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 16 of 217 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  By becoming aware of the Godly spark within them, they would become more fully human. Again, they expressed this insight in the mythological terms of Kabbalah. Dov Baer, the successor of the Besht, said that God and man were a unity: a man would only become adām as God had intended on the day of creation when he lost his sense of separation from the rest of existence and was transformed into the “cosmic figure of primordial man, whose likeness Ezekiel beheld on the throne.” 58 It was a distinctively Jewish expression of the Greek or Buddhist belief in the enlightenment which made human beings aware of their own transcendent dimension. The Greeks had expressed this insight in their doctrine of the Incarnation and deification of Christ. The Hasidim developed their own form of Incarnationalism. The Zaddik, the Hasidic Rabbi, became the avatar of his generation, a link between heaven and earth and a representative of the divine presence. As Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl (1730–1797) wrote, the Zaddik “is truly a part of God, and has a place, as it were, with Him.” 59 Just as Christians imitated Christ in an attempt to draw near to God, the Hasid imitated his Zaddik, who had made the ascent to God and practiced perfect devekuth. He was a living proof that this enlightenment was possible. Because the Zaddik was close to God, the Hasidim could approach the Master of the Universe through him. They would crowd around their Zaddik, hanging on his every word, as he told them a story about the Besht or expounded a verse of Torah. As in the enthusiastic Christian sects, Hasidism was not a solitary religion but intensely communal. The Hasidim would attempt to follow their Zaddik in his ascent to the ultimate together with their master, in a group. Not surprisingly, the more orthodox Rabbis of Poland were horrified by this personality cult, which completely bypassed the learned Rabbi who had long been seen as the incarnation of Torah. The opposition was led by Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–1797), the Gaon or head of the academy of Vilna. The Shabbetai Zevi debacle had made some Jews extremely hostile to mysticism, and the Gaon of Vilna has often been seen as the champion of a more rational religion. Yet he was an ardent Kabbalist as well as a master of Talmud. His close disciple Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhin praised his “complete and mighty mastery of the whole of The Zohar ... which he studied with the flame of the love and fear of the divine majesty, with holiness and purity and a wonderful devekuth.” 60 Whenever he spoke of Isaac Luria, his whole body would tremble.

• From A History of God (1993)

  His surrender was similar to the ideal of islam: like Jews and Muslims at a comparable stage of their development, Western Christians were no longer willing to accept mediators but were evolving a sense of their inalienable responsibility before God. Calvin also based his reformed religion on God’s absolute rule. He has not left us with a full account of his conversion experience. In his Commentary on the Psalms, he simply tells us that it was entirely the work of God. He had been completely enthralled by the institutional Church and “the superstitions of the papacy.” He was both unable and unwilling to break free, and it had taken an act of God to shift him: “At last God turned my course in a different direction by the hidden bridle of his providence.… By a sudden conversion to docility, he tamed a mind too stubborn for its years.”35 God alone was in control and Calvin absolutely powerless, yet he felt singled out for a special mission precisely by his acute sense of his own failure and impotence. The radical conversion had been characteristic of Western Christianity since the time of Augustine. Protestantism would continue the tradition of breaking abruptly and violently with the past in what the American philosopher William James called a “twice-born” religion for “sick souls.”36 Christians were being “born again” to a new faith in God and a rejection of the host of intermediaries that had stood between them and the divine in the medieval Church. Calvin said that people had venerated the saints out of anxiety; they had wanted to propitiate an angry God by gaining the ear of those closest to him. Yet in their rejection of the cult of the saints, Protestants often betrayed an equal anxiety. When they heard the news that the saints were ineffective, a good deal of the fear and hostility they had felt for this intransigent God seemed to explode in an intense reaction. The English humanist Thomas More detected a personal hatred in many of the diatribes against the “idolatry” of saint-worship.37 This came out in the violence of their image-smashing. Many Protestants and Puritans took the condemnation of graven images in the Old Testament very seriously when they shattered the statues of the saints and the Virgin Mary and hurled whitewash over the frescoes in the churches and cathedrals. Their frantic zeal showed that they were just as fearful of offending this irritable and jealous God as they had been when they had prayed to the saints to intercede for them. It also showed that this zeal to worship God alone did not spring from a calm conviction but from the anxious denial that had caused the ancient Israelites to tear down the poles of Asherah and pour torrents of abuse upon their neighbors’ gods.