Confusion

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 A History of God (1993)

  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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like Marcellus, many Christians were troubled by the threat to the divine unity. Marcellus seems to have believed that the Logos was only a passing phase: it had emerged from God at the creation, had become incarnate in Jesus and, when the redemption was complete, would melt back into the divine nature, so that the One God would be all in all. 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. In his Life of Antony, the famous desert ascetic, Athanasius tried to show how his new doctrine affected Christian spirituality. Antony, known as the father of monasticism, had lived a life of formidable austerity in the Egyptian desert. Yet in The Sayings of the Fathers, an anonymous anthology of maxims of the early desert monks, he comes across as a human and vulnerable man, troubled by boredom, agonizing over human problems and giving simple, direct advice.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Cappadocians were also anxious to develop the notion of the Holy Spirit, which they felt had been dealt with very perfunctorily at Nicaea: “And we believe in the Holy Spirit” seemed to have been added to Athanasius’s creed almost as an afterthought. People were confused about the Holy Spirit. Was it simply a synonym for God or was it something more? “Some have conceived [the Spirit] as an activity,” noted Gregory of Nazianzus, “some as a creature, some as God and some have been uncertain what to call him.”20 St. Paul had spoken of the Holy Spirit as renewing, creating and sanctifying, but these activities could only be performed by God. It followed, therefore, that the Holy Spirit, whose presence within us was said to be our salvation, must be divine, not a mere creature. The Cappadocians employed a formula that Athanasius had used in his dispute with Arius: God had a single essence (ousia) which remained incomprehensible to us—but three expressions (hypostases) which made him known. Instead of beginning their consideration of God with his unknowable ousia, the Cappadocians began with mankind’s experience of his hypostases. Because God’s ousia is unfathomable, we can only know him through those manifestations which have been revealed to us as Father, Son and Spirit. This did not mean that the Cappadocians believed in three divine beings, however, as some Western theologians imagined. The word hypostasis was confusing to people who were not familiar with Greek, because it had a variety of senses: some Latin scholars like St. Jerome believed that the word hypostasis meant the same as ousia and thought that the Greeks believed in three divine essences. But the Cappadocians insisted that there was an important difference between ousia and hypostasis, which it was essential to bear in mind. Thus the ousia of an object was that which made something what it was; it was usually applied to an object as it was within itself. Hypostasis, on the other hand, was used to denote an object viewed from without. Sometimes the Cappadocians liked to use the word prosopon instead of hypostasis. Prosopon had originally meant “force” but had acquired a number of secondary meanings: thus it could refer to the expression on a person’s face which was an outward depiction of his state of mind; it was also used to denote a role that he had consciously adopted or a character that he intended to act. Consequently, like hypostasis, prosopon meant the exterior expression of somebody’s inner nature, or the individual self as it was presented to an onlooker. So when the Cappadocians said that God was one ousia in three hypostases, they meant that God as he is in himself was One: there was only a single, divine self-consciousness. But when he allows something of himself to be glimpsed by his creatures, he is three prosopoi.

• From A History of God (1993)

  We attain to participation in the divine nature, and yet at the same time it remains totally inaccessible. We need to affirm both at the same time and to preserve the antimony as a criterion for right doctrine.65 There was nothing new in Palamas’s doctrine: it had been outlined during the eleventh century by Symeon the New Theologian. But Palamas was challenged by Barlaam the Calabrian, who had studied in Italy and been strongly influenced by the rationalistic Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas. He opposed the traditional Greek distinction between God’s “essence” and his “energies,” accusing Palamas of splitting God into two separate parts. Barlaam proposed a definition of God that went back to the ancient Greek rationalists and emphasized his absolute simplicity. Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who, Barlaam claimed, had been specially enlightened by God, taught that God was unknowable and remote from the world. It was not possible, therefore, for men and women to “see” God: human beings could only sense his influence indirectly in scripture or the wonders of creation. Barlaam was condemned by a Council of the Orthodox Church in 1341 but was supported by other monks who had also been influenced by Aquinas. Basically this had become a conflict between the God of the mystics and the God of the philosophers. Barlaam and his supporters Gregory Akindynos (who liked to quote the Greek version of the Summa Theologiae), Nicephoras Gregoras and the Thomist Prochoros Cydones had all become alienated from the apophatic theology of Byzantium with its stress on silence, paradox and mystery. They preferred the more positive theology of Western Europe, which defined God as Being rather than as Nothing. Against the mysterious deity of Denys, Symeon and Palamas, they set up a God about which it was possible to make