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 14 of 217 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  It would be easy for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the advice of a pir and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand the ecstasy of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he meant when he said that he was one with God. Extravagant claims like those of al-Bistami would certainly arouse the ire of the establishment. At this early stage, Sufism was very much a minority movement, and the ulema often regarded it as an inauthentic innovation. Junayd’s famous pupil Husain ibn Mansur (usually known as al-Hallaj, the Wool-Carder) threw all caution to the winds, however, and became a martyr for his mystical faith. Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow of the caliphate and the establishment of a new social order, he was imprisoned by the authorities and crucified like his hero, Jesus. In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: “I am the Truth!” According to the Gospels, Jesus had made the same claim, when he had said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Koran repeatedly condemned the Christian belief in God’s Incarnation in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising that Muslims were horrified by al-Hallaj’s ecstatic cry. Al-Haqq (the Truth) was one of the names of God, and it was idolatry for any mere mortal to claim this title for himself. Al-Hallaj had been expressing his sense of a union with God that was so close that it felt like identity. As he said in one of his poems: I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I: We are two spirits dwelling in one body. If thou seest me, thou seest Him, And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both. 34 It was a daring expression of that annihilation of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd had called ’fana . Al-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly death. When he was brought to be crucified and saw the cross and the nails, he turned to the people and uttered a prayer, ending with the words: “And these Thy servants who are gathered to slay me, in zeal for Thy religion and in desire to win Thy favors, forgive them, O Lord, and have mercy upon them; for verily if Thou hadst revealed to them that which Thou hast revealed to me, they would not have done what they have done; and if Thou hadst hidden from me that which Thou hast hidden from them, I should not have suffered this tribulation. Glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou willest.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  “Sip it in the middle. What is it like?” “Salt.” “Sip it at the far end. What is it like?” “Salt.” “Throw it away and then come to me.” He did as he was told but [that did not stop the salt from] remaining the same. [His father] said to him: “My dear child, it is true that you cannot perceive Being here, but it is equally true that it is here. This first essence—the whole universe has as its Self: That is the Real: That is the Self: that you are, Sretaketu!” Thus, even though we cannot see it, Brahman pervades the world and, as Atman, is found eternally within each one of us.28 Atman prevented God from becoming an idol, an exterior Reality “out there,” a projection of our own fears and desires. God is not seen in Hinduism as a Being added on to the world as we know it, therefore, nor is it identical with the world. There was no way that we could fathom this out by reason. It is only “revealed” to us by an experience (anubhara) which cannot be expressed in words or concepts. Brahman is “What cannot be spoken in words, but that whereby words are spoken … What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can think.”29 It is impossible to speak to a God that is as immanent as this or to think about it, making it a mere object of thought. It is a Reality that can only be discerned in ecstasy in the original sense of going beyond the self: God comes to the thought of those who know It beyond thought, not to those who imagine It can be attained by thought. It is unknown to the learned and known to the simple. It is known in the ecstasy of an awakening that opens the door of life eternal.30 Like the gods, reason is not denied but transcended. The experience of Brahman or Atman cannot be explained rationally any more than a piece of music or a poem. Intelligence is necessary for the making of such a work of art and its appreciation, but it offers an experience that goes beyond the purely logical or cerebral faculty. This will also be a constant theme in the history of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Here Denys departs from Neoplatonism, which perceived God as static and remote, entirely unresponsive to human endeavor. The God of the Greek philosophers was unaware of the mystic who occasionally managed to achieve an ecstatic union with him, whereas the God of the Bible turns toward humanity. God also achieves an “ecstasy” which takes him beyond himself to the fragile realm of created being: And we must dare to affirm (for it is the truth) that the Creator of the universe himself, in his beautiful and good yearning towards the universe ... is transported outside himself in his providential activities towards all things that have being ... and so is drawn from his transcendent throne above all things to dwell within the heart of all things, through an ecstatic power that is above being and whereby he yet stays within himself. 