Longing

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 8 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Certainly the Schalbes and the group around Johannes Braun appear to have shaped Luther’s devotional attitudes. 37 That piety may have incorporated a strong feminine side: St. Anna and Mary became important figures in Luther’s devotional universe, and the myths and stories surrounding his time in Eisenach hint at a motherless lad far from home and in search of tenderness. One tradition has it that the widow Ursula Cotta took him in because she liked his singing and sympathized with his reluctance to beg; another story tells of how he was left alone suffering with fever while the rest of the household was in church, and had to crawl to the kitchen on hands and knees to get the water he needed. 38 Apocryphal though the stories may be, perhaps they reflect the psychological reality that Luther both needed and found a connection to his mother in Eisenach. — F ROM Eisenach, Luther moved on to university at Erfurt in 1501, the institution that his revered older friend Johannes Braun had attended. Although farther away from home than the rival University of Leipzig, it was closer to Eisenach and his maternal family. Luther may have lodged at the student house of St. George—choosing another institution named for the patron saint of Mansfeld—or he may have joined the Amplonian College near St. Michael’s Church, Heaven’s Gate, the biggest of the student bursas, or residential colleges. These institutions followed a strict quasi-monastic regimen: Students had to be in bed at 8 P.M., rose at 4 A.M., and Luther would have shared a room. Many students seem to have found their way around the rules, however, for as Luther acidly remembered, “Erfurt is a whorehouse and beerhouse; these two lessons are what students got from that gymnasium.” 39 Founded in 1392, the university was the oldest German institution to have a charter, and in the early sixteenth century it boasted an outstanding collection of humanists, interested in the revival of ancient learning and in returning to the sources. Yet although he was influenced by these intellectual trends, Luther apparently developed no contacts to leading humanists at Erfurt, such as Eobanus Hessus and Conrad Mutian, in contrast to two of his later friends, Georg Spalatin and Johannes Lang, who were both part of Mutian’s circle. And although the humanist Crotus Rubeanus later described Luther as his good friend and remembered how he and Luther were united by an enthusiasm for study, there is perhaps something extravagant about his claims to friendship as he avers that “my soul has always remained yours.” 40 After all, he was writing in 1519, after Luther had become famous. Luther started out as a rather average student, coming thirtieth in his cohort of fifty-seven baccalaureates.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Ibn al-Arabi also liked to call God al-Ama , “the Cloud” or “The Blindness” 48 to emphasize his inaccessibility. But these human logoi also reveal the Hidden God to himself . It is a two-way process: God sighs to become known and is delivered from his solitude by the people in whom he reveals himself. The sorrow of the Unknown God is assuaged by the Revealed God in each human being who makes him known to himself; it is also true that the Revealed God in every individual yearns to return to its source with a divine nostalgia that inspires our own longing. Divinity and humanity were thus two aspects of the divine life that animates the entire cosmos. This insight was not dissimilar to the Greek understanding of the Incarnation of God in Jesus, but Ibn al-Arabi could not accept the idea that one single human being, however holy, could express the infinite reality of God. Instead he believed that each human person was a unique avatar of the divine. Yet he did develop the symbol of the Perfect Man ( insan i-kamil ) who embodied the mystery of the Revealed God in each generation for the benefit of his contemporaries, though he did not, of course, incarnate the whole reality of God or his hidden essence. The Prophet Muhammad had been the Perfect Man of his generation and a particularly effective symbol of the divine. This introspective, imaginative mysticism was a search for the ground of being in the depths of the self. It deprived the mystic of the certainties that characterize the more dogmatic forms of religion. Since each man and woman had had a unique experience of God, it followed that no one religion could express the whole of the divine mystery. There was no objective truth about God to which all must subscribe; since this God transcended the category of personality, predictions about his behavior and inclinations were impossible. Any consequent chauvinism about one’s own faith at the expense of other people’s was obviously unacceptable, since no one religion had the whole truth about God. Ibn al-Arabi developed the positive attitude toward other religions which could be found in the Koran and took it to a new extreme of tolerance: My heart is capable of every form. A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols, A pasture for gazelles, the votary’s Kabah The tables of the Torah, the Koran. Love is the faith I hold: wherever turn His camels, still the one true faith is mine. 49 The man of God was equally at home in synagogue, temple, church and mosque, since all provided a valid apprehension of God. Ibn al-Arabi often used the phrase “the God created by the faiths” ( Khalq al-haqq fi’litiqad); it could be pejorative if it referred to the “god” that men and women created in a particular religion and considered identical with God himself. This only bred intolerance and fanaticism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  As he spun around and around, the Sufi felt the boundaries of selfhood dissolve as he melted into his dance, giving him a foretaste of the annihilation of Jana . The founder of the order was Jalal ad-Din Rumi (ca. 1207–73), known to his disciples as Mawlana, our Master. He had been born in Khurusan in Central Asia but had fled to Konya in modern Turkey before the advancing Mongol armies. His mysticism can be seen as a Muslim response