statements. The Greeks had always distrusted this tendency in Western thought and, in the face of this infiltration of rationalistic Latin ideas, Palamas reasserted the paradoxical theology of Eastern Orthodoxy. God must not be reduced to a concept that could be expressed by a human word. He agreed with Barlaam that God was unknowable but insisted that he had nonetheless been experienced by men and women. The light that had transfigured the humanity of Jesus on Mount Tabor was not God’s essence, which no man had seen, but was in some mysterious way God himself. The liturgy which, according to Greek theology, enshrined orthodox opinion, proclaimed that on Tabor: “We have seen the Father as light and the Spirit as light.” It had been a revelation of “what we once were and what we are to be” when, like Christ, we become deified.66 Again, what we “saw” when we contemplated God in this life was not a substitute for God but was somehow God himself. Of course this was a contradiction, but the Christian God was a paradox: antimony and silence represented the only correct posture before the mystery that we called “God”—not a philosophical hubris which tried to iron out the difficulties.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Why was this so important to Luther? There were two principal reasons. First, Luther said that we must believe precisely what the Scriptures said and that when Jesus said “is” there was no way to read it other than “is.” To do so was heresy. We were bound to believe the Word. Yes, it challenged us, but we could not put reason above the Word of God. It was difficult to understand how the bread and the wine could continue looking like bread and wine while being the body and blood of Jesus Christ, but it was also difficult to understand the Trinity and the Incarnation and the Resurrection and many other things, but we were obliged to believe them if that is what the Scriptures said. How it happened that the bread and wine became Christ’s body and blood was as beside the point as how the Holy Spirit fertilized Mary’s egg or how Jesus’s corpse became alive or how he walked through walls and ascended into heaven. It was unlikely we could know how, but we were nonetheless obliged to believe. The second reason this was important to Luther had to do with the very important idea that God did not wish us to have disdain for the physical or the corporeal. According to Luther, the Catholic church of his time and the Gnostics had taught that to be more like God meant to become less physical and more spiritual, to be somehow at war with this world. Luther said that Christ had come into the world to redeem it and he had become a human to redeem humanity. So every material thing in this world, once it was touched by Christ, was redeemed and returned to the “goodness” it originally had before the Fall. So to say that Christ himself could not be present in bread and wine but that the bread and wine must via transubstantiation physically be transformed into the literal body and blood of Jesus (although still looking like bread and wine) was to denigrate the bread and the wine, and the whole material and physical world. According to him, Christ could really be actually present in the bread and the wine without their becoming other than what they were.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  PART IV Being Who You Are Is Not a Disorder Being who you are is not a disorder . Being unloved is not a psychiatric disorder . I can’t find being born in the diagnostic manual . I can’t find being born to a mother incapable of touching you . I can’t find being born on the shock treatment table . Being offered affection unqualified safety and respect when and only when you score pot for your father is not a diagnosis. Putting your head down and crying your way through elementary school is not a mental illness… —Franz Wright, “Pediatric Suicide”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Athanasius was exiled no fewer than five times. It was very difficult to make his creed stick. In particular the term homoousion (literally, “made of the same stuff”) was highly controversial because it was unscriptural and had materialistic association. Thus two copper coins could be said to be homoousion , because both derived from the same substance. Further, Athanasius’s creed begged many important questions. It stated that Jesus was divine but did not explain how the Logos could be “of the same stuff” as the Father without being a second God. In 339 Marcellus, Bishop of Ancyra—a loyal friend and colleague of Athanasius, who had even gone into exile with him on one occasion—argued that the Logos could not possibly be an eternal divine being. He was only a quality or potential inherent within God: as it stood, the Nicene formula could be accused of tritheism, the belief that there were three gods: Father, Son and Spirit. Instead of the controversial homoousion , Marcellus proposed the compromise term homoiousion , of like or similar nature. The tortuous nature of this debate has often excited ridicule, notably by Gibbon, who found it absurd that Christian unity should have been threatened by a mere diphthong. What is remarkable, however, is the tenacity with which Christians held on to their sense that the divinity of Christ was essential, even though it was so difficult to formulate in conceptual terms. Like Marcellus, many Christians were troubled by the threat to the divine unity. Marcellus seems to have believed that the Logos was only a passing phase: it had emerged from God at the creation, had become incarnate in Jesus and, when the redemption was complete, would melt back into the divine nature, so that the One God would be all in all. 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.