Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 17 of 267 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  And among the creators is your son Avraham, a road-building bard in Israel. 31 The Zionist no longer needs God; he himself is the creator. Other Zionists retained a more conventional faith. The Kabbalist Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), who served as the Chief Rabbi for Palestinian Jewry, had had little contact with the Gentile world before his arrival in the Land of Israel. He insisted that as long as the concept of serving God was defined as the service of a particular Being, separate from the ideals and duties of religion, it would not be “free from the immature outlook which is always focused in particular beings.” 32 God was not another Being: En Sof transcended all human concepts such as personality. To think of God as a particular being was idolatry and the sign of a primitive mentality. Kook was steeped in Jewish tradition, but he was not dismayed by the Zionist ideology. True, the Laborites believed that they had shaken off religion, but this atheistic Zionism was only a phase. God was at work in the pioneers: the divine “sparks” were trapped in these “husks” of darkness and were awaiting redemption. Whether they thought so or not, Jews were in their essence inseparable from God and were fulfilling God’s plan without realizing it. During the exile, the Holy Spirit had departed from his people. They had hidden the Shekinah away in synagogues and study halls, but soon Israel would become the spiritual center of the world and reveal the true conception of God to the Gentiles. This type of spirituality could be dangerous. The devotion to the Holy Land would give birth to the idolatry of Jewish fundamentalism in our own day. Devotion to historical “Islam” has contributed to a similar fundamentalism in the Muslim world. Both Jews and Muslims were struggling to find meaning in a dark world. The God of history seemed to have failed them. The Zionists had been right to fear the final elimination of their people. For many Jews, the traditional idea of God would become an impossibility after the Holocaust. The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Shabbetai began to sign his letters: “I am the Lord your God, Shabbetai Zevi.” But when he was brought back to Istanbul for his trial, he had fallen once again into a depression. The sultan gave him the choice of conversion to Islam or death: Shabbetai chose Islam and was immediately released. He was given an imperial pension and died as an apparently loyal Muslim on September 17, 1676. Naturally the appalling news devastated his supporters, many of whom instantly lost their faith. The Rabbis attempted to erase his memory from the earth: they destroyed all the letters, pamphlets and tracts about Shabbetai they could find. To this day, many Jews are embarrassed by this Messianic debacle and find it hard to deal with. Rabbis and rationalists alike have downplayed its significance. Recently, however, scholars have followed the late Gershom Scholem in trying to understand the meaning of this strange episode and its more significant aftermath. 48 Astonishing as it may seem, many Jews remained loyal to their Messiah, despite the scandal of his apostasy. The experience of redemption had been so profound that they could not believe that God had allowed them to be deluded. It is one of the most striking instances of the religious experience of salvation taking precedence over mere facts and reason. Faced with the choice of abandoning their newfound hope or accepting an apostate Messiah, a surprising number of Jews of all classes refused to submit to the hard facts of history. Nathan of Gaza devoted the rest of his life to preaching the mystery of Shabbetai: by converting to Islam, he had continued his lifelong battle with the forces of evil. Yet again, he had been impelled to violate the deepest sanctities of his people in order to descend into the realm of darkness to liberate the kelipoth. He had accepted the tragic burden of his mission and descended to the lowest depths to conquer the world of Godlessness from within. In Turkey and Greece, about two hundred families remained loyal to Shabbetai: after his death they decided to follow his example in order to continue his battle with evil and converted to Islam en masse in 1683. They remained secretly loyal to Judaism, keeping in close touch with the Rabbis and congregating in the clandestine synagogues in one another’s houses. In 1689 their leader Jacob Querido made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and the Messiah’s widow declared that he was the reincarnation of Shabbetai Zevi. There is still a small group of Donmeh (apostates) in Turkey, who live outwardly impeccable Islamic lives but cling passionately to their Judaism in secret.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But where did that leave the honest seeker after truth? Was a sound, unshakable faith in God impossible? The strain of his quest caused al-Ghazzali such personal distress that he had a breakdown. He found himself unable to swallow or to eat and felt overwhelmed by a weight of doom and despair. Finally in about 1094 he found that he could not speak or give his lectures: God shriveled my tongue until I was prevented from giving instruction. So I used to force myself to teach on a particular day for the benefit of my various pupils but my tongue would not utter a single word. 12 He fell into a clinical depression. The doctors rightly diagnosed a deep-rooted conflict and told him that until he was delivered from his hidden anxiety, he would never recover. Fearing that he was in danger of hellfire if he did not recover his faith, al-Ghazzali resigned his prestigious academic post and went off to join the Sufis. There he found what he was looking for. Without abandoning his reason—he always distrusted the more extravagant forms of Sufism—al-Ghazzali discovered that the mystical disciplines yielded a direct but intuitive sense of something that could be called “God.” The British scholar John Bowker shows that the Arabic word for existence ( wujud ) derives from the root wajada: “he found.” 