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The most influential Kabbalistic text was The Zohar, which was probably written in about 1275 by the Spanish mystic Moses of Leon. As a young man, he had studied Maimonides but had gradually felt the attraction of mysticism and the esoteric tradition of Kabbalah. The Zohar (The Book of Splendour) is a sort of mystical novel, which depicts the third-century Talmudist Simeon ben Yohai wandering around Palestine with his son Eliezar, talking to his disciples about God, nature and human life. There is no clear structure and no systematic development of theme or ideas. Such an approach would be alien to the spirit of The Zohar, whose God resists any neat system of thought. Like Ibn al-Arabi, Moses of Leon believed that God gives each mystic a unique and personal revelation, so there is no limit to the way the Torah can be interpreted: as the Kabbalist progresses, layer upon layer of significance is revealed. The Zohar shows the mysterious emanation of the ten sefiroth as a process whereby the impersonal En Sof becomes a personality. In the three highest sefiroth—Kether, Hokhmah and Binah—when, as it were, En Sof has only just “decided” to express himself, the divine reality is called “he.” As “he” descends through the middle sefiroth—Hesed, Din, Tifereth, Netsakh, Hod and Yesod—“he” becomes “you.” Finally, when God becomes present in the world in the Shekinah, “he” calls himself “I.” It is at this point, where God has, as it were, become an individual and his self-expression is complete, that man can begin his mystical journey. Once the mystic has acquired an understanding of his own deepest self, he becomes aware of the Presence of God within him and can then ascend to the more impersonal higher spheres, transcending the limits of personality and egotism. It is a return to the unimaginable Source of our being and the hidden world of uncreated reality. In this mystical perspective, our world of sense impression is simply the last and outermost shell of the divine reality. In Kabbalah, as in Sufism, the doctrine of the creation is not really concerned with the physical origins of the universe. The Zohar sees the Genesis account as a symbolic version of a crisis within En Sof, which causes the Godhead to break out of its unfathomable introspection and reveal itself. As The Zohar says: In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recesses of En Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, red nor green and of no color whatever.55

• From A History of God (1993)

  It is not surprising that Muhammad found the revelations such an immense strain: not only was he working through to an entirely new political solution for his people, but he was composing one of the great spiritual and literary classics of all time. He believed that he was putting the ineffable Word of God into Arabic, for the Koran is as central to the spirituality of Islam as Jesus, the Logos, is to Christianity. We know more about Muhammad than about the founder of any other major religion, and in the Koran, whose various suras or chapters can be dated with reasonable accuracy, we can see how his vision gradually evolved and developed, becoming ever more universal in scope. He did not see at the outset all that he had to accomplish, but this was revealed to him little by little, as he responded to the inner logic of events. In the Koran we have, as it were, a contemporaneous commentary on the beginnings of Islam that is unique in the history of religion. In this sacred book, God seems to comment on the developing situation: he answers some of Muhammad’s critics, explains the significance of a battle or a conflict within the early Muslim community and points to the divine dimension of human life. It did not come to Muhammad in the order we read today but in a more random manner, as events dictated and as he listened to their deeper meaning. As each new segment was revealed, Muhammad, who could neither read nor write, recited it aloud, the Muslims learned it by heart and those few who were literate wrote it down. Some twenty years after Muhammad’s death, the first official compilation of the revelations was made. The editors put the longest suras at the beginning and the shortest at the end. This arrangement is not as arbitrary as it might appear, because the Koran is neither a narrative nor an argument that needs a sequential order. Instead, it reflects on various themes: God’s presence in the natural world, the lives of the prophets or the Last Judgment. To a Westerner, who cannot appreciate the extraordinary beauty of the Arabic, the Koran seems boring and repetitive. It seems to go over the same ground again and again. But the Koran was not meant for private perusal but for liturgical recitation. When Muslims hear a sura chanted in the mosque, they are reminded of all the central tenets of their faith.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  There is not such a great gap between mysticism and rationalism as we tend to imagine. The Gaon of Vilna’s remarks about sleep show a clear perception of the role of the unconscious: we have all urged friends to “sleep on” a problem in the hope of finding a solution that has eluded them in their waking hours. When our minds are receptive and relaxed, ideas come from the deeper region of the mind. This has also been the experience of such scientists as Archimedes, who discovered his famous Principle in the bath. A truly creative philosopher or scientist has, like the mystic, to confront the dark world of uncreated reality and the cloud of unknowing in the hope of piercing it. As long as they wrestle with logic and concepts, they are, necessarily, imprisoned in ideas or forms of thought that have already been established. Often their discoveries seem “given” from outside. They speak in terms of vision and inspiration. Thus Edward Gibbon (1737–94), who loathed religious enthusiasm, had what amounts to a moment of vision while musing among the ruins of the Capitol in Rome, which impelled him to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Commenting on this experience, the twentieth-century historian Arnold Toynbee described it as a “communion”: “he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of a vast tide.” Such a moment of inspiration, Toynbee concludes, is akin to the “experience that has been described as the Beatific Vision by souls to whom it has been vouchsafed.”62 Albert Einstein also claimed that mysticism was “the sower of all true art and science”: To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.63 In this sense, the religious enlightenment discovered by such mystics as the Besht can be seen as akin to some other achievements of the Age of Reason: it was enabling simpler men and women to make the imaginative transition to the New World of modernity.