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Dev nudges me to take him to various places of worship. It’s still a social exercise for me, another maternal duty I hadn’t foreseen. Most places get just one visit. The Hebrew that mesmerizes me at the conservative temple frustrates Dev, who likes the Reform service, though it sometimes sounds to me—with its talk of Middle East strife—more political than spiritual. While I adore the hand-clapping gospel music of the Baptists, the anti-gay diatribe is tough to swallow, ditto the long service. By summer, I figure my half-baked sense of a higher power might resonate with the super-liberal Protestant parishes that shun dogma, but they actually put me off. Church X has the sterile feel of an operating theater. Since the well-off parishioners send their kids to fancy camps, it’s almost totally child-free. The sermon—on justice to one’s fellows—has so squeezed out any mention of God or Jesus, maybe to sound modern, there’s no sense of history. The pastor asks for peace and gives thanks for plenty, but the homily might come from Reader’s Digest. Looking for something to say to the pastor, I ask him how he deals with the problem of evil, and he says, We don’t believe in it—a phrase so obviously untrue, I wonder how they sell it. It’s like a Rotary Club meeting where everybody’s agreed on the agenda in advance and is only waiting for the danish to come out. Lots of professors go to Church Y, so again, I think maybe they’ll rook me in. But where Church X avoids God altogether, Church Y sees gods everywhere, each more or less interchangeable. These gods sound no more potent than the rabbit’s foot Dev carries into the batter’s box on a belt loop. The zendo wants people to sit in silence then chant for five minutes, which Dev could never do. You could be saying jump-rope rhymes, the monk informs me before the service. The breathing of the chants is supposed to relax you into a posture I couldn’t hold for the appointed time if you oil-canned my knees like Oz’s Tin Man. It’s a year before we follow Toby and his wife, Catherine, to their Catholic parish, maybe because I associate their church with the shame of my lapsed pals or the Inquisition’s torture devices. The whole surface of the room is sloppy with kids—toddlers zigzag down the aisles, babies squeak and yell. On the altar, Father Kane is a blue-eyed Irishman who takes us through Mass in the most unvarnished way, with none of the maudlin piety I’ve seen at some other churches and temples.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. In his Life of Antony , the famous desert ascetic, Athanasius tried to show how his new doctrine affected Christian spirituality. Antony, known as the father of monasticism, had lived a life of formidable austerity in the Egyptian desert. Yet in The Sayings of the Fathers , an anonymous anthology of maxims of the early desert monks, he comes across as a human and vulnerable man, troubled by boredom, agonizing over human problems and giving simple, direct advice. In his biography, however, Athanasius presents him in an entirely different light. He is, for example, transformed into an ardent opponent of Arianism; he had already begun to enjoy a foretaste of his future apotheosis, since he shares the divine apatheia to a remarkable degree. When, for example, he emerged from the tombs where he had spent twenty years wrestling with demons, Athanasius says that Antony’s body showed no signs of ageing. He was a perfect Christian, whose serenity and impassibility set him apart from other men: “his soul was unperturbed, and so his outward appearance was calm.” 13 He had perfectly imitated Christ: just as the Logos had taken flesh, descended into the corrupt world and fought the powers of evil, so Antony had descended into the abode of demons. Athanasius never mentions contemplation, which according to such Christian platonists as Clement or Origen had been the means of deification and salvation. It was no longer considered possible for mere mortals to ascend to God in this way by their own natural powers. Instead, Christians must imitate the descent of the Word made flesh into the corruptible, material world. But Christians were still confused: if there was only one God, how could the Logos also be divine? Eventually three outstanding theologians of Cappadocia in eastern Turkey came up with a solution that satisfied the Eastern Orthodox Church. They were Basil, Bishop of Caesarea (ca. 329–79), his younger brother Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (335–95) and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–91). The Cappadocians, as they are called, were all deeply spiritual men.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The scientific discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus might not have disturbed Ismailis, Sufis, Kabbalists or hesychasts, but they did pose problems for those Catholics and Protestants who had embraced the new literalism. How could the theory that the earth moved round the sun be reconciled with the biblical verses: “The world also is established, that it cannot be moved”; “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down and hasteth to his place where he arose”; “He appointed the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth his going down”? 48 Churchmen were highly disturbed by some of Galileo’s suggestions. If, as he said, there could be life on the moon, how could these men have descended from Adam and how had they got out of Noah’s Ark? How could the theory of the motion of the earth be squared with Christ’s ascension into heaven? Scripture said that the heavens and the earth had been created for man’s benefit. How could this be so if, as Galileo claimed, the earth was just another planet revolving around the sun? Heaven and Hell were regarded as real places, which it was difficult to locate in the Copernican system. Hell, for example, was widely believed to be situated at the center of the earth, where Dante had put it. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit scholar who was consulted on the Galileo question by the newly established Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, came down on the side of tradition: “Hell is a subterranean place distinct from the tombs.” He concluded that it must be at the center of the earth, basing his final argument on “natural reason”: The last is natural reason. There is no doubt that it is indeed reasonable that the place of devils and wicked damned men should be as far as possible from the place where angels and blessed men will be forever. The abode of the blessed (as our adversaries agree) is heaven, and no place is further removed from heaven than the center of the earth. 49 Bellarmine’s arguments sound farcical today. Even the most literal Christians no longer imagine that hell is at the center of the earth. But many have been shaken by other scientific theories that find “no room for God” in a sophisticated cosmology. At a time when Mulla Sadra was teaching Muslims that heaven and hell were located in the imaginary world within each individual, sophisticated churchmen such as Bellarmine were strenuously arguing that they had a literal geographic location. When Kabbalists were reinterpreting the biblical account of creation in a deliberately symbolic manner and warning their disciples not to take this mythology literally, Catholics and Protestants were insisting that the Bible was factually true in every detail. This would make the traditional religious mythology vulnerable to the new science and would eventually make it impossible for many people to believe in God at all. The theologians were not preparing their people well for this approaching challenge.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Plotinus (205–270) had studied in Alexandria under Origen’s old teacher Ammonius Saccus and had later joined the Roman army, hoping that it would take him to India, where he was anxious to study. Unfortunately the expedition came to grief and Plotinus fled to Antioch. Later he founded a prestigious school of philosophy in Rome. We know little else about him, since he was an extremely reticent man who never spoke about himself and did not even celebrate his own birthday. Like Celsus, Plotinus found Christianity a thoroughly objectionable creed, yet he influenced generations of future monotheists in all three of the God-religions. It is important, therefore, to give some detailed consideration to his vision of God. Plotinus has been described as a watershed: he had absorbed the main currents of some 800 years of Greek speculation and transmitted it in a form which has continued to influence such crucial figures in our own century as T. S. Eliot and Henri Bergson. Drawing on Plato’s ideas, Plotinus evolved a system designed to achieve an understanding of the self. 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.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Since I’ve just been in Texas to clear out her ex-boyfriend’s belongings that summer, her latest romantic misadventure is fresh in my head. Toby says, This was your mother’s new boyfriend? What happened to the nurse? She got sober. He didn’t, the nurse. That’s the hell of it. She picked this subsequent guy sober. At first Mother described the new guy as a boarder. Ben Barker, his name was. I expected some homely local Joe, but in the picture she sent, Ben towered over Mother with the lean frame of a basketballer. He had steely razor-cut hair and deep blue eyes. A health nut, Ben occupied a room in a house whose curtains were saturated with menthol smoke. He introduced to Mother’s kitchen the Cadillac of vegetable juicers along with a flat of wheatgrass for squeezing all the chlorophyll out of. It’s supposed to clean your liver, Mother told me. It’s filthy stuff to drink. How can you tell your liver’s dirty? I said. That’s what I wanted to know, Mother said. Tell me he’s got a job at least, I said . He’s retired, she said. I thought he was, like, fifty. (Which, by the way, was way younger than Mother.) She told me Ben had done well farming all over the Midwest, but the crop prices kept dropping and he’d sold out. He kept his truck parked in the garage but mostly tooled around the county on a racing bike worthy of the Tour de France. He also had a fancy fiberglass kayak he took out in the bayous at dawn among the alligators and morning glories. He got Mother taking pricey vitamins by the fistful. He wanted her to flush out her nose with salt water snorted from the spout of a porcelain Indian neti pot, but she eschewed that and kept burning cigarillos, though she did sip infusions of Chinese herbs he bought at the Buddhist temple run by Vietnamese monks. One morning Mother called me to ask a question I found strange. Did you ever meet somebody you thought wasn’t who they said they were? I hadn’t. I’d met all manner of strange individuals. But other than a tripped-out guitar player who’d told everybody he was Moses, I’d never met anybody whose stated identity I questioned. How, I asked Mother, had she come to this? Well, she said, he’ll be telling a story, and he’ll say, “The guy said to me, ‘Bill…’” And I’ll say, “But your name’s not Bill; it’s Ben.” At that time the sheriff in our town was a guy I used to steal watermelons with named Stooge. On the phone, Stooge didn’t sound overexercised. Ben Barker’s truck was registered legal in the name he’d given Mother. Stooge doubted the guy was some lost gangster. Lecia told me the guy seemed too well spoken, too well read, to be outright dangerous.