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 18 of 217 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like poets or painters, they used symbolism which bore little relation to logic but which they felt revealed a deeper reality than could be perceived by the senses or expressed in rational concepts. Accordingly they developed a method of reading the Koran which they called tawil (literally, “carrying back”). They felt that this would take them back to the original archetypal Koran, which had been uttered in the menok at the same time as Muhammad had recited it in the getik. Henri Corbin, the late historian of Iranian Shiism, has compared the discipline of tawil to that of harmony in music. It was as though the Ismaili could hear a “sound”—a verse of the Koran or a hadith—on several levels at the same time; he was trying to train himself to hear its heavenly counterpart as well as the Arabic words. The effort stilled his clamorous critical faculty and made him conscious of the silence that surrounds each word in much the same way as a Hindu listens to the ineffable silence surrounding the sacred syllable OUM. As he listened to the silence, he became aware of the gulf that exists between our words and ideas of God and the full reality. 5 It was a discipline that helped Muslims to understand God as he deserved to be understood, Abu Yaqub al- Sijistani, a leading Ismaili thinker (d. 971), explained. Muslims often spoke about God anthropomorphically, making him a larger-than-life man, while others drained him of all religious meaning and reduced God to a concept. Instead, al-Sijistani advocated the use of the double negative. We should begin by talking about God in negatives, saying, for example, that he was “nonbeing” rather than “being,” “not ignorant” rather than “wise” and so forth. But we should immediately negate that rather lifeless and abstract negation, saying that God is “not not-ignorant” or that he is “not No-thing” in the way that we normally use the word. He does not correspond to any human way of speaking. By a repeated use of this linguistic discipline, the batini would become aware of the inadequacy of language when it tried to convey the mystery of God. Hamid al-Din Kirmani (d. 1021), a later Ismaili thinker, described the immense peace and satisfaction that this exercise produced in his Rahaf al-aql (Balm for the Intellect). It was by no means an arid, cerebral discipline, a pedantic trick, but invested every detail of the Ismaili’s life with a sense of significance. Ismaili writers frequently spoke of their batin in terms of illumination and transformation. Tawil was not designed to provide information about God but to create a sense of wonder that enlightened the batini at a level deeper than the rational. Nor was it escapism. The Ismailis were political activists. Indeed, Jafar ibn Sadiq, the Sixth Imam, had defined faith as action. Like the Prophet and the Imams, the believer had to make his vision of God effective in the mundane world.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  Suddenly he seemed to see Yahweh himself sitting on his throne in heaven directly above the Temple, which was the replica of his celestial court on earth. Yahweh’s train filled the sanctuary and he was attended by two seraphs, who covered their faces with their wings lest they look upon his face. They cried out to one another antiphonally: “Holy! holy! holy is Yahweh Sabaoth. His glory fills the whole earth.”1 At the sound of their voices, the whole Temple seemed to shake on its foundations and was filled with smoke, enveloping Yahweh in an impenetrable cloud, similar to the cloud and smoke that had hidden him from Moses on Mount Sinai. When we use the word “holy” today, we usually refer to a state of moral excellence. The Hebrew kaddosh, however, has nothing to do with morality as such but means “otherness,” a radical separation. The apparition of Yahweh on Mount Sinai had emphasized the immense gulf that had suddenly yawned between man and the divine world. Now the seraphs were crying: “Yahweh is other! other! other!” Isaiah had experienced that sense of the numinous which has periodically descended upon men and women and filled them with fascination and dread. In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto described this fearful experience of transcendent reality as mysterium terribile et fascinans: it is terribile because it comes as a profound shock that severs us from the consolations of normality and fascinans because, paradoxically, it exerts an irresistible attraction. There is nothing rational about this overpowering experience, which Otto compares to that of music or the erotic: the emotions it engenders cannot adequately be expressed in words or concepts. Indeed, this sense of the Wholly Other cannot even be said to “exist” because it has no place in our normal scheme of reality.2 The new Yahweh of the Axial Age was still “the god of the armies” (sabaoth) but was no longer a mere god of war. Nor was he simply a tribal deity, who was passionately biased in favor of Israel: his glory was no longer confined to the Promised Land but filled the whole earth. Isaiah was no Buddha experiencing an enlightenment that brought tranquillity and bliss. He had not become the perfected teacher of men. Instead he was filled with mortal terror, crying aloud: What a wretched state I am in! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have looked at the King, Yahweh Sabaoth.3

• From A History of God (1993)

