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.

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• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

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

• From Vision Quest (1979)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  In popular legend, Shiva was also a great Yogi, so he also inspired his devotees to transcend personal concepts of divinity by means of meditation. Vishnu was usually kinder and more playful. He liked to show himself to mankind in various incarnations or avatars . One of his more famous personae was the character of Krishna, who had been born into a noble family but was brought up as a cowherd. Popular legend loved the stories of his dalliance with the cowgirls, which depicted God as the Lover of the Soul. Yet when Vishnu appears to Prince Arjuna as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita , it is a terrifying experience: I see the gods in your body, O God, and hordes of varied creatures: Brahman, the cosmic creator, on his lotos throne, all the seers and celestial serpents. 12 Everything is somehow present in the body of Krishna: he has no beginning or end, he fills space, and includes all possible deity: “Howling storm gods, sun gods, bright gods and gods of ritual.” 13 He is also “man’s tireless spirit,” the essence of humanity. 14 All things rush toward Krishna, as rivers roil toward the sea or as moths fly into a blazing flame. All Arjuna can do as he gazes at this awe-ful sight is quake and tremble, having entirely lost his bearings. The development of bhakti answered a deep-rooted popular need for some kind of personal relationship with the ultimate. Having established Brahman as utterly transcendent, there is a danger that it could become too rarefied and, like the ancient Sky God, fade from human consciousness. The evolution of the bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism and the avatars of Vishnu seem to represent another stage in religious development when people insist that the Absolute cannot be less than human. These symbolic doctrines and myths deny that the Absolute can be expressed in only one epiphany, however: there were numerous Buddhas and bodhisattvas , and Vishnu had a variety of avatars . These myths also express an ideal for humanity: they show mankind enlightened or deified, as he was meant to be. By the first century CE , there had been a similar thirst for divine immanence in Judaism. The person of Jesus had seemed to answer that need. St. Paul, the earliest Christian writer, who created the religion that we now know as Christianity, believed that Jesus had replaced the Torah as God’s principal revelation of himself to the world. 15 It is not easy to know exactly what he meant by this.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  13 Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of “ascent” seems an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have had this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the climactic insight a “vision of God”; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is that this is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind—often called the imagination—rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares. Augustine seems to have imagined that privileged human beings were sometimes able to see God in this life: he cited Moses and St. Paul as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540–604), who was an acknowledged master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He was not an intellectual and, as a typical Roman, had a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of the divine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced by such Greek Christians as Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. God was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that God was difficult of access. There was certainly no way we could talk about him familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing at all about God. We could make no predictions about his behavior on the basis of our knowledge of people: “Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot fully know anything about him.” 14 Frequently Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach to God. The joy and peace of contemplation could only be attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The most perfect motion, therefore, was the circle because it was perpetually turning and returning to its original point: the circling celestial spheres imitate the divine world as best they can. This utterly static image of divinity would have an immense influence on Jews, Christians and Muslims, even though it had little in common with the God of revelation, who is constantly active, innovative and, in the Bible, even changes his mind, as when he repents of having made man and decides to destroy the human race in the Flood. There was a mystical aspect of Plato which monotheists would find most congenial. Plato’s divine forms were not realities “out there” but could be discovered within the self. In his dramatic dialogue the Symposium, Plato showed how love of a beautiful body could be purified and transformed into an ecstatic contemplation (theoria) of ideal Beauty. He makes Diotima, Socrates’ mentor, explain that this Beauty is unique, eternal and absolute, quite unlike anything that we experience in this world: This Beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away; neither waxes nor wanes; next it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear to the imagination like the beauty of a face or hands or anything else corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or science, or like beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it in a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatsoever; he will see it as absolute, existing alone within itself, unique, eternal. 34 In short, an idea like Beauty has much in common with what many theists would call “God.” Yet despite its transcendence, the ideas were to be found within the mind of man. We moderns experience thinking as an activity, as something that we do. Plato envisaged it as something which happens to the mind: the objects of thought were realities that were active in the intellect of the man who contemplated them. Like Socrates, he saw thought as a process of recollection, an apprehension of something that we had always known but had forgotten. Because human beings were fallen divinities, the forms of the divine world were within them and could be “touched” by reason, which was not simply a rational or cerebral activity but an intuitive grasp of the eternal reality within us. This notion would greatly influence mystics in all three of the religions of historical monotheism. Plato believed that the universe was essentially rational. This was another myth or imaginary conception of reality. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) took it a step further.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This will not be a history in the usual sense, since the idea of God has not evolved from one point and progressed in a linear fashion to a final conception. Scientific notions work like that, but the ideas of art and religion do not. Just as there are only a given number of themes in love poetry, so too people have kept saying the same things about God over and over again. Indeed, we shall find a striking similarity in Jewish, Christian and Muslim ideas of the divine. Even though Jews and Muslims both find the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation almost blasphemous, they have produced their own versions of these controversial theologies. Each expression of these universal themes is slightly different, however, showing the ingenuity and inventiveness of the human imagination as it struggles to express its sense of “God.” Because this is such a big subject, I have deliberately confined myself to the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, though I have occasionally considered pagan, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality to make a monotheistic point clearer. It seems that the idea of God is remarkably close to ideas in religions that developed quite independently. Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration. Despite the secular tenor of much Western society, the idea of God still affects the lives of millions of people. Recent surveys have shown that ninety-nine percent of Americans say that they believe in God: the question is which “God” of the many on offer do they subscribe to? Theology often comes across as dull and abstract, but the history of God has been passionate and intense. Unlike some other conceptions of the ultimate, it was originally attended by agonizing struggle and stress. The prophets of Israel experienced their God as a physical pain that wrenched their every limb and filled them with rage and elation. The reality that they called God was often experienced by monotheists in a state of extremity: we shall read of mountaintops, darkness, desolation, crucifixion and terror. The Western experience of God seemed particularly traumatic. What was the reason for this inherent strain? Other monotheists spoke of light and transfiguration. They used very daring imagery to express the complexity of the reality they experienced, which went far beyond the orthodox theology. There has recently been a revived interest in mythology, which may indicate a widespread desire for a more imaginative expression of religious truth.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

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