to this scourge, which might have caused many to lose faith in al-Lah. Rumi’s ideas are similar to those of his contemporary Ibn al-Arabi, but his poem the Masnawi , known as the Sufi Bible, had a more popular appeal and helped to disseminate the God of the mystics among ordinary Muslims who were not Sufis. In 1244 Rumi had come under the spell of the wandering dervish Shams ad-Din, whom he saw as the Perfect Man of his generation. Indeed, Shams ad-Din believed that he was a reincarnation of the Prophet and insisted upon being addressed as “Muhammad.” He had a dubious reputation and was known not to observe the Shariah, the Holy Law of Islam, thinking himself above such trivialities. Rumi’s disciples were understandably worried by their Master’s evident infatuation. When Shams was killed in a riot, Rumi was inconsolable and devoted still more time to mystical music and dancing. He was able to transform his grief imaginatively into a symbol of the love of God—of God’s yearning for humanity and humanity’s longing for al-Lah. Whether knowingly or not, everybody was searching for the absent God, obscurely aware that he or she was separated from the Source of being. Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separateness. Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has caused men and women to moan. I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold [to such a person] the power of love-desire: everyone who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united to it. 51 The Perfect Man was believed to inspire more ordinary mortals to seek God: Shams ad-Din had unlocked in Rumi the poetry of the Masnawi , which recounted the agonies of this separation. Like other Sufis, Rumi saw the universe as a theophany of God’s myriad Names. Some of these revealed God’s wrath or severity, while others expressed those qualities of mercy which were intrinsic to the divine nature. The mystic was engaged in a ceaseless struggle ( jihad ) to distinguish the compassion, love and beauty of God in all things and to strip away everything else.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But a difference of power in everything Keeps us apart; For one is as nothing, but the brazen sky Stays a fixed habituation for ever. Yet we can in greatness of mind Or of body be like the Immortals. 4 Instead of seeing his athletes as on their own, each striving to achieve his personal best, Pindar sets them against the exploits of the gods, who were the pattern for all human achievement. Men were not slavishly imitating the gods as hopelessly distant beings but living up to the potential of their own essentially divine nature. The myth of Marduk and Tiamat seems to have influenced the people of Canaan, who told a very similar story about Baal-Habad, the god of storm and fertility, who is often mentioned in extremely unflattering terms in the Bible. The story of Baal’s battle with Yam-Nahar, the god of the seas and rivers, is told on tablets that date to the fourteenth century BCE. Baal and Yam both lived with El, the Canaanite High God. At the Council of El, Yam demands that Baal be delivered up to him. With two magic weapons, Baal defeats Yam and is about to kill him when Asherah (El’s wife and mother of the gods) pleads that it is dishonorable to slay a prisoner. Baal is ashamed and spares Yam, who represents the hostile aspect of the seas and rivers which constantly threaten to flood the earth, while Baal, the Storm God, makes the earth fertile. In another version of the myth, Baal slays the seven-headed dragon Lotan, who is called Leviathan in Hebrew. In almost all cultures, the dragon symbolizes the latent, the unformed and the undifferentiated. Baal has thus halted the slide back to primal formlessness in a truly creative act and is rewarded by a beautiful palace built by the gods in his honor. In very early religion, therefore, creativity was seen as divine: we still use religious language to speak of creative “inspiration” which shapes reality anew and brings fresh meaning to the world. But Baal undergoes a reverse: he dies and has to descend to the world of Mot, the god of death and sterility. When he hears of his son’s fate, the High God El comes down from his throne, puts on sackcloth and gashes his cheeks, but he cannot redeem his son. It is Anat, Baal’s lover and sister, who leaves the divine realm and goes in search of her twin soul, “desiring him as a cow her calf or a ewe her lamb.” 5 When she finds his body, she makes a funeral feast in his honor, seizes Mot, cleaves him with her sword, winnows, burns and grinds him like corn before sowing him in the ground. Similar stories are told about the other great goddesses—Inana, Ishtar and Isis—who search for the dead god and bring new life to the soil. The victory of Anat, however, must be perpetuated year after year in ritual celebration.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master of Illumination. Like the Greeks, he experienced God in terms of light. In Arabic, ishraq refers to the first light of dawn that issues from the East as well as to enlightenment: the Orient, therefore, is not the geographical location but the source of light and energy. In Suhrawardi’s Oriental faith, therefore, human beings dimly remember their Origin, feeling uneasy in this world of shadow, and long to return to their first abode. Suhrawardi claimed that his philosophy would help Muslims to find their true orientation, to purify the eternal wisdom within them by means of the imagination. Suhrawardi’s immensely complex system was an attempt to link all the religious insights of the world into a spiritual religion. Truth must be sought wherever it could be found. Consequently his philosophy linked the pre-Islamic Iranian cosmology with the Ptolemaic planetary system and the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation. Yet no other Faylasuf had ever quoted so extensively from the Koran. When he discussed cosmology, Suhrawardi was not primarily interested in accounting for the physical origins of the universe. In his masterwork The Wisdom of Illumination (Hiqmat al-Ishraq), Suhrawardi began by considering problems of physics and natural science, but this was only a prelude to the mystical