Love

Passages

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

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• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  One the one hand, so many individuals and groups who have started out with a dream of distributive justice for all peoples have ended up in bloody slaughter. One way to establish that justice would be to kill all those who oppose it. Why, in other words, does distributive justice tend so often to end up in violence? On the other hand, “love,” that most precious word in our language, refers to an almost unimaginable range of referents—from, say, our favorite candy bar to the soul mate of our life, from, say, our favorite sports team to God Almighty. If “justice” tends so often to go wrong, why does “love” tend so often to be empty? Could it be that love is a style or mode of justice, so that you can never have either alone? We speak of a human being as composed of flesh and spirit or of body and soul. Combined, they form a human person; separated, what’s left is a human corpse. When body and soul or flesh and spirit are separated, we do not get two persons; we get one corpse. Think, then, of justice as the body of love and love as the soul of justice. Think, then, of justice as the flesh of love, and love as the spirit of justice. Combined, you have both; separated, you have neither. Justice without love or love without justice is a moral corpse. That is why justice without love becomes brutal and love without justice become banal. In the late 1940s I was in boarding high school at St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, County Donegal, Ireland. When we studied poetry—Irish or British—we had to learn the poems by heart before discussing them. So, in my very early teens, I learned that in John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” this is the urn’s message: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Now, almost sixty years later, I summarize what I have learned from this book’s biblical meditation on the Abba Prayer of Jesus by imaging an alternative “Ode on a Biblical Urn.” The urn is made not of ceramic, but of stone, and it tells us: “Justice is love, love is justice. That is all we know on earth, and all we need to know.” AppendixMatthew 6:9–13 Our Father in the heavens, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, as in heaven so on earth. Give us our daily bread today And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Luke 11:2–4 Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us our daily bread each day And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation The Teaching (Didach [image "image" file=Image00054.jpg] ) 8.2 Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Looooo, he says, which means both hello and I love you. I love you back, I say. I love you more cause you’re bigger. But in my mind are other sentences, which I’ve spoken to enough licensed professionals by now that I can let them stream through me without a scalding lava burn. I love you harder cause I need you more, you leathery old galoot. Did my absence hurt you into this? How dare you cease to daddy me so soon.... And when the ambulance driver shows up with his stretcher, he and the attendant have to pry Daddy’s large-knuckled hands off the silver bars of that bed. Daddy’s eyes lock on mine. He says one word to me, and it must meander through his skull a long time, searching through the ruined brain to find the perfect monosyllabic curse. Bad, he says to me. They’ve taken his teeth out, and tears river down the crow’s feet of his tough Indian face. Bad bad bad. I talk to the ambulance driver. I look through Daddy’s wallet for his social security card, which I can’t find. What I do find is my first college report card—straight A’s for the only time since grade school. Also, there’s the copy of the first poem I published at age nineteen, with the stains of many beers where it had been spread across the damp surface of many bars, a page smoothed out for men no doubt too bleary to read it. We loved each other this way, Daddy and I, from afar. We’re like totem animals in each other’s foreign cosmologies—like islanders whose ancestral gods favor each other. Each of us represented to the other what little we knew of love inside that family, but whoever I’ve turned into has wiped away who I was as a kid, whoever he once loved. Age about twelve, I’d ceased to shoot pool and scale fish, stopped tuning in to the Friday night fights after Ali and Liston, nor did I follow the Yankees with the intensity Daddy thought their due. My very last visit when Daddy was still upright and continent and unparalyzed, he’d squired me to a New Year’s dance at the American Legion club, a place so skeevy neither Mother nor Lecia ever—to my knowledge—set shoe leather in the joint. I dressed for the occasion as I might have for Sunday school or a job interview. Daddy steered me by my elbow through the threshold onto the sloping floor of scarred sky-blue linoleum, inside the boxy paneled walls with imitation knotholes that could—with sufficient liquor—make you feel stared at by all the veterans who’d drunk themselves into early graves in that place. Folding chairs were drawn around small tables whose treacherous wobbles required matchbooks, and the matchbooks advertised kits you could write away for so as to finish high school and become an artist or beautician or drill press operator.