56 Emanation had become a passionate and voluntary outpouring of love, rather than an automatic process. Denys’s way of negation and paradox was not just something that we do but something that happens to us. For Plotinus, ecstasy had been a very occasional rapture: it had been achieved by him only two or three times in his life. Denys saw ecstasy as the constant state of every Christian. This was the hidden or esoteric message of Scripture and liturgy, revealed in the smallest gestures. Thus when the celebrant leaves the altar at the beginning of the Mass to walk through the congregation, sprinkling it with holy water before returning to the sanctuary, this is not just a rite of purification—though it is that too.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Blake rebelled against the institutional churches, but some theologians were attempting to incorporate the Romantic vision into official Christianity. They also found the idea of a remote transcendent God both abhorrent and irrelevant, stressing instead the importance of subjective religious experience. In 1799, the year after Wordsworth and Coleridge had published the Lyrical Ballads in England, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) published On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, his own Romantic manifesto, in Germany. Dogmas were not divine facts but simply “accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.”12 Religious faith could not be confined to the propositions of the creeds: it involved an emotional apprehension and an interior surrender. Thought and reason had their place, but they could only take us so far. When we had come to the limit of reason, feeling would complete the journey to the Absolute. When he spoke of “feeling,” Schleiermacher did not mean a sloppy emotionalism but an intuition which drove men and women toward the infinite. Feeling was not opposed to human reason but an imaginative leap that takes us beyond the particular to an apprehension of the whole. The sense of God thus acquired arose from the depths of each individual rather than a collision with an objective Fact. Western theology had tended to overemphasize the importance of rationality ever since Thomas Aquinas, a tendency which had increased since the Reformation. Schleiermacher’s romantic theology was an attempt to redress the balance. He made it clear that feeling was not an end in itself and could not provide a complete explanation of religion. Reason and feeling both pointed beyond themselves to an indescribable Reality. Schleiermacher defined the essence of religion as “the feeling of absolute dependence.”13 This, as we shall see, was an attitude that would become anathema to progressive thinkers during the nineteenth century, but Schleiermacher did not mean an abject servility before God. In context, the phrase refers to the sense of reverence that arises in us when we contemplate the mystery of life. This attitude of awe sprang from that universal human experience of the numinous. The prophets of Israel had experienced this as a profound shock when they had their visions of holiness. Romantics such as Wordsworth had felt a similar reverence and sense of dependence upon the spirit they encountered in nature. Schleiermacher’s distinguished pupil Rudolf Otto would explore this experience in his important book The Idea of the Holy, showing that when human beings are confronted with this transcendence, they no longer feel that they are the alpha and omega of existence.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. By faith, of course, he did not mean adopting the correct theology but cultivating an inner attitude of surrender and openness to God. If his disciples laid themselves open to God without reserve, they would be able to do everything that he could do. Like the Rabbis, Jesus did not believe that the Spirit was just for a privileged elite but for all men of goodwill: some passages even suggest that, again like some of the Rabbis, Jesus believed that even the goyim could receive the Spirit. If his disciples had “faith,” they would be able to do even greater things. Not only would they be able to forgive sins and exorcise demons, but they would be able to hurl a mountain into the sea. 10 They would discover that their frail, mortal lives had been transfigured by the “powers” of God that were present and active in the world of the Messianic Kingdom.