part of his work. Like Ibn Sina, he had grown dissatisfied with the wholly rational and objective orientation of Falsafah, though he did believe that rational and metaphysical speculation had their place in the perception of total reality. The true sage, in his opinion, excelled in both philosophy and mysticism. There was always such a sage in the world. In a theory that was very close to Shii Imamology, Suhrawardi believed that this spiritual leader was the true pole (qutb) without whose presence the world could not continue to exist, even if he remained in obscurity. Suhrawardi’s Ishraqi mysticism is still practiced in Iran. It is an esoteric system not because it is exclusive but because it requires spiritual and imaginative training of the sort undergone by Ismailis and Sufis. The Greeks, perhaps, would have said that Suhrawardi’s system was dogmatic rather than kerygmatic. He was attempting to discover the imaginative core that lay at the heart of all religion and philosophy and, though he insisted that reason was not enough, he never denied its right to probe the deepest mysteries. Truth had to be sought in scientific rationalism as well as esoteric mysticism; sensibility must be educated and informed by the critical intelligence.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Originally they had acknowledged only one Supreme Deity, who had created the world and governed human affairs from afar. Belief in such a High God (sometimes called the Sky God, since he is associated with the heavens) is still a feature of the religious life in many indigenous African tribes. They yearn toward God in prayer; believe that he is watching over them and will punish wrongdoing. Yet he is strangely absent from their daily lives: he has no special cult and is never depicted in effigy. The tribesmen say that he is inexpressible and cannot be contaminated by the world of men. Some people say that he has “gone away.” Anthropologists suggest that this God has become so distant and exalted that he has in effect been replaced by lesser spirits and more accessible gods. So too, Schmidt’s theory goes, in ancient times, the High God was replaced by the more attractive gods of the pagan pantheons. In the beginning, therefore, there was One God. If this is so, then monotheism was one of the earliest ideas evolved by human beings to explain the mystery and tragedy of life. It also indicates some of the problems that such a deity might have to face. It is impossible to prove this one way or the other. There have been many theories about the origin of religion. Yet it seems that creating gods is something that human beings have always done. When one religious idea ceases to work for them, it is simply replaced. These ideas disappear quietly, like the Sky God, with no great fanfare. In our own day, many people would say that the God worshipped for centuries by Jews, Christians and Muslims has become as remote as the Sky God. Some have actually claimed that he has died. Certainly he seems to be disappearing from the lives of an increasing number of people, especially in Western Europe. They speak of a “God-shaped hole” in their consciousness where he used to be, because, irrelevant though he may seem in certain quarters, he has played a crucial role in our history and has been one of the greatest human ideas of all time. To understand what we are losing—if, that is, he really is disappearing —we need to see what people were doing when they began to worship this God, what he meant and how he was conceived. To do that we need to go back to the ancient world of the Middle East, where the idea of our God gradually emerged about 14,000 years ago. One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen. Our scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Hokhmah (Wisdom) becomes the second parzuf , called Abba: Father. Binah (Intelligence) becomes the third parzuf , called Ima: Mother. Din (Judgment); Hesed (Mercy); Rakhamim (Compassion); Netsakh (Patience); Hod (Majesty); Yesod (Foundation) all become the fourth parzuf , called Zeir Anpin: the Impatient One. His consort is: The last sefirah , called Malkuth (Kingdom) or the Shekinah: it becomes the fifth parzuf , which is called Nuqrah de Zeir: Zeir’s Woman. The sexual symbolism is a bold attempt to depict the reunification of the sefiroth , which will heal the rupture that occurred when the vessels were broken and restore the original harmony. The two “couples”—Abba and Ima, Zeir and Nuqrah—engage in ziwwug (copulation), and this mating of the male and female elements within God symbolizes the restored order. The Kabbalists constantly warn their readers not to take this literally. It is a fiction designed to hint at a process of integration that cannot be described in clear, rational terms and to neutralize the overwhelmingly masculine imagery of God. The salvation envisaged by the mystics did not depend upon historical events like the coming of the Messiah but was a process that God himself must undergo. God’s first plan had been to make humanity his helpmate in the process of redeeming those divine sparks that had been scattered and trapped in chaos at the Breaking of the Vessels. But Adam had sinned in the Garden of Eden. Had he not done so, the original harmony would have been restored and the divine exile ended on the first Sabbath. But Adam’s fall repeated the primal catastrophe of the Breaking of the Vessels. The created order fell and the divine light in his soul was scattered abroad and imprisoned in broken matter. Consequently, God evolved yet another plan. He had chosen Israel to be his helpmate in the struggle for sovereignty and control. Even though Israel, like the divine sparks themselves, is scattered throughout the cruel and Godless realm of the diaspora, Jews have a special mission. As long as the divine sparks are separated and lost in matter, God is incomplete. By careful observance of Torah and the discipline of prayer, each Jew could help to restore the sparks to their divine source and so redeem the world. In this vision of salvation, God is not gazing down on humanity condescendingly but, as Jews had always insisted, is actually dependent upon mankind. Jews have the unique privilege of helping to re-form God and create him anew. 