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It seems a bleak doctrine, but Spinoza’s God inspired him with a truly mystical awe. As the aggregate of all the laws in existence, God was the highest perfection, which welded everything into unity and harmony. When human beings contemplated the workings of their minds in the way that Descartes had enjoined, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite being of God at work within them. Like Plato, Spinoza believed that intuitive and spontaneous knowledge reveals the presence of God more than a laborious acquisition of facts. Our joy and happiness in knowledge is equivalent to the love of God, a deity which is not an eternal object of thought but the cause and principle of that thought, deeply one with every single human being. There is no need for revelation or divine law: this God is accessible to the whole of humanity, and the only Torah is the eternal law of nature. Spinoza brought the old metaphysics into line with the new science: his God was not the unknowable One of the Neoplatonists but closer to the absolute Being described by philosophers like Aquinas. But it was also close to the mystical God experienced by orthodox monotheists within themselves. Jews, Christians and philosophers tended to see Spinoza as an atheist: there was nothing personal about this God, which was inseparable from the rest of reality. Indeed, Spinoza had only used the word “God” for historical reasons: he agreed with atheists, who claim that reality cannot be divided into a part which is “God” and a part which is not-God. If God cannot be separated from anything else, it is impossible to say that “he” exists in any ordinary sense. What Spinoza was saying in effect was that there was no God that corresponded to the meaning we usually attach to that word. But mystics and philosophers had been making the same point for centuries. Some had said that there was “Nothing” apart from the world we know. Were it not for the absence of the transcendent En Sof, Spinoza’s pantheism would resemble Kabbalah and we could sense an affinity between radical mysticism and the newly emergent atheism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  From the very beginning, religion had helped people to relate to the world and to root themselves in it. The cult of the holy place had preceded all other reflection upon the world and helped men and women to find a focus in a terrifying universe. The deification of the natural forces had expressed the wonder and awe which had always been part of the human response to the world. Even Augustine had found the world a place of wondrous beauty, despite his anguished spirituality. Descartes, whose philosophy was based on the Augustinian tradition of introspection, had no time at all for wonder. A sense of mystery was to be avoided at all costs because it represented a primitive state of mind that civilized man had outgrown. In the introduction to his treatise Les météores, he explained that it was natural for us to “have more admiration for the things above us than for those on our level or below.”9 Poets and painters had, therefore, depicted the clouds as God’s throne, had imagined God sprinkling dew upon the clouds or hurling lightning against the rocks with his own hand: This leads me to hope that if I here explain the nature of the clouds, in such a way that we will no longer have occasion to wonder at anything that can be seen of them, or anything that descends from them, we will easily believe that it is similarly possible to find the causes of everything that is most admirable above the earth. Descartes would explain clouds, winds, dew and lightning as mere physical events in order, as he explained, to remove “any cause to marvel.”10 The God of Descartes, however, was the God of the philosophers who took no cognizance of earthly events. He was revealed not in the miracles described in scripture but in the eternal laws that he had ordained: Les météores also explained that the manna that had fed the ancient Israelites in the desert was a kind of dew. Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to “prove” the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them around. Well-intentioned as it is, this kind of argument misses the point of the symbolism that is of the essence of biblical narrative.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us. This method of looking at the world has achieved great results. One of its consequences, however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the “spiritual” or the “holy” which pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was once an essential component of our human experience of the world. In the South Sea Islands, they call this mysterious force mana; others experience it as a presence or spirit; sometimes it has been felt as an impersonal power, like a form of radioactivity or electricity. It was believed to reside in the tribal chief, in plants, rocks or animals. The Latins experienced numina (spirits) in sacred groves; Arabs felt that the landscape was populated by the jinn. Naturally people wanted to get in touch with this reality and make it work for them, but they also simply wanted to admire it. When they personalized the unseen forces and made them gods, associated with the wind, sun, sea and stars but possessing human characteristics, they were expressing their sense of affinity with the unseen and with the world around them.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not. 39 Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible.