  Not everybody could achieve these higher states, however, but other Christians could glimpse something of this mystical experience in the icons. In the West, religious art was becoming predominantly representational: it depicted historical events in the lives of Jesus or the saints. In Byzantium, however, the icon was not meant to represent anything in this world but was an attempt to portray the ineffable mystical experience of the hesychasts in a visual form to inspire the nonmystics. As the British historian Peter Brown explains, “Throughout the Eastern Christian world, icon and vision validated one another. Some deep gathering into one focal point of the collective imagination … ensured that by the sixth century, the supernatural had taken on the precise lineaments, in dreams and in each person’s imagination, in which it was commonly portrayed in art. The icon had the validity of a realized dream.”22 Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey information, ideas or doctrines. They were a focus of contemplation (theoria) which provided the faithful with a sort of window on the divine world. They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however, that by the eighth century they had become the center of a passionate doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church. 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There we may see God and ourself as by law revealed: ourself in splendor, filled with the light of Intellect, or rather, light itself, pure, buoyant, aerial, become—in truth, being—a god. 53 This god was not an alien object but our best self. It comes “neither by knowing, nor by Intellection that discovers the Intellectual beings [in the Mind or nous] but by a presence (parousia) overpassing all knowledge.” 54 Christianity was coming into its own in a world where Platonic ideas predominated. Thereafter, when Christian thinkers tried to explain their own religious experience, they turned naturally to the Neoplatonic vision of Plotinus and his later pagan disciples. The notion of an enlightenment that was impersonal, beyond human categories and natural to humanity was also close to the Hindu and Buddhist ideal in India, where Plotinus had been so keen to study. Thus despite the more superficial differences, there were profound similarities between the monotheistic and other visions of reality. It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences. The sense of presence, ecstasy and dread in the presence of a reality—called nirvana, the One, Brahman or God—seems to be a state of mind and a perception that are natural and endlessly sought by human beings. Some Christians were determined to make friends with the Greek world. Others wanted nothing whatever to do with it. During an outbreak of persecution in the 170s, a new prophet called Montanus arose in Phrygia in modern Turkey, who claimed to be a divine avatar. “I am the Lord God Almighty, who descended to a man,” he used to cry; “I am Father, son and Paraclete.” His companions Priscilla and Maximilla made similar claims. 55 Montanism was a fierce apocalyptic creed which painted a fearsome portrait of God. Not only were its adherents obliged to turn their backs upon the world and lead celibate lives, but they were told that martyrdom was the only sure path to God. Their agonizing death for the faith would hasten the coming of Christ: the martyrs were soldiers of God engaged in a battle with the forces of evil. This terrible creed appealed to a latent extremism in the Christian spirit: Montanism spread like wildfire in Phrygia, Thrace, Syria and Gaul. It was particularly strong in North Africa, where the people were used to gods who demanded human sacrifice. Their cult of Baal, which had entailed the sacrifice of the firstborn, had been suppressed by the emperor only during the second century. Soon the heresy had attracted no less a person than Tertullian, the leading theologian of the Latin Church.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Koran constantly stresses the need for intelligence in deciphering the “signs” or “messages” of God. 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!”17

• From A History of God (1993)

  These communities produced the scholars known as the tannaim, including rabbinic heroes like Rabbi Yohannan himself, Rabbi Akiva the mystic and Rabbi Ishmael: they compiled the Mishnah, the codification of an oral law which brought the Mosaic law up to date. Next a new set of scholars, known as the amoraim, began a commentary on the Mishnah and produced the treatises known collectively as the Talmud. In fact two Talmuds had been compiled; the Jerusalem Talmud, which was completed by the end of the fourth century, and the Babylonian Talmud, which is considered the more authoritative and which was not completed until the end of the fifth century. The process continued as each generation of scholars began to comment in their turn on the Talmud and the exegesis of their predecessors. This legal contemplation is not as desiccated as outsiders tend to imagine. It was an endless meditation on the Word of God, the new Holy of Holies; each layer of exegesis represented the walls and courts of a new Temple, enshrining the presence of God among his people. Yahweh had always been a transcendent deity, who directed human beings from above and without. The Rabbis made him intimately present within mankind and the smallest details of life. After the loss of the Temple and the harrowing experience of yet another exile, the Jews needed a God in their midst. The Rabbis did not construct any formal doctrines about God. Instead, they experienced him as an almost tangible presence. Their spirituality has been described as a state of “normal mysticism.” 