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Jacob also experienced a number of epiphanies. On one occasion, he had decided to return to Haran to find a wife among his relatives there. On the first leg of his journey, he slept at Luz near the Jordan valley, using a stone as a pillow. That night he dreamed of a ladder which stretched between earth and heaven: angels were going up and down between the realms of god and man. We cannot but be reminded of Marduk’s ziggurat: on its summit, suspended as it were between heaven and earth, a man could meet his gods. At the top of his own ladder, Jacob dreamed that he saw El, who blessed him and repeated the promises that he had made to Abraham: Jacob’s descendants would become a mighty nation and possess the land of Canaan. He also made a promise that made a significant impression on Jacob, as we shall see. Pagan religion was often territorial: a god had jurisdiction only in a particular area, and it was always wise to worship the local deities when you went abroad. But El promised Jacob that he would protect him when he left Canaan and wandered in a strange land: “I am with you; I will keep you safe wherever you go.”12 The story of this early epiphany shows that the High God of Canaan was beginning to acquire a more universal implication. When he woke up, Jacob realized that he had unwittingly spent the night in a holy place where men could have converse with their gods: “Truly Yahweh is in this place, and I never knew it!” J makes him say. He was filled with the wonder that often inspired pagans when they encountered the sacred power of the divine: “How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God (beth El); this is the gate of heaven.”13 He had instinctively expressed himself in the religious language of his time and culture: Babylon itself, the abode of the gods, was called “Gate of the gods” (Bab-ili). Jacob decided to consecrate this holy ground in the traditional pagan manner of the country. He took the stone he had used as a pillow, upended it and sanctified it with a libation of oil. Henceforth the place would no longer be called Luz but Beth-El, the House of El. Standing stones were a common feature of Canaanite fertility cults, which, we shall see, flourished at Beth-El until the eighth century BCE. Although later Israelites vigorously condemned this type of religion, the pagan sanctuary of Beth-El was associated in early legend with Jacob and his God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Reading the Koran is therefore a spiritual discipline, which Christians may find difficult to understand because they do not have a sacred language, in the way that Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic are sacred to Jews, Hindus and Muslims. It is Jesus who is the Word of God, and there is nothing holy about the New Testament Greek. Jews, however, have a similar attitude toward the Torah. When they study the first five books of the Bible, they do not simply run their eyes over the page. Frequently they recite the words aloud, savoring the words that God himself is supposed to have used when he revealed himself to Moses on Sinai. Sometimes they sway backward and forward, like a flame before the breath of the Spirit. Obviously Jews who read their Bible in this way are experiencing a very different book than Christians who find most of the Pentateuch extremely dull and obscure.

• From A History of God (1993)

  And then I began to complain to him of the trouble I had with this problem of knowledge. “Awaken to yourself,” he said to me, “and your problem will be solved.” 37 The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very different from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had more in common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into the religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without, illumination would come from within the mystic himself. There was no imparting of facts. Instead, the exercise of the human imagination would enable people to return to God by introducing them to the alam al-mithal , the world of pure images. Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane, physical world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the heavenly realm). Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God-religions had ostensibly abandoned. The menok , which in Suhrawardi’s scheme became the alam al-mithal , was now an intermediate realm that existed between our world and God’s. This could not be perceived by means of reason or by the senses. It was the faculty of the creative imagination which enabled us to dis-cover the realm of hidden archetypes, just as the symbolic interpretation of the Koran revealed its true spiritual meaning. The alam al-mithal was close to the Ismaili perception of the spiritual history of Islam which was the real meaning of the earthly events or Ibn Sina’s angelology, which we discussed in the last chapter. It would be crucial to all future mystics of Islam as a way of interpreting their experiences and visions. Suhrawardi was examining the visions that are so strikingly similar, whether they are seen by shamans, mystics or ecstatics, in many different cultures. There has recently been much interest in this phenomenon. Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious is a more scientific attempt to examine this common imaginative experience of humanity. Other scholars, such as the Rumanian-American philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade, have attempted to show how the epics of ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights. 38 Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of scripture—such as Heaven, Hell and the Last Judgment—were as real as the phenomena we experience in this world, but not in the same way. They could not be empirically proven but could only be discerned by the trained imaginative faculty, which enabled visionaries to see the spiritual dimension of earthly phenomena. This experience was nonsensical to anybody who had not had the requisite training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment could only be experienced when the necessary moral and mental exercises had been undertaken.