13 Literally, therefore, wujud means “that which is findable”: it was more concrete than the Greek metaphysical terms and yet gave Muslims more leeway. An Arabic-speaking philosopher who attempted to prove that God existed did not have to produce God as another object among many. He simply had to prove that he could be found. The only absolute proof of God’s wujud would appear—or not—when the believer came face to face with the divine reality after death, but the reports of such people as the prophets and mystics who claimed to have experienced it in this life should be considered carefully. The Sufis certainly claimed that they had experienced the wujud of God: the word wajd was a technical term for their ecstatic apprehension of God which gave them complete certainty ( yaqin ) that it was a reality, not just a fantasy. Admittedly those reports could be mistaken in their claims, but after living for ten years as a Sufi, al-Ghazzali found that the religious experience was the only way of verifying a reality that lay beyond the reach of the human intellect and cerebral process. The Sufis’ knowledge of God was not a rational or metaphysical knowledge, but it was clearly akin to the intuitive experience of the prophets of old: Sufis thus found the essential truths of Islam for themselves by reliving its central experience. Al-Ghazzali therefore formulated a mystical creed that would be acceptable to the Muslim establishment, who had often looked askance at the mystics of Islam, as we shall see in the following chapter.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Indeed, the man who had done so much to fight for conscience and freedom and against spiritual tyranny was in danger of creating a church that was in some respects less tolerant than the one he had attacked. Other matters also troubled him. At the height of his collapse, and ready to die, Luther had prayed repeatedly to “Christ who shed his blood for us’, addressing God: “You know that there are many, whom you have allowed now to shed their blood for the gospel, and I believed that I would be one who would shed my blood for your name, but I am not worthy of it. Let your will be done.’” These remarks reveal that Luther was again preoccupied with martyrdoms, recent and ongoing.* Just a few months before, on 23 April, Georg Winkler of Halle — an evangelical who had formerly been a close advisor of Albrecht of Mainz — was murdered on his way back from an inter- rogation by the archbishop’s officials.” Luther had heard of his death the week before his collapse, and suspected that Albrecht might have had Winkler assassinated. And another case was worrying him as well. Leonhard Kaiser, a former Catholic cleric who had started to preach Lutheran doctrine in Bavaria, had been arrested, and on his release in 1525 he had gone to study in Wittenberg, where he became well known to Luther and Melanchthon. But then, after eighteen months in Wittenberg, his father fell seriously ill and he had returned home to Bavaria, only to see his father die just a few hours after he arrived. Unwise enough to preach again, Kaiser was soon arrested by the Bavarian duke’s officials as a recidivist heretic, and on 7 March 1527, he was imprisoned once more. Luther and Melanchthon both wrote him letters of spiritual comfort, as did the Saxon Elector. 316 MARTIN LUTHER The news of Kaiser’s imprisonment and impending martyrdom weighed heavily on Luther. In December 1524 “Brother Henry’ — a Dutch Lutheran who had also been a student at Wittenberg and a follower of Karlstadt — had been murdered by hostile peasants. Luther had written a pamphlet about his martyrdom, one of the first of many martyrologies of the Reformation.” His reaction to the Kaiser case, however, was much more emotional and was pervaded by a strong sense of foreboding. On 20 May, a month and a half before his break- down, he wrote to Kaiser, and was in no doubt about what fate awaited him.“ In October, still under the impact of his collapse, Luther continued to write about how he felt ‘unequal’ to Kaiser; he was nothing but a ‘wordy preacher’, whereas ‘Leo’ was a powerful man of action, a ‘lion’ and ‘emperor’ true to his name.* It is not surprising that Luther should have identified with Kaiser. There would be even more surprising parallels as the case unfolded.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Wordsworth used it to describe the spirit which, with true mystical agnosticism, he refused to name because it did not fit into any of the categories he knew. Another mystical poet of the period sounded a more apocalyptic note and announced that God was dead. In his early poetry, William Blake (1757–1827) had used a dialectical method: terms such as “innocence” and “experience,” which seemed diametrically opposed to one another, were discovered to be half-truths of a more complex reality. Blake had transformed the balanced antithesis, which had characterized the rhymed couplets of poetry during the Age of Reason in England, into a method of forging a personal and subjective vision. In Songs of Innocence and Experience, two contrary states of the human soul are both revealed to be inadequate until they are synthesized: innocence must become experience and experience itself fall to the lowest depths before the recovery of true innocence. The poet has become a prophet, “Who Present, Past, & Future, sees” and who listens to the Holy Word that spoke to humanity in primordial time: Calling the lapsèd Soul, And weeping in the evening dew That might controll The starry pole, And fallen, fallen, light renew. 