was to be and indeed has been the official summation of what all Lutherans believe. On June 23, the Lutheran theologians and princes gathered for a final reading of the document and signatures, although only the princes, other nobles, and those who officially represented territories and cities were to sign. It most likely was presented to the emperor on the following day, and on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth the German translation was read aloud with everyone in attendance, including the emperor himself, who understood German, but poorly, so that the profusion of meaningless Teutonic syllables—like the wordless lullaby of a bird’s song—soon lured him deep into the forest of a well-documented snooze.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Whether Luther had thought about it much or hadn’t, once he broke away from the theological lockstep of Rome, he had broken away not only from what it believed but from the deeper and larger idea that one could force another’s beliefs. This was an astounding development. He had opened the door to what we today call conscience and dissent. He had therefore also opened the door to the idea that truth and power were inevitably at odds with each other. This was an immeasurably significant moment, and most of what we take for granted in the West, especially with regard to democracy and human rights, began with this crucial idea. Once this brightest of all ideas took hold, who could believe that a forced conversion to another religion was a real conversion? Brute power itself had been vanquished by the human right to believe as one wished. Conscience and DissentIt is this, more than his theological views, that makes Martin Luther such an outsized figure in history. Anyone could dissent from theological views, and others had done so. Many had agitated for reform in the church. But to succeed such that one created a new world in which dissent was genuinely possible—in which it was even important and almost encouraged—was something new and shocking. What door had Luther opened? No one knew, including Luther himself. It was both wonderful and terrible. And it led directly to the world in which we have lived ever since. Luther had begun by arguing for a view of the truth, but in so doing, he had dragged with him the brand-new idea of truthful argument. Perhaps this is the greatest part of his legacy, that in fighting with Rome, he semi-wittingly discovered that truth had a nature that was, as it were, both noun and verb. The world had always understood the idea that truth was what was right and true, but suddenly now how one sought the truth and whether and how one argued for the truth were on the table as well. Thus, because of Luther, truth had become two things, had burst into another dimension. It had overnight been doubled, or perhaps squared. There was first what was true, and now suddenly there was also the process of how one determined what was true. And this second thing mattered as much as what was true. How one arrived at and argued for truth must itself partake of truth. Thus the means and the end had become inextricably and forevermore intertwined. This certainly followed from what one finds in the Bible, but never before had it come into history as it had with Luther. In this he had unwittingly been the vessel for what was the greatest revolution in history, the one that would lead to all the others.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It was this attitude that later enabled Muslims to build a fine tradition of natural science, which has never been seen as such a danger to religion as in Christianity. A study of the workings of the natural world showed that it had a transcendent dimension and source, whom we can talk about only in signs and symbols: even the stories of the prophets, the accounts of the Last Judgment and the joys of paradise should not be interpreted literally but as parables of a higher, ineffable reality. But the greatest sign of all was the Koran itself: indeed its individual verses are called ayat . Western people find the Koran a difficult book, and this is largely a problem of translation. Arabic is particularly difficult to translate: even ordinary literature and the mundane utterances of politicians frequently sound stilted and alien when translated into English, for example, and this is doubly true of the Koran, which is written in dense and highly allusive, elliptical speech. The early suras in particular give the impression of human language crushed and splintered under the divine impact. Muslims often say that when they read the Koran in a translation, they feel that they are reading a different book because nothing of the beauty of the Arabic has been conveyed. As its name suggests, it is meant to be recited aloud, and the sound of the language is an essential part of its effect. Muslims say that when they hear the Koran chanted in the mosque they feel enveloped in a divine dimension of sound, rather as Muhammad was enveloped in the embrace of Gabriel on Mount Hira or when he saw the angel on the horizon no matter where he looked. It is not a book to be read simply to acquire information. It is meant to yield a sense of the divine, and must not be read in haste: And thus have We bestowed from on high this [divine writ] as a discourse in the Arabic tongue, and have given therein many facets to all manner of warnings, so that men might remain conscious of Us, or that it give rise to a new awareness in them. [Know] then, [that] God is sublimely exalted, the Ultimate Sovereign ( al-Malik ), the Ultimate Truth ( al-Haqq): and [knowing this], do not approach the Koran in haste, ere it has been revealed unto thee in full, but [always] say: “O my Sustainer, cause me to grow in knowledge!” 