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In 1201, while making the circumambulations around the Kabah, Ibn al-Arabi had a vision which had a profound and lasting effect upon him: he had seen a young girl, named Nizam, surrounded by a heavenly aura and he realized that she was an incarnation of Sophia, the divine Wisdom. This epiphany made him realize that it would be impossible for us to love God if we relied only on the rational arguments of philosophy. Falsafah emphasized the utter transcendence of al-Lah and reminded us that nothing could resemble him. How could we love such an alien Being? Yet we can love the God we see in his creatures: “If you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God, for he is the Beautiful Being,” he explained in the Futuhat al-Makkiyah (The Meccan Revelations). “Thus in all its aspects, the object of love is God alone.” 40 The Shahadah reminded us that there was no god, no absolute reality but al-Lah. Consequently, there was no beauty apart from him. We cannot see God himself, but we can see him as he has chosen to reveal himself in such creatures as Nizam, who inspire love in our hearts. Indeed, the mystic had a duty to create his own epiphanies for himself in order to see a girl like Nizam as she really was. Love is essentially a yearning for something that remains absent; that is why so much of our human love remains disappointing. Nizam had become “the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure.” As he explained in the prelude to The Diwan, a collection of love poems: In the verses I have composed for the present book, I never cease to allude to the divine inspirations, the spiritual visitations, the correspondences [of our world] with the world of Angelic Intelligences. In this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking in symbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract me more than those of actual life and because this young girl knew exactly what I was referring to. 41 The creative imagination had transformed Nizam into an avatar of God. Some eighty years later, the young Dante Alighieri had a similar experience in Florence when he saw Beatrice Portinari. As soon as he caught sight of her, he felt his spirit tremble violently and seemed to hear it cry: “Behold a god more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all.33 God, therefore, was not an objective reality but a spiritual presence in the complex depths of the self. Augustine shared this insight not only with Plato and Plotinus but also with Buddhists, Hindus and Shamans in the nontheistic religions. Yet his was not an impersonal deity but the highly personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. God had condescended to man’s weakness and gone in search of him: You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain that peace which was yours.34 The Greek theologians did not generally bring their own personal experience into their theological writing, but Augustine’s theology sprang from his own highly individual story. Augustine’s fascination with the mind led him to develop his own psychological Trinitarianism in the treatise De Trinitate, written in the early years of the fifth century. Since God had made us in his own image, we should be able to discern a trinity in the depths of our minds. Instead of starting with the metaphysical abstractions and verbal distinctions that the Greeks enjoyed, Augustine began this exploration with a moment of truth that most of us have experienced. When we hear such phrases as “God is Light” or “God is truth,” we instinctively feel a quickening of spiritual interest and feel that “God” can give meaning and value to our lives. But after this momentary illumination, we fall back into our normal frame of mind, when we are obsessed with “things accustomed and earthly.”35 Try as we might, we cannot recapture that moment of inarticulate longing. Normal thought processes cannot help us; instead we must listen to “what the heart means” by such phrases as “He is Truth.”36 But is it possible to love a reality that we do not know? Augustine goes on to show that since there is a trinity in our own minds which mirrors God, like any Platonic image, we yearn toward our Archetype—the original pattern on which we were formed.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Since we are created in God’s image, we must reflect God, the supreme archetype. Our yearning for the reality that we call “God” must, therefore, mirror a sympathy with the pathos of God. Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary God sighing with longing, but this sigh (nafas rahmani) was not an expression of maudlin self-pity. It had an active, creative force which brought the whole of our cosmos into existence; it also exhaled human beings, who became logoi, words that express God to himself. It follows that each human being is a unique epiphany of the Hidden God, manifesting him in a particular and unrepeatable manner. Each one of these divine logoi are the names that God has called himself, making himself totally present in each one of his epiphanies. God cannot be summed up in one human expression since the divine reality is inexhaustible. It also follows that the revelation that God has made in each one of us is unique, different from the God known by the other innumerable men and women who are also his logoi. We will only know our own “ God” since we cannot experience him objectively; it is impossible to know him in the same way as other people. As Ibn al-Arabi said: “Each being has as his god only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the whole.” He liked to quote the hadith: “Meditate upon God’s blessings, but not upon his essence (al-Dhat).” 