9 Like the Gnostics and Kabbalists, Blake envisaged a state of absolute fallenness. There could be no true vision until human beings recognized their lapsed condition. Like these earlier mystics, Blake was using the idea of an original fall to symbolize a process that is continuously present in the mundane reality about us. Blake had rebelled against the vision of the Enlightenment, which had attempted to systematize truth. He had also rebelled against the God of Christianity, who had been used to alienate men and women from their humanity. This God had been made to promulgate unnatural laws to repress sexuality, liberty and spontaneous joy. Blake railed against the “fearful symmetry” of this inhumane God in “The Tyger,” seeing him as remote from the world in unutterably “distant deeps and skies.” Yet the wholly other God, Creator of the World, undergoes mutation in the poems. God himself has to fall into the world and die in the person of Jesus. 10 He even becomes Satan, the enemy of mankind. Like the Gnostics, Kabbalists and early Trinitarians, Blake envisaged a kenosis, a self-emptying in the Godhead, who falls from his solitary heaven and becomes incarnate in the world. There is no longer an autonomous deity in a world of his own, who demands that men and women submit to an external, heteronymous law. There is no human activity which is alien to God; even the sexuality repressed by the Church is manifest in the passion of Jesus himself. God has died voluntarily in Jesus and the transcendent, alienating God is no more.

• From A History of God (1993)

  All our old conceptions of divinity had to die before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a style in which God could once more become a possibility. Altizer’s theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the dark God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret. Paul Van Buren was more precise and logical. In The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963), he claimed that it was no longer possible to speak of God acting in the world. Science and technology had made the old mythology invalid. Simple faith in the Old Man in the Sky was clearly impossible, but so was the more sophisticated belief of the theologians. We must do without God and hold on to Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel was “the good news of a free man who has set other men free.” Jesus of Nazareth was the liberator, “the man who defines what it means to be a man.” 5 In Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), William Hamilton noted that this kind of theology had its roots in the United States, which had always had a Utopian bent and had no great theological tradition of its own. The imagery of the death of God represented the anomie and barbarism of the technical age, which made it impossible to believe in the biblical God in the old way. Hamilton himself saw this theological mood as a way of being Protestant in the twentieth century. Luther had left his cloister and gone out into the world. In the same way, he and the other Christian radicals were avowedly secular men. They had walked away from the sacred place where God used to be to find the man Jesus in their neighbor out in the world of technology, power, sex, money and the city. Modern secular man did not need God. There was no God-shaped hole within Hamilton: he would find his own solution in the world. There is something rather poignant about this buoyant sixties optimism. Certainly, the radicals were right that the old ways of speaking about God had become impossible for many people, but in the 1990s it is sadly difficult to feel that liberation and a new dawn are at hand. Even at the time, the Death of God theologians were criticized, since their perspective was that of the affluent, middle-class, white American. Black theologians such as James H. Cone asked how white people felt they had the right to affirm freedom through the death of God when they had actually enslaved people in God’s name. The Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein found it impossible to understand how they could feel so positive about Godless humanity so soon after the Nazi Holocaust.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Indeed, by the end of the century, a significant number of people were beginning to feel that if God was not yet dead, it was the duty of rational, emancipated human beings to kill him. The idea of God which had been fostered for centuries in the Christian West now appeared disastrously inadequate, and the Age of Reason seemed to have triumphed over centuries of superstition and bigotry. Or had it? The West had now seized the initiative, and its activities would have fateful consequences for Jews and Muslims, who would be forced to review their own position. Many of the ideologies which rejected the idea of God made good sense. The anthropomorphic, personal God of Western Christendom was vulnerable. Appalling crimes had been committed in his name. Yet his demise was not experienced as a joyous liberation but attended by doubt, dread and, in some cases, agonizing conflict. Some people tried to save God by evolving new theologies to free him from the inhibiting systems of empirical thought, but atheism had