17 By approaching the Koran in the right way, Muslims claim that they do experience a sense of transcendence, of an ultimate reality and power that lie behind the transient and fleeting phenomena of the mundane world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The phrase “untying the knots” is also found in Tibetan Buddhism, another indication of the fundamental agreement of mystics worldwide. The process described can perhaps be compared to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock those complexes that impede the mental health of the patient. As a Kabbalist, Abulafia was more concerned with the divine energy that animates the whole of creation but which the soul cannot perceive. As long as we clog our minds with ideas based on sense perception, it is difficult to discern the transcendent element of life. By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia taught his disciples to go beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world. One of his methods was the Hokhmah ha-Tseruf (The Science of the Combination of the Letters), which took the form of a meditation on the Name of God. The Kabbalist was to combine the letters of the divine Name in different combinations with a view to divorcing his mind from the concrete to a more abstract mode of perception. The effects of this discipline—which sound remarkably unpromising to an outsider—appear to have been remarkable. Abulafia himself compared it to the sensation of listening to musical harmonies, the letters of the alphabet taking the place of notes in a scale. He also used a method of associating ideas, which he called dillug (jumping) and kefitsah (skipping), which is clearly similar to the modern analytic practice of free association. Again, this is said to have achieved astonishing results. As Abulafia explained, it brings to light hidden mental processes and liberated the Kabbalist from “the prison of the natural spheres and leads [him] to the boundaries of the divine sphere.” 57 In this way, the “seals” of the soul were unlocked and the initiate discovered resources of psychic power that enlightened his mind and assuaged the pain of his heart. In rather the same way as a psychoanalytic patient needs the guidance of his therapist, Abulafia insisted that the mystical journey into the mind could only be undertaken under the supervision of a master of Kabbalah. He was well aware of the dangers because he himself had suffered from a devastating religious experience in his youth which had almost caused him to despair. Today patients will often internalize the person of the analyst in order to appropriate the strength and health that he or she represents.

• From A History of God (1993)

  We cannot clean up the term “God” and we cannot make it whole; but, stained and mauled as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it above an hour of great sorrow. 12 Unlike the other rationalists, Buber was not opposed to myth: he found Lurianic myth of the divine sparks trapped in the world to be of crucial symbolic significance. The separation of the sparks from the Godhead represent the human experience of alienation. When we relate to others, we will restore the primal unity and reduce the alienation in the world. Where Buber looked back to the Bible and Hasidism, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72) returned to the spirit of the Rabbis and the Talmud. Unlike Buber, he believed that the mitzvot would help Jews to counter the dehumanizing aspects of modernity. They were actions that fulfilled God’s need rather than our own. Modern life was characterized by depersonalization and exploitation: even God was reduced to a thing to be manipulated and made to serve our purposes. Consequently religion became dull and insipid; we needed a “depth theology” to delve below the structures and recover the original awe, mystery and wonder. It was no use trying to prove God’s existence logically. Faith in God sprang from an immediate apprehension that had nothing to do with concepts and rationality. The Bible must be read metaphorically like poetry if it is to yield that sense of the sacred. The mitzvot should also be seen as symbolic gestures that train us to live in God’s presence. Each mitzvah is a place of encounter in the tiny details of mundane life and, like a work of art, the world of the mitzvot has its own logic and rhythm. Above all, we should be aware that God needs human beings. He is not the remote God of the philosophers but the God of pathos described by the prophets. Atheistic philosophers have also been attracted by the idea of God during the second half of the twentieth century. In Being and Time (1927) Martin Heidegger (1899–1976) saw Being in rather the same way as Tillich, though he would have denied that it was “God” in the Christian sense: it was distinct from particular beings and quite separate from the normal categories of thought. Some Christians have been inspired by Heidegger’s work, even though its moral value is called into question by his association with the Nazi regime. In What Is Metaphysics ?, his inaugural lecture at Freiburg, Heidegger developed a number of ideas that had already surfaced in the work of Plotinus, Denys and Erigena.