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 17 of 217 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  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.” 13 He had instinctively expressed himself in the religious language of his time and culture: Babylon itself, the abode of the gods, was called “Gate of the gods” (Bab-ili). Jacob decided to consecrate this holy ground in the traditional pagan manner of the country. He took the stone he had used as a pillow, upended it and sanctified it with a libation of oil.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Though from my gaze profound Deep awe hath hid Thy Face, In wondrous and ecstatic Grace I feel Thee touch my inmost ground.33 The emphasis on unity harks back to the Koranic ideal of tawhid: by drawing together his dissipated self, the mystic would experience the divine presence in personal integration. Al-Junayd was acutely aware of the dangers of mysticism. It would be easy for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the advice of a pir and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand the ecstasy of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he meant when he said that he was one with God. Extravagant claims like those of al-Bistami would certainly arouse the ire of the establishment. At this early stage, Sufism was very much a minority movement, and the ulema often regarded it as an inauthentic innovation. Junayd’s famous pupil Husain ibn Mansur (usually known as al-Hallaj, the Wool-Carder) threw all caution to the winds, however, and became a martyr for his mystical faith. Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow of the caliphate and the establishment of a new social order, he was imprisoned by the authorities and crucified like his hero, Jesus. In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: “I am the Truth!” According to the Gospels, Jesus had made the same claim, when he had said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Koran repeatedly condemned the Christian belief in God’s Incarnation in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising that Muslims were horrified by al-Hallaj’s ecstatic cry. Al-Haqq (the Truth) was one of the names of God, and it was idolatry for any mere mortal to claim this title for himself. Al-Hallaj had been expressing his sense of a union with God that was so close that it felt like identity. As he said in one of his poems: I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I: We are two spirits dwelling in one body. If thou seest me, thou seest Him, And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.34 It was a daring expression of that annihilation of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd had called ’fana. Al-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly death.

• From A History of God (1993)

  We can go further. It is highly likely that Abraham’s God was El, the High God of Canaan. The deity introduces himself to Abraham as El Shaddai (El of the Mountain), which was one of El’s traditional titles.9 Elsewhere he is called El Elyon (The Most High God) or El of Bethel. The name of the Canaanite High God is preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El or Ishma-El. They experienced him in ways that would not have been unfamiliar to the pagans of the Middle East. We shall see that centuries later Israelites found the mana or “holiness” of Yahweh a terrifying experience. On Mount Sinai, for example, he would appear to Moses in the midst of an awe-inspiring volcanic eruption, and the Israelites had to keep their distance. In comparison, Abraham’s god El is a very mild deity. He appears to Abraham as a friend and sometimes even assumes human form. This type of divine apparition, known as an epiphany, was quite common in the pagan world of antiquity. Even though in general the gods were not expected to intervene directly in the lives of mortal men and women, certain privileged individuals in mythical times had encountered their gods face to face. The Iliad is full of such epiphanies. The gods and goddesses appear to both Greeks and Trojans in dreams, when the boundary between the human and divine worlds was believed to be lowered. At the very end of the Iliad, Priam is guided to the Greek ships by a charming young man who finally reveals himself as Hermes.10 When the Greeks looked back to the golden age of their heroes, they felt that they had been closely in touch with the gods, who were, after all, of the same nature as human beings. These stories of epiphanies expressed the holistic pagan vision: when the divine was not essentially distinct from either nature or humanity, it could be experienced without great fanfare. The world was full of gods, who could be perceived unexpectedly at any time, around any corner or in the person of a passing stranger. It seems that ordinary folk may have believed that such divine encounters were possible in their own lives: this may explain the strange story in the Acts of the Apostles when, as late as the first century CE, the apostle Paul and his disciple Barnabas were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes by the people of Lystra in what is now Turkey.11