79 In the very earliest passages of the Talmud, God was experienced in mysterious physical phenomena. The Rabbis spoke about the Holy Spirit, which had brooded over creation and the building of the sanctuary, making its presence felt in a rushing wind or a blazing fire. Others heard it in the clanging of a bell or a sharp knocking sound. One day, for example, Rabbi Yohannan had been sitting discussing Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot, when a fire descended from heaven and angels stood nearby: a voice from heaven confirmed that the Rabbi had a special mission from God. 80 So strong was their sense of presence that any official, objective doctrines would have been quite out of place. The Rabbis frequently suggested that on Mount Sinai, each one of the Israelites who had been standing at the foot of the mountain had experienced God in a different way. God had, as it were, adapted himself to each person “according to the comprehension of each.” 81 As one Rabbi put it, “God does not come to man oppressively but commensurately with a man’s power of receiving him.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Since Being is “Wholly Other,” it is in fact Nothing—no thing, neither an object nor a particular being. Yet it is what makes all other existence possible. The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit . He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: “Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?” It is a question that evokes the shock of surprise and wonder that has been a constant in the human response to the world: why should anything exist at all? In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Heidegger began by asking the same question. Theology believed that it had the answer and traced everything back to Something Else, to God. But this God was just another being rather than something that was wholly other. Heidegger had a somewhat reductive idea of the God of religion—though one shared by many religious people—but he often spoke in mystical terms about Being. He speaks of it as a great paradox; describes the thinking process as a waiting or listening to Being and seems to experience a return and withdrawal of Being, rather as mystics feel the absence of God. There is nothing that human beings can do to think Being into existence. Since the Greeks, people in the Western world have tended to forget Being and have concentrated on beings instead, a process that has resulted in its modern technological success. In the article written toward the end of his life titled “Only a God Can Save Us,” Heidegger suggested that the experience of God’s absence in our time could liberate us from preoccupation with beings. But there was nothing we could do to bring Being back into the present. We could only hope for a new advent in the future. The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) saw the idea of God as natural to humanity. The whole of human life was directed toward the future: we experience our lives as incomplete and unfinished. Unlike animals, we are never satisfied but always want more. It is this which has forced us to think and develop, since at each point of our lives we must transcend ourselves and go on to the next stage: the baby must become a toddler, the toddler must overcome its disabilities and become a child, and so forth. All our dreams and aspirations look ahead to what is to come.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  If both poems were average or okay, or if one poem was plain speech and one ornate—in those cases, no predicting what they’d go for. At the symphony one night when Shirley couldn’t go, Walt pressed on flaws in my method, asking, Any way you’re swaying them? You mean I’m unintentionally signaling them somehow? I said. Maybe intoning the gorgeous ones in some hyper-approving way? The violins were tuning up, the different bows trying to find the same note. It was that instant before a concert when I always wanted to bolt, because what if I didn’t like Beethoven, which I’d never heard? Maybe I should beg off and say I’m feeling sick. At home, I could make a hoagie and turn on the tube, rather than stay captive in an overheated hall in a seat that made your legs sweaty with a stranger on one side hogging your armrest. Walt’s face had that expectant air, though, he maybe knew the music was so magnificent that even a plebe like me could hear it. He said, Let’s say the women do have some innate taste, despite lacking any analytical tools they could articulate. What’s that mean, you think? I can’t remember how I said it—and we both knew I cared too much about the outcome for my little test to pass as science. I told him I wanted to believe in quality the way I had as a kid, when a great poem could flood me with certainty that there was something good in the world. Or somebody out there knew who I was even if we’d never met—or never would meet. Which made poetry one of the sole spiritual acts in our mostly godless household. Just because the ladies never went to school didn’t mean they couldn’t tell the difference between Beethoven and The Hokey-Pokey . Awe was okay with them, possibly their natural state. No really crap teachers had ruined their native taste by preaching what they were supposed to like. Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off. Which was what the symphony did that night for the first time, me sitting alongside Walt while the soft timpani mallets with the dandelion-puff heads banged loud enough for the dead, deaf composer to rouse from the distant German dirt. Afterward, Walt and I didn’t say much, just walked through the parking lot exhaling steam with the crowd, everybody’s eyes glancing in opposing vectors, brushing off each other but meeting, too, with that soft recognition you have after being drenched awhile by the same orderly chaos. We were like swimmers walking out of the sea. Every ten paces or so, headlights flipping on would turn shadow figures into full-fledged human units. Unlocking the car, Walt brought up my half-assed experiment again, saying, How’re you sure you know which poem’s best?