47 The whole reality of God is unknowable; we must concentrate on the particular Word spoken in our own being. Ibn al-Arabi also liked to call God al-Ama, “the Cloud” or “The Blindness” 48 to emphasize his inaccessibility. But these human logoi also reveal the Hidden God to himself. It is a two-way process: God sighs to become known and is delivered from his solitude by the people in whom he reveals himself. The sorrow of the Unknown God is assuaged by the Revealed God in each human being who makes him known to himself; it is also true that the Revealed God in every individual yearns to return to its source with a divine nostalgia that inspires our own longing. Divinity and humanity were thus two aspects of the divine life that animates the entire cosmos. This insight was not dissimilar to the Greek understanding of the Incarnation of God in Jesus, but Ibn al-Arabi could not accept the idea that one single human being, however holy, could express the infinite reality of God. Instead he believed that each human person was a unique avatar of the divine. Yet he did develop the symbol of the Perfect Man (insan i-kamil) who embodied the mystery of the Revealed God in each generation for the benefit of his contemporaries, though he did not, of course, incarnate the whole reality of God or his hidden essence.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Because of her overweening presumption, she had fallen from the Pleroma and her grief and distress had formed the world of matter. Exiled and lost, Sophia had wandered through the cosmos, yearning to return to her divine Source. This amalgam of oriental and pagan ideas expressed the Gnostics’ profound sense that our world was in some sense a perversion of the celestial, born of ignorance and dislocation. Other Gnostics taught that “God” had not created the material world, since he could have had nothing to do with base matter. This had been the work of one of the aeons, which they called the demiourgos or Creator. He had become envious of “God” and aspired to be the center of the Pleroma. Consequently he fell and had created the world in a fit of defiance. As Valentinus explained, he had “made heaven without knowledge; he formed man in ignorance of man; he brought earth to light without understanding earth.” 35 But the Logos, another of the aeons, had come to the rescue and descended to earth, assuming the physical appearance of Jesus in order to teach men and women the way back to God. Eventually this type of Christianity would be suppressed, but we shall see that centuries later Jews, Christians and Muslims would return to this type of mythology, finding that it expressed their religious experience of “God” more accurately than orthodox theology. These myths were never intended as literal accounts of creation and salvation; they were symbolic expressions of an inner truth. “God” and the Pleroma were not external realities “out there” but were to be found within: Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body. Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing. If you carefully investigate these matters, you will find him in yourself. 36 The Pleroma represented a map of the soul. The divine light could be discerned even in this dark world, if the Gnostic knew where to look: during the Primal Fall—of either Sophia or the Demiurge—some divine sparks had also fallen from the Pleroma and been trapped in matter. The Gnostic could find a divine spark in his own soul, could become aware of a divine element within himself which would help him to find his way home. The Gnostics showed that many of the new converts to Christianity were not satisfied with the traditional idea of God which they had inherited from Judaism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Since God had made us in his own image, we should be able to discern a trinity in the depths of our minds. Instead of starting with the metaphysical abstractions and verbal distinctions that the Greeks enjoyed, Augustine began this exploration with a moment of truth that most of us have experienced. When we hear such phrases as “God is Light” or “God is truth,” we instinctively feel a quickening of spiritual interest and feel that “God” can give meaning and value to our lives. But after this momentary illumination, we fall back into our normal frame of mind, when we are obsessed with “things accustomed and earthly.” 35 Try as we might, we cannot recapture that moment of inarticulate longing. Normal thought processes cannot help us; instead we must listen to “what the heart means” by such phrases as “He is Truth.” 36 But is it possible to love a reality that we do not know? Augustine goes on to show that since there is a trinity in our own minds which mirrors God, like any Platonic image, we yearn toward our Archetype—the original pattern on which we were formed. If we start by considering the mind loving itself, we find not a trinity but a duality: love and the mind. But unless the mind is aware of itself, with what we should call self-consciousness, it cannot love itself. Anticipating Descartes, Augustine argues that knowledge of ourselves is the bedrock of all other certainty. Even our experience of doubt makes us conscious of ourselves. 37 Within the soul there are three properties, therefore: memory, understanding and will, corresponding to knowledge, self-knowledge and love. Like the three divine persons, these mental activities are essentially one because they do not constitute three separate minds, but each fills the whole mind and pervades the other two: “I remember that I possess memory and understanding and will; I understand that I understand, will and remember. I will my own willing and remembering and understanding.” 38 Like the Divine Trinity described by the Cappadocians, all three properties, therefore, “constitute one life, one mind, one essence.” 39 This understanding of our mind’s workings, however, is only the first step: the trinity we encounter within us is not God himself but is a trace of the God who made us. Both Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa had used the imagery of a reflection in a mirror to describe God’s transforming presence within the soul of man, and to understand this correctly we must recall that the Greeks believed that the mirror image was real, formed when the light from the eye of the beholder mingled with the light beaming from the object and reflected on the surface of the glass. 40 Augustine believed that the trinity in the mind was also a reflection that included the presence of God and was directed toward him. 41 But how do we get beyond this image, reflected as in a glass darkly, to God himself?