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  What is perhaps oddest about Erikson’s theory is that it must not only arrange many facts rather precariously to fit its preconceived mold but also ignore many facts about Luther’s relationship with his father that were not unknown at the time. So much passed between them over the years that Erikson’s assertion comes across as dishonest cherry-picking in the service of a modish Freudian narrative. There is ample evidence that Luther loved his father and that Luther’s father loved his son. Indeed, when Luther’s school-yard chum Hans Reinecke wrote to him of his father’s death, Luther wrote, “Seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now.” He said that it “has plunged me into deep sadness not only because he was my father but also because he loved me very much.” Even more, he says, “through him my creator has given me all that I am and have.”6 School DaysLuther’s recollections of his earliest years come to us almost exclusively from the much older Luther. From his marriage in 1525 until his death in 1546, Luther and his wife, Kathie, lived in the former Augustinian cloister—called the Black Cloister—where they took in a number of student boarders and had frequent guests. At some point, it became acceptable for some of these boarders and guests—the students especially—to record much of what Luther said. These notes filled many volumes and came to be known as Tischreden, or Table Talk, often containing several versions of the same anecdote or statement as recorded by more than one participant, so that it can be confusing to sort them out. Furthermore, Luther’s mature recollections have more than a little editorial English on the ball and must be understood as an often irascible older man making a particularly sharp point about an event from decades earlier, rather than as a simple and placidly indifferent recounting of the facts. Given these caveats, we may nonetheless say that Luther’s reminiscences of his school days are not at all fond ones. For example, he says that one morning during his earliest years at school he was thrashed fifteen times for failing to conjugate and decline a certain Latin verb. Luther explains it was a verb the class had not yet been taught—and was therefore not obliged to know—so the errors made that day were only the teacher’s, in administering these now immortalized quindecimal hidings. But even in a treatise in 1524, he already spoke of having “learned less than nothing despite all the flogging, trembling, anguish, and misery.” One gets the general impression that childhood for an exceedingly sensitive and intelligent boy such as the young Martin Luther must have been an endless, fear-filled trial from which he could hardly wait to escape.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  She turns to Warren, Do you think she’s an alcoholic? How insulting, I think, and brace myself for Warren’s assessment, already dredging up a defense: I’ve never been five minutes late to pick up Dev. I’m a room parent, for God’s sake. I lead toddlers around the aquarium on a rope. No, he says. (How my love for him doth bloom, the drinking mind thinks.) She likes a drink. (Or nine, the scolding, sober part of me thinks.) But who doesn’t? he concludes. (Those WASPs down so much sauce—the sober mind observes—that Warren wouldn’t know a dipsomaniac if one hit him with a polo mallet.) That’s the kind of courtroom convened in my skull, prosecution and defense. Back home the next morning, while Dev blanks out at the TV, I sneak around, reaching under beds and into the hamper, gathering ratholed beer cans and wine bottles. Once Warren’s home, I drive around to unload them from the hatchback like body parts into dumpsters all over town. I also rotate liquor stores, telling each indifferent proprietor that I’m having a spectacular party—myself the honored guest. One morning before New Year’s, I’m trying to jam Dev into his coat, and he’s slipping around in my hands like a greased pig. I get one arm in, and he collapses laughing on the floor. I’ve been pondering the doctor’s suggestion as I say to Warren, Let’s quit drinking. Sure, Warren says, why not. He crimps the top of his lunch sack. He, by the way, doesn’t need to quit drinking, and being full-time at both work and grad school—and being I’m a sneaky bitch—he’s missing the gallons I drink. From my hands, Dev breaks free and dashes into the living room while I say, It’s not like we’re going to a party. Going after Dev, Warren tells me not to start, for I gripe nonstop about our lack of social life. He returns with our maniacally snickering son tucked under one arm like a baguette. Warren asks me to toss Dev’s coat upside down on the floor. Okay, dip and flip, sweetie, Warren says, setting Dev so he stands with his feet at his coat’s hood. Dev bends over, dips his hands in his coat sleeves, then upends the coat over his head. Good man, I say as Warren starts to clip a mitten to a sleeve. I ask him where—with his own patriarch’s testy disposition—he mastered parenting. He’s hitching the second mitten on as Dev lurches to smooch, my cheek. Hoisting him up, Warren says, I imagine what my father would’ve done with me, then do the opposite. I tug at Warren’s sleeve so he curves his tall form down, seeming to tolerate my peck on his lips. (Is this true or only my faulty interpretation?) The familiar masculine odor of him sends down my spine a surge of ardor as if stirred from a muddy aquarium bottom.