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. In Vedic religion, people had experienced a holy power in the sacrificial ritual. They had called this sacred power Brahman. The priestly caste (known as Brahmanas) were also believed to possess this power. Since the ritual sacrifice was seen as the microcosm of the whole universe, Brahman gradually came to mean a power which sustains everything. The whole world was seen as the divine activity welling up from the mysterious being of Brahman, which was the inner meaning of all existence. The Upanishads encouraged people to cultivate a sense of Brahman in all things. It was a process of revelation in the literal meaning of the word: it was an unveiling of the hidden ground of all being. Everything that happens became a manifestation of Brahman: true insight lay in the perception of the unity behind the different phenomena. Some of the Upanishads saw Brahman as a personal power, but others saw it as strictly impersonal. Brahman cannot be addressed as “thou”; it is a neutral term, so is neither he nor she; nor is it experienced as the will of a sovereign deity. Brahman does not speak to mankind. It cannot meet men and women; it transcends all such human activities. Nor does it respond to us in a personal way: sin does not “offend” it, and it cannot be said to “love” us or be “angry.” Thanking or praising it for creating the world would be entirely inappropriate. This divine power would be utterly alien were it not for the fact that it also pervades, sustains and inspires us . The techniques of Yoga had made people aware of an inner world. These disciplines of posture, breathing, diet and mental concentration have also been developed independently in other cultures, as we shall see, and seem to produce an experience of enlightenment and illumination which have been interpreted differently but which seem natural to humanity. The Upanishads claimed that this experience of a new dimension of self was the same holy power that sustained the rest of the world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  8 Augustine’s mind was filled with the Greek imagery of the great chain of being instead of the Semitic images of the seven heavens. This was not a literal journey through outer space to a God “out there” but a mental ascent to a reality within. This rapturous flight seems something given, from without, when he says “our minds were lifted up” as though he and Monica were passive recipients of grace, but there is a deliberation in this steady climb toward “eternal being.” Similar imagery of ascent has also been noted in the trance experiences of Shamans “from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego,” as Joseph Campbell puts it. 9 The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly perceptions have been left far behind. The experience of God that is finally attained is utterly indescribable, since normal language no longer applies. The Jewish mystics describe anything but God! They tell us about his cloak, his palace, his heavenly court and the veil that shields him from human gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes. Muslims who speculated about Muhammad’s flight to heaven stress the paradoxical nature of his final vision of God: he both saw and did not see the divine presence. 10 Once the mystic has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he reaches the point where neither concepts nor imagination can take him any further. Augustine and Monica were equally reticent about the climax of their flight, stressing its transcendence of space, time and ordinary knowledge. They “talked and panted” for God, and “touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of heart.” 11 Then they had to return to normal speech, where a sentence has a beginning, a middle and an end: Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are quiescent, if the heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about itself, if all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language and everything transitory is silent—for if anyone could hear then this is what all of them would be saying, “We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides for eternity” (Psalm 79:3,5).… That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things. 12 This was no naturalistic vision of a personal God: they had not, so to speak, “heard his voice” through any of the normal methods of naturalistic communication: through ordinary speech, the voice of an angel, through nature or the symbolism of a dream. It seemed that they had “touched” the Reality which lay beyond all these things. 13 Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of “ascent” seems an incontrovertible fact of life.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like the philosophers and scientists, post-Reformation Christians had effectively abandoned the imaginative God of the mystics and sought enlightenment from the God of reason. 2 One God I N 742 BCE , a member of the Judaean royal family had a vision of Yahweh in the Temple which King Solomon had built in Jerusalem. It was an anxious time for the people of Israel. King Uzziah of Judah had died that year and was succeeded by his son Ahaz, who would encourage his subjects to worship pagan gods alongside Yahweh. The northern Kingdom of Israel was in a state of near-anarchy: after the death of King Jeroboam II, five kings had sat on the throne between 746 and 736, while King Tigleth Pilesar III, King of Assyria, looked hungrily at their lands, which he was anxious to add to his expanding empire. In 722, his successor, King Sargon II, would conquer the northern Kingdom and deport the population: the ten northern tribes of Israel were forced to assimilate and disappeared from history, while the little Kingdom of Judah feared for its own survival. As Isaiah prayed in the Temple shortly after King Uzziah’s death, he was probably full of foreboding; at the same time he may have been uncomfortably aware of the inappropriateness of the lavish Temple ceremonial. Isaiah may have been a member of the ruling class, but he had populist and democratic views and was highly sensitive to the plight of the poor. As the incense filled the sanctuary before the Holy of Holies and the place reeked with the blood of the sacrificial animals, he may have feared that the religion of Israel had lost its integrity and inner meaning. Suddenly he seemed to see Yahweh himself sitting on his throne in heaven directly above the Temple, which was the replica of his celestial court on earth. Yahweh’s train filled the sanctuary and he was attended by two seraphs, who covered their faces with their wings lest they look upon his face. They cried out to one another antiphonally: “Holy! holy! holy is Yahweh Sabaoth. His glory fills the whole earth.” 