come to stay. There was also a reaction against the cult of reason. The poets, novelists and philosophers of the Romantic movement pointed out that a thoroughgoing rationalism was reductive, because it left out the imaginative and intuitive activities of the human spirit. Some reinterpreted dogmas and mysteries of Christianity in a secular way. This reconstituted theology translated the old themes of hell and heaven, rebirth and redemption into an idiom that made them intellectually acceptable to the post-Enlightenment, depriving them of their association with a supernatural Reality “out there.” One of the themes of this “natural supernaturalism,” as the American literary critic M. R. Abrams has called it, 1 was that of the creative imagination. This was seen as a faculty that could engage with external reality in such a way as to create a new truth. The English poet John Keats (1795–1821) put it succinctly: “The imagination is like Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” He was referring to the story of the creation of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost , when, after dreaming of an as yet uncreated reality, Adam had woken to find it in the woman confronting him. In the same letter, Keats had written of the imagination as a sacred faculty: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination—what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.” 2 Reason had only a limited role in this creative process. Keats also described a state of mind which he called “Negative Capability,” “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” 3 Like a mystic, the poet had to transcend reason and hold himself in an attitude of silent waiting. Medieval mystics had described the experience of God in rather the same way.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  25 Reprieve God is the voice that says, “I am not here.” —Don DeLillo, Falling Man A fter sitting through a local hospital talk on getting sober, I approach the thirty-year-old doctor who’d been at the mike the way a thirsty dog approaches a water dish, and she sits with me outside on the hospital steps under a mist-drenched moon. It looks like nothing so much as a dissolving aspirin, vague and bitter at its edges as I feel. As I’d twitched in my seat, shaking and jonesing for a drink, her fresh-scrubbed face and sleek chignon had evoked some pampered childhood full of ballet recitals. But at age thirteen—long before med school—she’d been living on the street, giving blow jobs at the bus terminal for dope. Sober for fourteen years, she’d just finished her residency. And for that, she credits a god I can’t believe in. But I’m desperate enough that night not to struggle so much as before. I tell her how Mother’s radical overhaul for years might be convincing me that sobriety can transform others, just not me. (Thank you, Mother, for saving yourself so conspicuously that it saved us both.) On the moonlit step, the young intern addresses me as I used to speak to the Down syndrome women I taught, so slowly that I can see her tongue move, saying I have a disease. It’s progressive and fatal. I nod. For the first time, the disease idea isn’t just metaphorical, though Joan the Bone had once said (regarding the patience with which she listened to me drone on): When I look at you, I see somebody swathed in bandages. On those cold concrete steps, some black river is rushing through me down to my fingertips. If I close my eyes to ease the headache I get from even the soft moonlight, I can feel the car spin and see the concrete divider hurling toward me. Progressive means, the young doctor goes on, whatever jackpot you just hit last night, whatever blackout, whatever bottom you found—that’s where you go down from. That’s your highlight. The top of the curve. My mouth forms an O and the noise comes out for it’s dawning on me that liquor will never again salve my aches or loosen the knots that bind me so graciously, as it once did. You’ve passed some line where it works, she says. I used to try to figure it out. Maybe it’s how the pancreas handles sugar, or some enzyme we give off when we drink that sets up a craving. But whatever line it is, you’ve crossed it. Somebody who’s crossed the line and craves liquor like you do and wants to keep drinking is like a pickle who wants to be a cucumber again. You can’t. It’s over. And so it hits me: I have to kiss alcohol goodbye—no half measures, no quibbling, no champagne at the wedding, no valium at the dentist, no codeine for the cough.

• From A History of God (1993)

  I seek God!” When the supercilious bystanders asked where he imagined God had gone—had he run away, perhaps, or emigrated?—the madman glared at them. “ ‘Where has God gone?’ he called out. ‘I mean to tell you. We have killed him,—you and I! We are all his murderers!’ ” An unimaginable but irreversible event had torn mankind from its roots, thrown the earth off course and cast it adrift in a pathless universe. Everything that had previously given human beings a sense of direction had vanished. The death of God would lead to unparalleled despair and panic. “Is there still an above and below?” cried the madman in his anguish. “Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?” 17 Nietzsche realized that there had been a radical shift in the consciousness of the West which would make it increasingly difficult to believe in the phenomenon most people described as “God.” Not only had our science made such notions as the literal understanding of creation an impossibility, but our greater control and power made the idea of a divine overseer unacceptable. People felt that they were witnessing a new dawn. Nietzsche’s madman insisted that the death of God would bring about a newer, higher phase of human history. To become worthy of their deicide, human beings would have to become gods themselves. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche proclaimed the birth of the Superman who would replace God; the new enlightened man would declare war upon the old Christian values, trample upon the base mores of the rabble and herald a new, powerful humanity which would have none of the feeble Christian virtues of love and pity. He also turned to the ancient myth of perpetual recurrence and rebirth, found in such religions as Buddhism. Now that God was dead, this world could take his place as the supreme value. Whatever goes comes back; whatever dies blooms again; whatever breaks is joined anew. Our world could be revered as eternal and divine, attributes that had once applied only to the distant, transcendent God. The Christian God, Nietzsche taught, was pitiable, absurd and “a crime against life.” 18 He had encouraged people to fear their bodies, their passions and their sexuality and had promoted a puling morality of compassion which had made us weak. There was no ultimate meaning or value and human beings had no business offering an indulgent alternative in “God.” Again, it must be said that the Western God was vulnerable to this critique. He had been used to alienate people from their humanity and from sexual passion by means of a life- denying asceticism. He had also been made into a facile panacea and an alternative to life here below. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) certainly regarded belief in God as an illusion that mature men and women should lay aside. The idea of God was not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The psychological effect of Christ’s words on the believer was the best proof of the truth of religion. As in Puritanism, an emotional experience of religion was the only proof of genuine faith and hence of salvation. But this mysticism-for- everybody could be dangerous. Mystics had always stressed the perils of the spiritual paths and warned against hysteria: peace and tranquillity were the signs of a true mysticism. This Born-Again Christianity could produce frenzied behavior, as in the violent ecstasies of the Quakers and Shakers. It could also lead to despair: the poet William Cowper (1731–1800) went mad when he no longer felt saved, imagining that this lack of sensation was a sign that he was damned. In the religion of the heart, doctrines about God were transposed into interior emotional states. Thus Count von Zinzendorf, the patron of several religious communities who lived on his estates in Saxony, argued like Wesley that “faith was not in thoughts nor in the head, but in the heart, a light illuminated in the heart.” 29 Academics could go on “chattering about the mystery of the Trinity” but the meaning of the doctrine was not the relations of the three Persons to one another but “what they are to us.” 30 The Incarnation expressed the mystery of the new birth of an individual Christian, when Christ became “the King of the heart.” This emotive type of spirituality had also surfaced in the Roman Catholic Church in the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which established itself in the face of much opposition from the Jesuits and the establishment, who were suspicious of its frequently mawkish sentimentality. It has survived to the present day: many Roman Catholic churches contain a statue of Christ baring his breast to display a bulbous heart surrounded by a nimbus of flames. It was the mode in which he had appeared to Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1647–90) in her convent in Paray-le-Monial, France. There is no resemblance between this Christ and the abrasive figure of the Gospels. In his whining self-pity, he shows the dangers of concentrating on the heart to the exclusion of the head. In 1682 Marguerite-Marie recalled that Jesus appeared to her at the beginning of Lent: covered all over with wounds and bruises.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Luria gave a new meaning to the original image of the exile of the Shekinah. It will be recalled that in the Talmud, the Rabbis had seen the Shekinah voluntarily going into exile with the Jews after the destruction of the Temple. The Zohar had identified the Shekinah with the last sefirah and made it the female aspect of divinity. In Luria’s myth, the Shekinah fell with the other sefiroth when the Vessels were shattered. In the first stage of Tikkun, she had become Nuqrah and by mating with Zeir (the six “Middle” sefiroth) had almost been reintegrated into the divine world. But when Adam sinned, the Shekinah fell once more and went into exile from the rest of the Godhead. Luria was most unlikely to have encountered the writings of those Christian Gnostics who had developed a very similar mythology. He had spontaneously reproduced the old myths of exile and fall to meet the tragic conditions of the sixteenth century. Tales of divine copulation and the exiled goddess had been rejected by the Jews during the biblical period, when they were evolving their doctrine of the One God. Their connection with paganism and idolatry should logically have revolted the Sephardim. Instead, Luria’s mythology was embraced eagerly by Jews from Persia to England, Germany to Poland, Italy to North Africa, Holland to Yemen; recast in Jewish terms, it was able to touch a buried chord and give new hope in the midst of despair. It enabled the Jews to believe that despite the appalling circumstances in which so many of them lived, there was an ultimate meaning and significance.