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I always fancied an affair with a scullery maid, he says. I’m propped on an elbow studying him. He fails to open his eyes, as he says, Aren’t you even a little sleepy? I’m pouting, I say. Can’t you hear me pouting with your eyes shut? He reaches up a hand to pinch my pouting mouth with two fingers. Okay, duck lips, he says, rolling over. My father thinks you’re smart and funny—both uncommon virtues. My mother thinks if you keep jogging, you’ll damage your female organs and fail to reproduce. Do they think I’m cute? He’s half blind. She wants to dress you in hot pink or lime green. Tell me they like me and I’ll sneak back to your sister’s room. As much as they like anybody, he says. Don’t worry about it, sweetie. The next morning I’m wide-eyed before dawn, half waiting for some Inquisitor to roust me from the ruffled covers of the type Little Bo Peep probably slept in. I bathe with French-milled soap and brush my short hair. In the library, I find a copy of Matthew Arnold’s poems autographed to some illegible forebear. I’m perusing when a voice from the stair causes Tiger Three to rise shakily on his ancient hips and trot out. Mr. Whitbread says, I fail to see why you couldn’t greet them when they arrived, for God’s sake. Once the front door has opened and shut, Tiger slinks back in and slumps at my feet. After a while I smell coffee and bacon, and a while later, I see a wizened, disheveled old woman balding under her black hairnet. Slippers slide her up the hall across from me to the wet bar. (I’d later find out she’s the cook.) She opens the fridge and draws out a carton of eggnog, pouring herself a small punch cup full. How sweet, I think, they keep eggnog in the summer. Then she unscrews the top of a bottle of dark rum and upends it with both hands. She takes two long draws, then shuffles off. 7The Constant LoversThe myth they chose was the constant lovers. The theme was richness over time It is a difficult story, and the wise never choose it because it requires such long performance, and because there is nothing, by definition, between the acts… —Robert Hass, “Against Botticelli” It would’ve been a vintage personal ad. Scared, provincial girl desperate to escape family insanity seeks quietly witty, literate gorilla. Profound loneliness a must. Belief in poetry must supersede belief in capitalism. She: abrim with self-loathing, incapable of chilly silence. He: won’t yell, wag firearms, or leave.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Amid the other patients in the dayroom, Daddy is sitting with a thin pink blanket over his legs when we walk up. When he sees me, his face tries to brighten, but the dead half of it hangs down. He’s shaking his head with a stiff, persistent fraction of a smile. Truly, he’s a man split in half, neither fully dead nor fully alive. His eyes are black as a crow’s, though, and they sparkle and go wet when he sees me. Mur, he says, Murr. That’s right, I say It’s Mary. I kiss his whiskery neck, asking does he want me to shave him before I leave. But he doesn’t register the offer—a relief, since I whinge at inflicting the slightest razor nick. His good hand grabs my left hand, grips it with the old iron he had in my youth. I stand next to him while Warren waits off to the side. A little old lady in cat’s eye glasses with hair woven atop her head wheels up to me. She says, Are you his wife? No, ma’am, I say, wondering if maybe Mother doesn’t visit as often as she’s told us, else this old bird was also too out of things to remember Mother. His sweetheart? No, ma’am, I say. I’m his daughter. Thank goodness, she says. I’m his girlfriend. Daddy lets go my hand a second and waves over toward the lady. She wheels to his other side, then puts her hand on one wheel of his chair protectively, saying, He buys me Cokes. He stays with me all day, so I never have to wonder where he’s at. He’s good that way, I say. He’s never lied to me, not once. From the half of Daddy’s face I can see, his old smile is perfect. His eye glances off mine in cahoots. I can, for an instant, see him as he’d been all tall, kneeling down to me, saying, Don’t tell your mama and sister. You and me’ll sneak off for a strawberry freeze… I start to move away, and he grasps my hand with a lobster grip. I wave Warren over. Daddy, I say, this is Warren. Daddy glances at him. Is that your sweetheart? the lady says. Yes, ma’am. Daddy studies my hand as if it were some codex that needed to be deciphered somehow. He looks up at me, and from a great distance—tens of thousands of miles, decades—it’s as if he’s been fast-forwarded into our presence. Our glances click, and his claw of a hand clings to mine. Murrr, he said. That’s right, Daddy. He shakes his head and purses his lips. He looks around the room as if for help. The lady says, You’re making him mad, little lady. She pats his hand again. Honey, she says—honey, can I get you a Dr Pepper? He half nods. All right then, she says and wheels around.