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 37 of 217 · 20 per page

• 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

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

• From A History of God (1993)

  These “vessels” or “pipes” were not material, of course, but were composed of a sort of thicker light that served as “shells” ( kelipot ) for the purer light of the sefiroth . When the three highest sefiroth had radiated from Adam Kadmon, their vessels had functioned perfectly. But when the next six sefiroth issued from his “eyes,” their vessels were not strong enough to contain the divine light and they smashed. Consequently the light was scattered. Some of it rose upward and returned to the Godhead, but some divine “sparks” fell into the empty waste and remained trapped in chaos. Thenceforth nothing was in its proper place. Even the three highest sefiroth had fallen to a lower sphere as a result of the catastrophe. The original harmony had been ruined and the divine sparks were lost in the formless waste of tohu u-bohu , in exile from the Godhead. This strange myth is reminiscent of the earlier Gnostic myths of a primordial dislocation. It expresses the tension involved in the whole creative process, which is far closer to the Big Bang envisaged by scientists today than the more peaceful, orderly sequence described by Genesis. It was not easy for En Sof to emerge from his hidden state: he could only do so—as it were—in a sort of trial and error. In the Talmud, the Rabbis had had a similar idea. They had said that God had made other worlds and had destroyed them before he created this one. But all was not lost. Some Kabbalists compared this “Breaking” ( Shevirath ) to the breakthrough of birth or the bursting of a seed pod. The destruction had simply been a prelude to a new creation. Although everything was in disarray, En Sof would bring new life out of this apparent chaos by means of the process of Tikkun or reintegration. After the catastrophe, a new stream of light issued from En Sof and broke through the “forehead” of Adam Kadmon. This time the sefiroth were reorganized into new configurations: they were no longer to be generalized aspects of God. Each one became a “Countenance” ( parzuf ) in which the entire personality of God was revealed, with—as it were—distinctive features, in rather the same way as in the three personae of the Trinity. Luria was trying to find a new way of expressing the old Kabbalistic idea of the inscrutable God giving birth to himself as a person. In the process of Tikkun , Luria used the symbolism of the conception, birth and development of a human personality to suggest a similar evolution in God. It is complicated and perhaps best explained in diagrammatic form. In the reintegration of Tikkun , God restored order by regrouping the ten sefiroth into five “Countenances” ( parzufim ) in the following stages: Kether (The Crown), the highest sefirah , which The Zohar had called “Nothing,” becomes the first parzuf , called “Arik” Anpin: the Forebearing One.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Reading the Koran is therefore a spiritual discipline, which Christians may find difficult to understand because they do not have a sacred language, in the way that Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic are sacred to Jews, Hindus and Muslims. It is Jesus who is the Word of God, and there is nothing holy about the New Testament Greek. Jews, however, have a similar attitude toward the Torah. When they study the first five books of the Bible, they do not simply run their eyes over the page. Frequently they recite the words aloud, savoring the words that God himself is supposed to have used when he revealed himself to Moses on Sinai. Sometimes they sway backward and forward, like a flame before the breath of the Spirit. Obviously Jews who read their Bible in this way are experiencing a very different book than Christians who find most of the Pentateuch extremely dull and obscure. The early biographers of Muhammad constantly describe the wonder and shock felt by the Arabs when they heard the Koran for the first time. Many were converted on the spot, believing that God alone could account for the extraordinary beauty of the language. Frequently a convert would describe the experience as a divine invasion that tapped buried yearnings and released a flood of feelings. Thus the young Qurayshi Umar ibn al-Khattab had been a virulent opponent of Muhammad; he had been devoted to the old paganism and ready to assassinate the Prophet. But this Muslim Saul of Tarsus was converted not by a vision of Jesus the Word but by the Koran. There are two versions of his conversion story, both worthy of note. The first has Umar discovering his sister, who had secretly become a Muslim, listening to a recitation of a new sura. “What was that balderdash?” he had roared angrily as he strode into the house, knocking poor Fatimah to the ground. But when he saw that she was bleeding, he probably felt ashamed because his face changed. He picked up the manuscript, which the visiting Koran reciter had dropped in the commotion, and, being one of the few Qurayshis who were literate, he started to read. Umar was an acknowledged authority on Arabic oral poetry and was consulted by poets as to the precise significance of the language, but he had never come across anything like the Koran. “How fine and noble is this speech!” he said wonderingly, and was instantly converted to the new religion of al-Lah. 18 The beauty of the words had reached through his reserves of hatred and prejudice to a core of receptivity that he had not been conscious of. We have all had a similar experience, when a poem touches a chord of recognition that lies at a level deeper than the rational. In the other version of Umar’s conversation, he encountered Muhammad one night at the Kabah, reciting the Koran quietly to himself before the shrine.

• From A History of God (1993)

  When Denys talks about ecstasy, he is not referring to a peculiar state of mind or an alternative form of consciousness achieved by an obscure yogic discipline. This is something that every Christian can manage in this paradoxical method of prayer and theoria. It will stop us talking and bring us to the place of silence: “As we plunge into that darkness which is beyond intellect, we shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.”55 Like Gregory of Nyssa, he found the story of Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai instructive. When Moses had climbed the mountain, he did not see God himself on the summit but had only been brought to the place where God was. He had been enveloped by a thick cloud of obscurity and could see nothing: thus everything that we can see or understand is only a symbol (the word Denys uses is “paradigm”) which reveals the presence of a reality beyond all thought. Moses had passed into the darkness of ignorance and thus achieved union with that which surpasses all understanding: we will achieve a similar ecstasy that will “take us out of ourselves” and unite us to God. This is only possible because, as it were, God comes to meet us on the mountain. Here Denys departs from Neoplatonism, which perceived God as static and remote, entirely unresponsive to human endeavor. The God of the Greek philosophers was unaware of the mystic who occasionally managed to achieve an ecstatic union with him, whereas the God of the Bible turns toward humanity. God also achieves an “ecstasy” which takes him beyond himself to the fragile realm of created being: And we must dare to affirm (for it is the truth) that the Creator of the universe himself, in his beautiful and good yearning towards the universe … is transported outside himself in his providential activities towards all things that have being … and so is drawn from his transcendent throne above all things to dwell within the heart of all things, through an ecstatic power that is above being and whereby he yet stays within himself.56 Emanation had become a passionate and voluntary outpouring of love, rather than an automatic process. Denys’s way of negation and paradox was not just something that we do but something that happens to us.