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 15 of 217 · 20 per page

• 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  The “parasang”—the basic unit—is equivalent to 180 trillion “fingers” and each “finger” stretches from one end of the earth to the other. These massive dimensions boggle the mind, which gives up trying to follow them or even to conceive a figure of such size. That is the point. The Shiur is trying to tell us that it is impossible to measure God or contain him in human terms. The mere attempt to do so demonstrates the impossibility of the project and gives us a new experience of God’s transcendence. Not surprisingly, many Jews have found this odd attempt to measure the wholly spiritual God blasphemous. That is why an esoteric text such as the Shiur was kept hidden from the unwary. Seen in context, the Shiur Qomah would give to those adepts who were prepared to approach it in the right way, under the guidance of their spiritual director, a new insight into the transcendence of a God which exceeds all human categories. It is certainly not meant to be taken literally; it certainly conveys no secret information. It is a deliberate evocation of a mood that created a sense of wonder and awe. The Shiur introduces us to two essential ingredients in the mystical portrait of God, which are common in all three faiths. First, it is essentially imaginative; secondly, it is ineffable. The figure described in the Shiur is the image of God whom the mystics see sitting enthroned at the end of their ascent. There is absolutely nothing tender, loving or personal about this God; indeed his holiness seems alienating. When they see him, however, the mystical heroes burst into songs which give very little information about God but which leave an immense impression: A quality of holiness, a quality of power, a fearful quality, a dreaded-quality, a quality of awe, a quality of dismay, a quality of terror— Such is the quality of the garment of the Creator, Adonai, God of Israel, who, crowned, comes to the thone of his glory; His garment is engraved inside and outside and entirely covered with YHWH, YHWH. No eyes are able to behold it, neither the eyes of flesh and blood, nor the eyes of his servants. 6 If we cannot imagine what Yahweh’s cloak is like, how can we think to behold God himself? Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish mystical texts is the fifth-century Sefer Yezirah (The Book of Creation). There is no attempt to describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as though he were writing a book. But language has been entirely transformed, and the message of creation is no longer clear.

• From A History of God (1993)

  We know that God cannot be compared to any of the things that exist. It is better, therefore, to use negative terminology when we attempt to describe him. Instead of saying that “he exists,” we should deny his nonexistence and so on. As with the Ismailis, the use of the negative language was a discipline that would enhance our appreciation of God’s transcendence, reminding us that the reality was quite distinct from any idea that we poor humans can conceive of him. We cannot even say that God is “good” because he is far more than anything that we can mean by “goodness.” This is a way of excluding our imperfections from God, preventing us from projecting our hopes and desires onto him. That would create a God in our own image and likeness. We can, however, use the Via Negativa to form some positive notions of God. Thus, when we say that God is “not impotent” (instead of saying that he is powerful), it follows logically that God must be able to act. Since God is “not imperfect” his actions must also be perfect. When we say that God is “not ignorant” (meaning that he is wise), we can deduce that he is perfectly wise and fully informed. This kind of deduction can only be made about God’s activities, not about his essence, which remains beyond the reach of our intellect. When it came to a choice between the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers, Maimonides always chose the former. Even though the doctrine of the creation ex nihilo was philosophically unorthodox, Maimonides adhered to the traditional biblical doctrine and jettisoned the philosophic idea of emanation. As he pointed out, neither creation ex nihilo nor emanation could be proven definitively by reason alone. Again, he considered prophecy superior to philosophy. Both the prophet and the philosopher spoke about the same God, but the prophet had to be imaginatively as well as intellectually gifted. He had a direct, intuitive knowledge of God which was higher than the knowledge achieved by discursive reasoning. Maimonides seems to have been something of a mystic himself. He speaks of the trembling excitement that accompanied this kind of intuitive experience of God, an emotion “consequent upon the perfection of the imaginative faculties.” 20 Despite Maimonides’ emphasis on rationality, he maintained that the highest knowledge of God derived more from the imagination than from the intellect alone. His ideas spread among the Jews of Southern France and Spain, so that by the beginning of the fourteenth century, there was what amounted to a Jewish philosophical enlightenment in the area. Some of these Jewish Faylasufs were more vigorously rationalistic than Maimonides. Thus Levi ben Gershom (1288–1344) of Bagnols in Southern France denied that God had knowledge of mundane affairs.