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I start to move away, and he grasps my hand with a lobster grip. I wave Warren over. Daddy, I say, this is Warren. Daddy glances at him. Is that your sweetheart? the lady says. Yes, ma’am. Daddy studies my hand as if it were some codex that needed to be deciphered somehow. He looks up at me, and from a great distance—tens of thousands of miles, decades—it’s as if he’s been fast-forwarded into our presence. Our glances click, and his claw of a hand clings to mine. Murrr, he said. That’s right, Daddy. He shakes his head and purses his lips. He looks around the room as if for help. The lady says, You’re making him mad, little lady. She pats his hand again. Honey, she says—honey, can I get you a Dr Pepper? He half nods. All right then, she says and wheels around. My chiclet engagement ring’s still loose, only held on by the wedding ring I had fitted. Daddy wiggles the ring on my knuckle. He says, Murrr...murr. Married, I finally say. I’m married. Yes, to Warren. He’s my husband. I reach for Warren and draw him over. For a second there, I hold each of their hands, standing like a conduit between them. I’m still looking only at the good half of Daddy’s face. He gives Warren the up and down scrutiny he’d bring to a horse prior to auction, then he glances back at me and rolls his eyes as if to say, jokingly, This yahoo. Then he lets go my hand to shake Warren’s, and I take that in. And that’s it, that instant. My life as I’ve shaped it includes—for that instant only—the daddy I once loved more than beans and rice. The lady wheels back with a Dr Pepper. I help her flip the tab, and she slides a bent straw into it. We take turns buying, she tells me. Daddy takes a sip and winks at her. Then he looks over at me, saying, Looooo. I love you, too, Daddy, I say. At the end of the visit, Warren calls him Mr. Karr and says he’s glad to meet him. And Daddy takes my hand in his and looks down at it and up at Warren. His eyes meet mine, and in a stiff nod, I get his last blessing, since within the year, we’ll come back to bury him.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther was saying that freedom and love must be at the center of Christian faith. A faith “without love is not enough; indeed, it is no faith at all,” he said.10 Luther also took pains to point out the similarities between the bondage of works in which the papal system had held people and the bondage of other kinds of works in which this recent movement in Wittenberg had held people. There were people who had grown up revering the host and the chalice of wine in such a way that it was impossible for them quickly to behave as though these were nothing special, as though they, who were common laypeople, should be able to touch the host with their hands and handle the cup of wine without terror. Luther well remembered his own paralysis at his first Mass. So to force people to handle the cup with their own hands was no different from forbidding them to partake of the cup. In these and other things, freedom must be the only guide. Let people be free to take the cup, but let them not be coerced to do it. As an example of this freedom, Luther chose to wear his monk’s cowl when he preached. He might easily have done as Karlstadt had done and worn his academic gown, but Luther wanted to be clear that if he is not coerced to wear his cowl, then perhaps he will wear it after all. It was in the freedom to wear it or to refrain from wearing it that he rejoiced. Karlstadt and Zwilling had, as it were, forced nonconformity in the same way that the pope had forced conformity. It was as though in rebelling against a forced uniform of suit and tie, a group would cast a suspicious eye on anyone not wearing the new anti-uniform of denim and tattoos. Both attitudes represent a kind of bondage, and both are against the greatest laws of all, the Gospel laws of love and freedom. “Formerly the devil made us too papistic,” Luther said, “and now he wants to make us too evangelical.”11 In a pamphlet about the Lord’s Supper, titled Receiving Both Kinds in the Sacrament, he wrote the following, which reprises the heart of his earlier book The Freedom of a Christian: I have taught in such a way that my teaching would lead first and foremost to a knowledge of Christ, that is, to pure and proper faith and genuine love, and thereby to freedom in all matters of external conduct, such as eating, drinking, clothes, praying, fasting, monasteries, sacrament, and whatever it may be. Such freedom is to be used in a salutary way only by those who have faith and love, that is, those who are real Christians. On such people we can and should impose no human law—nor permit anyone else to do so—which would bind their conscience.12

• From A History of God (1993)