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Other Jews went further. In his Fountain of Life, the Neoplatonist Solomon ibn Gabirol (ca. 1022–ca. 1070) could not accept the doctrine of creation ex nihilo but tried to adapt the theory of emanation to allow God some degree of spontaneity and free will. He claimed that God had willed or desired the process of emanation, thereby attempting to make it less mechanical and indicate that God was in control of the laws of existence instead of subject to the same dynamic. But Gabirol failed to explain adequately how matter could derive from God. Others were less innovative. Bahya ibn Pakudah (d. ca. 1080) was not a strict Platonist but retreated to the methods of Kalam whenever it suited him. Thus, like Saadia, he argued that God had created the world at a particular moment. The world had certainly not come into being by accident: that would be as ridiculous an idea as imagining that a perfectly written paragraph came into being when ink was spilled on a page. The order and purposiveness of the world shows that there must be a Creator, as scripture had revealed. Having thus put forward this highly unphilosophical doctrine, Bahya switched from Kalam to Falsafah, listing Ibn Sina’s proof that a Necessary, Simple Being had to exist. Bahya believed that the only people who worshipped God properly were prophets and philosophers. The prophet had a direct, intuitive knowledge of God, the philosopher a rational knowledge of him. Everybody else was simply worshipping a projection of himself, a God made in his own image. They were all like blind men, led by other human beings, if they did not try to prove the existence and unity of God for themselves. Bahya was as elitist as any Faylasuf, but he also had strong Sufi leanings: reason could tell us that God existed but could not tell us anything about him. As its title suggests, Bahya’s treatise Duties of the Heart used reason to help us to cultivate a proper attitude toward God. If Neoplatonism conflicted with his Judaism, he simply jettisoned it. His religious experience of God took precedence over any rationalistic method. But if reason could not tell us anything about God, what was the point of rational discussion of theological matters? This question agonized the Muslim thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), a crucial and emblematic figure in the history of religious philosophy. Born in Khurasan, he had studied Kalam under Juwayni, the outstanding Asharite theologian, to such effect that at the age of thirty-three he was appointed director of the prestigious Nizamiyyah mosque in Baghdad. His brief was to defend Sunni doctrines against the Shii challenge of the Ismailis. Al-Ghazzali, however, had a restless temperament that made him struggle with truth like a terrier, worrying problems to the bitter death and refusing to be content with an easy, conventional answer. As he tells us,

• From A History of God (1993)

  The scientific discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus might not have disturbed Ismailis, Sufis, Kabbalists or hesychasts , but they did pose problems for those Catholics and Protestants who had embraced the new literalism. How could the theory that the earth moved round the sun be reconciled with the biblical verses: “The world also is established, that it cannot be moved”; “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down and hasteth to his place where he arose”; “He appointed the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth his going down”? 48 Churchmen were highly disturbed by some of Galileo’s suggestions. If, as he said, there could be life on the moon, how could these men have descended from Adam and how had they got out of Noah’s Ark? How could the theory of the motion of the earth be squared with Christ’s ascension into heaven? Scripture said that the heavens and the earth had been created for man’s benefit. How could this be so if, as Galileo claimed, the earth was just another planet revolving around the sun? Heaven and Hell were regarded as real places, which it was difficult to locate in the Copernican system. Hell, for example, was widely believed to be situated at the center of the earth, where Dante had put it. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit scholar who was consulted on the Galileo question by the newly established Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, came down on the side of tradition: “Hell is a subterranean place distinct from the tombs.” He concluded that it must be at the center of the earth, basing his final argument on “natural reason”: The last is natural reason. There is no doubt that it is indeed reasonable that the place of devils and wicked damned men should be as far as possible from the place where angels and blessed men will be forever. The abode of the blessed (as our adversaries agree) is heaven, and no place is further removed from heaven than the center of the earth. 49 Bellarmine’s arguments sound farcical today. Even the most literal Christians no longer imagine that hell is at the center of the earth. But many have been shaken by other scientific theories that find “no room for God” in a sophisticated cosmology. At a time when Mulla Sadra was teaching Muslims that heaven and hell were located in the imaginary world within each individual, sophisticated churchmen such as Bellarmine were strenuously arguing that they had a literal geographic location. When Kabbalists were reinterpreting the biblical account of creation in a deliberately symbolic manner and warning their disciples not to take this mythology literally, Catholics and Protestants were insisting that the Bible was factually true in every detail. This would make the traditional religious mythology vulnerable to the new science and would eventually make it impossible for many people to believe in God at all. The theologians were not preparing their people well for this approaching challenge.

