Bewilderment

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 Martin Luther (2016)

  In fact, Luther came to believe that the very idea that mere human reason could do so was not merely wrong but was a hubristic folly. How with human words and thoughts could we bridge the infinite distance between man and God, between earth and heaven? Was this not by definition impossible? Wasn’t the attempt to do so—to build an impossibly high ladder of dead men’s bones stretching toward the pearly gates—by definition a fool’s errand and even a diabolical enterprise? Was this project not simply the Tower of Babel in another guise? It was true that Aristotle and philosophy and reason could take us to the top of a very high mountain. But what then? They could not fashion wings for us, with which we could fly the rest of the way to God. They would leave us stranded on the top of the mountain. We could stretch and strain all we liked, but we would never touch the blueness of the sky itself. God must bring the sky to us, and therefore it must be divine revelation initiated by God to bridge this most unbridgeable of all gulfs. So Luther was puzzled. Why had the church swallowed Aristotle’s thinking along these lines for so many centuries and baptized human philosophy as though it could do what it plainly could not? Answering this very important question would occupy Luther for some time to come.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  With typical élan and nuance, Erasmus eloquently laid out every aspect of the arguments. In even more classically Erasmian fashion, he took a firm stand against taking a firm stand, asserting that the question of whether free will existed could never truly be settled. He said that the idea that Luther had demonstrated free will did not exist was simply wrong. Besides, there was enough in the Old Testament to make the case for free will, and the church fathers—whose points of view were further recommended by their lives of great holiness (he said pointedly)—had also believed free will existed. So there. Also, there was no way of saying exactly whether free will might not play at least some role in our salvation, however small—although Erasmus rightly qualified this by saying that no matter what we did that could be construed as good, we would nonetheless be obliged to give the glory to God and to ascribe whatever good we did to God’s grace. But did this actually mean there was no such thing as free will? He doubted it. This was the mystery of it all, but Erasmus was not uncomfortable with that mystery. If there was a mystery, there was a mystery. Why force an inscrutable text to say something because we were uncomfortable with its inscrutability? On this and some other issues, the only honest way out was to let them stand as mysteries about which we could only say so much. Luther’s thesis was therefore one with many things to recommend it, but the simple and forced finality of it bore the stamp of wishful exaggeration.*6 Erasmus also felt that some truths were better quietly kept away from the public at large, and Luther’s explosive idea that free will doesn’t exist—and that what one does therefore doesn’t matter toward salvation one way or another—could lead to tremendous misunderstanding, which could lead to social decay. From his point of view, this social decay was already happening because of Luther’s teachings and Luther ought to be far more concerned about that. It was one thing to be against pharisaical and strained piety and another to let wildness and immorality reign and caper about. No one wished people to be puffed up with religious pride, but neither should one invite Dionysus with his thyrsus into St. Peter’s to lead maenads in bacchanalian revelry. The woeful news coming out of Germany indicated that this was happening already. So to say free will did not exist was not an open-and-shut case, and the suggestion that it was was not merely a theological error but an error that could harm the faithful, who did not understand such arcane theological points and whose lives—and, infinitely more important, whose eternal future—would suffer as a result.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Zwickau had already been solidly receptive to Luther’s teachings for a couple of years, so reformation had taken root there rather quickly. But there were far more radical roilings there too, most of them instigated by an especially colorful radical named Thomas Müntzer, who claimed Luther as his spiritual father. But Müntzer had dark depths of which Luther knew nothing just yet. This was why Luther had felt quite comfortable in recommending him for a post in Zwickau at St. Mary’s Church and did so. But it was in Zwickau that Müntzer fell in with the weaver Nicholas Storch. Described as “lean and goggle-eyed,”7 Storch had an uncanny ability to draw listeners into his eccentric, ethereal orbit. He spoke of mystical visions and revelations, and before anyone knew it, he and Müntzer were attracting many glassy-eyed adherents and diverging not only from the Catholicism of Rome but from the Reformation of Luther and the Bible too. Müntzer publicly praised Storch from the pulpit and deputized him to conduct secret meetings so that he could teach others this more direct pathway to God. In fact, he was convinced