• From A History of God (1993)

  Surely Mary was not the mother of God but the mother of the man Jesus? How could God have been a helpless, puling baby? Was it not more accurate to say that he had dwelt with Christ in particular intimacy, as in a temple? Despite the obvious inconsistencies, the orthodox stuck to their guns. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, reiterated the faith of Athanasius: God had indeed descended so deeply into our flawed and corrupt world that he had even tasted death and abandonment. It seemed impossible to reconcile this belief with the equally firm conviction that God was utterly impassible, unable to suffer or change. The remote God of the Greeks, characterized chiefly by the divine apatheia, seemed an entirely different deity from the God who was supposed to have become incarnate in Jesus Christ. The orthodox felt that the “heretics,” who found the idea of a suffering, helpless God deeply offensive, wanted to drain the divine of its mystery and wonder. The paradox of the Incarnation seemed an antidote to the Hellenic God who did nothing to shake our complacency and who was so entirely reasonable. In 529 the emperor Justinian closed the ancient school of philosophy in Athens, the last bastion of intellectual paganism: its last great master had been Proclus (412–485), an ardent disciple of Plotinus. Pagan philosophy went underground and seemed defeated by the new religion of Christianity. Four years later, however, four mystical treatises appeared which were purportedly written by Denys the Areopagite, St. Paul’s first Athenian convert. They were, in fact, written by a sixth-century Greek Christian, who has preserved his anonymity. The pseudonym had a symbolic power, however, which was more important than the identity of the author: Pseudo-Denys managed to baptize the insights of Neoplatonism and wed the God of the Greeks to the Semitic God of the Bible. Denys was also the heir of the Cappadocian Fathers. Like Basil, he took the distinction between kerygma and dogma very seriously. In one of his letters, he affirmed that there were two theological traditions, both of which derived from the apostles. The kerygmatic gospel was clear and knowable; the dogmatic gospel was silent and mystical. Both were mutually interdependent, however, and essential to the Christian faith.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. The period 800–200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and formative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace.

• From A History of God (1993)

  For Plotinus, ecstasy had been a very occasional rapture: it had been achieved by him only two or three times in his life. Denys saw ecstasy as the constant state of every Christian. This was the hidden or esoteric message of Scripture and liturgy, revealed in the smallest gestures. Thus when the celebrant leaves the altar at the beginning of the Mass to walk through the congregation, sprinkling it with holy water before returning to the sanctuary, this is not just a rite of purification—though it is that too. It imitates the divine ecstasy, whereby God leaves his solitude and merges himself with his creatures. Perhaps the best way of viewing Denys’s theology is as that spiritual dance between what we can affirm about God and the appreciation that everything we can say about him can only be symbolic. As in Judaism, Denys’s God has two aspects: one is turned toward us and manifests himself in the world; the other is the far side of God as he is in himself, which remains entirely incomprehensible. He “stays within himself” in his eternal mystery, at the same time as he is totally immersed in creation. He is not another being, additional to the world. Denys’s method became normative in Greek theology. In the West, however, theologians would continue to talk and explain. Some imagined that when they said “God,” the divine reality actually coincided with the idea in their minds. Some would attribute their own thoughts and ideas to God—saying that God wanted this, forbade that and had planned the other—in a way that was dangerously idolatrous. The God of Greek Othodoxy, however, would remain mysterious, and the Trinity would continue to remind Eastern Christians of the provisional nature of their doctrines. Eventually, the Greeks decided that an authentic theology must meet Denys’s two criteria: it must be silent and paradoxical.