• From A History of God (1993)

  I have poked into every dark recess, I have made an assault on every problem, I have plunged into every abyss. I have Scrutinized the creed of every sect, I have tried to lay bare the inmost doctrines of every community. All this I have done that I might distinguish between true and false, between sound tradition and heretical innovation.9 He was searching for the kind of indubitable certainty that a philosopher like Saadia felt, but he became increasingly disillusioned. No matter how exhaustive his research, absolute certainty eluded him. His contemporaries sought God in several ways, according to their personal and temperamental needs: in Kalam, through an Imam, in Falsafah and in Sufi mysticism. Al-Ghazzali seems to have studied each of these disciplines in his attempt to understand “what all things really are in themselves.”10 The disciples of all four of the main versions of Islam that he researched claimed total conviction but, al-Ghazzali asked, how could this claim be verified objectively? Al-Ghazzali was as aware as any modern skeptic that certainty was a psychological condition that was not necessarily objectively true. Faylasufs said that they acquired certain knowledge by rational argument; mystics insisted that they had found it through the Sufi disciplines; Ismailis felt that it was only found in the teachings of their Imam. But the reality that we call “God” cannot be tested empirically, so how could we be sure that our beliefs were not mere delusions? The more conventionally rational proofs failed to satisfy al-Ghazzali’s strict standards. The theologians of Kalam began with propositions found in scripture, but these had not been verified beyond reasonable doubt. The Ismailis depended upon the teachings of a hidden and inaccessible Imam, but how could we be certain that the Imam was divinely inspired, and if we cannot find him what is the point of this inspiration? Falsafah was particularly unsatisfactory. Al-Ghazzali directed a considerable part of his polemic against al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. Believing that they could only be refuted by an expert in their own discipline, al-Ghazzali studied Falsafah for three years until he had completely mastered it.11 In his treatise The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he argued that the Faylasufs were begging the question. If Falsafah confined itself to mundane, observable phenomena as in medicine, astronomy or mathematics, it was extremely useful but it could tell us nothing about God. How could anybody prove the doctrine of emanation, one way or the other? By what authority did the Faylasufs assert that God knew only general, universal things rather than particulars? Could they prove this? Their argument that God was too exalted to know the baser realities was inadequate: since when was ignorance about anything excellent? There was no way that any of these propositions could be satisfactorily verified, so the Faylasufs had been irrational and unphilosophical by seeking knowledge that lay beyond the capacity of the mind and could not be verified by the senses.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Further, Athanasius’s creed begged many important questions. It stated that Jesus was divine but did not explain how the Logos could be “of the same stuff” as the Father without being a second God. In 339 Marcellus, Bishop of Ancyra—a loyal friend and colleague of Athanasius, who had even gone into exile with him on one occasion—argued that the Logos could not possibly be an eternal divine being. He was only a quality or potential inherent within God: as it stood, the Nicene formula could be accused of tritheism, the belief that there were three gods: Father, Son and Spirit. Instead of the controversial homoousion, Marcellus proposed the compromise term homoiousion, of like or similar nature. The tortuous nature of this debate has often excited ridicule, notably by Gibbon, who found it absurd that Christian unity should have been threatened by a mere diphthong. What is remarkable, however, is the tenacity with which Christians held on to their sense that the divinity of Christ was essential, even though it was so difficult to formulate in conceptual terms. Like Marcellus, many Christians were troubled by the threat to the divine unity. Marcellus seems to have believed that the Logos was only a passing phase: it had emerged from God at the creation, had become incarnate in Jesus and, when the redemption was complete, would melt back into the divine nature, so that the One God would be all in all.