there were several clear spiritual stages by which one mystically achieved the “righteousness of God.” First, he said, there was “amazement” and then “disengagement,” and then “contemplation,” and then “endurance,” and then one finally achieved “the righteousness of God” itself. Not only was this not in any way biblical, but it seemed the precise inverse of everything Luther had taken such pains to teach. One must run from the idea of climbing up a ladder of “religious works” to God. That was the clear lesson of his failed monastic efforts. One only realized one could not climb to God and then via the miraculous door opened by faith, God came to you. But there was no one in Zwickau to point this out, so these men continued swimming in these rarefied and confused theological waters. Rumors flew that they were about to appoint twelve apostles to preach their new gospel—and seventy-two further disciples—just as Jesus had done.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Still, the main question remains: How is it that someone so very focused on the love and grace of God for so much of his life could come to say things that seem to contradict what he said earlier in life? It almost beggars belief, but because we have the texts and cannot avoid them, these writings force us to ask whether a person’s life can be seen as a whole or must be taken in parts, as though we were not one person who can be perceived as a single person throughout our lives, but can be some concatenation of persons spread throughout our lifetimes. If the devil was at work in Luther’s weaknesses—in his body and mind and soul—in tempting Luther to write such things, he could never have been more effective. If he had bided his time those many years only to tempt Luther to give in to his basest emotions, he was successful, for what he accomplished not merely would help the Nazis justify what they did to the Jews, which is itself the standard by which we measure human evil, but also would cause millions to read with a jaundiced eye every good thing Luther had ever written before. It is all a disorienting Möbius strip of contradictions. Thus making sense of his late statements against the Jews seems impossible. Half of what Luther wrote in that lamentable pamphlet was based on things he obviously earnestly believed, but which we now know to be untrue. For example, much of what he wrote took its lead from books such as Victory over the Godless Hebrews, written by a Carthusian monk named Salvagus Porchetus around 1300. According to this and other books, Jews blasphemed against Jesus and Mary, which Luther felt must not be tolerated. Modern shibboleths regarding freedoms of speech and religion were unthinkable in his day, and Luther felt that not to expel the Jews from Saxony was in some way to aid and abet such blasphemies. The Porchetus book catalogs one of the blasphemies against Jesus as the accusation that he had used kabbalistic magic to perform his miracles—until he was at last exposed and executed. In these writings, Mary was called a “whore” or a “dung heap” and was said to have given birth to Jesus while menstruating. Porchetus—and therefore Luther—believed that all Jews hoped their true Messiah would come and slay all the Christians. Luther also believed that Jews really did poison wells and abduct children for ritual murders and that they would lead others away from Christ with these terrible lies, which for him was the worst thing imaginable.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The Sacramentarian ControversyWhereas the blowup with Erasmus concerned the issue of free will, the next controversy in Luther’s widely controversial life concerned the nature of the Lord’s Supper, and this time the challengers came not from those who sided with the pope but from within the ranks of the Reformation. It concerned the nature of the elements—the bread and the wine—at the Eucharist. In the Gospels, Jesus at the Last Supper said, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.”10 In both cases, he was holding things that appeared to be other than his body and his blood. He was holding first bread and then wine. So the question at issue was, when he said “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” what exactly did he mean? This whole controversy—over which much genuine blood was eventually spilled and many bodies broken—all depended on what the meaning of the word “is” is. The Catholic church had always taught that the priest was able via his singular spiritual authority to transform the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood—literally. When he prayed over the elements during Mass, they somehow became the actual body and blood of Jesus.