• From A History of God (1993)

  A number of these sayings are believed to have been spoken by God himself to Muhammad. These hadith qudsi (sacred traditions) emphasize God’s immanence and presence in the believer: one famous hadith, for example, lists the stages whereby a Muslim apprehends a divine presence which seems almost incarnate in the believer: you begin by observing the commandments of the Koran and Shariah and then progress to voluntary acts of piety: My servant draws near to me by means of nothing dearer to me than that which I have established as a duty to him. And my servant continues drawing nearer to me through supererogatory acts until I love him: and when I love him, I become his ear through which he hears, his eye with which he sees, his hand with which he grasps and his foot whereon he walks. 36 As in Judaism and Christianity, the transcendent God is also an immanent presence encountered here below. The Muslims could cultivate a sense of this divine presence by methods very similar to those discovered by the two older religions. The Muslims who promoted this type of piety based on the imitation of Muhammad are generally known as the ahl al-hadith, the Traditionists. They appealed to the ordinary people, because theirs was a fiercely egalitarian ethic. They opposed the luxury of the Ummayad and Abbasid courts but were not in favor of the revolutionary tactics of the Shiah. They did not believe that the caliph need have exceptional spiritual qualities: he was simply an administrator. Yet by stressing the divine nature of the Koran and the sunnah, they provided each Muslim with the means of direct contact with God that was potentially subversive and highly critical of absolute power. There was no need for a caste of priests to act as mediators. Each Muslim was responsible before God for his or her own fate. Above all, the Traditionists taught that the Koran was an eternal reality which, like the Torah or the Logos, was somehow of God himself; it had dwelt in his mind from before the beginning of time. Their doctrine of the uncreated Koran meant that when it was recited, Muslims could hear the invisible God directly. The Koran represented the presence of God in their very midst. His speech was on their lips when they recited its sacred words, and when they held the holy book it was as though they had touched the divine itself.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  With bated breath I said, “What will happen to us if that comet falls out of the sky?” My mother’s silence was so long that I looked from the comet to her face, and there I beheld something in her countenance that I had seen only once before, when I came into her room and found her in prayer. When she spoke, she said, “Nothing will happen to us, Howard; God will take care of us.” O simplehearted mother of mine, in one glorious moment you put your heart on the ultimate affirmation of the human spirit! Many things have I seen since that night. Times without number I have learned that life is hard, as hard as crucible steel; but as the years have unfolded, the majestic power of my mother’s glowing words has come back again and again, beating out its rhythmic chant in my own spirit. Here are the faith and the awareness that overcome fear and transform it into the power to strive, to achieve, and not to yield. 1 Recently untouchability was outlawed by the Indian state. A Hindu government did what years of British rule failed to do. Perhaps this is as it should be. 2 From my privately published volume of poems, The Greatest of These , p. 3. CHAPTER THREEDeceptionD ECEPTION is perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak have protected themselves against the strong. Through the ages, at all stages of sentient activity, the weak have survived by fooling the strong. The techniques of deception seem to be a part of the nervous-reflex action of the organism. The cuttlefish, when attacked, will release some of the fluid from his sepia bag, making the water all around him murky; in the midst of the cloudy water he confuses his attacker and makes his escape. Almost any hunter of birds has seen the mother simulate a broken wing so as to attract attention to herself and thereby save the life of her young. As a boy I have seen the shadow of the hawk on the grassy meadow where I lay resting underneath a shade tree. Consider the behavior of the birds a few feet away as they see the shadow. I have seen them take little feet full of dried grass or leaves, turn an easy half somersault, and play dead. The hawk blinks his eyes, thinks he has had an optical illusion, and goes on to find birds that do not know enough to pretend to be dead. We often played a game of hide-and-seek in which the refrain was, “Lay low, slick duck, the hawk’s around.” Natural selection has finally resulted in giving to various animals neutral colors or blending colors so that they fade into the landscape and thus protect themselves from destruction by deceiving the enemy. All little children well know this technique. They know that they cannot cope with the parental will on equal terms.