• From A History of God (1993)

  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.” This new type of theology made no attempt to define God. This, Symeon insisted, would be presumptuous; indeed, to speak about God in any way at all implied that “that which is incomprehensible is comprehensible.”24 Instead of arguing rationally about God’s nature, the “new” theology relied on direct, personal religious experience. It was impossible to know God in conceptual terms, as though he were just another being about which we could form ideas. God was a mystery. A true Christian was one who had a conscious experience of the God who had revealed himself in the transfigured humanity of Christ. Symeon had himself been converted from a worldly life to contemplation by an experience that seemed to come to him out of the blue. At first he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually he became aware that he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed into a light that was of God himself. This was not light as we know it, of course; it was beyond “form, image or representation and could only be experienced intuitively, through prayer.”25 But this was not an experience for the elite or for monks only; the kingdom announced by Christ in the Gospels was a union with God that everybody could experience here and now, without having to wait until the next life.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. One was “symbolic and presupposing initiation,” the other “philosophical and capable of proof—and the ineffable is woven with what can be uttered.” 47 The kerygma persuades and exhorts by its clear, manifest truth, but the silent or hidden tradition of dogma was a mystery that required initiation: “It effects and establishes the soul with God by initiations that do not teach anything,” 48 Denys insisted, in words that recalled Aristotle. There was a religious truth which could not adequately be conveyed by words, logic or rational discourse. It was expressed symbolically, through the language and gestures of the liturgy or by doctrines which were “sacred veils” that hid the ineffable meaning from view but which also adapted the utterly mysterious God to the limitations of human nature and expressed the Reality in terms that could be grasped imaginatively if not conceptually. 49 The hidden or esoteric meaning was not for a privileged elite but for all Christians. Denys was not advocating an abstruse discipline that was suitable for monks and ascetics only. The liturgy, attended by all the faithful, was the chief path to God and dominated his theology.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  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?” It bears too great and complex a meaning, has too many sacred associations. Those who do reject the word “God” must be respected, since so many appalling things have been done in its name. It is easy to understand why there are some who propose a period of silence about “the last things” so that the misused words may be redeemed. But this is not the way to redeem them.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  16 The God who may have inspired the first successful peasants’ uprising in history is a God of revolution. In all three faiths, he has inspired an ideal of social justice, even though it has to be said that Jews, Christians and Muslims have often failed to live up to this ideal and have transformed him into the God of the status quo. The Israelites called Yahweh “the God of our fathers,” yet it seems that he may have been quite a different deity from El, the Canaanite High God worshipped by the patriarchs. He may have been the god of other people before he became the God of Israel. In all his early appearances to Moses, Yahweh insists repeatedly and at some length that he is indeed the God of Abraham, even though he had originally been called El Shaddai. This insistence may preserve the distant echoes of a very early debate about the identity of the God of Moses. It has been suggested that Yahweh was originally a warrior god, a god of volcanoes, a god worshipped in Midian, in what is now Jordan. 17 We shall never know where the Israelites discovered Yahweh, if indeed he really was a completely new deity. Again, this would be a very important question for us today, but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers. In pagan antiquity, gods were often merged and amalgamated, or the gods of one locality accepted as identical with the god of another people. All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The so-called “Midianite Theory”—that Yahweh was originally a god of the people of Midian—is usually discredited today, but it was in Midian that Moses had his first vision of Yahweh. It will be recalled that Moses had been forced to flee Egypt for killing an Egyptian who was ill-treating an Israelite slave. He had taken refuge in Midian, married there, and it was while he was tending his father-in-law’s sheep that he had seen a strange sight: a bush that burned without being consumed. When he went closer to investigate, Yahweh had called to him by name and Moses had cried: “Here I am!” ( hineni! ), the response of every prophet of Israel when he encountered the God who demanded total attention and loyalty: “Come no nearer” [God] said, “Take off your shoes for the place on which you stand is holy ground.