• From A History of God (1993)

  It will be recalled that in more traditional societies, people believed that their experience here below repeated events that had taken place in the celestial world: Plato’s doctrine of the forms or eternal archetypes had expressed this perennial belief in a philosophical idiom. In pre-Islamic Iran, for example, reality had a double aspect: there was thus a visible (getik) sky and a heavenly (menok) sky that we could not see with our normal perception. The same was true of more abstract, spiritual realities: every prayer or virtuous deed that we perform here and now in the getik was duplicated in the celestial world which gave it true reality and eternal significance. These heavenly archetypes were felt to be true in the same way as the events and forms that inhabit our imaginations often seem more real and significant to us than our mundane existence. It can be seen as an attempt to explain our conviction that, despite the mass of dispiriting evidence to the contrary, our lives and the world we experience have meaning and importance. In the tenth century, the Ismailis revived this mythology, which had been abandoned by Persian Muslims when they converted to Islam but which was still part of their cultural inheritance, and fused it imaginatively with the Platonic doctrine of emanation. Al-Farabi had envisaged ten emanations between God and the material world which presided over the Ptolemaic spheres. Now the Ismailis made the Prophet and the Imams the “souls” of this celestial scheme. In the highest “prophetic” sphere of the First Heaven was Muhammad; in the Second Heaven was Ali, and each of the seven Imams presided over the succeeding spheres in due order. Finally in the sphere nearest to the material world was Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah, Ali’s wife, who had made this sacred line possible. She was, therefore, the Mother of Islam and corresponded with Sophia, the divine Wisdom. This image of the apotheosized Imams reflected the Ismaili interpretation of the true meaning of Shii history. This had not just been a succession of external, mundane events—many of them tragic. The lives of these illustrious human beings here on earth had corresponded to events in the menok, the archetypal order. 4 We should not be too quick to deride this as a delusion. Today in the West we pride ourselves on our concern for objective accuracy, but the Ismaili batinis, who sought the “hidden” (batin) dimension of religion, were engaged in a quite different quest.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But, despite their differences, both the fundamentalists and the Pentecostalists were trying to fill the void left by the victory of reason in the modern Western world. In their emphasis upon love and their wariness of doctrine, the Pentecostalists were closer to the middle-class liberal Protestants at this early stage, though later in the century, as we shall see, some would be drawn into the more extreme, hard-line fundamentalist camp and would lose their sense of the primacy of charity. IN THE JEWISH WORLD, there were also signs that people were beginning to retreat from the overly rational forms of faith that had developed during the nineteenth century. In Germany, philosophers such as Herman Cohn (1842–1918) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) attempted to keep alive the values of the Enlightenment, though Rosenzweig also tried to revive the old ideas of mythology and ritual in a way that modernized people could appreciate. He described the various commandments of the Torah, which could not always be explained rationally, as symbols, pointing beyond themselves to the divine. These rites created an interior attitude that opened Jews to the possibility of the sacred, helping them to cultivate a listening, waiting attitude. The biblical stories of creation and revelation were not facts but expressions of spiritual realities in our inner lives. Other scholars, such as Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), directed attention to those forms of faith which had been dismissed by the rationalist historians. Buber revealed the richness of Hasidism and Scholem explored the world of the Kabbalah. But these older spiritualities, which belonged to a different world, were increasingly opaque to Jews who were imbued with the rational spirit. Zionists often experienced their defiantly secularist ideology in ways that would once have been called religious. People had to fill the spiritual vacuum somehow, in order to avoid nihilistic despair. If conventional religion no longer worked, they would create a secularist spirituality that filled their lives with transcendent meaning. Zionism was, like other modern movements, a return to a single, fundamental value that represented a new way of being Jewish. By going back to the Land, Jews would not only save themselves from the anti-Semitic catastrophe that some felt to be imminent, but they would also find psychic healing without God, the Torah, or the Kabbalah. The Zionist writer Asher Ginsberg (1856–1927), who wrote under the pseudonym Ahad Ha-Am (“One of the People”), was convinced that Jews had to develop a more rational and scientific way of looking at the world.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  For what? (Had we really not discussed this? Surely we did, but I don’t recall it that way.) I told you I was starting school for my master’s. It’s paid for through work. I thought next fall, after the baby came, I say. You shouldn’t be out here without a coat, he says. Don’t you think it’s bad timing? I say. You’re one to talk, he says, gesturing to my belly. Can you at least not take summer classes? The baby’ll come in June. He sighs. Maybe this year. But I want to get it over with. During the week, he leaves at eight in the morning, and three nights a week, he gets in after ten. Weekends, he always seems to be working on papers or that literary magazine he cofounded. Lying next to him, my body swells as if hooked to a bicycle pump, and with each inch of girth, he floats further, and I began slowly to shift my gaze away from his back. I start to stare inward to the pearlescent mystery I’m carrying. Some nights I tell myself the birth will bring Warren back to me. (And maybe—in his version of events—he’d report that I’d studied baby books with a Talmudic intensity, hardly reading anymore the poetry he was devoted to. The bigger I got, the lower my IQ, I swear. It’s not politic to say so, but hey. Maybe Warren was telling himself the birth would bring me back to him.) One day, as I meticulously fold and refold minuscule T-shirts and onesies in the trance of the deeply unprepared, the phone rings. And a woman’s voice says the sentence I’ve been waiting to hear for so long, I’m almost deaf to it. So obsessed am I with the upcoming birth that she has to repeat it several times. I said that we’d like to publish your book of poems.