1 At the sound of their voices, the whole Temple seemed to shake on its foundations and was filled with smoke, enveloping Yahweh in an impenetrable cloud, similar to the cloud and smoke that had hidden him from Moses on Mount Sinai. When we use the word “holy” today, we usually refer to a state of moral excellence. The Hebrew kaddosh , however, has nothing to do with morality as such but means “otherness,” a radical separation.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In order to do justice to this new vision of God, we must understand that these myths were not intended to be taken literally. The Safed Kabbalists were aware that the imagery they used was very daring and constantly hedged around it with such expressions as “as it were” or “one might suppose.” But any talk about God was problematic, not least the biblical doctrine of the creation of the universe. The Kabbalists found this as difficult in their own way as had the Faylasufs. Both accepted the Platonic metaphor of emanation, which involves God with the world that eternally flows from him. The prophets had stressed God’s holiness and separation from the world, but The Zohar had suggested that the world of God’s sefiroth comprised the whole of reality. How could he be separate from the world if he was all in all? Moses ben Jacob Cordovero of Safed (1522–1570) saw the paradox clearly and attempted to deal with it. In his theology, God En Sof was no longer the incomprehensible Godhead but the thought of the world: he was one with all created things in their ideal Platonic state but separate from their flawed embodiment below: “Insofar as everything that exists is contained in his existence, [God] encompasses all existence,” he explained, “his substance is present in his sefiroth and He Himself is everything and nothing exists outside him.” 5 He was very close to the monism of Ibn al-Arabi and Mulla Sadra. But Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the hero and saint of the Kabbalism of Safed, tried to explain the paradox of the divine transcendence and immanence more fully with one of the most astonishing ideas ever formulated about God. Most Jewish mystics were very reticent about their experience of the divine. It is one of the contradictions of this type of spirituality that mystics claim that their experiences are ineffable but are yet quite ready to write it all down. Kabbalists were wary of this, however. Luria was one of the first Zaddikim, or holy men, who attracted disciples to his brand of mysticism by his personal charisma. He was not a writer, and our knowledge of his Kabbalistic system is based on the conversations recorded by his disciples Hayim Vital (1542–1620) in his treatise Etz Hayim (The Tree of Life) and Joseph ibn Tabul, whose manuscript was not published until 1921. Luria confronted the question that had troubled monotheists for centuries: how could a perfect and infinite God have created a finite world riddled with evil? Where had evil come from? Luria found his answer by imagining what had happened before the emanation of the sefiroth , when En Sof had been turned in upon itself in sublime introspection. In order to make room for the world, Luria taught, En Sof had, as it were, vacated a region within himself.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God. At his baptism he had been called the Son of God by a voice from heaven, but this was probably simply a confirmation that he was the beloved Messiah. There was nothing particularly unusual about such a proclamation from above: the Rabbis often experienced what they called a bat qol (literally, “Daughter of the Voice”), a form of inspiration that had replaced the more direct prophetic revelations. 7 Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai had heard such a bat qol confirming his own mission on the occasion when the Holy Spirit had descended upon him and his disciples in the form of fire. Jesus himself used to call himself “the Son of Man.” There has been much controversy about this title, but it seems that the original Aramaic phrase ( bar nasha ) simply stressed the weakness and mortality of the human condition. If this is so, Jesus seems to have gone out of his way to emphasize that he was a frail human being who would one day suffer and die. The Gospels tell us that God had given Jesus certain divine “powers” ( dunamis ), however, which enabled him, mere mortal though he was, to perform the God-like tasks of healing the sick and forgiving sins. When people saw Jesus in action, therefore, they had a living, breathing image of what God was like. On one occasion, three of his disciples claimed to have seen this more clearly than usual. The story has been preserved in all three of the Synoptic Gospels and would be very important to later generations of Christians. It tells us that Jesus had taken Peter, James and John up a very high mountain, which is traditionally identified with Mount Tabor in Galilee. There he was “transfigured” before them: “his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as the light.” 