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet the Koran constantly emphasizes the importance of intelligence and understanding, and Ibn Hanbal’s position was somewhat simpleminded. Many Muslims found it perverse and obscurantist. A compromise was found by Abu al-Hasan ibn Ismail al-Ashari (878–941). He had been a Mutazili but was converted to Traditionism by a dream in which the Prophet had appeared to him and urged him to study hadith. Al-Ashari then went to the other extreme, became an ardent Traditionist and preached against the Mutazilah as the scourge of Islam. Then he had another dream, in which Muhammad looked rather irritated and said: “I did not tell you to give up rational arguments but to support the true hadiths!”38 Henceforth al-Ashari used the rationalist techniques of the Mutazilah to promote the agnostic spirit of Ibn Hanbal. Where the Mutazilis claimed that God’s revelation could not be unreasonable, al-Ashari used reason and logic to show that God was beyond our understanding. The Mutazilis had been in danger of reducing God to a coherent but arid concept; al-Ashari wanted to return to the full-blooded God of the Koran, despite its inconsistency. Indeed, like Denys the Areopagite, he believed that paradox would enhance our appreciation of God. He refused to reduce God to a concept that could be discussed and analyzed like any other human idea. The divine attributes of knowledge, power, life and so on were real; they had belonged to God from all eternity. But they were distinct from God’s essence, because God was essentially one, simple and unique. He could not be regarded as a complex being because he was simplicity itself; we could not analyze him by defining his various characteristics or splitting him up into smaller parts. Al-Ashari refused any attempt to resolve the paradox: thus he insisted that when the Koran says that God “sits on his throne,” we must accept that this is a fact even though it is beyond our understanding to conceive of a pure spirit “sitting.” Al-Ashari was trying to find a middle course between deliberate obscurantism and extreme rationalism. Some literalists claimed that if the blessed were going to “see” God in heaven, as the Koran said, he must have a physical appearance. Hisham ibn Hakim went so far as to say that: Allah has a body, defined, broad, high and long, of equal dimensions, radiating with light, of a broad measure in its three dimensions, in a place beyond place, like a bar of pure metal, shining as a round pearl on all sides, provided with color, taste, smell and touch.39

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Right across the empire student numbers collapsed throughout the rest of the 1520s: the University of Greifswald even had to close its doors for a generation. The clergy too was transformed by the evangelical message. The immediate effect of the attack on private Masses was to destroy at a stroke the whole ecclesiastical career structure. And who would now want their sons to enter the Church? Whatever else the Reformation meant, it would entail a massive reduction in the numbers of clergy, culling both the clerical proletariat of priests saying private Masses and the upper clerical ranks with their substantial benefices. Neither priests nor university men had a monopoly on religious truth any longer. Anyone, even the unlettered, could understand the Bible for themselves. In late December 1521, a group of three prophets arrived in Wittenberg from nearby Zwickau, claiming that God spoke to them directly. Nikolaus Storch and Thomas Drechsel were jour- neyman cloth-makers; the third, Markus Thomas or Stiibner, had attended university in Wittenberg, but he was the son of a bathkeeper whose name ‘Stiibner’ betrayed his origins. Because of their close contact with the body, bathkeepers were regarded as dishonourable, their status so low that marriage to a bathkeeper’s child meant social death. Storch had already caused considerable excitement in his home 228 MARTIN LUTHER town where he set up conventicles and stressed the importance of direct revelation. Stiibner, who knew Melanchthon well, argued that infant baptism could not be found in Scripture. The Zwickau prophets represented a new kind of evangelical movement that owed little or nothing to universities. God’s spirit, it seemed, was being poured out onto laypeople to preach and prophesy, bypassing traditional authority.* The sense that these were exceptional times was further heightened by the arrival of the plague in Wittenberg. Confronted with the reality of death, many worried about the state of their souls. Melanchthon, Luther’s representative in the town during his prolonged absence, was thrown into a flurry of indecision. He was unsure what to make of the prophets’ claims that God spoke to them directly, and defended them against the students. At the same time he tried to persuade Spalatin and Friedrich to permit Luther to return: only Luther, he urged, could judge these spirits. He sent the request to the Elector via Spalatin, leaving the letter unsealed so that Spalatin could read it.