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Knott lumped up to the stage, a hulking bubble of a guy in sweatshirt and pants he might have rifled from a dumpster. His heavy black glasses—worn in a wire-rim age—were lopsidedly held together in the center by bandaids. His fair hair hung in unwashed strings. He drew a poem from a wrinkly paper bag stuffed with pages, and after read ing a few lines, he said in a disgusted voice, That’s such shit, stupid moron Knott, asshole . People laughed nervously, looking around. He wadded up the page and tossed it. The room roared. That’s pretty much how the reading went, one balled-up page after another, mingled with lyric poems of great finish and hilarity. The audience hooted in wild and rolling waves. Guys in the front row started throwing the paper balls back, which made Knott hump even deeper in his oversize clothes as if dodging hurled tomatoes. At the end, a guy in a tie next to me said, I used to think poets shouldn’t get public grants, but this guy really can’t do anything else. When Knott left the stage, people hollered for him to come back. I sat on the hard floor almost aquiver. Writers had heretofore been mythical to me as griffins—winged, otherworldly creatures you had to conjure from the hard-to-find pages they left behind. That was partly why I’d not tried too hard to become one: it was like deciding to be a cowgirl or a maenad. In our town, the only bookstores sold gold-rimmed Bibles big as coffee tables and plastic dashboard figurines of Jesus—flaming heart all day-glo orange. Yet I’d believed—through grade school—Mother’s lie that poetry was a viable profession. As a toddler, Mother’s slate-blue volume of Shakespeare served as my booster seat, and in grade school, I memorized speeches she’d read aloud, to distract or engage her. Picture a bedridden woman with an ice pack balanced on her throbbing head while a girl—age seven, draped in a bedsheet and wearing a cardboard crown—recites Macbeth as Lady M. scrubs blood off: Out, out, damn spot … Then social mores had intervened. A distinct scene from junior high flushes vividly back. Girls sitting out of rotation volleyball in gym class stared at me all gap-mouthed when—of a rainy spring day—I spouted e. e. cummings. Through open green gym doors, sheets of rain erased the parking lot we normally stood staring at as if it were a refrigerator about to manifest food. The poem started: in Just-: spring when the world is mud- luscious… As I went on, Kitty Stanley sat cross-legged in black gym shorts and white blouse, peeling fuchsia polish off her thumbnail with a watchmaker’s precision. She was a mouth breather, Kitty, whose blond bouffant hairdo featured above her bangs a yarn bow the color of a kumquat. That it? Beverly said. Her black-lined gaze looked like an old-timey bandit mask. Indeed, I said. (This was my assholish T. S.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. She was usually one of the most powerful of the gods, certainly more powerful than the Sky God, who remained a rather shadowy figure. She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece, and remarkably similar stories were devised in all these cultures to express her role in the spiritual lives of the people. These myths were not intended to be taken literally, but were metaphorical attempts to describe a reality that was too complex and elusive to express in any other way. These dramatic and evocative stories of gods and goddesses helped people to articulate their sense of the powerful but unseen forces that surrounded them. Indeed, it seems that in the ancient world people believed that it was only by participating in this divine life that they would become truly human. Earthly life was obviously fragile and overshadowed by mortality, but if men and women imitated the actions of the gods they would share to some degree their greater power and effectiveness. Thus it was said that the gods had shown men how to build their cities and temples, which were mere copies of their own homes in the divine realm. The sacred world of the gods—as recounted in myth—was not just an ideal toward which men and women should aspire, but was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled. Everything on earth was thus believed to be a replica of something in the divine world, a perception that informed the mythology, ritual and social organization of most of the cultures of antiquity and continues to influence more traditional societies in our own day. 1 In ancient Iran, for example, every single person or object in the mundane world ( getik ) was held to have its counterpart in the archetypal world of sacred reality ( menok ). This is a perspective that is difficult for us to appreciate in the modern world, since we see autonomy and independence as supreme human values. Yet the famous tag post coitum omne animal tristis est still expresses a common experience: after an intense and eagerly anticipated moment, we often feel that we have missed something greater that remains just beyond our grasp. The imitation of a god is still an important religious notion: resting on the Sabbath or washing somebody’s feet on Maundy Thursday—actions that are meaningless in themselves—are now significant and sacred because people believe that they were once performed by God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The other two men turn out to be angels. Nobody seems particularly surprised by this revelation. By the time J was writing in the eighth century BCE , no Israelite would have expected to “see” God in this way: most would have found it a shocking notion. J’s contemporary, “E,” finds the old stories about the patriarchs’ intimacy with God unseemly: when E tells stories about Abraham’s or Jacob’s dealings with God, he prefers to distance the event and make the old legends less anthropomorphic. Thus he will say that God speaks to Abraham through an angel. J, however, does not share this squeamishness and preserves the ancient flavor of these primitive epiphanies in his account. 