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He picked up the manuscript, which the visiting Koran reciter had dropped in the commotion, and, being one of the few Qurayshis who were literate, he started to read. Umar was an acknowledged authority on Arabic oral poetry and was consulted by poets as to the precise significance of the language, but he had never come across anything like the Koran. “How fine and noble is this speech!” he said wonderingly, and was instantly converted to the new religion of al-Lah. 18 The beauty of the words had reached through his reserves of hatred and prejudice to a core of receptivity that he had not been conscious of. We have all had a similar experience, when a poem touches a chord of recognition that lies at a level deeper than the rational. In the other version of Umar’s conversation, he encountered Muhammad one night at the Kabah, reciting the Koran quietly to himself before the shrine. Thinking that he would like to listen to the words, Umar crept under the damask cloth that covered the huge granite cube and edged his way around until he was standing directly in front of the Prophet. As he said, “There was nothing between us but the cover of the Kabah”—all his defenses but one were down. Then the magic of the Arabic did its work: “When I heard the Koran, my heart was softened and I wept and Islam entered into me.” 19 It was the Koran which prevented God from being a mighty reality “out there” and brought him into the mind, heart and being of each believer. The experience of Umar and the other Muslims who were converted by the Koran can perhaps be compared to the experience of art described by George Steiner in his book Real Presences: Is there anything in what we say? He speaks of what he calls “the indiscretion of serious art, literature and music” which “queries the last privacies of our existence.” It is an invasion or an annunciation, which breaks into “the small house of our cautionary being” and commands us “change your life!” After such a summons, the house “is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before.” 20 Muslims like Umar seem to have experienced a similar unsettling of sensibility, an awakening and a disturbing sense of significance which enabled them to make the painful break with the traditional past. Even those Qurayshis who refused to accept Islam were disturbed by the Koran and found that it lay outside all their familiar categories: it was nothing like the inspiration of the kahin or the poet; nor was it like the incantations of a magician. Some stories show powerful Qurayshis who remained steadfastly with the opposition being visibly shaken when they listened to a sura.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  But, sir, I think you are a traitor to all the darker peoples of the earth. I am wondering what you, an intelligent man, can say in defense of your position.” Our subsequent conversation lasted for more than five hours. The clue to my own discussion with this probing, honest, sympathetic Hindu is found in my interpretation of the meaning of the religion of Jesus. It is a privilege, after so long a time, to set down what seems to me to be an essentially creative and prognostic interpretation of Jesus as religious subject rather than religious object. It is necessary to examine the religion of Jesus against the background of his own age and people, and to inquire into the content of his teaching with reference to the disinherited and the underprivileged. We begin with the simple historical fact that Jesus was a Jew. The miracle of the Jewish people is almost as breathtaking as the miracle of Jesus. Is there something unique, some special increment of vitality in the womb of the people out of whose loins he came, that made of him a logical flowering of a long development of racial experience, ethical in quality and Godlike in tone? It is impossible for Jesus to be understood outside of the sense of community which Israel held with God. This does not take anything away from him; rather does it heighten the challenge which his life presents, for such reflection reveals him as the product of the constant working of the creative mind of God upon the life, thought, and character of a race of men. Here is one who was so conditioned and organized within himself that he became a perfect instrument for the embodiment of a set of ideals—ideals of such dramatic potency that they were capable of changing the calendar, rechanneling the thought of the world, and placing a new sense of the rhythm of life in a weary, nerve-snapped civilization. How different might have been the story of the last two thousand years on this planet grown old from suffering if the link between Jesus and Israel had never been severed! What might have happened if Jesus, so perfect a flower from the brooding spirit of God in the soul of Israel, had been permitted to remain where his roots would have been fed by the distilled elements accumulated from Israel’s wrestling with God! The thought is staggering. The Christian Church has tended to overlook its Judaic origins, but the fact is that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of Palestine when he went about his Father’s business, announcing the acceptable year of the Lord. Of course it may be argued that the fact that Jesus was a Jew is merely coincidental, that God could have expressed himself as easily and effectively in a Roman. True, but the fact is he did not. And it is with that fact that we must deal.