  In 630 the city of Mecca opened its gates to Muhammad, who was able to take it without bloodshed. In 632, shortly before his death, he made what has been called the Farewell Pilgrimage, in which he Islamized the old Arabian pagan rites of the hajj and made this pilgrimage, which was so dear to the Arabs, the fifth “pillar” of his religion. All Muslims have a duty to make the hajj at least once in a lifetime if their circumstances permit. Naturally the pilgrims remember Muhammad, but the rites have been interpreted to remind them of Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael rather than their prophet. These rites look bizarre to an outsider—as do any alien social or religious rituals—but they are able to unleash an intense religious experience and perfectly express the communal and personal aspects of Islamic spirituality. Today many of the thousands of pilgrims who assemble at the appointed time in Mecca are not Arabs, but they have been able to make the ancient Arabic ceremonies their own. As they converge on the Kabah, clad in the traditional pilgrim dress that obliterates all distinctions of race or class, they feel that they have been liberated from the egotistic preoccupations of their daily lives and been caught up into a community that has one focus and orientation. They cry in unison, “Here I am at your service, O al-Lah,” before they begin the circumambulations around the shrine. The essential meaning of this rite is brought out well by the late Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati: As you circumambulate and move closer to the Kabah, you feel like a small stream merging with a big river. Carried by a wave you lose touch with the ground. Suddenly, you are floating, carried on by the flood. As you approach the centre, the pressure of the crowd squeezes you so hard that you are given a new life. You are now part of the People; you are now a Man, alive and eternal.… The Kabah is the world’s sun whose face attracts you into its orbit. You have become part of this universal system. Circumambulating around Al-lah, you will soon forget yourself.… You have been transformed into a particle that is gradually melting and disappearing. This is absolute love at its peak. 34 Jews and Christians have also emphasized the spirituality of community. The hajj offers each individual Muslim the experience of a personal integration in the context of the ummah , with God at its center. As in most religions, peace and harmony are important pilgrimage themes, and once the pilgrims have entered the sanctuary violence of any kind is forbidden. Pilgrims may not even kill an insect or speak a harsh word.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Instead of such idolatry, Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice: Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for, he says, “Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of al-Lah” (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance. 50 We never see any god but the personal Name that has been revealed and given concrete existence in each one of us; inevitably our understanding of our personal Lord is colored by the religious tradition into which we were born. But the mystic (arif) knows that this “God” of ours is simply an “angel” or a particular symbol of the divine, which must never be confused with the Hidden Reality itself. Consequently he sees all the different religions as valid theophanies. Where the God of the more dogmatic religions divides humanity into warring camps, the God of the mystics is a unifying force.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Not mine the praise in that or this: Thine is the praise in both, I wis. 30 This is close to her famous prayer: “O God! If I worship thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine Everlasting Beauty!” 31 The love of God became the hallmark of Sufism. Sufis may well have been influenced by the Christian ascetics of the Near East, but Muhammad remained a crucial influence. They hoped to have an experience of God that was similar to that of Muhammad when he had received his revelations. Naturally, they were also inspired by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became the paradigm of their own experience of God. They also evolved the techniques and disciplines that have helped mystics all over the world to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting the Divine Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of Muslim law. The effect of these practices sometimes resulted in behavior which seemed bizarre and unrestrained, and such mystics were known as “drunken” Sufis. The first of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d. 874), who, like Rabiah, approached God as a lover. He believed that he should strive to please al-Lah as he would a woman in a human love affair, sacrificing his own needs and desires so as to become one with the Beloved. Yet the introspective disciplines he adopted to achieve this led him beyond this personalized conception of God. As he approached the core of his identity, he felt that nothing stood between God and himself; indeed, everything that he understood as “self” seemed to have melted away: I gazed upon [al-Lah] with the eye of truth and said to Him: “Who is this?” He said, “This is neither I nor other than I. There is no God but I.” Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood.… Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying: “How fares it with me with Thee?” He said, “I am through Thou; there is no god but Thou.” 32 Yet again, this was no external deity “out there,” alien to mankind: God was discovered to be mysteriously identified with the inmost self. The systematic destruction of the ego led to a sense of absorption in a larger, ineffable reality. This state of annihilation ( ’fana ) became central to the Sufi ideal. Bistami had completely reinterpreted the Shahadah in a way that could have been construed as blasphemous, had it not been recognized by so many other Muslims as an authentic experience of that isl a m commanded by the Koran. Other mystics, known as the “sober” Sufis, preferred a less extravagant spirituality.