8 Moses and Elijah, representing respectively the Law and the prophets, suddenly appeared beside him and the three conversed together. Peter was quite overcome and cried aloud, not knowing what he said, that they should build three tabernacles to commemorate the vision. A bright cloud, like that which had descended on Mount Sinai, covered the mountaintop and a bat qol declared: “This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favor. Listen to him.” 9 Centuries later, when Greek Christians pondered the meaning of this vision, they decided that the “powers” of God had shone through Jesus’ transfigured humanity. They also noted that Jesus had never claimed that these divine “powers,” or dynameis , were confined to him alone. Again and again, Jesus had promised his disciples that if they had “faith” they would enjoy these “powers” too.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This method of looking at the world has achieved great results. One of its consequences, however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the “spiritual” or the “holy” which pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was once an essential component of our human experience of the world. In the South Sea Islands, they call this mysterious force mana; others experience it as a presence or spirit; sometimes it has been felt as an impersonal power, like a form of radioactivity or electricity. It was believed to reside in the tribal chief, in plants, rocks or animals. The Latins experienced numina (spirits) in sacred groves; Arabs felt that the landscape was populated by the jinn. Naturally people wanted to get in touch with this reality and make it work for them, but they also simply wanted to admire it. When they personalized the unseen forces and made them gods, associated with the wind, sun, sea and stars but possessing human characteristics, they were expressing their sense of affinity with the unseen and with the world around them. Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the “numinous” was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior. The numinous power was sensed by human beings in different ways—sometimes it inspired wild, bacchanalian excitement; sometimes a deep calm; sometimes people felt dread, awe and humility in the presence of the mysterious force inherent in every aspect of life. When people began to devise their myths and worship their gods, they were not seeking a literal explanation for natural phenomena. The symbolic stories, cave paintings and carvings were an attempt to express their wonder and to link this pervasive mystery with their own lives; indeed, poets, artists and musicians are often impelled by a similar desire today. In the Palaeolithic period, for example, when agriculture was developing, the cult of the Mother Goddess expressed a sense that the fertility which was transforming human life was actually sacred. Artists carved those statues depicting her as a naked, pregnant woman which archaeologists have found all over Europe, the Middle East and India. The Great Mother remained imaginatively important for centuries. Like the old Sky God, she was absorbed into later pantheons and took her place alongside the older deities.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The One must have transcended itself, gone beyond its Simplicity in order to make itself apprehensible to imperfect beings like ourselves. This divine transcendence could be described as “ecstasy” properly so called, since it is a “going out of the self” in pure generosity: “Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new.” 49 There was nothing personal in all this; Plotinus saw the One as beyond all human categories, including that of personality. He returned to the ancient myth of emanation to explain the radiation of all that exists from this utterly simple Source, using a number of analogies to describe this process: it was like a light shining from the sun or the heat that radiates from a fire and becomes warmer as you draw nearer to its blazing core. One of Plotinus’s favorite similes was the comparison of the One to the point at the center of a circle, which contained the possibility of all the future circles that could derive from it. It was similar to the ripple effect achieved by dropping a stone into a pool. Unlike the emanations in a myth such as the Enuma Elish , where each pair of gods that evolved from one another became more perfect and effective, the opposite was the case in Plotinus’s scheme. As in the Gnostic myths, the further a being got from its source in the One, the weaker it became. Plotinus regarded the first two emanations to radiate from the One as divine, since they enabled us to know and to participate in the life of God. Together with the One, they formed a Triad of divinity which was in some ways close to the final Christian solution of the Trinity. Mind ( nous ), the first emanation, corresponded in Plotinus’s scheme to Plato’s realm of ideas: it made the simplicity of the One intelligible, but knowledge here was intuitive and immediate. It was not laboriously acquired through research and reasoning processes but was absorbed in rather the same way as our senses drink in the objects they perceive. Soul ( psyche ), which emanates from Mind in the same way as Mind emanates from the One, is a little further from perfection, and in this realm knowledge can only be acquired discursively, so that it lacks absolute simplicity and coherence. Soul corresponds to reality as we know it: all the rest of physical and spiritual existence emanates from Soul, which gives to our world whatever unity and coherence it possesses. Again, it must be emphasized that Plotinus did not envisage this trinity of One, Mind and Soul as a god “out there.” The divine comprised the whole of existence.