* Luther for his part was breezily unworried about the prophets, writing to Spalatin: ‘I do not come to Wittenberg, nor do I change my quarters, because of the “Zwickau prophets”, for they don’t disturb me.’ It was easy for Luther to discern spirits, far away in the Wartburg; however, those involved in the frenetic pace of poli- tics and religious reform in Wittenberg found it much more difficult to work out what path to take.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Every Sunday they have some batch of parolees who need jobs, or welfare moms looking for baby clothes. Plus they argue like mad. Say what you will about Catholic dogma, like it or lump it, it sure gets people yakking it up. I confess to this couple that Jesus Himself seems sappy—a chump or fool. For all my pretense of practicing surrender, I can’t grasp signing up for crucifixion. The wife says, Long time ago, I started focusing my faith on the Holy Spirit. She’s the female pronoun in the Greek Bible. C’mon, the husband says. It’s not called Holy Spirit-anity; it’s called Christianity. After Mass one day, I challenge Father Kane on certain aspects of the liturgy that bother me. Missal in hand, I bargain like an insurance salesman to convince him how crappy Jesus is. I say something like, He’s so snotty to the lady at the well. I mean, He’s putting her down for sleeping around. (Worried, I must’ve been, about how He’d have judged any future premarital hilarity of my own.) You think He’s angry? the priest says. I always thought He was joking or teasing her. And she was just shocked He knew that stuff about her life. It’s true. Looking at the text, I’ve overlaid a judgmental tone on the story. Father Kane says, You know the best part, though—or a couple things. She was Samaritan. She could only go to the well in the hottest part of the day. This was like a colored water fountain before the civil rights movement. And Jesus drinks after her—that’s the radical part. The disciples are saying, Why’d you even talk to her? But Jesus didn’t flinch. Father Kane knows that Dev is studying for baptism and first communion, and he asks if I’ve considered doing the same. I unload one of my key deal breakers: I don’t believe the pope is the ultimate religious authority. Father Kane says right back, Maybe someday you will. (Little did I know how outmatched I was with the modest Father Kane, who’d clearly had this kind of talk before.) Grinning, he adds, God’s after you. Struggle all you want. I’m actually a little shocked that he cares whether I convert. Still, I sign up for instruction, claiming it’s for conversations with Dev. But when the lady in charge of classes kicks me out because I have to miss a few for work travel, I run tattle to Father Kane, who sits me in a pew. He claims I’ve already read what they’ll cover in class instruction. He wants to know my impression of Jesus. I say, He was a peasant from a pigsty town who made all the civil and religious authorities so mad they killed Him. But for me, the Resurrection is only a metaphor for renewal. If you can believe He made all this happen—Father Kane waves his hand around the room—right here in our little church, forget Rome and Lourdes and all that. That’s a miracle, right?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Then, dropping the confessional tone and returning to marriage, Luther’s mood suddenly changed. Perhaps, he teased Melanchthon, you are just trying to pay me back, by wishing a wife on me “in order to get even with me for having given you a wife.” Indeed, it was Luther, fearing for the small and sickly-looking Melanchthon, who had found him a wife. “Philipp is marrying Catharina Krapp,” he had written to Johannes Lang in August 1520, “which they say I was the author of. I do for men whatever is best if there are means.” He added insouciantly that he was “not at all bothered by the universal clamor.”28 Catharina brought only a small dowry and was not especially good-looking. It seems that the first years of the union were not happy, with Melanchthon describing marriage as a “servitude.”29 Yet for all his bluster that sexuality was not a problem for him, and his insistence that “flesh” was a broad term, one senses that Luther was confronting his own “flesh.” It is surely significant that here he chose the married man Melanchthon as his confidant, and not the bachelor Spalatin (to whom, by contrast, he had been remarkably frank about his constipation). Moreover, Luther was beginning to discuss his sexual identity by way of examining the relationship with his father.