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. Gregory of Nazianzus made this clear when he explained that contemplation of the Three in One induced a profound and overwhelming emotion that confounded thought and intellectual clarity. No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. 24 Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians continue to find that the contemplation of the Trinity is an inspiring religious experience. For many Western Christians, however, the Trinity is simply baffling. This could be because they consider only what the Cappadocians would have called its kerygmatic qualities, whereas for the Greeks it was a dogmatic truth that was only grasped intuitively and as a result of religious experience. Logically, of course, it made no sense at all. In an earlier sermon, Gregory of Nazianzus had explained that the very incomprehensibility of the dogma of the Trinity brings us up against the absolute mystery of God; it reminds us that we must not hope to understand him. 25 It should prevent us from making facile statements about a God who, when he reveals himself, can only express his nature in an ineffable manner. Basil also warned us against imagining that we could work out the way in which the Trinity operated, so to speak: it was no good, for example, attempting to puzzle out how the three hypostases of the Godhead were at one and the same time identical and distinct. This lay beyond words, concepts and human powers of analysis. 26 Thus the Trinity must not be interpreted in a literal manner; it was not an abstruse “theory” but the result of theoria , contemplation. When Christians in the West became embarrassed by this dogma during the eighteenth century and tried to jettison it, they were trying to make God rational and comprehensible to the Age of Reason. This was one of the factors that would lead to the so-called Death of God in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we shall see. One of the reasons why the Cappadocians evolved this imaginative paradigm was to prevent God from becoming as rational as he was in Greek philosophy, as understood by such heretics as Arius. The theology of Arius was a little too clear and logical. The Trinity reminded Christians that the reality that we called “God” could not be grasped by the human intellect. The doctrine of the Incarnation, as expressed at Nicaea, was important but could lead to a simplistic idolatry. People might start thinking about God himself in too human a way: it might even be possible to imagine “him” thinking, acting and planning like us.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  13 He then became not a priest, as his mother had intended, but a prophet. Three of Luther’s companions—Mathesius, Johann Aurifaber and Anton Lauterbach—all provided versions of Luther’s first encounter with a Bible in their notes of Luther’s table talk, from 1531, 1538, and 1540, so it was evidently a story that Luther liked to tell. Its emotional significance suggests how central his mother—also known as “Hannah”—may have been to his sense of religious vocation; Luther too would later style himself a prophet, having also ended up on a path different from what his mother might have envisaged. 14 Luther’s mother later became a target for Catholic polemicists who wanted to show that the reformer was the scion of the Devil. Johannes Nas, for one, a Catholic controversialist of the second half of the sixteenth century, alleged that Luther’s mother had been working as a bath maid—a dishonorable profession and a byword for loose morals. She had been seduced by a stranger dressed in luxurious red, who promised her that she would never suffer want and would catch a rich husband if only she would give herself to him. Thus Luther was the outcome of a liaison with what must have been the Devil himself. This was a throwback to sexual slurs that the Catholic Johannes Cochlaeus, a contemporary originally sympathetic to Luther’s ideas and then his determined antagonist, had cast as early as 1533: that Luther was “a lousy runaway monk and rascally nun’s fanny who had neither land nor people, an ignoble changeling who was born of a bath maid as they say.” 15 Luther laughed off these attacks: Either he was a bath maid’s son or he was a changeling, he quipped. He could not be both. But although he affected not to care, he remembered the insult and quoted it several times. 16 — H OWEVER much in decline from its glory days, Eisenach was very different to his hometown. While Mansfeld was a town of slag heaps and taverns, Eisenach boasted churches, monasteries, and books. Many of Luther’s relatives on his mother’s side were university graduates who had made careers as doctors, academics, administrators, and lawyers. This was the background that would have prompted him to think of attending university, and to become active in public life. Significantly, when he angrily refuted suggestions in 1520 that his parents were from Bohemia—intended to taint him with connections to Hussite heretics—he referred to Eisenach and his relatives there: “Nearly all my kinfolk are at Eisenach, and I am known there and recognized by them even today…and there is no other town in which I am better known.