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Besht abandoned Luria’s grand schemes for the salvation of the world. The Hasid was simply responsible for reuniting the sparks trapped in the items of his personal world—in his wife, his servants, furniture and food. As Hillel Zeitlin, one of the Besht’s disciples, explained, the Hasid has a unique responsibility to his particular environment, which he alone can perform: “Every man is a redeemer of a world that is all his own. He beholds only what he, and only he, ought to behold and feels only what he is personally singled out to feel.”54 Kabbalists had devised a discipline of concentration (devekuth) which helped mystics to become aware of the presence of God wherever they turned. As a seventeenth-century Kabbalist of Safed had explained, mystics should sit in solitude, take time off from the study of Torah and “imagine the light of the Shekinah above their heads, as though it were flowing all around them and they were sitting in the midst of light.”55 This sense of God’s presence had brought them to a tremulous, ecstatic joy. The Besht taught his followers that this ecstasy was not reserved for the privileged mystical elite but that every Jew had a duty to practice devekuth and become aware of the all-pervasive presence of God: in fact failure in devekuth was tantamount to idolatry, a denial that nothing truly exists apart from God. This brought the Besht into conflict with the establishment, who feared that Jews would abandon the study of Torah in favor of these potentially dangerous and eccentric devotions.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet we could not arrive at the idea of “imperfection” if we did not have a prior conception of “perfection.” Like Anselm, Descartes concluded that a perfection that did not exist would be a contradiction in terms. Our experience of doubt, therefore, tells us that a supreme and perfect being —God—must exist. Descartes went on to deduce facts about the nature of God from this “proof” of his existence, in much the same way as he had conducted mathematical demonstrations. As he said in his Discourse on Method, “it is at least as certain that God, who is this perfect being, is or exists, as any demonstration of geometry can possibly be.” 8 Just as a Euclidian triangle must have angles that add up to two right angles, Descartes’s perfect being had to have certain attributes. Our experience tells us that the world has objective reality and a perfect God, who must, be truthful, could not deceive us. Instead of using the world to prove the existence of God, therefore, Descartes had used the idea of God to give him faith in the reality of the world. In his own way, Descartes felt as alienated from the world as Pascal. Instead of reaching out toward the world, his mind recoils upon itself. Even though the idea of God gives man certainty about his own existence and is, therefore, essential to Descartes’s epistemology, the Cartesian method reveals an isolation and an image of autonomy that would become central to the Western image of man in our own century. Alienation from the world and a proud self-reliance would lead many people to reject the whole idea of a God who reduces a man or woman to the condition of a dependent. From the very beginning, religion had helped people to relate to the world and to root themselves in it. The cult of the holy place had preceded all other reflection upon the world and helped men and women to find a focus in a terrifying universe. The deification of the natural forces had expressed the wonder and awe which had always been part of the human response to the world. Even Augustine had found the world a place of wondrous beauty, despite his anguished spirituality.

• From A History of God (1993)

  When Paul explained the faith that had been handed on to him, he said that Jesus had suffered and died “for our sins,”19 showing that at a very early stage, Jesus’ disciples, shocked by the scandal of his death, had explained it by saying that it had somehow been for our benefit. In Chapter 9, we shall see that during the seventeenth century other Jews would find a similar explanation for the scandalous end of yet another Messiah. The early Christians felt that Jesus was in some mysterious way still alive and that the “powers” that he had possessed were now embodied in them, as he had promised. We know from Paul’s epistles that the first Christians had all kinds of unusual experiences that could have indicated the advent of a new type of humanity: some had become faith healers, some spoke in heavenly languages, others delivered what they believed were inspired oracles from God. Church services were noisy, charismatic affairs, quite different from a tasteful evensong today at the parish church. It seemed that Jesus’ death had indeed been beneficial in some way: it had released a “new kind of life” and a “new creation”—a constant theme in Paul’s letters.20 There were, however, no detailed theories about the crucifixion as an atonement for some “original sin” of Adam: we shall see that this theology did not emerge until the fourth century and was only important in the West. Paul and the other New Testament writers never attempted a precise, definitive explanation of the salvation they had experienced. Yet the notion of Christ’s sacrificial death was similar to the ideal of the bodhisattva, which was developing at this time in India. Like the bodhisattva, Christ had, in effect, become a mediator between humanity and the Absolute, the difference being that Christ was the only mediator and the salvation he effected was not an unrealized aspiration for the future, like that of the bodhisattva, but a fait accompli. Paul insisted that Jesus’ sacrifice had been unique. Although he believed that his own sufferings on behalf of others were beneficial, Paul was quite clear that Jesus’ suffering and death were in quite a different league.21 There is a potential danger here. The innumerable Buddhas and the elusive, paradoxical avatars all reminded the faithful that ultimate reality could not be adequately expressed in any one form. The single Incarnation of Christianity, suggesting that the whole of the inexhaustible reality of God had been manifest in just one human being, could lead to an immature type of idolatry.