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Each one of these divine logoi are the names that God has called himself, making himself totally present in each one of his epiphanies. God cannot be summed up in one human expression since the divine reality is inexhaustible. It also follows that the revelation that God has made in each one of us is unique, different from the God known by the other innumerable men and women who are also his logoi. We will only know our own “God” since we cannot experience him objectively; it is impossible to know him in the same way as other people. As Ibn al-Arabi said: “Each being has as his god only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the whole.” He liked to quote the hadith: “Meditate upon God’s blessings, but not upon his essence (al-Dhat).”47 The whole reality of God is unknowable; we must concentrate on the particular Word spoken in our own being. Ibn al-Arabi also liked to call God al-Ama, “the Cloud” or “The Blindness”48 to emphasize his inaccessibility. But these human logoi also reveal the Hidden God to himself. It is a two-way process: God sighs to become known and is delivered from his solitude by the people in whom he reveals himself. The sorrow of the Unknown God is assuaged by the Revealed God in each human being who makes him known to himself; it is also true that the Revealed God in every individual yearns to return to its source with a divine nostalgia that inspires our own longing. Divinity and humanity were thus two aspects of the divine life that animates the entire cosmos. This insight was not dissimilar to the Greek understanding of the Incarnation of God in Jesus, but Ibn al-Arabi could not accept the idea that one single human being, however holy, could express the infinite reality of God. Instead he believed that each human person was a unique avatar of the divine. Yet he did develop the symbol of the Perfect Man (insan i-kamil) who embodied the mystery of the Revealed God in each generation for the benefit of his contemporaries, though he did not, of course, incarnate the whole reality of God or his hidden essence. The Prophet Muhammad had been the Perfect Man of his generation and a particularly effective symbol of the divine.

• From A History of God (1993)

  They were convinced that Jews would remain incomplete, alienated human beings until they had a country of their own. The yearning for the return to Zion (one of the chief hills of Jerusalem) began as a defiantly secular movement, since the vicissitudes of history had convinced the Zionists that their religion and their God did not work. In Russia and Eastern Europe, Zionism was an offshoot of the revolutionary socialism that was putting the theories of Karl Marx into practice. The Jewish revolutionaries had become aware that their comrades were just as anti-Semitic as the Tsar and feared that their lot would not improve in a communist regime: events proved that they were correct. Accordingly ardent young socialists such as David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) simply packed their bags and sailed to Palestine, determined to create a model society that would be a light to the Gentiles and herald the socialist millennium. Others had no time for these Marxist dreams. The charismatic Austrian Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) saw the new Jewish venture as a colonial enterprise: under the wing of one of the European imperial powers, the Jewish state would be a vanguard of progress in the Islamic wilderness. Despite its avowed secularism, Zionism expressed itself instinctively in conventionally religious terminology and was essentially a religion without God. It was filled with ecstatic and mystical hopes for the future, drawing on the ancient themes of redemption, pilgrimage and rebirth. Zionists even adopted the practice of giving themselves new names as a sign of the redeemed self. Thus Asher Ginzberg, an early propagandist, called himself Ahad Ha’am (One of the People). He was now his own man because he had identified himself with the new national spirit, though he did not think that a Jewish state was feasible in Palestine. He simply wanted a “spiritual center” there to take the place of God as the single focus of the people of Israel. It would become “a guide to all the affairs of life,” reach “to the depths of the heart” and “connect with all one’s feelings.” Zionists had reversed the old religious orientation. Instead of being directed toward a transcendent God, Jews sought fulfillment here below. The Hebrew term hagshamah (literally, “making concrete”) had been a negative term in medieval Jewish philosophy, referring to the habit of attributing human or physical characteristics to God. In Zionism, hagshamah came to mean fulfillment, the embodiment of the hopes of Israel in the mundane world. Holiness no longer dwelt in heaven: Palestine was a “holy” land in the fullest sense of the word. Just how holy can be seen in the writings of the early pioneer Aaron David Gordon (d.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Gerson himself was a mystic, who believed that it was better to “hold primarily to the love of God without lofty enquiry” rather than to “seek through reasons based on the true faith, to understand the nature of God.” 7 There had been an upsurge of mysticism in Europe during the fourteenth century, as we have seen, and the people were beginning to appreciate that reason was inadequate to explain the mystery they called “God.” As Thomas à Kempis said in The Imitation of Christ: Of what use is it to discourse learnedly on the Trinity, if you lack humility and therefore displease the Trinity.... I would far rather feel contrition than be able to define it. If you knew the whole Bible by heart, and all the teachings of the philosophers, how would this help you without the grace and love of God? 8 The Imitation of Christ, with its rather dour, gloomy religiosity, became one of the most popular of all Western spiritual classics. During these centuries, piety centered increasingly on