• From A History of God (1993)

  From that moment, Dante was ruled by his love of Beatrice, which acquired a mastery “owing to the power which my imagination gave him.” 42 Beatrice remained the image of divine love for Dante, and in The Divine Comedy, he shows how this brought him, through an imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, to a vision of God. Dante’s poem had been inspired by Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven; certainly his view of the creative imagination was similar to that of Ibn al-Arabi. Dante argued that it was not true that imaginativa simply combined images derived from perception of the mundane world, as Aristotle had maintained; it was in part an inspiration from God: O fantasy (imaginativa), that reav’st us oft away So from ourselves that we remain distraught, Deaf though a thousand trumpets round us bray. What moves thee when the senses show thee naught? Light moves thee, formed in Heaven, by will maybe Of Him who sends it down, or else self-wrought. 43 Throughout the poem, Dante gradually purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical descriptions of Hell give way to the difficult, emotional climb up Mount Purgatory to the earthly paradise, where Beatrice upbraids him for seeing her physical being as an end in itself: instead, he should have seen her as a symbol or an avatar that pointed him away from the world to God. There are scarcely any physical descriptions in Paradise; even the blessed souls are elusive, reminding us that no human personality can become the final object of human yearning. Finally, the cool intellectual imagery expresses the utter transcendence of God, who is beyond all imagination. Dante has been accused of painting a cold portrait of God in the Paradiso, but the abstraction reminds us that ultimately we know nothing at all about him. Ibn al-Arabi was also convinced that the imagination was a God-given faculty. When a mystic created an epiphany for himself, he was bringing to birth here below a reality that existed more perfectly in the realm of archetypes. When we saw the divine in other people, we were making an imaginative effort to uncover the true reality: “God made the creatures like veils,” he explained, “He who knows them as such is led back to Him, but he who takes them as real is barred from His presence.” 44 Thus—as seemed to be the way of Sufism—what started as a highly personalized spirituality, centering on a human being, led Ibn al-Arabi to a transpersonal conception of God. The image of the female remained important to him: he believed that women were the most potent incarnations of Sophia, the divine Wisdom, because they inspired a love in men that was ultimately directed toward God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Here Denys departs from Neoplatonism, which perceived God as static and remote, entirely unresponsive to human endeavor. The God of the Greek philosophers was unaware of the mystic who occasionally managed to achieve an ecstatic union with him, whereas the God of the Bible turns toward humanity. God also achieves an “ecstasy” which takes him beyond himself to the fragile realm of created being: And we must dare to affirm (for it is the truth) that the Creator of the universe himself, in his beautiful and good yearning towards the universe … is transported outside himself in his providential activities towards all things that have being … and so is drawn from his transcendent throne above all things to dwell within the heart of all things, through an ecstatic power that is above being and whereby he yet stays within himself. 56 Emanation had become a passionate and voluntary outpouring of love, rather than an automatic process. Denys’s way of negation and paradox was not just something that we do but something that happens to us. For Plotinus, ecstasy had been a very occasional rapture: it had been achieved by him only two or three times in his life. Denys saw ecstasy as the constant state of every Christian. This was the hidden or esoteric message of Scripture and liturgy, revealed in the smallest gestures. Thus when the celebrant leaves the altar at the beginning of the Mass to walk through the congregation, sprinkling it with holy water before returning to the sanctuary, this is not just a rite of purification—though it is that too. It imitates the divine ecstasy, whereby God leaves his solitude and merges himself with his creatures. Perhaps the best way of viewing Denys’s theology is as that spiritual dance between what we can affirm about God and the appreciation that everything we can say about him can only be symbolic. As in Judaism, Denys’s God has two aspects: one is turned toward us and manifests himself in the world; the other is the far side of God as he is in himself, which remains entirely incomprehensible. He “stays within himself” in his eternal mystery, at the same time as he is totally immersed in creation. He is not another being, additional to the world. Denys’s method became normative in Greek theology. In the West, however, theologians would continue to talk and explain. Some imagined that when they said “God,” the divine reality actually coincided with the idea in their minds. Some would attribute their own thoughts and ideas to God—saying that God wanted this, forbade that and had planned the other—in a way that was dangerously idolatrous. The God of Greek Othodoxy, however, would remain mysterious, and the Trinity would continue to remind Eastern Christians of the provisional nature of their doctrines. Eventually, the Greeks decided that an authentic theology must meet Denys’s two criteria: it must be silent and paradoxical.