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  80 Three days later, the army tried to organize pro-shah demonstrations, and clashes between the revolutionaries and the military became more violent. The shah made a last effort at appeasement, appointing Shahpour Bakhtiar, a known liberal, to form a constitutional government; the shah promised that he would dismantle SAVAK, release political prisoners, and make fundamental changes in his economic and foreign policy. But this came a year too late; the people had heard too many promises made under duress to give these latest offers credence. Khomeini declared December 30 (which, according to the Islamic calendar, was the first anniversary of the Qum massacre) to be a day of mourning. There were more deaths in Mashhad, Tehran, and Qazrin; pictures of these latest martyrs were displayed alongside portraits of Khomeini. On December 23, when soldiers tore up pictures of Khomeini in Mashhad, there was a skirmish, and twelve civilians were killed. Immediately, crowds gathered at the spot and walked toward the soldiers, led by young men who were willing to sacrifice their lives. The army began to retreat, the soldiers firing at the ground to keep the people at bay. The next day, tens of thousands went back onto the streets to protest against these killings. 8 1 By mid-January, it was all over. Prime Minister Bakhtiar negotiated the shah’s departure, which, to save face, was declared to be only temporary. The royal family flew to Egypt, where Sadat took them in. Bakhtiar tried to stall the Revolution by ordering the release of political prisoners, dismantling SAVAK, refusing oil to Israel and South Africa, and promising to review all foreign contracts and to make major cuts in military expenditure. Again, it was too late. The crowds were clamoring for the return of the man they called their Imam, and on February 1, 1979, Bakhtiar was forced to allow Khomeini to return. Khomeini’s arrival in Tehran was one of those symbolic events, like the storming of the Bastille, which seem to change the world forever. For committed liberal secularists, inside and outside Iran, it was a dark moment, a triumph of superstition over rationality. But for many Muslims, Sunni as well as Shii, who had long feared that Islam was about to be annihilated, it seemed a luminous reversal. For some Iranian Shiis, Khomeini’s return seemed a miracle, and inevitably, it resembled the mythical return of the Hidden Imam. As he drove through the streets of Tehran, the crowds shouted for “Imam Khomeini,” confident that a new age of justice had dawned.

• From A History of God (1993)

  God is not one of the things that exist and is quite unlike anything else in our experience. In fact, it is more accurate to call God “Nothing”: we should not even call him a Trinity since he is “neither a unity nor a trinity in the sense in which we know them.” 51 He is above all names just as he is above all being. 52 Yet we can use our incapacity to speak about God as a method of achieving a union with him, which is nothing less than a “deification” (theosis) of our own nature. God had revealed some of his Names to us in scripture, such as “Father,” “Son” and “Spirit,” yet the purpose of this had not been to impart information about him but to draw men and women toward himself and enable them to share his divine nature. In each chapter of his treatise The Divine Names, Denys begins with a kerygmatic truth, revealed by God: his goodness, wisdom, paternity and so forth. He then proceeds to show that although God has revealed something of himself in these titles, what he reveals is not himself. If we really want to understand God, we must go on to deny those attributes and names. Thus we must say that he is both “God” and “not- God,” “good” and then go on to say that he is “not-good.” The shock of this paradox, a process that includes both knowing and unknowing, will lift us above the world of mundane ideas to the inexpressible reality itself. Thus, we begin by saying that: of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, imagination, name and many other things. But he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be named. He is not one of the things that are. 53 Reading the Scriptures is not a process of discovering facts about God, therefore, but should be a paradoxical discipline that turns the kerygma into dogma. This method is a theurgy, a tapping of the divine power that enables us to ascend to God himself and, as Platonists had always taught, become ourselves divine. It is a method to stop us thinking! “We have to leave behind us all our conceptions of the divine. We call a halt to the activities of our minds.” 54 We even have to leave our denials of God’s attributes behind. Then and only then shall we achieve an ecstatic union with God. When Denys talks about ecstasy, he is not referring to a peculiar state of mind or an alternative form of consciousness achieved by an obscure yogic discipline.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In the early twentieth century, many people revered Spinoza as the hero of modernity, feeling an affinity with his symbolic exile, alienation and quest for secular salvation. Spinoza has been regarded as an atheist, but he did have a belief in a God, even though this was not the God of the Bible. Like the Faylasufs, he saw revealed religion as inferior to the scientific knowledge of God acquired by the philosopher. The nature of religious faith had been misunderstood, he argued in A Theologico-Political Treatise. It had become “a mere compound of credulity and prejudices,” a “tissue of meaningless mysteries.” 