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. At the end of his life, Schleiermacher felt that he might have overemphasized the importance of feeling and subjectivity. He was aware that Christianity was beginning to seem an outmoded creed: some Christian doctrines were misleading and made the faith vulnerable to the new skepticism. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, seemed to suggest that there were three gods. Schleiermacher’s disciple Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) saw the doctrine as a flagrant instance of Hellenization. It had corrupted the Christian message by introducing an alien “layer of metaphysical concepts, derived from the natural philosophy of the Greeks,” having nothing at all to do with the pristine Christian experience. 14 Yet Schleiermacher and Ritschl had failed to see that each generation had to create its own imaginative conception of God, just as each Romantic poet had to experience truth upon his own pulse. The Greek Fathers were simply trying to make the Semitic concept of God work for them by expressing it in terms of their own culture. As the West entered the modern technical age, the older ideas of God would prove inadequate. Yet right up to the end, Schleiermacher insisted that religious emotion was not opposed to reason. On his deathbed he said: “I must think the deepest, speculative thoughts, and they are to me completely at one with the most intimate religious sensations.” 15 Concepts about God were useless unless they were imaginatively transformed by feeling and personal religious experience. During the nineteenth century, one major philosopher after another rose to challenge the traditional view of God, at least the “God” who prevailed in the West. They were particularly offended by the notion of a supernatural deity “out there” which had an objective existence. We have seen that though the idea of God as the Supreme Being had gained ascendancy in the West, other monotheistic traditions had gone out of their way to separate themselves from this type of theology. Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians had all insisted in their different ways that our human idea of God did not correspond to the ineffable reality of which it was a mere symbol. All had suggested, at one time or another, that it was more accurate to describe God as “Nothing” rather than the Supreme Being, since “he” did not exist in any way that we could conceive. Over the centuries, the West had gradually lost sight of this more imaginative conception of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In Genesis, God’s first creative word had been: “Let there be light!” In The Zohar’s commentary on Genesis (called Bereshit in Hebrew after its opening word: “in the beginning”) this “dark flame” is the first sefirah: Kether Elyon, the Supreme Crown of Divinity. It has no color or form: other Kabbalists prefer to call it Nothing (ayin). The highest form of divinity that the human mind can conceive is equated with nothingness because it bears no comparison with any of the other things in existence. All the other sefiroth, therefore, emerge from the womb of Nothingness. This is a mystical interpretation of the traditional doctrine of the creation ex nihilo. The process of the Godhead’s self-expression continues as the welling of light, which spreads in ever wider spheres. The Zohar continues: But when this flame began to assume size and extension, it produced radiant colors. For in the inmost center a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En Sof. The well broke through, and yet did not entirely break through, the eternal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely recognizable until under the impact of its breakthrough, a hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and it is called Bereshit, the Beginning; the first word of creation.56 This “point” is Hokhmah (Wisdom), the second sefirah which contains the ideal form of all created things. The point develops into a palace or a building, which becomes Binah (Intelligence), the third sefirah. These three highest sefiroth represent the limit of human comprehension. Kabbalists say that God exists in Binah as the great “Who?” (Mi) which stands at the beginning of every question. But it is not possible to get an answer. Even though En Sof is gradually adapting Itself to human limitations, we have no way of knowing “Who” he is: the higher we ascend, the more “he” remains shrouded in darkness and mystery.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the “numinous” was basic to religion. It preceded any desire to explain the origin of the world or find a basis for ethical behavior. The numinous power was sensed by human beings in different ways—sometimes it inspired wild, bacchanalian excitement; sometimes a deep calm; sometimes people felt dread, awe and humility in the presence of the mysterious force inherent in every aspect of life. When people began to devise their myths and worship their gods, they were not seeking a literal explanation for natural phenomena. The symbolic stories, cave paintings and carvings were an attempt to express their wonder and to link this pervasive mystery with their own lives; indeed, poets, artists and musicians are often impelled by a similar desire today. In the Palaeolithic period, for example, when agriculture was developing, the cult of the Mother Goddess expressed a sense that the fertility which was transforming human life was actually sacred. Artists carved those statues depicting her as a naked, pregnant woman which archaeologists have found all over Europe, the Middle East and India. The Great Mother remained imaginatively important for centuries. Like the old Sky God, she was absorbed into later pantheons and took her place alongside the older deities. 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.