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Hosea gives us a startling insight into the way the prophets were developing their image of God. At the very beginning of his career, Yahweh seemed to have issued a shocking command. He told Hosea to go off and marry a whore (esheth zeuunim) because the whole country had “become nothing but a whore abandoning Yahweh.”25 It appears, however, that God had not ordered Hosea to scour the streets for a prostitute: esheth zeuunim (literally, “a wife of prostitution”) meant either a woman with a promiscuous temperament or a sacred prostitute in a fertility cult. Given Hosea’s preoccupation with fertility rituals, it seems likely that his wife, Gomer, had become one of the sacred personnel in the cult of Baal. His marriage was, therefore, an emblem of Yahweh’s relationship with the faithless Israel. Hosea and Gomer had three children, who were given fateful, symbolic names. The elder son was called Jezreel, after a famous battlefield, their daughter was Lo-Ruhamah (Unloved) and their younger son Lo-Ammi (Not-My-People). At his birth, Yahweh had annulled the covenant with Israel: “You are not my people and I am not your God.”26 We shall see that the prophets were often inspired to perform elaborate mimes to demonstrate the predicament of their people, but it appears that Hosea’s marriage was not coldly planned from the beginning. The text makes it clear that Gomer did not become an esheth zeuunim until after their children had been born. It was only with hindsight that it seemed to Hosea that his marriage had been inspired by God. The loss of his wife had been a shattering experience, which gave Hosea an insight into the way Yahweh must feel when his people deserted him and went whoring after deities like Baal. At first Hosea was tempted to denounce Gomer and have nothing more to do with her: indeed, the law stipulated that a man must divorce an unfaithful wife. But Hosea still loved Gomer, and eventually he went after her and bought her back from her new master. He saw his own desire to win Gomer back as a sign that Yahweh was willing to give Israel another chance.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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 that moment, Dante was ruled by his love of Beatrice, which acquired a mastery “owing to the power which my imagination gave him.” 42 Beatrice remained the image of divine love for Dante, and in The Divine Comedy , he shows how this brought him, through an imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, to a vision of God. Dante’s poem had been inspired by Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven; certainly his view of the creative imagination was similar to that of Ibn al-Arabi. Dante argued that it was not true that imaginativa simply combined images derived from perception of the mundane world, as Aristotle had maintained; it was in part an inspiration from God: O fantasy ( imaginativa ), that reav’st us oft away So from ourselves that we remain distraught, Deaf though a thousand trumpets round us bray. What moves thee when the senses show thee naught? Light moves thee, formed in Heaven, by will maybe Of Him who sends it down, or else self-wrought. 43 Throughout the poem, Dante gradually purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical descriptions of Hell give way to the difficult, emotional climb up Mount Purgatory to the earthly paradise, where Beatrice upbraids him for seeing her physical being as an end in itself: instead, he should have seen her as a symbol or an avatar that pointed him away from the world to God. There are scarcely any physical descriptions in Paradise; even the blessed souls are elusive, reminding us that no human personality can become the final object of human yearning. Finally, the cool intellectual imagery expresses the utter transcendence of God, who is beyond all imagination. Dante has been accused of painting a cold portrait of God in the Paradiso , but the abstraction reminds us that ultimately we know nothing at all about him. Ibn al-Arabi was also convinced that the imagination was a God-given faculty.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The nurse says, I think they can smell their mothers. I smooch his little hand, cooing, You’re my crème brûlée, my chocolate shake, my bear claw. You’re my—in a flash, I think of my daddy snuggling the white cat he once so spoiled—boon companion. With Dev tucked under my arm, I set to staring at him as if to emboss my gaze on him, to seal him in the safe bubble of it, and so also to sear into my own head every iota of him. Warren comments that he does look an awful lot like Winston Churchill. Put a cigar in his mouth... Bite your tongue, I say. At some point the woman in the next bed comes over to show us her boy, and when she peels aside the blanket to reveal his face, I have to stop my own recoil, for that is one unfortunate-looking baby. He’s cute, Warren says. This kid has a face like a caved-in squash. His full head of hair lends him a werewolf aspect. My plump, pink-cheeked, bald-as-a-bubble infant sets the standard against which all others will come up short. I sit there with a smile welded on my face till the werewolf baby starts to sputter neurasthenically, Ehh...ehhh ehhh... The woman looks up at us, saying, Time to nurse. If Dev, who wails like a freight train when hungry, made no more noise than that, he’d starve. I’m tired, Warren says, though his handsome face holds nary a crease. Bone-weary, I let him peel my clingy hand off his biceps to extract himself.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily concerned with the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest companions had been mystically inclined, and the Muslims had quickly developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment of the austerity of the early ummah. They attempted to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF) that were supposed to have been favored by the Prophet. Consequently, they were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained: The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one’s own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price. 