24 He looked critically at biblical history. The Israelites had called any phenomenon that they could not understand “God.” The prophets, for example, were said to have been inspired by God’s Spirit simply because they were men of exceptional intellect and holiness. But this kind of “inspiration” was not confined to an elite but was available to everybody through natural reason: the rites and symbols of the faith could only help the masses who were incapable of scientific, rational thought. Like Descartes, Spinoza returned to the Ontological Proof for God’s existence. The very idea of “God” contains a validation of God’s existence because a perfect being which did not exist would be a contradiction in terms. The existence of God was necessary because it alone provided the certainty and confidence necessary to make other deductions about reality. Our scientific understanding of the world shows us that it is governed by immutable laws. For Spinoza God is simply the principle of law, the sum of all the eternal laws in existence. God is a material being, identical with and equivalent to the order which governs the universe. Like Newton, Spinoza returned to the old philosophical idea of emanation. Because God is inherent and immanent in all things—material and spiritual—it can be defined as the law that orders their existence. To speak of God’s activity in the world was simply a way of describing the mathematical and causal principles of existence. It was an absolute denial of transcendence. It seems a bleak doctrine, but Spinoza’s God inspired him with a truly mystical awe. As the aggregate of all the laws in existence, God was the highest perfection, which welded everything into unity and harmony. When human beings contemplated the workings of their minds in the way that Descartes had enjoined, they opened themselves to the eternal and infinite being of God at work within them. Like Plato, Spinoza believed that intuitive and spontaneous knowledge reveals the presence of God more than a laborious acquisition of facts. Our joy and happiness in knowledge is equivalent to the love of God, a deity which is not an eternal object of thought but the cause and principle of that thought, deeply one with every single human being.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In his own book Hajj, Shariati took his readers through the pilgrimage to Mecca, gradually articulating a dynamic conception of God which each pilgrim had to create imaginatively for him- or herself. Thus, on reaching the Kabah, pilgrims would realize how suitable it was that the shrine is empty: “This is not your final destination; the Kabah is a sign so that the way is not lost; it only shows you the direction.” 10 The Kabah witnessed to the importance of transcending all human expressions of the divine, which must not become ends in themselves. Why is the Kabah a simple cube, without decoration or ornament? Because it represents “the secret of God in the universe: God is shapeless, colorless, without simularity, whatever form or condition mankind selects, sees or imagines, it is not God.” 11 The hajj itself was the antithesis of the alienation experienced by so many Iranians in the postcolonial period. It represents the existential course of each human being who turns his or her life around and directs it toward the ineffable God. Shariati’s activist faith was dangerous: the Shah’s secret police tortured and deported him and may even have been responsible for his death in London in 1977. Martin Buber (1878–1965) had an equally dynamic vision of Judaism as a spiritual process and a striving for elemental unity. Religion consisted entirely of an encounter with a personal God, which nearly always took place in our meetings with other human beings. There were two spheres: one the realm of space and time where we relate to other beings as subject and object, as I-It. In the second realm, we relate to others as they truly are, seeing them as ends in themselves. This is the I-Thou realm, which reveals the presence of God. Life was an endless dialogue with God, which does not endanger our freedom or creativity, since God never tells us what he is asking of us. We experience him simply as a presence and an imperative and have to work out the meaning for ourselves. This meant a break with much Jewish tradition, and Buber’s exegesis of traditional texts is sometimes strained. As a Kantian, Buber had no time for Torah, which he found alienating: God was not a lawgiver! The I-Thou encounter meant freedom and spontaneity, not the weight of a past tradition. Yet the mitzvot are central to much Jewish spirituality, and this may explain why Buber has been more popular with Christians than with Jews. Buber realized that the term “God” had been soiled and degraded, but he refused to relinquish it. “Where would I find a word to equal it, to describe the same reality?”