• From A History of God (1993)

  All the streams of my tears Run their course for you! And the last flame of my heart— It burns up to you! Oh come back My unknown God! My pain! my last—happiness. 20 Like Hegel’s, Nietzsche’s theories were used by a later generation of Germans to justify the policies of National Socialism, a reminder that an atheistic ideology can lead to just as cruel a crusading ethic as the idea of “God.” God had always been a struggle in the West. His demise was also attended by strain, desolation and dismay. Thus in In Memoriam, the great Victorian poem of doubt, Alfred Lord Tennyson recoiled in horror from the prospect of a purposeless, indifferent nature, red in tooth and claw. Published in 1850, nine years before the publication of The Origin of Species, the poem shows that Tennyson had already felt his faith crumbling and himself reduced to An infant crying in the night; An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry. 21 In “Dover Beach,” Matthew Arnold had lamented the inexorable withdrawal of the sea of faith, which left mankind wandering on a darkling plain. The doubt and dismay had spread to the Orthodox world, though the denial of God did not take on the precise lineaments of Western doubt but was more in the nature of a denial of ultimate meaning. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) can be seen to describe the death of God, articulated his own conflict between faith and belief in a letter to a friend, written in March 1854: I look upon myself as a child of the age, a child of unbelief and doubt; it is probable, nay, I know for certain, that I shall remain so to my dying day. I have been tortured with longing to believe—am so, indeed, even now; and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties that stand in the way. 22 His novel is similarly ambivalent. Ivan, described as an atheist by the other characters (who attribute to him the now famous maxim: “If God does not exist, all is permitted”), says unequivocally that he does believe in God. Yet he does not find this God acceptable, since he fails to provide ultimate meaning for the tragedy of life.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Sabellius attracted some disciples, but most Christians were distressed by his theory: it suggested that the impassible God had in some sense suffered when playing the role of the Son, an idea that they found quite unacceptable. Yet when Paul of Samosata, Bishop of Antioch from 260 to 272, had suggested that Jesus had simply been a man, in whom the Word and Wisdom of God had dwelt as in a temple, this was considered equally unorthodox. Paul’s theology was condemned at a synod at Antioch in 264, though he managed to hold on to his see with the support of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. It was clearly going to be very difficult to find a way of accommodating the Christian conviction that Jesus had been divine with the equally strong belief that God was One. When Clement had left Alexandria in 202 to become a priest in the service of the Bishop of Jerusalem, his place at the catechetical school was taken by his brilliant young pupil Origen, who was about twenty years old at the time. As a youth Origen had been passionately convinced that martyrdom was the way to heaven. His father, Leonides, had died in the arena four years earlier, and Origen had tried to join him. His mother, however, saved him by hiding his clothes. Origen had started by believing that the Christian life meant turning against the world, but he later abjured this position and developed a form of Christian Platonism. Instead of seeing an impassible gulf between God and the world, which could only be bridged by the radical dislocation of martyrdom, Origen developed a theology that stressed the continuity of God with the world. His was a spirituality of light, optimism and joy. Step by step, a Christian could ascend the chain of being until he reached God, his natural element and home. As a Platonist, Origen was convinced of the kinship between God and the soul: the knowledge of the divine was natural to humanity. It could be “recollected” and awakened by special disciplines. To adapt his Platonic philosophy to the Semitic scriptures, Origen developed a symbolic method of reading the Bible. Thus the virgin birth of Christ in the womb of Mary was not primarily to be understood as a literal event but as the birth of the divine Wisdom in the soul. He also adopted some of the ideas of the Gnostics. Originally, all the beings in the spiritual world had contemplated the ineffable God who had revealed himself to them in the Logos, the divine Word and Wisdom. But they had grown tired of this perfect contemplation and fallen from the divine world into bodies, which had arrested their fall. All was not lost, however.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels. 1 This essentially mystical experience meant that the God of Pascal was different from the God of the other scientists and philosophers we shall consider in this chapter. This was not the God of the philosophers but the God of revelation, and the overwhelming power of his conversion led Pascal to throw in his lot with the Jansenists against the Jesuits, their chief enemies. Where Ignatius had seen the world as full of God and had encouraged Jesuits to cultivate a sense of the divine omnipresence and omnipotence, Pascal and the Jansenists found the world to be bleak and empty, bereft of divinity. Despite his revelation, Pascal’s God remains “a hidden God” who cannot be discovered by means of rational proof. The Pensées , Pascal’s jottings on religious matters, which were published posthumously in 1669, are rooted in a profound pessimism about the human condition. Human “vileness” is a constant theme; it cannot even be alleviated by Christ, “who will be in agony until the end of the world.” 2 The sense of desolation and of God’s terrifying absence characterizes much of the spirituality of the new Europe. The continuing popularity of the Pensées shows that Pascal’s darker spirituality and his hidden God appealed to something vital in the Western religious consciousness. Pascal’s scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition. When he contemplated the immensity of the universe, he was scared stiff: When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. 3 This is a salutary reminder that we should not generalize about the buoyant optimism of the scientific age. Pascal could envisage the full horror of a world that seemed empty of ultimate meaning or significance. The terror of waking up in an alien world, which had always haunted humanity, has rarely been more eloquently expressed. Pascal was brutally honest with himself; unlike most of his contemporaries, he was convinced that there was no way of proving the existence of God. When he imagined himself arguing with somebody who was constitutionally unable to believe, Pascal could find no arguments to convince him. This was a new development in the history of monotheism. Hitherto nobody had seriously questioned the existence of God. Pascal was the first person to concede that, in this brave new world, belief in God could only be a matter of personal choice.