* This is known as the doctrine of transubstantiation. Luther disagreed with this doctrine, holding that the plain meaning of Scripture must be grasped, and no more or less. Jesus said that the bread was his body and the wine was his blood (“This is my body,” and “This is my blood”). He did not say, “This bread will become my body” or “This wine will soon be my blood.” Rather he simply said, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.” Luther said that when a Christian in faith says these words, the body and blood of Christ are present, because he has spoken these words of Jesus in faith. Whatever the Scripture says is true and needn’t be finessed into being merely a symbol or a metaphor. Luther called this doctrine the Real Presence. Jesus really was genuinely present in the elements. He did not become present when a priest prayed, but he was present when we believed in the words he spoke. The Word of God was true, and believing that—faith in the Word—was all that mattered. So it was the faith of the believer in the Word of God—and not the transforming words of any priest—that effected the change. But others in the Reformation disagreed. The first of these was Karlstadt, but more significant to this issue was Huldrych Zwingli of Switzerland, who said that the word “is” actually meant “signifies.” Zwingli claimed this had been revealed to him in a dream and that what Karlstadt believed on this issue had not influenced him. But these differences mattered profoundly to the men who argued about them.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther and the JewsWithout question, one of the most bizarre episodes of Luther’s life concerns his writings at the very end of his life on the subject of the Jews. No scholar in five centuries has been able to make sense of the worst of what he said, mainly because it flatly contradicts much of what he had written on the subject earlier in his life. In fact, early in life Luther hoped that the Reformation would help many of the European Jews see that the Christians who had so mistreated and reviled them were not actual Christians at all, but were merely Gentile hypocrites. In 1519, he wondered why Jews would ever consider converting to the Christian faith given the “cruelty and enmity we wreak on them—that in our behavior towards them we less resemble Christians than beasts.” In 1523, he wrote a treatise titled “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew” in which he wrote, If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian. They have dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs rather than human beings, they have done little else than deride them and seize their property.8 But the perplexing irony is that in his bilious later years, Luther seemed to be advocating precisely this and worse. In his superlatively intemperate and vile On the Jews and Their Lies, he angrily advocates setting fire to their synagogues, destroying their houses, and even confiscating their prayer books and money. Whatever leanings Luther had toward religious liberty are here flushed into the sea, and we are left to wonder how it could be possible that the same person could write things that not only are different from but seem violently to contradict each other. If it hadn’t been for the Nazis, almost no one would ever have heard of these writings. When Luther wrote them, he had little idea that four centuries in the future a political malevolence would rise up in his beloved Germany and that its most diabolical proponents would ferret out from the mountains of his writings those few passages of his most injudicious writings to aid their cause. Or that that diabolical cause would end with the murder of six million Jewish noncombatants in as cold-blooded and calculated a manner as anything in the history of the world. That the Nazis’ cynical master of propaganda would find the few vile words Luther had written against Jews and broadcast them to the world, ignoring the 110 volumes of Luther’s other writings, is of course fathomlessly cynical. Even at the time, those who knew Luther’s other works very well either were unaware of this pamphlet or simply ignored it, feeling that it was such a strange outlier it could hardly be understood rationally.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Once that Word has been spoken, as it were, the Father remains silent: there is nothing that we can say about him, since the only God we know is the Logos or Son. The Father, therefore, has no identity, no “I” in the normal sense, and confounds our notion of personality. At the very source of Being is the Nothing glimpsed not only by Denys but also by Plotinus, Philo and even the Buddha. Since the Father is commonly presented as the End of the Christian quest, the Christian journey becomes a progress toward no place, no where and No One. The idea of a personal God or a personalized Absolute has been important to humanity: Hindus and Buddhists had to permit the personalistic devotionalism of bhakti. But the paradigm or symbol of the Trinity suggests that personalism must be transcended and that it is not enough to imagine God as man writ large, behaving and reacting in much the same way as we ourselves. The doctrine of the Incarnation can be seen as another attempt to neutralize the danger of idolatry. Once “God” is seen as a wholly other reality “out there,” he can easily become a mere idol and a projection, which enables human beings to externalize and worship their own prejudice and desires. Other religious traditions have attempted to prevent this by insisting that the Absolute is somehow bound up with the human condition, as in the Brahman-Atman paradigm. Arius—and later Nestorius and Eutyches—all wanted to make Jesus either human or divine, and they were resisted partly because of this tendency to keep humanity and divinity in separate spheres. True, their solutions were more rational, but