Jesus the man. The practice of making the stations of the cross dwelt in particular detail on Jesus’ physical pain and sorrow. Some fourteenth-century meditations written by an anonymous author tell the reader that when he wakes up in the morning after spending most of the night meditating on the Last Supper and the Agony in the Garden, his eyes should still be red with weeping. Immediately he should begin to contemplate Jesus’ trial and follow his progress to Calvary, hour by hour. The reader is urged to imagine himself pleading with the authorities to save Christ’s life, to sit beside him in prison and to kiss his chained hands and feet. 9 In this dismal program, there is little emphasis on the Resurrection. Instead the stress is on the vulnerable humanity of Jesus. A violence of emotion and what strikes the modern reader as morbid curiosity characterizes many of these descriptions. Even the great mystics Bridget of Sweden or Julian of Norwich speculate in lurid detail about Jesus’ physical state: I saw his dear face, dry, bloodless, and pallid with death. It became more pale, deathly and lifeless. Then, dead, it turned a blue color, gradually changing to a browny blue, as the flesh continued to die. For me his passion was shown primarily through his blessed face, and particularly by his lips. There too I saw these same four colors, though previously they had been, as I had seen, fresh, red, and lovely. It was a sorry business to see him change as he progressively died.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Not surprisingly, most Israelites declined the prophet’s invitation to enter into a dialogue with Yahweh. They preferred a less demanding religion of cultic observance either in the Jerusalem Temple or in the old fertility cults of Canaan. This continues to be the case: the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque. The ancient Canaanite religions were still flourishing in Israel. In the tenth century, King Jeroboam I had set up two cultic bulls at the sanctuaries of Dan and Beth-El. Two hundred years later, the Israelites were still taking part in fertility rites and sacred sex there, as we see in the oracles of the prophet Hosea, Amos’s contemporary.20 Some Israelites appear to have thought that Yahweh had a wife, like the other gods: archaeologists have recently unearthed inscriptions dedicated “To Yahweh and his Asherah.” Hosea was particularly disturbed by the fact that Israel was breaking the terms of the covenant by worshipping other gods, such as Baal. Like all of the new prophets, he was concerned with the inner meaning of religion. As he makes Yahweh say: “What I want is love (hesed), not sacrifice; knowledge of God (daath Elohim), not holocausts.”21 He did not mean theological knowledge: the word daath comes from the Hebrew verb yada: to know, which has sexual connotations. Thus J says that Adam “knew” his wife, Eve.22 In the Old Canaanite religion, Baal had married the soil and the people had celebrated this with ritual orgies, but Hosea insisted that since the covenant, Yahweh had taken the place of Baal and had wedded the people of Israel. They had to understand that it was Yahweh, not Baal, who would bring fertility to the soil.23 He was still wooing Israel like a lover, determined to lure her back from the Baals who had seduced her: When that day comes—it is Yahweh who speaks— she will call me, “My husband,” no longer will she call me, “My Baal.” I will take the names of the Baals off her lips, their names shall never be uttered again.24 Where Amos attacked social wickedness, Hosea dwelt on the lack of inwardness in Israelite religion: the “knowledge” of God was related to “hesed,” implying an interior appropriation and attachment to Yahweh that must supersede exterior observance.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Shiis also had a different political outlook from other Muslims. Where the rituals and disciplines of Sunni spirituality helped Sunni Muslims to accept life as it was and to conform to archetypal norms, Shii mysticism expressed a divine discontent. The early traditions that developed shortly after the announcement of the doctrine of the Occultation reveal the frustration and impotence felt by many Shiis during the tenth century. 33 This has been called “the Shii century” because many of the local commanders in the Islamic empire who wielded effective power in a given region had Shii sympathies, but this turned out to make no appreciable difference. For the majority, life was still unjust and inequitable, despite the clear teaching of the Koran. Indeed, the Imams had all been victims of rulers whom Shiis regarded as corrupt and illegitimate: tradition had it that every single one of the Imams after Husain had been poisoned by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. In their longing for a more just and benevolent social order, Shiis developed an eschatology centering on the final appearance (zuhur) of the Hidden Imam during the Last Days, when he would return, battle with the forces of evil, and establish a Golden Age of justice and peace before the Final Judgment. But this yearning for the End did not mean that the Shiis had abandoned the conservative ethos and become future-oriented. They were so strongly aware of the archetypal ideal, the way things ought to be, that they found ordinary political life intolerable. The Hidden Imam would not bring something new into the world; he would simply correct human history to make human affairs finally conform to the fundamental principles of existence. Similarly, the Imam’s “appearance” would in a profound sense simply make manifest something that had been there all along, for the Hidden Imam is a constant presence in the life of Shiis; he represents the elusive light of God in a dark, tyrannical world and the only source of hope. The Occultation completed the mythologization of Shii history which had begun when the Sixth Imam gave up political activism and separated religion from politics. Myth does not provide a blueprint for pragmatic political action but supplies the faithful with a way of looking at their society and developing their interior lives. The myth of Occultation depoliticized the Shiah once and for all. There was no sense in Shiis taking useless risks by pitting themselves against the might of temporal rulers. The image of an Imam, a just political leader who could not exist in the world as it was but had to go into hiding, expressed the Shiis’ alienation from their society.