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Ever since the prophets of Israel started to ascribe their own feelings and experiences to God, monotheists have in some sense created a God for themselves. God has rarely been seen as a self-evident fact that can be encountered like any other objective existent. Today many people seem to have lost the will to make this imaginative effort. This need not be a catastrophe. When religious ideas have lost their validity, they have usually faded away painlessly: if the human idea of God no longer works for us in the empirical age, it will be discarded. Yet in the past people have always created new symbols to act as a focus for spirituality. Human beings have always created a faith for themselves, to cultivate their sense of the wonder and ineffable significance of life. The aimlessness, alienation, anomie and violence that characterize so much of modern life seem to indicate that now that they are not deliberately creating a faith in “God” or anything else—it matters little what—many people are falling into despair. In the United States, we have seen that ninety-nine percent of the population claim to believe in God, yet the prevalence of fundamentalism, apocalypticism and “instant” charismatic forms of religiosity in America is not reassuring. The escalating crime rate, drug addiction and the revival of the death penalty are not signs of a spiritually healthy society. In Europe there is a growing blankness where God once existed in the human consciousness. One of the first people to express this dry desolation—quite different from the heroic atheism of Nietzsche—was Thomas Hardy. In “The Darkling Thrush,” written on December 30, 1900, at the turn of the twentieth century, he expressed the death of spirit that was no longer able to create a faith in life’s meaning: I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

• From A History of God (1993)

  More dramatic than the linguistic philosophers were the radical theologians of the 1960s who enthusiastically followed Nietzsche and proclaimed the death of God. In The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Thomas J. Altizer claimed that the “good news” of God’s death had freed us from slavery to a tyrannical transcendent deity: “Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God’s self-alienation in Christ.”4 Altizer spoke in mystical terms of the dark night of the soul and the pain of abandonment. The death of God represented the silence that was necessary before God could become meaningful again. All our old conceptions of divinity had to die before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a style in which God could once more become a possibility. Altizer’s theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the dark God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret. Paul Van Buren was more precise and logical. In The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963), he claimed that it was no longer possible to speak of God acting in the world. Science and technology had made the old mythology invalid. Simple faith in the Old Man in the Sky was clearly impossible, but so was the more sophisticated belief of the theologians. We must do without God and hold on to Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel was “the good news of a free man who has set other men free.” Jesus of Nazareth was the liberator, “the man who defines what it means to be a man.”5 In Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), William Hamilton noted that this kind of theology had its roots in the United States, which had always had a Utopian bent and had no great theological tradition of its own. The imagery of the death of God represented the anomie and barbarism of the technical age, which made it impossible to believe in the biblical God in the old way. Hamilton himself saw this theological mood as a way of being Protestant in the twentieth century. Luther had left his cloister and gone out into the world. In the same way, he and the other Christian radicals were avowedly secular men. They had walked away from the sacred place where God used to be to find the man Jesus in their neighbor out in the world of technology, power, sex, money and the city. Modern secular man did not need God. There was no God-shaped hole within Hamilton: he would find his own solution in the world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It meanwhile pants and struggles and endeavors to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered with weariness, into its own familiar darkness. 15 God could only be reached after “a great effort of the mind,” which had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, “the soul could do nothing but weep.” “Tortured” by its desire for God, it only “found rest in tears, being wearied out.” 16 Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West continued to find God a strain. In the East, the Christian experience of God was characterized by light rather than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism, which is also found worldwide. This did not depend on imagery and vision but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys the Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs , “every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest to those who search.” The aim of the contemplative was to go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction. Then he would acquire “a certain sense of presence” that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human experiences of a relationship with another person. 17 This attitude was called hesychia , “tranquillity” or “interior silence.” Since words, ideas and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration, so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive. How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The Greeks loved that kind of paradox, and the hesychasts turned to the old distinction between God’s essence ( ousia ) and his “energies” ( energeiai ) or activities in the world, which enabled us to experience something of the divine. Since we could never know God as he is in himself, it was the “energies” not the “essence,” that we experienced in prayer. They could be described as the “rays” of divinity, which illuminated the world and were an outpouring of the divine, but as distinct from God himself as sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested a God who was utterly silent and unknowable. As St.