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. During the 1780s, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyaday (1745–1813) had not found the emotional exuberance of Hasidism alien to the intellectual quest. He founded a new form of Hasidism which attempted to blend mysticism with rational contemplation. It became known as the Habad, an acrostic of the three attributes of God: Hokhmah (Wisdom), Binah (Intelligence) and Da’at (Knowledge). Like earlier mystics who had amalgamated philosophy with spirituality, Zalman believed that metaphysical speculation was an essential preliminary to prayer because it revealed the limitations of the intellect. His technique started from the fundamental Hasidic vision of God present in all things and led the mystic, by a dialectical process, to realize that God was the only reality. Zalman explained: “From the standpoint of the Infinite, blessed be He, all the worlds are as if literally nothing and nihility.” 64 The created world has no existence apart from God, its vital force. It is only because of our limited perceptions that it appears to exist separately, but this is an illusion. God, therefore, is not really a transcendent being who occupies an alternative sphere of reality: he is not external to the world. Indeed, the doctrine of God’s transcendence is another illusion of our minds, which find it almost impossible to get beyond sense impressions. The mystical disciplines of Habad would help Jews to get beyond sensory perception to see things from God’s point of view. To an unenlightened eye the world seems empty of God: the contemplation of Kabbalah will break down the rational boundaries to help us discover the God who is in the world around us. Habad shared the Enlightenment confidence in the ability of the human mind to reach God but did so through the time-honored method of paradox and mystical concentration. Like the Besht, Zalman was convinced that anybody could attain the vision of God: Habad was not for an elite of mystics. Even if people seemed to lack spiritual talent, they could achieve enlightenment. It was hard work, however. As Rabbi Dov Baer of Lubavitch (1773–1827), Zalman’s son, explained in his Tract on Ecstasy, one had to begin with a heartbreaking perception of inadequacy. Mere cerebral contemplation is not enough: it had to be accompanied by self-analysis, study of Torah and prayer. It was painful to give up our intellectual and imaginative prejudices about the world, and most people were deeply reluctant to give up their point of view.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the mystic weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words. The purpose was to bypass the intellect and remind Jews that no words or concepts could represent the reality to which the Name pointed. Again, the experience of pushing language to its limits and making it yield a non-linguistic significance created a sense of the otherness of God. Mystics did not want a straightforward dialogue with a God whom they experienced as an overwhelming holiness rather than a sympathetic friend and father. Throne Mysticism was not unique. The Prophet Muhammad is said to have had a very similar experience when he made his Night Journey from Arabia to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He had been transported in sleep by Gabriel on a celestial horse. On arrival, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and a crowd of other prophets, who confirmed Muhammad in his own prophetic mission. Then Gabriel and Muhammad began their perilous ascent up a ladder (miraj through the seven heavens, each of which was presided over by a prophet. Finally Muhammad reached the divine sphere. The early sources reverently keep silent about the final vision, to which these verses in the Koran are believed to refer. And indeed he saw him a second time by the lote-tree of the furthest limit, near unto the garden of promise, with the lote-tree veiled in a veil of nameless splendor … [And withal] the eye did not waver, nor yet did it stray: truly did he see some of the most profound of his Sustainer’s symbols.7 Muhammad did not see God himself but only symbols that pointed to the divine reality: in Hinduism the lote-tree marks the limit of rational thought. There is no way in which the vision of God can appeal to the normal experiences of thought or language. The ascent to heaven is a symbol of the furthest reach of the human spirit, which marks the threshold of ultimate meaning. The imagery of ascent is common. St. Augustine had experienced an ascent to God with his mother at Ostia, which he described in the language of Plotinus: Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporate objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works and entered into our own minds.8

• From A History of God (1993)

  17 By approaching the Koran in the right way, Muslims claim that they do experience a sense of transcendence, of an ultimate reality and power that lie behind the transient and fleeting phenomena of the mundane world. Reading the Koran is therefore a spiritual discipline, which Christians may find difficult to understand because they do not have a sacred language, in the way that Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic are sacred to Jews, Hindus and Muslims. It is Jesus who is the Word of God, and there is nothing holy about the New Testament Greek. Jews, however, have a similar attitude toward the Torah. When they study the first five books of the Bible, they do not simply run their eyes over the page. Frequently they recite the words aloud, savoring the words that God himself is supposed to have used when he revealed himself to Moses on Sinai. Sometimes they sway backward and forward, like a flame before the breath of the Spirit. Obviously Jews who read their Bible in this way are experiencing a very different book than Christians who find most of the Pentateuch extremely dull and obscure. The early biographers