dogma—as opposed to kerygma—should not be confined by the wholly explicable, any more than poetry or music. The doctrine of the Incarnation—as fumblingly expressed by Athanasius and Maximus—was an attempt to articulate the universal insight that “God” and man must be inseparable. In the West, where the Incarnation was not formulated in this way, there has been a tendency for God to remain external to man and an alternative reality to the world that we know. Consequently, it has been all too easy to make this “God” a projection, which has recently become discredited. Yet by making Jesus the only avatar, we have seen that Christians would adopt an exclusive notion of religious truth: Jesus was the first and last Word of God to the human race, rendering future revelation unnecessary. Consequently, like Jews, they were scandalized when a prophet arose in Arabia during the seventh century who claimed to have received a direct revelation from their God and to have brought a new scripture to his people.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Again, he was not at all interested in finding a scientific explanation of the universe or attempting to explain the physical origins of life; instead of looking outside the world for an objective explanation, Plotinus urged his disciples to withdraw into themselves and begin their exploration in the depths of the psyche. Human beings are aware that something is wrong with their condition; they feel at odds with themselves and others, out of touch with their inner nature and disoriented. Conflict and a lack of simplicity seem to characterize our existence. Yet we are constantly seeking to unite the multiplicity of phenomena and reduce them to some ordered whole. When we glance at a person, we do not see a leg, an arm, another arm and a head, but automatically organize these elements into an integrated human being. This drive for unity is fundamental to the way our minds work and must, Plotinus believed, also reflect the essence of things in general. To find the underlying truth of reality, the soul must refashion itself, undergo a period of purification ( katharsis ) and engage in contemplation ( theoria ), as Plato had advised. It will have to look beyond the cosmos, beyond the sensible world and even beyond the limitations of the intellect to see into the heart of reality. This will not be an ascent to a reality outside ourselves, however, but a descent into the deepest recesses of the mind. It is, so to speak, a climb inward. The ultimate reality was a primal unity, which Plotinus called the One. All things owe their existence to this potent reality. Because the One is simplicity itself, there was nothing to say about it: it had no qualities distinct from its essence that would make ordinary description possible. It just was . Consequently, the One is nameless: “If we are to think positively of the One,” Plotinus explained, “there would be more truth in Silence.” 46 We cannot even say that it exists, since as Being itself, it is “not a thing but is distinct from all things.” 47 Indeed, Plotinus explained, it “is Everything and Nothing; it can be none of the existing things, and yet it is all.” 48 We shall see that this perception will be a constant theme in the history of God. But this Silence cannot be the whole truth, Plotinus argued, since we are able to arrive at some knowledge of the divine. This would be impossible if the One had remained shrouded in its impenetrable obscurity.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Thus the Trinity must not be interpreted in a literal manner; it was not an abstruse “theory” but the result of theoria, contemplation. When Christians in the West became embarrassed by this dogma during the eighteenth century and tried to jettison it, they were trying to make God rational and comprehensible to the Age of Reason. This was one of the factors that would lead to the so-called Death of God in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we shall see. One of the reasons why the Cappadocians evolved this imaginative paradigm was to prevent God from becoming as rational as he was in Greek philosophy, as understood by such heretics as Arius. The theology of Arius was a little too clear and logical. The Trinity reminded Christians that the reality that we called “God” could not be grasped by the human intellect. The doctrine of the Incarnation, as expressed at Nicaea, was important but could lead to a simplistic idolatry. People might start thinking about God himself in too human a way: it might even be possible to imagine “him” thinking, acting and planning like us. From there, it was only a very short step to attributing all kinds of prejudiced opinions to God and thus making them absolute. The Trinity was an attempt to correct this tendency. Instead of seeing it as a statement of fact about God, it should, perhaps, be seen as a poem or a theological dance between what is believed and accepted by mere mortals about “God” and the tacit realization that any such statement or kerygma could only be provisional. The difference between the Greek and the Western use of the word “theory” is instructive. In Eastern Christianity, theoria would always mean contemplation. In the West, “theory” has come to mean a rational hypothesis which must be logically