• From A History of God (1993)

  When the death of God is complete, the Human Face Divine will appear: Jesus said; “Wouldst thou love one who never died For thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself Eternally for Man, Man could not exist; for Man is Love As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by brotherhood. 11 Blake rebelled against the institutional churches, but some theologians were attempting to incorporate the Romantic vision into official Christianity. They also found the idea of a remote transcendent God both abhorrent and irrelevant, stressing instead the importance of subjective religious experience. In 1799, the year after Wordsworth and Coleridge had published the Lyrical Ballads in England, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) published On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, his own Romantic manifesto, in Germany. Dogmas were not divine facts but simply “accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech.” 12 Religious faith could not be confined to the propositions of the creeds: it involved an emotional apprehension and an interior surrender. Thought and reason had their place, but they could only take us so far. When we had come to the limit of reason, feeling would complete the journey to the Absolute. When he spoke of “feeling,” Schleiermacher did not mean a sloppy emotionalism but an intuition which drove men and women toward the infinite. Feeling was not opposed to human reason but an imaginative leap that takes us beyond the particular to an apprehension of the whole. The sense of God thus acquired arose from the depths of each individual rather than a collision with an objective Fact. Western theology had tended to overemphasize the importance of rationality ever since Thomas Aquinas, a tendency which had increased since the Reformation. Schleiermacher’s romantic theology was an attempt to redress the balance. He made it clear that feeling was not an end in itself and could not provide a complete explanation of religion. Reason and feeling both pointed beyond themselves to an indescribable Reality. Schleiermacher defined the essence of religion as “the feeling of absolute dependence.” 13 This, as we shall see, was an attitude that would become anathema to progressive thinkers during the nineteenth century, but Schleiermacher did not mean an abject servility before God. In context, the phrase refers to the sense of reverence that arises in us when we contemplate the mystery of life. This attitude of awe sprang from that universal human experience of the numinous.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Dogma, however, represented the deeper meaning of biblical truth, which could only be apprehended through religious experience and expressed in symbolic form. Besides the clear message of the Gospels, a secret or esoteric tradition had been handed down “in a mystery” from the apostles; this had been a “private and secret teaching,” which our holy fathers have preserved in a silence that prevents anxiety and curiosity ... so as to safeguard by this silence the sacred character of the mystery. The uninitiated are not permitted to behold these things: their meaning is not to be divulged by writing it down. 14 Behind the liturgical symbols and the lucid teachings of Jesus, there was a secret dogma which represented a more developed understanding of the faith. A distinction between esoteric and exoteric truth will be extremely important in the history of God. It was not to be confined to Greek Christians, but Jews and Muslims would also develop an esoteric tradition. The idea of a “secret” doctrine was not to shut people out. Basil was not talking about an early form of Freemasonry. He was simply calling attention to the fact that not all religious truth was capable of being expressed and defined clearly and logically. Some religious insights had an inner resonance that could only be apprehended by each individual in his own time during what Plato had called theoria, contemplation. Since all religion was directed toward an ineffable reality that lay beyond normal concepts and categories, speech was limiting and confusing. If they did not “see” these truths with the eye of the spirit, people who were not yet very experienced could get quite the wrong idea. Besides their literal meaning, therefore, the scriptures also had a spiritual significance which it was not always possible to articulate. The Buddha had also noted that certain questions were “improper” or inappropriate, since they referred to realities that lay beyond the reach of words. You would only discover them by undergoing the introspective techniques of contemplation: in some sense you had to create them for yourself. The attempt to describe them in words was likely to be as grotesque as a verbal account of one of Beethoven’s late quartets. As Basil said, these elusive religious realities could only be suggested in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy or, better still, by silence. 15 Western Christianity would become a much more talkative religion and would concentrate on the kerygma: this would be one of its chief problems with God. In the Greek Orthodox Church, however, all good theology would be silent or apophatic. As Gregory of Nyssa said, every concept of God is a mere simulacrum, a false likeness, an idol: it could not reveal God himself.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Muhammad used to enter a tranced state and sometimes seemed to lose consciousness; he used to sweat profusely, even on a cold day, and often felt an interior heaviness like grief that impelled him to lower his head between his knees, a position adopted by some contemporary Jewish mystics when they entered an alternative state of consciousness—though Muhammad could not have known this. 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.