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Those who had gone into exile were not forced to assimilate, as the ten northern tribes had been in 722. They lived in two communities: one in Babylon itself and the other on the banks of a canal leading from the Euphrates called the Chebar, not far from Nippur and Ur, in an area which they named Tel Aviv (Springtime Hill). Among the first batch of exiles to be deported in 597 had been a priest called Ezekiel. For about five years he stayed alone in his house and did not speak to a soul. Then he had a shattering vision of Yahweh, which literally knocked him out. It is important to describe his first vision in some detail because—centuries later—it would become very important to Jewish mystics, as we shall see in Chapter 7. Ezekiel had seen a cloud of light, shot through with lightning. A strong wind blew from the north. In the midst of this stormy obscurity, he seemed to see—he is careful to emphasize the provisional nature of the imagery—a great chariot pulled by four strong beasts. They were similar to the karibu carved on the palace gates in Babylon, yet Ezekiel makes it almost impossible to visualize them: each one had four heads: with the face of a man, a lion, a bull and an eagle. Each one of the wheels rolled in a different direction from the others. The imagery simply served to emphasize the alien impact of the visions that he was struggling to articulate. The beating of the creatures’ wings was deafening; it “sounded like rushing water, like the voice of Shaddai, a voice like a storm, like the noise of a camp.” On the chariot there was something that was “like” a throne and, sitting in state, was a “being that looked like a man”: it shone like brass, fire shooting from its limbs. It was also “something that looked like the glory (kavod) of Yahweh.”49 At once Ezekiel fell upon his face and heard a voice addressing him. The voice called Ezekiel “son of man,” as if to emphasize the distance that now existed between humanity and the divine realm. Yet again, the vision of Yahweh was to be followed by a practical plan of action. Ezekiel was to speak the word of God to the rebellious sons of Israel. The nonhuman quality of the divine message was conveyed by a violent image: a hand stretched toward the prophet clasping a scroll, covered with Wailings and moanings. Ezekiel was commanded to eat the scroll, to ingest the Word of God and make it part of himself. As usual, the mysterium was fascinans as well as terribile: the scroll turned out to taste as sweet as honey. Finally, Ezekiel said, “the spirit lifted me and took me; my heart, as I went, overflowed with bitterness and anger, and the hand of Yahweh lay heavy on me.”50 He arrived at Tel Aviv and lay “like one stunned” for a whole week.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions. When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that “he” would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified, but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings, and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear—from eminent monotheists in all three faiths—that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was—in any sense—a reality “out there”; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  DUKE JOHN: Is it a good or a bad dream? THE ELECTOR: I know not; God knows. DUKE JOHN: Don’t be uneasy at it; but be so good as tell it to me. THE ELECTOR: Having gone to bed last night, fatigued and out of spirits, I fell asleep shortly after my prayer, and slept calmly for about two hours and a half; I then awoke, and continued awake to midnight, all sorts of thoughts passing through my mind. Among other things, I thought how I was to observe the Feast of All Saints. I prayed for the poor souls in purgatory; and supplicated God to guide me, my counsels, and my people according to truth. I again fell asleep, and then dreamed that Almighty God sent me a monk, who was a true son of the Apostle Paul. All the saints accompanied him by order of God, in order to bear testimony before me, and to declare that he did not come to contrive any plot, but that all that he did was according to the will of God. They asked me to have the goodness graciously to permit him to write something on the door of the church of the Castle of Wittenberg. This I granted through my chancellor. Thereupon the monk went to the church, and began to write in such large characters that I could read the writing at Schweinitz. [Eighteen miles away.] The pen which he used was so large that its end reached as far as Rome, where it pierced the ears of a lion that was crouching there, and caused the triple crown upon the head of the Pope to shake. All the cardinals and princes, running hastily up, tried to prevent it from falling. You and I, brother, wished also to assist, and I stretched out my arm;—but at this moment I awoke, with my arm in the air, quite amazed, and very much enraged at the monk for not managing his pen better. I recollected myself a little; it was only a dream. I was still half asleep, and once more closed my eyes. The dream returned. The lion, still annoyed by the pen, began to roar with all his might, so much so that the whole city of Rome, and all the States of the Holy Empire, ran to see what the matter was. The Pope requested them to oppose this monk, and applied particularly to me, on account of his being in my country. I again awoke, repeated the Lord’s prayer, entreated God to preserve his Holiness, and once more fell asleep.