demonstrated. Developing a “theory” about God implied that “he” could be contained in a human system of thought. There had only been three Latin theologians at Nicaea. Most Western Christians were not up to this level of discussion and, since they would not understand some of the Greek terminology, many felt unhappy with the doctrine of the Trinity. Perhaps it was not wholly translatable into another idiom. Every culture has to create its own idea of God. If Westerners found the Greek interpretation of the Trinity alien, they would have to come up with a version of their own. The Latin theologian who defined the Trinity for the Latin Church was Augustine. He was also an ardent Platonist and devoted to Plotinus and was, therefore, more sympathetically disposed to this Greek doctrine than some of his Western colleagues. As he explained, misunderstanding was often simply due to terminology:

• From A History of God (1993)

  My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in kindergarten. Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed. People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was formed in infancy. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years. Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions. When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that “he” would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified, but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings, and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The story of Elijah contains the last mythical account of the past in the Jewish scriptures. Change was in the air throughout the Oikumene. The period 800–200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and formative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God,” like the other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism. I propose to look briefly at two of these new developments before proceeding in the next chapter to examine the reformed religion of Yahweh. The religious experience of India developed along similar lines, but its different emphasis will illuminate the peculiar characteristics and problems of the Israelite notion of God. The rationalism of Plato and Aristotle is also important because Jews, Christians and Muslims all drew upon their ideas and tried to adapt them to their own religious experience, even though the Greek God was very different from their own. In the seventeenth century BCE, Aryans from what is now Iran had invaded the Indus valley and subdued the indigenous population. They had imposed their religious ideas, which we find expressed in the collection of odes known as the Rig-Veda. There we find a multitude of gods, expressing many of the same values as the deities of the Middle East and presenting the forces of nature as instinct with power, life and personality. Yet there were signs that people were beginning to see that the various gods might simply be manifestations of one divine Absolute that transcended them all. Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody—not even the gods—could understand the mystery of existence:

• From A History of God (1993)

  Eventually Athanasius was able to convince Marcellus and his disciples that they should join forces, because they had more in common with one another than with the Arians. Those who said that the Logos was of the same nature as the Father and those who believed that he was similar in nature to the Father were “brethren, who mean what we mean and are disputing only about terminology.”12 The priority must be to oppose Arius, who declared that the Son was entirely distinct from God and of a fundamentally different nature. To an outsider, these theological arguments inevitably seem a waste of time: nobody could possibly prove anything definitively, one way or the other, and the dispute proved to be simply divisive. However, for the participants, this was no arid debate but concerned the nature of the Christian experience. Arius, Athanasius and Marcellus were all convinced that something new had come into the world with Jesus, and they were struggling to articulate this experience in conceptual symbols to explain it to themselves and to others. The words could only be symbolic, because the realities to which they pointed were ineffable. Unfortunately, however, a dogmatic intolerance was creeping into Christianity, which would ultimately make the adoption of the “correct” or orthodox symbols crucial and obligatory. This doctrinal obsession, unique to Christianity, could easily lead to a confusion between the human symbol and the divine reality. Christianity had always been a paradoxical faith: the powerful religious experience of the early Christians had overcome their ideological objections to the scandal of a crucified Messiah. Now at Nicaea the Church had opted for the paradox of the Incarnation, despite its apparent incompatibility with monotheism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In Christianity, the most personalized of the three, the relationship with God is characterized by love. But the point of love is that the ego has, in some sense, to be annihilated. In either dialogue or love, egotism is a perpetual possibility. Language itself can be a limiting faculty since it embeds us in the concepts of our mundane