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  We should not be too quick to deride this as a delusion. Today in the West we pride ourselves on our concern for objective accuracy, but the Ismaili batinis, who sought the “hidden” (batin) dimension of religion, were engaged in a quite different quest. Like poets or painters, they used symbolism which bore little relation to logic but which they felt revealed a deeper reality than could be perceived by the senses or expressed in rational concepts. Accordingly they developed a method of reading the Koran which they called tawil (literally, “carrying back”). They felt that this would take them back to the original archetypal Koran, which had been uttered in the menok at the same time as Muhammad had recited it in the getik. Henri Corbin, the late historian of Iranian Shiism, has compared the discipline of tawil to that of harmony in music. It was as though the Ismaili could hear a “sound”—a verse of the Koran or a hadith—on several levels at the same time; he was trying to train himself to hear its heavenly counterpart as well as the Arabic words. The effort stilled his clamorous critical faculty and made him conscious of the silence that surrounds each word in much the same way as a Hindu listens to the ineffable silence surrounding the sacred syllable OUM. As he listened to the silence, he became aware of the gulf that exists between our words and ideas of God and the full reality.5 It was a discipline that helped Muslims to understand God as he deserved to be understood, Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani, a leading Ismaili thinker (d. 971), explained. Muslims often spoke about God anthropomorphically, making him a larger-than-life man, while others drained him of all religious meaning and reduced God to a concept. Instead, al-Sijistani advocated the use of the double negative. We should begin by talking about God in negatives, saying, for example, that he was “nonbeing” rather than “being,” “not ignorant” rather than “wise” and so forth. But we should immediately negate that rather lifeless and abstract negation, saying that God is “not not-ignorant” or that he is “not No-thing” in the way that we normally use the word. He does not correspond to any human way of speaking. By a repeated use of this linguistic discipline, the batini would become aware of the inadequacy of language when it tried to convey the mystery of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Then it was Elijah’s turn. The people crowded around the altar of Yahweh while he dug a trench around it which he filled with water, to make it even more difficult to ignite. Then Elijah called upon Yahweh. Immediately, of course, fire fell from heaven and consumed the altar and the bull, licking up all the water in the trench. The people fell upon their faces: “Yahweh is God,” they cried, “Yahweh is God.” Elijah was not a generous victor. “Seize the prophets of Baal!” he ordered. Not one was to be spared: he took them to a nearby valley and slaughtered the lot.25 Paganism did not usually seek to impose itself on other people—Jezebel is an interesting exception—since there was always room for another god in the pantheon alongside the others. These early mythical events show that from the first Yahwism demanded a violent repression and denial of other faiths, a phenomenon we shall examine in more detail in the next chapter. After the massacre, Elijah climbed up to the top of Mount Carmel and sat in prayer with his head between his knees, sending his servant from time to time to scan the horizon. Eventually he brought news of a small cloud—about the size of a man’s hand—rising up from the sea, and Elijah told him to go and warn King Ahab to hurry home before the rain stopped him. Almost as he spoke, the sky darkened with storm clouds and the rain fell in torrents. In an ecstasy, Elijah tucked up his cloak and ran alongside Ahab’s chariot. By sending rain, Yahweh had usurped the function of Baal, the Storm God, proving that he was just as effective in fertility as in war. Fearing a reaction against his massacre of the prophets, Elijah fled to the Sinai peninsula and took refuge on the mountain where God had revealed himself to Moses. There he experienced a theophany which manifested the new Yahwist spirituality. He was told to stand in the crevice of a rock to shield himself from the divine impact: Then Yahweh himself went by. Thence came a mighty wind, so strong it tore the mountains and shattered the rocks before Yahweh. But Yahweh was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake. But Yahweh was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire. But Yahweh was not in the fire. And after the fire came the sound of a gentle breeze. And when Elijah heard this, he covered his face with a cloak.26 Unlike the pagan deities, Yahweh was not in any of the forces of nature but in a realm apart. He is experienced in the scarcely perceptible timbre of a tiny breeze in the paradox of a voiced silence.