of Muhammad constantly describe the wonder and shock felt by the Arabs when they heard the Koran for the first time. Many were converted on the spot, believing that God alone could account for the extraordinary beauty of the language. Frequently a convert would describe the experience as a divine invasion that tapped buried yearnings and released a flood of feelings. Thus the young Qurayshi Umar ibn al-Khattab had been a virulent opponent of Muhammad; he had been devoted to the old paganism and ready to assassinate the Prophet. But this Muslim Saul of Tarsus was converted not by a vision of Jesus the Word but by the Koran. There are two versions of his conversion story, both worthy of note. The first has Umar discovering his sister, who had secretly become a Muslim, listening to a recitation of a new sura. “What was that balderdash?” he had roared angrily as he strode into the house, knocking poor Fatimah to the ground. But when he saw that she was bleeding, he probably felt ashamed because his face changed.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Thus the hypostases Father, Son and Spirit should not be identified with God himself, because, as Gregory of Nyssa explained, “the divine nature (ousia) is unnameable and unspeakable”; “Father,” “Son” and “Spirit” are only “terms that we use” to speak of the energeiai by which he has made himself known.21 Yet these terms have symbolic value because they translate the ineffable reality into images that we can understand. Men have experienced God as transcendent (the Father, hidden in inaccessible light), as creative (the Logos) and as immanent (the Holy Spirit). But these three hypostases are only partial and incomplete glimpses of the Divine Nature itself, which lies far beyond such imagery and conceptualization.22 The Trinity, therefore, should not be seen as a literal fact but as a paradigm that corresponds to real facts in the hidden life of God. In his letter To Alabius: That There Are Not Three Gods, Gregory of Nyssa outlined his important doctrine of the inseparability or coinherence of the three divine persons or hypostases. One should not think of God splitting himself up into three parts; that was a grotesque and indeed blasphemous idea. God expressed himself wholly and totally in each one of these three manifestations when he wished to reveal himself to the world. Thus the Trinity gives us an indication of the pattern of “every operation which extends from God to creation”: as Scripture shows, it has its origin in the Father, proceeds through the agency of the Son and is made effective in the world by means of the immanent Spirit. But the Divine Nature is equally present in each phase of the operation. In our own experience we can see the interdependence of the three hypostases: we should never have known about the Father were it not for the revelation of the Son, nor could we recognize the Son without the indwelling Spirit who makes him known to us. The Spirit accompanies the divine Word of the Father, just as the breath (Greek, pneuma; Latin, Spiritus) accompanies the word spoken by a man. The three persons do not exist side by side in the divine world. We can compare them to the presence of different fields of knowledge in the mind of an individual: philosophy may be different from medicine, but it does not inhabit a separate sphere of consciousness. The different sciences pervade one another, fill the whole mind and yet remain distinct.23 Ultimately, however, the Trinity only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience: it had to be lived, not thought, because God went far beyond human concepts. It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. Gregory of Nazianzus made this clear when he explained that contemplation of the Three in One induced a profound and overwhelming emotion that confounded thought and intellectual clarity.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Naturally, they were also inspired by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became the paradigm of their own experience of God. They also evolved the techniques and disciplines that have helped mystics all over the world to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting the Divine Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of Muslim law. The effect of these practices sometimes resulted in behavior which seemed bizarre and unrestrained, and such mystics were known as “drunken” Sufis. The first of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d. 874), who, like Rabiah, approached God as a lover. He believed that he should strive to please al-Lah as he would a woman in a human love affair, sacrificing his own needs and desires so as to become one with the Beloved. Yet the introspective disciplines he adopted to achieve this led him beyond this personalized conception of God. As he approached the core of his identity, he felt that nothing stood between God and himself; indeed, everything that he understood as “self” seemed to have melted away: I gazed upon [al-Lah] with the eye of truth and said to Him: “Who is this?” He said, “This is neither I nor other than I. There is no God but I.” Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood.... Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying: “How fares it with me with Thee?” He said, “I am through Thou; there is no god but Thou.” 32 Yet again, this was no external deity “out there,” alien to mankind: God was discovered to be mysteriously identified with the inmost self. The systematic destruction of the ego led to a sense of absorption in a larger, ineffable reality. This state of annihilation (’fana) became central to the Sufi ideal. Bistami had completely reinterpreted the Shahadah in a way that could have been construed as blasphemous, had it not been recognized by so many other Muslims as an authentic experience of that islam commanded by the Koran. Other mystics, known as the “sober” Sufis, preferred a less extravagant spirituality. Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910), who mapped out the ground plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al-Bistami’s extremism could be dangerous. He taught that Jana (annihilation) must be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self. Union with God should not destroy our natural capabilities but fulfill them: a Sufi who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realization and self-control. He would become more fully human.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Word was made flesh in order that “the whole human being would become God, deified by the grace of God become man— whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace.” 57 Just as enlightenment and Buddhahood did not involve invasion by a supernatural reality but were an enhancement of powers that were natural to humanity, so too the deified Christ showed us the state that we could acquire by means of God’s grace. Christians could venerate Jesus the God-Man in rather the same way as Buddhists had come to revere the image of the enlightened Gautama: he had been the first example of a truly glorified and fulfilled humanity. Where the Greek view of Incarnation brought Christianity closer to the oriental tradition, the Western view of Jesus took a more eccentric course. The classic theology was expressed by Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury (1033–1109), in his treatise Why God Became Man. Sin, he argued, had been an affront of such magnitude that atonement was essential if God’s plans for the human race were not to be completely thwarted. The Word had been made flesh to make reparation on our behalf. God’s justice demanded that the debt be repaid by one who was both God and man: the magnitude of the offense meant that only the Son of God could effect our salvation, but, as a man had been responsible, the redeemer also had to be a member of the human race. It was a tidy, legalistic scheme that depicted God thinking, judging and weighing things up as though he were a human being. It also reinforced the Western image of a harsh God who could only be satisfied by the hideous death of his own Son, who had been offered up as a kind of human sacrifice. The doctrine of the Trinity has often been misunderstood in the Western world. People tend to imagine three divine figures or else ignore the doctrine altogether and identify “God” with the Father and make Jesus a divine friend—not quite on the same level. Muslims and Jews have also found the doctrine puzzling and even blasphemous. Yet we shall see that in both Judaism and Islam mystics developed remarkably similar conceptions of the divine. The idea of a kenosis, the self-emptying ecstasy of God, would, for example, be crucial in both Kabbalah and Sufism. In the Trinity, the Father transmits all that he is to the Son, giving up everything—even the possibility of expressing himself in another Word.

• From A History of God (1993)

  They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however, that by the eighth century they had become the center of a passionate doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church. People were beginning to ask what exactly the artist was painting when he painted Christ. It was impossible to depict his divinity, but if the artist claimed that he was only painting the humanity of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism, the heretical belief that Jesus’ human and divine natures were quite distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to ban icons altogether, but icons were defended by two leading monks: John of Damascus (656–747) of the monastery of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and Theodore (759–826), of the monastery of Studius near Constantinople. They argued that the iconoclasts were wrong to forbid the depiction of Christ. Since the Incarnation, the material world and the human body had both been given a divine dimension, and an artist could paint this new type of deified humanity. He was also painting an image of God, since Christ the Logos was the icon of God par excellence. God could not be contained in words or summed up in human concepts, but he could be “described” by the pen of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy. The piety of the Greeks was so dependent upon icons that by 820 the iconoclasts had been defeated by popular acclaim. This assertion that God was in some sense describable did not amount to an abandonment of Denys’s apophatic theology, however. In his Greater Apology for the Holy Images, the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons were “expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the ineffability of a mystery that transcends being. Without ceasing and without speech, they praise the goodness of God in that venerable and thrice- illumined melody of theology.” 23 Instead of instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church and helping them to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons held them in a sense of mystery. When describing the effect of these religious paintings, Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music, the most ineffable of the arts and possibly the most direct. Emotion and experience are conveyed by music in a way that bypasses words and concepts. In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater would assert that all art aspired to the condition of music; in ninth-century Byzantium, Greek Christians saw theology as aspiring to the condition of iconography. They found that God was better expressed in a work of art than in rationalistic discourse. After the intensely wordy Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, they were evolving a portrait of God that depended upon the imaginative experience of Christians. This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949–1022), Abbot of the small monastery of St. Macras in Constantinople, who became known as the “New Theologian.”