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.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Gnostics all began with an utterly incomprehensible reality which they called the Godhead, since it was the source of the lesser being that we call “ God.” There was nothing at all that we could say about it, since it entirely eludes the grasp of our limited minds. As Valentinus explained, the Godhead was perfect and pre-existent … dwelling in invisible and unnameable heights: this is the prebeginning and forefather and depth. It is uncontainable and invisible, eternal and ungenerated, is Quiet and deep Solitude for infinite aeons. With It was thought, which is also called Grace and Silence. 33 Men have always speculated about this Absolute, but none of their explanations have been adequate. It is impossible to describe the Godhead, which is neither “good” nor “evil” and cannot even be said to “exist.” Basilides taught that in the beginning, there had been not God but only the Godhead, which, strictly speaking, was Nothing because it did not exist in any sense that we can understand. 34 But this Nothingness had wished to make itself known and was not content to remain alone in Depth and Silence. There was an inner revolution in the depths of its unfathomable being which resulted in a series of emanations similar to those described in the ancient pagan mythologies. The first of these emanations was the “God,” which we know and pray to. Yet even “God” was inaccessible to us and needed further elucidation. Consequently new emanations proceeded from God in pairs, each of which expressed one of his divine attributes. “God” lay beyond gender but, as in the Enuma Elish , each pair of emanations consisted of a male and female—a scheme which attempted to neutralize the masculine tenor of more conventional monotheism. Each pair of emanations grew weaker and more attenuated, since they were getting ever further from their divine Source. Finally, when thirty such emanations (or aeons) had emerged, the process stopped and the divine world, the Pleroma, was complete. The Gnostics were not proposing an entirely outrageous cosmology, since everybody believed that the cosmos was teeming with such aeons, demons and spiritual powers. St. Paul had referred to Thrones, Dominations, Sovereignties and Powers, while the philosophers had believed that these invisible powers were the ancient gods and had made them intermediaries between man and the One. There had been a catastrophe, a primal fall, which the Gnostics described in various ways. Some said that Sophia (Wisdom), the last of the emanations, fell from grace because she aspired to a forbidden knowledge of the inaccessible Godhead.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  In the director’s office, Deb stands to greet us, and her shaggy dog licks Dev’s face, almost knocking him over. She holds out her slightly drawn-up hand for him, and he wastes no time in asking what’s wrong with it. She bends to fix her brown eyes level with his blue ones to explain that she got drunk and overdosed on a nasty drug called cocaine. I try to steer Dev off the subject, but Deb says, It’s normal to be curious. Anybody with a disability needs to be comfortable with answering questions about it. She holds out her arm, saying to Dev, You can touch it if you want to. He pinches it like a melon, then grabs her wrist and pulls it away from her body, as if to straighten it through his own grunting will, saying, Does that hurt? Deb says, No, it just feels tight. You were drinking cocaine, and your arm just spronged up that way? Dev wants to know. Oh, no, she says. The stuff kind of poisoned my head, and I fell down and hit it. I woke up and I couldn’t move at all. Paralyzed. Couldn’t talk, either, not even yes or no. Which dramatic bottoming out is hard to assign to one so put together as Deb. You can believe that she was married to an Oxford biochemist, that she modeled, that she ran a lab—all true. But that she drank like me and couldn’t quit? Impossible to picture. I was four or five years in and out of rehab, she tells us. On the night of my head injury, a cabdriver—actually an Indian guy I’d met in one detox— found me passed out in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. He’d driven by the house and seen my car parked sideways in the driveway, gotten worried, and broken in. Dev says, What did you think when you woke up and couldn’t move? I’ll tell you exactly what it was, she says. Boy, do I need a drink. Dev giggles at this. Part of me thinks, Maybe if I’d heard this at his age, I wouldn’t have wound up such a sot. It took me a long time to learn how to talk again, she says. I could show you how to eat with a spoon, but I couldn’t say the word spoon. Over months and months in long-term rehab, she learned to speak again, then read, then write with her left hand. Let me see you walk, Dev says. She rises, and the dog rises. She walks across the room, doing a kind of swaying swagger to heft the less mobile right leg forward apace. She does it with a rock star’s prance, adding a runway spin at the end. Dev says, You walk pretty good. That leg goes a little crooked, but you go fast. She looks at me and says, Do you need to have a grown-up talk?