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Brahman, the cosmic creator, on his lotos throne, all the seers and celestial serpents.12 Everything is somehow present in the body of Krishna: he has no beginning or end, he fills space, and includes all possible deity: “Howling storm gods, sun gods, bright gods and gods of ritual.”13 He is also “man’s tireless spirit,” the essence of humanity.14 All things rush toward Krishna, as rivers roil toward the sea or as moths fly into a blazing flame. All Arjuna can do as he gazes at this awe-ful sight is quake and tremble, having entirely lost his bearings. The development of bhakti answered a deep-rooted popular need for some kind of personal relationship with the ultimate. Having established Brahman as utterly transcendent, there is a danger that it could become too rarefied and, like the ancient Sky God, fade from human consciousness. The evolution of the bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism and the avatars of Vishnu seem to represent another stage in religious development when people insist that the Absolute cannot be less than human. These symbolic doctrines and myths deny that the Absolute can be expressed in only one epiphany, however: there were numerous Buddhas and bodhisattvas, and Vishnu had a variety of avatars. These myths also express an ideal for humanity: they show mankind enlightened or deified, as he was meant to be. By the first century CE, there had been a similar thirst for divine immanence in Judaism. The person of Jesus had seemed to answer that need. St. Paul, the earliest Christian writer, who created the religion that we now know as Christianity, believed that Jesus had replaced the Torah as God’s principal revelation of himself to the world.15 It is not easy to know exactly what he meant by this. Paul’s letters were occasional responses to specific questions rather than a coherent account of a fully articulated theology. He certainly believed that Jesus had been the Messiah: the word “Christ” was a translation of the Hebrew Massiach: the Anointed One. Paul also talked about the man Jesus as though he had been more than an ordinary human being, even though, as a Jew, Paul did not believe that he had been God incarnate. He constantly used the phrase “in Christ” to describe his experience of Jesus: Christians live “in Christ”; they have been baptized into his death; the Church somehow constitutes his body.16 This was not a truth which Paul argued logically. Like many Jews, he took a dim view of Greek rationalism, which he described as mere “foolishness.”17 It was a subjective and mystical experience that made him describe Jesus as a sort of atmosphere in which “we live and move and have our being.”18 Jesus had become the source of Paul’s religious experience: he was, therefore, talking about him in ways that some of his contemporaries might have talked about a god.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The veneration of the Imams was no mere political enthusiasm, however. As we have seen, Shiis had come to believe that their Imams embodied God’s presence on earth in some mysterious way. They had evolved an esoteric piety of their own which depended upon a symbolic reading of the Koran. It was held that Muhammad had imparted a secret knowledge to his cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib and that this ilm had been passed down the line of designated Imams, who were his direct descendants. Each of the Imams embodied the “Light of Muhammad” (al-nur al-Muhammad), the prophetic spirit which had enabled Muhammad to surrender perfectly to God. Neither the Prophet nor the Imams were divine, but they had been so totally open to God that he could be said to dwell within them in a more complete way than he dwelt in more ordinary mortals. The Nestorians had held a similar view of Jesus. Like the Nestorians, Shiis saw their Imams as “temples” or “treasuries” of the divine, brimful of that enlightening divine knowledge. This ilm was not simply secret information but a means of transformation and inner conversion. Under the guidance of his da’i (spiritual director), the disciple was roused from sloth and insensitivity by a vision of dreamlike clarity. This so transformed him that he was able to understand the esoteric interpretation of the Koran. This primal experience was an act of awakening, as we see in this poem by Nasiri al-Khusraw, a tenth-century Ismaili philosopher, which describes the vision of the Imam which changed his life: Have you ever heard of a sea which flows from fire? Have you ever seen a fox become a lion? The sun can transmute a pebble, which even the hand of nature can never change, into a gem. I am that precious stone, my Sun is he by whose rays this tenebrous world is filled with light. In jealousy I cannot speak [the Imam’s] name in this poem, but can only say that for him Plato himself would become a slave. He is the teacher, healer of souls, favored by God, image of wisdom, fountain of knowledge and truth. O Countenance of Knowledge, Virtue’s Form, Heart of Wisdom, Goal of Humankind, O Pride of Pride, I stood before thee, pale and skeletal, clad in a woolen cloak, and kissed thine hand as if it were the grave of the Prophet or Black Stone of the Kabah.3 As Christ on Mount Tabor represented deified humanity to Greek Orthodox Christians and as the Buddha embodied that enlightenment that is possible for all mankind, so too had the human nature of the Imam been transfigured by his total receptivity to God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This type of divine apparition, known as an epiphany, was quite common in the pagan world of antiquity. Even though in general the gods were not expected to intervene directly in the lives of mortal men and women, certain privileged individuals in mythical times had encountered their gods face to face. The Iliad is full of such epiphanies. The gods and goddesses appear to both Greeks and Trojans in dreams, when the boundary between the human and divine worlds was believed to be lowered. At the very end of the Iliad , Priam is guided to the Greek ships by a charming young man who finally reveals himself as Hermes. 