29 At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ata (d. 748) had been a disciple of Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one of the fathers of Sufism. The ulema were beginning to distinguish Islam sharply from other religions, seeing it as the one, true faith, but Sufis by and large remained true to the Koranic vision of the unity of all rightly guided religion. Jesus, for example, was revered by many Sufis as the prophet of the interior life. Some even amended the Shahadah, the profession of faith, to say: “There is no god but al-Lah and Jesus is his Messenger,” which was technically correct but intentionally provocative. Where the Koran speaks of a God of justice who inspires fear and awe, the early woman ascetic Rabiah (d. 801) spoke of love, in a way that Christians would have found familiar: Two ways I love Thee: selfishly, And next, as worthy is of Thee. ’Tis selfish love that I do naught Save think on Thee with every thought. ’Tis purest love when Thou dost raise The veil to my adoring gaze. Not mine the praise in that or this: Thine is the praise in both, I wis. 30 This is close to her famous prayer: “O God! If I worship thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine Everlasting Beauty!” 31 The love of God became the hallmark of Sufism. Sufis may well have been influenced by the Christian ascetics of the Near East, but Muhammad remained a crucial influence. They hoped to have an experience of God that was similar to that of Muhammad when he had received his revelations.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Instead of such idolatry, Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice: Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for, he says, “Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of al-Lah” (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.50 We never see any god but the personal Name that has been revealed and given concrete existence in each one of us; inevitably our understanding of our personal Lord is colored by the religious tradition into which we were born. But the mystic (arif) knows that this “God” of ours is simply an “angel” or a particular symbol of the divine, which must never be confused with the Hidden Reality itself. Consequently he sees all the different religions as valid theophanies. Where the God of the more dogmatic religions divides humanity into warring camps, the God of the mystics is a unifying force.

• From A History of God (1993)

  For Symeon, therefore, God was known and unknown, near and far. Instead of attempting the impossible task of describing “ineffable matters by words alone,”26 he urged his monks to concentrate on what could be experienced as a transfiguring reality in their own souls. As God had said to Symeon during one of his visions: “Yes, I am God, the one who became man for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you see, and I shall make you God.”27 God was not an external, objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlightenment. Yet Symeon’s refusal to speak about God did not lead him to break with the theological insights of the past. The “new” theology was based firmly on the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. In his Hymns of Divine Love, Symeon expressed the old Greek doctrine of the deification of humanity, as described by Athanasius and Maximus: O Light that none can name, for it is altogether nameless. O Light with many names, for it is at work in all things … How do you mingle yourself with grass? How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible, do you preserve the nature of the grass unconsumed?28 It was useless to define the God who affected this transformation, since he was beyond speech and description. Yet as an experience that fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating its integrity, “God” was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had developed ideas about God—such as the Trinity and the Incarnation—that separated them from other monotheists, yet the actual experience of their mystics had much in common with those of Muslims and Jews. Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily concerned with the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest companions had been mystically inclined, and the Muslims had quickly developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment of the austerity of the early ummah. They attempted to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF) that were supposed to have been favored by the Prophet. Consequently, they were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained: The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one’s own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price.29 At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ata (d. 748) had been a disciple of Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one of the fathers of Sufism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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 that moment, Dante was ruled by his love of Beatrice, which acquired a mastery “owing to the power which my imagination gave him.”42 Beatrice remained the image of divine love for Dante, and in The Divine Comedy, he shows how this brought him, through an imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, to a vision of God. Dante’s poem had been inspired by Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s ascent to heaven; certainly his view of the creative imagination was similar to that of Ibn al-Arabi. Dante argued that it was not true that imaginativa simply combined images derived from perception of the mundane world, as Aristotle had maintained; it was in part an inspiration from God: O fantasy (imaginativa), that reav’st us oft away So from ourselves that we remain distraught, Deaf though a thousand trumpets round us bray. What moves thee when the senses show thee naught? Light moves thee, formed in Heaven, by will maybe Of Him who sends it down, or else self-wrought.43 Throughout the poem, Dante gradually purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical descriptions of Hell give way to the difficult, emotional climb up Mount Purgatory to the earthly paradise, where Beatrice upbraids him for seeing her physical being as an end in itself: instead, he should have seen her as a symbol or an avatar that pointed him away from the world to God. There are scarcely any physical descriptions in Paradise; even the blessed souls are elusive, reminding us that no human personality can become the final object of human yearning. Finally, the cool intellectual imagery expresses the utter transcendence of God, who is beyond all imagination. Dante has been accused of painting a cold portrait of God in the Paradiso, but the abstraction reminds us that ultimately we know nothing at all about him.