experience. The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial, sacred time of myth. When monotheists turned to mysticism, however, mythology reasserted itself as the chief vehicle of religious experience. There is a linguistic connection between the three words “myth,” “mysticism” and “mystery.” All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence. 1 They are not popular words in the West today. The word “myth,” for example, is often used as a synonym for a lie: in popular parlance, a myth is something that is not true. A politician or a film star will dismiss scurrilous reports of their activities by saying that they are “myths” and scholars will refer to mistaken views of the past as “mythical.” Since the Enlightenment, a “mystery” has been seen as something that needs to be cleared up. It is frequently associated with muddled thinking. In the United States, a detective story is called a “mystery” and it is of the essence of this genre that the problem be solved satisfactorily. We shall see that even religious people came to regard “mystery” as a bad word during the Enlightenment. Similarly “mysticism” is frequently associated with cranks, charlatans or indulgent hippies. Since the West has never been very enthusiastic about mysticism, even during its heyday in other parts of the world, there is little understanding of the intelligence and discipline that are essential to this type of spirituality. Yet there are signs that the tide may be turning. Since the 1960s Western people have been discovering the benefits of certain types of Yoga, and religions such as Buddhism, which have the advantage of being uncontaminated by an inadequate theism, have enjoyed a great flowering in Europe and the United States. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell on mythology has enjoyed a recent vogue. The current enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the West can be seen as a desire for some kind of mysticism, for we shall find arresting similarities between the two disciplines. Mythology has often been an attempt to explain the inner world of the psyche, and both Freud and Jung turned instinctively to ancient myths, such as the Greek story of Oedipus, to explain their new science. It may be that people in the West are feeling the need for an alternative to a purely scientific view of the world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.24 Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians continue to find that the contemplation of the Trinity is an inspiring religious experience. For many Western Christians, however, the Trinity is simply baffling. This could be because they consider only what the Cappadocians would have called its kerygmatic qualities, whereas for the Greeks it was a dogmatic truth that was only grasped intuitively and as a result of religious experience. Logically, of course, it made no sense at all. In an earlier sermon, Gregory of Nazianzus had explained that the very incomprehensibility of the dogma of the Trinity brings us up against the absolute mystery of God; it reminds us that we must not hope to understand him.25 It should prevent us from making facile statements about a God who, when he reveals himself, can only express his nature in an ineffable manner. Basil also warned us against imagining that we could work out the way in which the Trinity operated, so to speak: it was no good, for example, attempting to puzzle out how the three hypostases of the Godhead were at one and the same time identical and distinct. This lay beyond words, concepts and human powers of analysis.26

• From A History of God (1993)

  One of these distant heroes, venerated in Babylon as an example of patience in suffering, was Job. After the exile, one of the survivors used this old legend to ask fundamental questions about the nature of God and his responsibility for the sufferings of humanity. In the old story, Job had been tested by God; because he had borne his unmerited sufferings with patience, God had rewarded him by restoring his former prosperity. In the new version of the Job story, the author split the old legend in half and made Job rage against God’s behavior. Together with his three comforters, Job dares to question the divine decrees and engages in a fierce intellectual debate. For the first time in Jewish religious history, the religious imagination had turned to speculation of a more abstract nature. The prophets had claimed that God had allowed Israel to suffer because of its sins; the author of Job shows that some Israelites were no longer satisfied by the traditional answer. Job attacks this view and reveals its intellectual inadequacy, but God suddenly cuts into his furious speculation. He reveals himself to Job in a vision, pointing to the marvels of the world he has created: how could a puny little creature like Job dare to argue with the transcendent God? Job submits, but a modern reader, who is looking for a more coherent and philosophical answer to the problem of suffering, will not be satisfied with this solution. The author of Job is not denying the right to question, however, but suggesting that the intellect alone is not equipped to deal with these imponderable matters. Intellectual speculation must give way to a direct revelation from God such as the prophets received.