• From A History of God (1993)

  These intensely emotional reversals have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America. It was a new birth, attended by violent convulsions of pain and effort, a new version of the Western struggle with God. The Awakening spread like a contagion to surrounding towns and villages, just as it would a century later when New York state would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so habitually scorched by the flames of religious fervor. While in this exalted state, Edwards noted that his converts felt that the whole world was delightful. They could not tear themselves away from their Bibles and even forgot to eat. Not surprisingly, perhaps, their emotion died down, and about two years later Edwards noted that “it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us.” Again, he was not speaking metaphorically: Edwards was a true Western literalist in religious matters. He was convinced that the Awakening had been a direct revelation of God in their midst, the tangible activity of the Holy Spirit as on the first Pentecost. When God had withdrawn, as abruptly as he had come, his place was—again, quite literally—taken by Satan. Exaltation was succeeded by suicidal despair. First one poor soul killed himself by cutting his throat and: “After this multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, to do as this person had done. Many had it urged upon them as if somebody had spoken to them, ‘Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!’ ” Two people went mad with “strange, enthusiastic delusions.”43 There were no more conversions, but the people who survived the experience were calmer and more joyful than they had been before the Awakening, or so Edwards would have us believe. The God of Jonathan Edwards and his converts, who revealed himself in such abnormality and distress, was clearly just as frightening and arbitrary in his dealings with his people as ever. The violent swings of emotion, the manic elation and profound despair, show that many of the less privileged people of America found it difficult to keep their balance when they had dealings with “God.” It also shows a conviction that we find also in the scientific religion of Newton that God is directly responsible for everything that happens in the world, however bizarre.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Like the later Pietists and Methodists, he was trying to internalize a God who had become distant and inhumanly objective and to transpose traditional doctrine into religious experience. He also shared the rejection of authority and essentially optimistic view of humanity shared later by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and those who subscribed to a religion of the heart. Bauthumely was flirting with the deeply exciting and subversive doctrine of the holiness of sin. If God was everything, sin was nothing—an assertion that Ranters like Laurence Clarkson and Alastair Coppe also tried to demonstrate by flagrantly violating the current sexual code or by swearing and blaspheming in public. Coppe was particularly famous for drunkenness and smoking. Once he had become a Ranter, he had indulged what was obviously a long-suppressed craving to curse and swear. We hear of him cursing for a whole hour in the pulpit of a London church and swearing at the hostess of a tavern so fearfully that she trembled for hours afterward. This could have been a reaction to the repressive Puritan ethic, with its unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind. Fox and his Quakers insisted that sin was by no means inevitable. He certainly did not encourage his Friends to sin and hated the licentiousness of the Ranters, but he was trying to preach a more optimistic anthropology and restore the balance. In his tract A Single Eye , Laurence Clarkson argued that since God had made all things good, “sin” only existed in men’s imagination. God himself had claimed in the Bible that he would make the darkness light. Monotheists had always found it difficult to accommodate the reality of sin, though mystics had tried to discover a more holistic vision. Julian of Norwich had believed that sin was “behovely” and somehow necessary. Kabbalists had suggested that sin was mysteriously rooted in God. The extreme libertarianism of Ranters like Coppe and Clarkson can be seen as a rough and ready attempt to shake off an oppressive Christianity which had terrorized the faithful with its doctrine of an angry, vengeful God. Rationalists and “enlightened” Christians were also trying to shake off the fetters of a religion which had presented God as a cruel authority figure, and to discover a milder deity. Social historians have noted that Western Christianity is unique among world religions for its violent alternations of periods of repression and permissiveness. They have also noted that the repressive phases usually coincide with a religious revival. The more relaxed moral climate of the Enlightenment would be succeeded in many parts of the West by the repressions of the Victorian period, which was accompanied by an upsurge of a more fundamentalist religiosity.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In this, he was the first modern. Pascal’s approach to the problem of God’s existence is revolutionary in its implications, but it has never been accepted officially by any church. In general, Christian apologists have preferred the rationalistic approach of Leonard Lessius, discussed at the end of the last chapter. Such an approach, however, could only lead to the God of the philosophers, not to the God of revelation experienced by Pascal. Faith, he insisted, was not a rational assent based on common sense. It was a gamble. It was impossible to prove that God exists but equally impossible for reason to disprove his existence: “We are incapable of knowing either what [God] is or whether he is.… Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager?” 4 This gamble is not entirely irrational, however. To opt for God is a win-win solution. In choosing to believe in God, Pascal continued, the risk is finite but the gain infinite. As the Christian progresses in the Faith, he or she will become aware of a continuous enlightenment, an awareness of God’s presence that is a sure sign of salvation. It is no good relying on external authority; each Christian is on his own. Pascal’s pessimism is countered by a growing realization in the Pensées that once the wager has been made, the hidden God reveals himself to anyone who seeks him. Pascal makes God say: “You would not seek me, if you had not already found me.” 5 True, humanity cannot batter its way to the distant God by arguments and logic or by accepting the teaching of an institutional church. But by making the personal decision to surrender to God, the faithful feel themselves transformed, becoming “faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a true friend.” 6 Somehow the Christian will find that life has acquired meaning and significance, having created faith and constructed a sense of God in the face of meaninglessness and despair. God is a reality because he works. Faith is not intellectual certainty but a leap into the dark and an experience that brings a moral enlightenment. René Descartes (1596–1650), another of the new men, had far more confidence in the ability of the mind to discover God. Indeed, he insisted that the intellect alone could provide us with the certainty we seek.