10 When the Greeks looked back to the golden age of their heroes, they felt that they had been closely in touch with the gods, who were, after all, of the same nature as human beings. These stories of epiphanies expressed the holistic pagan vision: when the divine was not essentially distinct from either nature or humanity, it could be experienced without great fanfare. The world was full of gods, who could be perceived unexpectedly at any time, around any corner or in the person of a passing stranger. It seems that ordinary folk may have believed that such divine encounters were possible in their own lives: this may explain the strange story in the Acts of the Apostles when, as late as the first century CE , the apostle Paul and his disciple Barnabas were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes by the people of Lystra in what is now Turkey. 11 In much the same way, when the Israelites looked back to their own golden age, they saw Abraham, Isaac and Jacob living on familiar terms with their god. El gives them friendly advice, like any sheikh or chieftain: he guides their wanderings, tells them whom to marry and speaks to them in dreams. Occasionally they seem to see him in human form—an idea that would later be anathema to the Israelites. In Chapter 18 of Genesis, J tells us that God appeared to Abraham by the oak tree of Mamre, near Hebron. Abraham had looked up and noticed three strangers approaching his tent during the hottest part of the day. With typical Middle Eastern courtesy, he insisted that they sit down and rest while he hurried to prepare food for them. In the course of conversation, it transpired, quite naturally, that one of these men was none other than his god, whom J always calls “Yahweh.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  The people crowded around the altar of Yahweh while he dug a trench around it which he filled with water, to make it even more difficult to ignite. Then Elijah called upon Yahweh. Immediately, of course, fire fell from heaven and consumed the altar and the bull, licking up all the water in the trench. The people fell upon their faces: “Yahweh is God,” they cried, “Yahweh is God.” Elijah was not a generous victor. “Seize the prophets of Baal!” he ordered. Not one was to be spared: he took them to a nearby valley and slaughtered the lot. 25 Paganism did not usually seek to impose itself on other people—Jezebel is an interesting exception—since there was always room for another god in the pantheon alongside the others. These early mythical events show that from the first Yahwism demanded a violent repression and denial of other faiths, a phenomenon we shall examine in more detail in the next chapter. After the massacre, Elijah climbed up to the top of Mount Carmel and sat in prayer with his head between his knees, sending his servant from time to time to scan the horizon. Eventually he brought news of a small cloud—about the size of a man’s hand—rising up from the sea, and Elijah told him to go and warn King Ahab to hurry home before the rain stopped him. Almost as he spoke, the sky darkened with storm clouds and the rain fell in torrents. In an ecstasy, Elijah tucked up his cloak and ran alongside Ahab’s chariot. By sending rain, Yahweh had usurped the function of Baal, the Storm God, proving that he was just as effective in fertility as in war. Fearing a reaction against his massacre of the prophets, Elijah fled to the Sinai peninsula and took refuge on the mountain where God had revealed himself to Moses. There he experienced a theophany which manifested the new Yahwist spirituality. He was told to stand in the crevice of a rock to shield himself from the divine impact: Then Yahweh himself went by. Thence came a mighty wind, so strong it tore the mountains and shattered the rocks before Yahweh. But Yahweh was not in the wind. After the wind came an earthquake. But Yahweh was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire. But Yahweh was not in the fire. And after the fire came the sound of a gentle breeze. And when Elijah heard this, he covered his face with a cloak. 26 Unlike the pagan deities, Yahweh was not in any of the forces of nature but in a realm apart. He is experienced in the scarcely perceptible timbre of a tiny breeze in the paradox of a voiced silence. The story of Elijah contains the last mythical account of the past in the Jewish scriptures. Change was in the air throughout the Oikumene.