• From A History of God (1993)

  After the schism, Greeks and Latins took divergent paths. In Greek Orthodoxy, theologia, the study of God, remained precisely that. It was confined to the contemplation of God in the essentially mystical doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. They would find the idea of a “theology of grace” or a “theology of the family” contradictions in terms: they were not particularly interested in theoretical discussions and definitions of secondary issues. The West, however, was increasingly concerned to define these questions and to form a correct opinion that was binding on everybody. The Reformation, for example, divided Christendom into yet more warring camps because Catholics and Protestants could not agree on the mechanics of how salvation happened and exactly what the Eucharist was. Western Christians continually challenged the Greeks to give their opinion on these contentious issues, but the Greeks lagged behind and, if they did reply, their answer frequently sounded rather cobbled together. They had become distrustful of rationalism, finding it an inappropriate tool for the discussion of a God who must elude concepts and logic. Metaphysics was acceptable in secular studies, but increasingly Greeks felt that it could endanger the faith. It appealed to the more talkative, busy part of the mind, whereas their theoria was not an intellectual opinion but a disciplined silence before the God who could only be known by means of religious and mystical experience. In 1082, the philosopher and humanist John Italos was tried for heresy because of his excessive use of philosophy and his Neoplatonic conception of creation. This deliberate withdrawal from philosophy happened shortly before al-Ghazzali had his breakdown in Baghdad and quit Kalam in order to become a Sufi. It is, therefore, poignant and ironic that Western Christians should have begun to get down to Falsafah at the precise moment when Greeks and Muslims were starting to lose faith in it. Plato and Aristotle had not been available in Latin during the Dark Ages, so inevitably the West had been left behind. The discovery of philosophy was stimulating and exciting. The eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury, whose views on the Incarnation we discussed in Chapter 4, seemed to think that it was possible to prove anything. His God was not Nothing but the highest being of all. Even the unbeliever could form an idea of a supreme being, which was “one nature, highest of all the things that are, alone sufficient unto itself in eternal beatitude.” 28 Yet he also insisted that God could only be known in faith. This is not as paradoxical as it might appear.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Diderot himself denied that he was an atheist. He simply said that he did not care whether God existed or not. When Voltaire objected to his book, he replied: “I believe in God, although I live very well with the atheists.… It is … very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but to believe or not to believe in God is not important at all.” With unerring accuracy, Diderot had put his finger on the essential point. Once “God” has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, “he” does not exist. As Diderot pointed out in the same letter, it was pointless to believe in the God of the philosophers who never interferes with the affairs of the world. The Hidden God had become Deus Otiosus: “Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.”66 He had come to the opposite conclusion to Pascal, who had seen the wager as of supreme importance and utterly impossible to ignore. In his Pensées Philosophiques, published in 1746, Diderot had dismissed Pascal’s religious experience as too subjective: he and the Jesuits had both been passionately concerned with God but had very different ideas about him. How to choose between them? Such a “God” was nothing but tempérament. At this point, three years before the publication of A Letter to the Blind, Diderot did believe that science—and science alone—could refute atheism. He evolved an impressive new interpretation of the argument from design. Instead of examining the vast motion of the universe, he urged people to examine the underlying structure of nature. The organization of a seed, a butterfly or an insect was too intricate to have happened by accident. In the Pensées Diderot still believed that reason could prove the existence of God. Newton had got rid of all the superstition and foolishness of religion: a God who worked miracles was on a par with the goblins with which we frighten our children. Three years later, however, Diderot had come to question Newton and was no longer convinced that the external world provided any evidence for God. He saw clearly that God had nothing whatever to do with the new science. But he could only express this revolutionary and inflammatory thought in fictional terms. In A Letter to the Blind, Diderot imagined an argument between a Newtonian, whom he called “Mr. Holmes,” and Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739), the late Cambridge mathematician who had lost his sight as a baby. Diderot makes Saunderson ask Holmes how the argument from design could be reconciled with such “monsters” and accidents as himself, who demonstrated anything but intelligent and benevolent planning: What is this world, Mr. Holmes, but a complex, subject to cycles of change, all of which show a continual tendency to destruction: a rapid succession of beings that appear one by one, flourish and disappear; a merely transitory symmetry and a momentary appearance of order.67

• From A History of God (1993)