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  “It doesn’t matter.” It came out sounding like I was forgiving her for something, but I really just wanted her to know I was willing to accept her on her own terms. “I haven’t been making love with Austin,” she said. “First I was too sore and then I wasn’t sure and then his girlfriend came all the way from New York. Girls don’t spend time with guys just to get laid,” she said. I admit it, hearing her say it made me feel good. We lay a little longer, just touching and kissing slowly. Carla definitely set the pace those first times. What she was doing was teaching me how she liked it to be. And then she looked me square in the eye and said, “You can do anything you want to me.” That sentence I had heard so often in the final throes of wet dreams, had so often fantasized in the last quick strokes of a bathroom beat-off break at school, that sentence opening the way for travel in the farthest reaches of the erotic cosmos had a strange effect: my cock wilted like a sunflower on a gray day. I rose again, but only after I had confessed my awe at the grandeur of her invitation and after Carla had shown me some of my options. I never really thought I’d ever come head to head with the prospect of fulfilled fantasy. She talked about everything in sex being beautiful if it felt good and said she thought everything would feel wonderful with a guy as gentle as me. That was a very nice thing for her to say and it made me feel awful good. I told her I had some pretty violent but friendly feelings about the love I’d like to make to her and that I’d never felt that way before. Then everything was all right and we proceeded to fuck around and around, rolling and intertwining like two weasels with one lame paw. Carla, having a few violent feelings of her own, pulled my hair and bit me little hard ones and dug her fingers into me all over. Thank Christ she keeps her fingernails short. I squeezed her till her vertebrae cracked and drove into her with all my abdominal strength, which is a lot even in off-season. Carla laid her head back and made beautiful animal sounds. I tried to pull out, but she held me and told me to “come, come,” that she was taking pills. I came and came, all right. I also twitched like a freshly killed snake and gasped like a victim of cardiac collapse. I had never experienced any feeling like that before. It was several universes beyond any pleasure I’d even imagined. Hard as I worked to help her, Carla didn’t come. But she did say she liked the love. Now that we’ve had some practice she comes all the time.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In popular legend, Shiva was also a great Yogi, so he also inspired his devotees to transcend personal concepts of divinity by means of meditation. Vishnu was usually kinder and more playful. He liked to show himself to mankind in various incarnations or avatars . One of his more famous personae was the character of Krishna, who had been born into a noble family but was brought up as a cowherd. Popular legend loved the stories of his dalliance with the cowgirls, which depicted God as the Lover of the Soul. Yet when Vishnu appears to Prince Arjuna as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita , it is a terrifying experience: I see the gods in your body, O God, and hordes of varied creatures: 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There is no simplistic notion of God, however. This single deity is not a being like ourselves whom we can know and understand. The phrase “Allahu Akhbah!” (God is greater!) that summons Muslims to salat distinguishes between God and the rest of reality, as well as between God as he is in himself (al-Dhat) and anything that we can say about him. Yet this incomprehensible and inaccessible God had wanted to make himself known. An early tradition (hadith) has God say to Muhammad: “I was a hidden treasure; I wanted to be known. Hence, I created the world so that I might be known.”25 By contemplating the signs (ayat) of nature and the verses of the Koran, Muslims could glimpse that aspect of divinity which has turned toward the world, which the Koran calls the Face of God (wajh al-Lah). Like the two older religions, Islam makes it clear that we only see God in his activities, which adapt his ineffable being to our limited understanding. The Koran urges Muslims to cultivate a perpetual consciousness (taqwa) of the Face or the Self of God that surrounds them on all sides: “Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of al-Lah.”26 Like the Christian Fathers, the Koran sees God as the Absolute, who alone has true existence: “All that lives on earth or in the heavens is bound to pass away: but forever will abide thy Sustainer’s Self, full of majesty and glory.”27 In the Koran, God is given ninety-nine names or attributes. These emphasize that he is “greater,” the source of all positive qualities that we find in the universe. Thus the world only exists because he is al-Ghani (rich and infinite); he is the giver of life (al-Muhyi), the knower of all things (al-Alim), the producer of speech (al-Kalimah): without him, therefore, there would not be life, knowledge or speech. It is an assertion that only God has true existence and positive value. Yet frequently the divine names seem to cancel one another out. Thus God is al-Qahtar, he who dominates and who breaks the back of his enemies, and al-Halim, the utterly forbearing one; he is al-Qabid, he who takes away, and al-Basit, he who gives abundantly; al-Khafid, he who brings low, and ar-Rafic, he who exalts. The Names of God play a central role in Muslim piety: they are recited, counted on rosary beads and chanted as a mantra. All this has reminded Muslims that the God they worship cannot be contained by human categories and refuses simplistic definition.