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther did not discover any especially new ideas. Nor did he discover the God behind these ideas. But what he did was rediscover the ideas, and pull them out from under centuries of accreted neglect. To see that this last idea is an ancient one, we need only read the Old Testament story of Solomon and the baby, which prefigures it. In that hoary and still startling story, two women claim to be the mother of a baby boy; unable to solve the dilemma, they come before the great and wise king Solomon, who devises a frightening solution. Cut the baby in two, he says. That way each of the women claiming to be the boy’s mother may have an equal share. But of course this bisection will not happen, and what does happen shows the unfathomable wisdom of Solomon, because it quickly reveals the identity of the baby’s true mother. One of the women says, “No, don’t cut the baby! Give it to her. As long as the child lives I will be happy.” The other woman says, “Cut the baby in half! That way neither of us will have him.” Solomon of course knows that the woman willing to give the baby to the other woman must be the baby’s true mother. This extraordinary story, which must be read in full, presages the principle at work once the world entered the door that Luther opened. The willingness on the part of the child’s mother to lose what is dear to her is a picture of God and his love. It is not enough simply to be right. That was the way of the Pharisee. The law of love and freedom was now in play too. What that story and what Luther did so many years later showed was that there was something deeper and more important than merely being right or merely winning. If I must win by the sword—or by any kind of force—then my victory is Pyrrhic and worthless. I must not only win but win the right way. I must not only aver the truth but do so in a way that itself honors truth. This marked a new epoch, and it is happily that epoch in which we live today. Although it is the job of the state to forcefully protect the innocent and its citizens, it is never the state’s job to enforce truth or morality or to “establish” any religion above another. That it can never and must never do.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The relics were shown in the Castle Church, and Friedrich commissioned 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 Dürer, Cranach, and Matthias Grünewald, the church’s collection of altars rivaled 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, remodeled 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.19 Politically, 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, or marriage licenses—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.20

• From A History of God (1993)

  Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane, physical world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the heavenly realm). Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God-religions had ostensibly abandoned. The menok, which in Suhrawardi’s scheme became the alam al-mithal, was now an intermediate realm that existed between our world and God’s. This could not be perceived by means of reason or by the senses. It was the faculty of the creative imagination which enabled us to dis-cover the realm of hidden archetypes, just as the symbolic interpretation of the Koran revealed its true spiritual meaning. The alam al-mithal was close to the Ismaili perception of the spiritual history of Islam which was the real meaning of the earthly events or Ibn Sina’s angelology, which we discussed in the last chapter. It would be crucial to all future mystics of Islam as a way of interpreting their experiences and visions. Suhrawardi was examining the visions that are so strikingly similar, whether they are seen by shamans, mystics or ecstatics, in many different cultures. There has recently been much interest in this phenomenon. Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious is a more scientific attempt to examine this common imaginative experience of humanity. Other scholars, such as the Rumanian-American philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade, have attempted to show how the epics of ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights.38 Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of scripture—such as Heaven, Hell and the Last Judgment—were as real as the phenomena we experience in this world, but not in the same way. They could not be empirically proven but could only be discerned by the trained imaginative faculty, which enabled visionaries to see the spiritual dimension of earthly phenomena. This experience was nonsensical to anybody who had not had the requisite training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment could only be experienced when the necessary moral and mental exercises had been undertaken. All our thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams and visions corresponded to realities in the alam al-mithal. The Prophet Muhammad, for example, had awakened to this intermediate world during the Night Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of the divine world. Suhrawardi would also have claimed that the visions of the Jewish Throne Mystics took place when they had learned to enter the alam al-mithal during their spiritual exercises of concentration. The path to God, therefore, did not lie solely through reason, as the Faylasufs had thought, but through the creative imagination, the realm of the mystic.