  As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God. It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable, yet was also the most obvious fact of life in the world: totally self-evident, it required no definition but was perceived by everybody as the element that made life possible. It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged to material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves. In Suhrawardi’s emanationist cosmology, the Light of Lights corresponded to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs, which was utterly simple. It generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending hierarchy; each light, recognizing its dependency upon the Light of Lights, developed a shadow-self that was the source of a material realm, which corresponded to one of the Ptolemaic spheres. This was a metaphor of the human predicament. There was a similar combination of light and darkness within each one of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit (also known, as in Ibn Sina’s scheme, as the Angel Gabriel, the light of our world). The soul longs to be united with the higher world of Lights and, if it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of the time or by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this here below. Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat. He had been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but could make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him. Then he had a vision of the Imam, the qutb, the healer of souls: Suddenly I was wrapped in gentleness; there was a blinding flash, then a diaphanous light in the likeness of a human being. I watched attentively and there he was.… He came towards me, greeting me so kindly that my bewilderment faded and my alarm gave way to a feeling of familiarity. And then I began to complain to him of the trouble I had with this problem of knowledge. “Awaken to yourself,” he said to me, “and your problem will be solved.”37 The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very different from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had more in common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into the religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without, illumination would come from within the mystic himself. There was no imparting of facts. Instead, the exercise of the human imagination would enable people to return to God by introducing them to the alam al-mithal, the world of pure images.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable, yet was also the most obvious fact of life in the world: totally self-evident, it required no definition but was perceived by everybody as the element that made life possible. It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged to material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves. In Suhrawardi’s emanationist cosmology, the Light of Lights corresponded to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs, which was utterly simple. It generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending hierarchy; each light, recognizing its dependency upon the Light of Lights, developed a shadow-self that was the source of a material realm, which corresponded to one of the Ptolemaic spheres. This was a metaphor of the human predicament. There was a similar combination of light and darkness within each one of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit (also known, as in Ibn Sina’s scheme, as the Angel Gabriel, the light of our world). The soul longs to be united with the higher world of Lights and, if it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of the time or by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this here below. Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat. He had been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but could make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him. Then he had a vision of the Imam, the qutb, the healer of souls: Suddenly I was wrapped in gentleness; there was a blinding flash, then a diaphanous light in the likeness of a human being. I watched attentively and there he was.... He came towards me, greeting me so kindly that my bewilderment faded and my alarm gave way to a feeling of familiarity. And then I began to complain to him of the trouble I had with this problem of knowledge. “Awaken to yourself,” he said to me, “and your problem will be solved.” 37 The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very different from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had more in common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into the religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without, illumination would come from within the mystic himself. There was no imparting of facts. Instead, the exercise of the human imagination would enable people to return to God by introducing them to the alam al-mithal, the world of pure images. Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane, physical world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the heavenly realm). Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God- religions had ostensibly abandoned.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The idea of the inner and outer man would again be promoted by thinkers like Andreas Karlstadt in Wittenberg and Claus Frey in Strasbourg. If the individual will were united with the Divine will, then God himself dwelled in the believer, providing an inner source of authority. Yet the Theologia also warned against the ‘false freedom’ that could result when people thought they had become vergottlicht — and indeed, Luther later argued that Thomas Mintzer, Karlstadt and other radicals were guilty of false freedom arising from spiritual pride. But whatever his later position, at this point Luther’s ideas seem to have contained a powerful streak of meditative mysti- cism. He read the Theologia deutsch in the crucial years up to 1516, and again between 1516 and 1518 as he began to work through the implica- tions of the Ninety-Five Theses.” At this time, his theology was capa- cious enough to encompass a spiritualising, inward-looking mysticism as well as the rational argument of the Ninety-Five Theses. It took him until Karlstadt’s complete appropriation of Gelassenheit in the years after 1524 to reject this possibility forever. The view of human nature that characterises the Theologia deutsch is also very unlike that of the later Luther who does not habitually distinguish between the inner and outer man; nor does he locate the spirit of God, still less the spirit of the Devil, within the individual. Equally, the mature Luther lacked the denigration of the flesh that was so central to other mystical thinkers, paradoxically, because his estimation of humankind was so low; indeed, man was so sinful that a union with God was not possible. As Luther moved away from the piety of the Theologia deutsch, both Gelassenheit and rejection of the world were lost. Lutheranism separ- ated from the meditative dimension that was such a powerful part of late medieval devotion. Luther’s increasing inclination towards a more intellectual engagement with the Bible may have been part of the change of direction in his thought.