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It is an assertion that only God has true existence and positive value. Yet frequently the divine names seem to cancel one another out. Thus God is al-Qahtar, he who dominates and who breaks the back of his enemies, and al-Halim, the utterly forbearing one; he is al-Qabid, he who takes away, and al-Basit, he who gives abundantly; al-Khafid, he who brings low, and ar-Rafic, he who exalts. The Names of God play a central role in Muslim piety: they are recited, counted on rosary beads and chanted as a mantra. All this has reminded Muslims that the God they worship cannot be contained by human categories and refuses simplistic definition. The first of the “pillars” of Islam would be the Shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith: “I bear witness that there is no god but al-Lah and that Muhammad is his Messenger.” This was not simply an affirmation of God’s existence but an acknowledgment that al-Lah was the only true reality, the only true form of existence. He was the only true reality, beauty or perfection: all the beings that seem to exist and possess these qualities have them only insofar as they participate in this essential being. To make this assertion demands that Muslims integrate their lives by making God their focus and sole priority. The assertion of the unity of God was not simply a denial that deities like the banat al-Lah were worthy of worship. To say that God was One was not a mere numerical definition: it was a call to make that unity the driving factor of one’s life and society. The unity of God could be glimpsed in the truly integrated self. But the divine unity also required Muslims to recognize the religious aspirations of others. Because there was only one God, all rightly guided religions must derive from him alone. Belief in the supreme and sole Reality would be culturally conditioned and would be expressed by different societies in different ways, but the focus of all true worship must have been inspired by and directed toward the being whom the Arabs had always called al-Lah. One of the divine names of the Koran is an-Nur, the Light.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Jesus had insisted that the “powers” of God were not for him alone. Paul developed this insight by arguing that Jesus had been the first example of a new type of humanity. Not only had he done everything that the old Israel had failed to achieve, but he had become the new adām, the new humanity in which all human beings, goyim included, must somehow participate.22 Again, this is not dissimilar to the Buddhist belief that, since all Buddhas had become one with the Absolute, the human ideal was to participate in Buddhahood. In his letter to the Church at Philippi, Paul quotes what is generally considered to be a very early Christian hymn which raises some important issues. He tells his converts that they must have the same self-sacrificing attitude as Jesus, Who subsisting in the form of God did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself, to assume the condition of a slave, and became as men are; and being as men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But God raised him high and gave him the name which is above all names so that all beings in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld, should bend the knee at the name of Jesus and that every tongue should acclaim Jesus Christ as Lord (kyrios) to the glory of God the Father.23 The hymn seems to reflect a belief among the first Christians that Jesus had enjoyed some kind of prior existence “with God” before becoming a man in the act of “self-emptying” (kenosis) by which, like a bodhisattva, he had decided to share the suffering of the human condition. Paul was too Jewish to accept the idea of Christ existing as a second divine being beside YHWH from all eternity. The hymn shows that after his exaltation he is still distinct from and inferior to God, who raises him and confers the title kyrios upon him. He cannot assume it himself but is given this title only “to the glory of God the Father.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Because this is such a big subject, I have deliberately confined myself to the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, though I have occasionally considered pagan, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality to make a monotheistic point clearer. It seems that the idea of God is remarkably close to ideas in religions that developed quite independently. Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration. Despite the secular tenor of much Western society, the idea of God still affects the lives of millions of people. Recent surveys have shown that ninety-nine percent of Americans say that they believe in God: the question is which “God” of the many on offer do they subscribe to? Theology often comes across as dull and abstract, but the history of God has been passionate and intense. Unlike some other conceptions of the ultimate, it was originally attended by agonizing struggle and stress. The prophets of Israel experienced their God as a physical pain that wrenched their every limb and filled them with rage and elation. The reality that they called God was often experienced by monotheists in a state of extremity: we shall read of mountaintops, darkness, desolation, crucifixion and terror. The Western experience of God seemed particularly traumatic. What was the reason for this inherent strain? Other monotheists spoke of light and transfiguration. They used very daring imagery to express the complexity of the reality they experienced, which went far beyond the orthodox theology. There has recently been a revived interest in mythology, which may indicate a widespread desire for a more imaginative expression of religious truth. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell has become extremely popular: he has explored the perennial mythology of mankind, linking ancient myths with those still current in traditional societies. It is often assumed that the three God-religions are devoid of mythology and poetic symbolism. Yet, although monotheists originally rejected the myths of their pagan neighbors, these often crept back into the faith at a later date. Mystics have seen God incarnated in a woman, for example. Others reverently speak of God’s sexuality and have introduced a female element into the divine.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Some historians deny that men like Robbins and Franklin were Ranters, noting that we only hear about their activities from their enemies, who may have distorted their beliefs for polemical reasons. But some texts by notable Ranters like Jacob Bauthumely, Richard Coppin and Laurence Clarkson have survived which show the same complex of ideas: they also preached a revolutionary social creed. In his treatise The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650), Bauthumely speaks of God in terms that recall the Sufi belief that God was the Eye, Ear and Hand of the man who turns to him: “O God, what shall I say thou art?” he asks. “For if I say I see thee, it is nothing but thy seeing of thy selfe; for there is nothing in me capable of seeing thee but thy selfe: If I say I know thee, that is no other but the knowledge of thy selfe.”39 Like the rationalists, Bauthumely rejects the doctrine of the Trinity and, again like a Sufi, qualifies his belief in the divinity of Christ by saying that while he was divine, God could not become manifest in only one man: “He as really and substantially dwells in the flesh of other men and Creatures, as well as in the man Christ.”40 The worship of a distinct, localized God is a form of idolatry; Heaven is not a place but the spiritual presence of Christ. The biblical idea of God, Bauthumely believed, was inadequate: sin is not an action but a condition, a falling short of our divine nature. Yet mysteriously, God was present in sin, which was simply “the dark side of God, a mere privation of light.”41 Bauthumely was denounced as an atheist by his enemies, but his outlook is not far in spirit from Fox, Wesley and Zinzenburg, though it is expressed far more crudely. Like the later Pietists and Methodists, he was trying to internalize a God who had become distant and inhumanly objective and to transpose traditional doctrine into religious experience. He also shared the rejection of authority and essentially optimistic view of humanity shared later by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and those who subscribed to a religion of the heart.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Al-Ghazzali therefore formulated a mystical creed that would be acceptable to the Muslim establishment, who had often looked askance at the mystics of Islam, as we shall see in the following chapter. Like Ibn Sina, he looked back to the ancient belief in an archetypal realm beyond this mundane world of sensory experience. The visible world (alam al-shahadah) is an inferior replica of what he called the world of the Platonic intelligence (alam al-malakut), as any Faylasuf acknowledged. The Koran and the Bible of the Jews and Christians had spoken of this spiritual world. Man straddled both realms of reality: he belonged to the physical as well as the higher world of the spirit because God had inscribed the divine image within him. In his mystical treatise Mishkat al-Anwar, al-Ghazzali interprets the Koranic Sura of Light, which I quoted in the last chapter.14 The light in these verses refers both to God and to the other illuminating objects: the lamp, the star. Our reason is also enlightening. Not only does it enable us to perceive other objects but, like God himself, it can transcend time and space. It partakes of the same reality as the spiritual world, therefore. But in order to make it clear that by “reason” he did not merely refer to our cerebral, analytic powers, al-Ghazzali reminds his readers that his explanation cannot be understood in a literal sense: we can only discuss these matters in the figurative language that is the preserve of the creative imagination. Some people possess a power that is higher than reason, however, which al-Ghazzali calls “the prophetic spirit.” People who lack this faculty should not deny that it exists simply because they have no experience of it. That would be as absurd as if somebody who was tone-deaf claimed that music was an illusion, simply because he himself could not appreciate it. We can learn something about God by means of our reasoning and imaginative powers, but the highest type of knowledge can be attained only by people like the prophets or the mystics who have this special God-enabling faculty. This sounds elitist, but mystics in other traditions have also claimed that the intuitive, receptive qualities demanded by a discipline like Zen or Buddhist meditation are a special gift, comparable to the gift of writing poetry. Not everybody has this mystical talent. Al-Ghazzali describes this mystical knowledge as an awareness that the Creator alone exists or has being. This results in the fading away of self and an absorption in God. Mystics are able to rise above the world of metaphor, which has to satisfy less gifted mortals; they