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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

A History of God
By
Karen Armstrong
From Abraham to the Present: The 4,000-year Quest for God
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Introduction
1 - In the Beginning
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-Salmun

Maps

The Ancient Middle East

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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

Christianity and Judaism CE 50-300

The World of the Fathers of the Church

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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

The Islamic Empire by 750

The Jews of Islam c
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

The Jews Settle in Eastern France and Germany 500-1100

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There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a
faith which enables us to put our trust in them
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I cannot say, however, that
my belief in these religious opinions about the nature of ultimate reality gave me much confidence that life here on earth was good or
beneficent
...
James Joyce got it right in Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man: I listened to my share of hell-fire sermons
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God, on the other hand, was a somewhat shadowy figure, defined in intellectual abstractions rather than images
...
' Not surprisingly, it meant little to me and I am bound to say that it still leaves me cold
...
Since writing this book, however, I have come to believe that it is also
incorrect
...
I read the lives of the saints, the metaphysical poets, T
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Eliot and some of
the simpler writings of the mystics
...
To do this I entered a religious order and, as
a novice and a young nun, I learned a good deal more about the faith
...
I
delved into the history of the monastic life and embarked on a minute discussion of the Rule of my own order, which we had to learn by heart
...
Attention seemed focused on secondary details and the more peripheral aspects of
religion
...
The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt
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Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy
...
I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics
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I also began to have
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How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God
incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate - and highly contradictory - doctrine of the
Trinity or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem?
Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life and once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away
...
Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious
about him, he became too remote to be a reality
...
The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my
earlier misgivings were justified
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Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine
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Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual
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I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more
mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in the kindergarten
...
People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was
formed in infancy
...

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals
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Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognisably human; they created religions at
the same time as they created works of art
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Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to
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It was not tacked on to a
primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity
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We have yet to see how it will work
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Humanism is itself a religion without God
- not all religions, of course, are theistic
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When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires
...
My predictions were not entirely unjustified but I have been extremely surprised by some
of my findings and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life
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Other Rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was - in any
sense - a reality 'out there'; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the
ordinary rational process
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A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist and yet that 'he' was the most important reality in the world
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The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly
different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time
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Indeed, the statement: 'I believe in God' has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement
it only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community
...
Had the
notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas
...
A fundamentalist would deny this, since
fundamentalism is anti-historical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as
people do today
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The same is true of atheism
...
The people who have been dubbed 'atheists' over the years have always been denied a particular conception
of the divine
...
We shall see that they are very different from one another
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence
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We hall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for
it to be logically or scientifically sound
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This did not disturb most monotheists before our own day because they were quite clear that their ideas about God were not sacrosanct but
could only be provisional
...
Some developed quite audacious ways of emphasising this essential distinction
...
Throughout history, men and women have experienced a
dimension of the spirit that seems to transcend the mundane world
...
However we choose to interpret it, this human experience of transcendence has been a fact of
life
...
All the major religions, however, would agree that it is impossible to describe this
transcendence in normal conceptual language
...
Jews, for example, are forbidden to pronounce the sacred Name of God and Muslims must not attempt to depict the divine
in visual imagery
...

This will not be a history in the usual sense, since the idea of God has not evolved from one point and progressed in a linear fashion to a final
conception
...
Just as there are only a given number of themes in love
poetry, so too people have kept saying the same things about God over and over again
...
Even though Jews and Muslims both find the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation
almost blasphemous, they have produced their own versions of these controversial theologies
...

Because this is such a big subject, I have deliberately confined myself to the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, though I
have occasionally considered pagan, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality to make a monotheistic point clearer
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Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of
God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration
...
Recent surveys have shown that ninety-nine per cent of
Americans say that they believe in God: the question is which 'God' of the many on offer do they subscribe to?
Theology often comes across as dull and abstract but the history of God has been passionate and intense
...
The prophets of Israel experienced their God as a physical pain that
wrenched their every limb and filled them with rage and elation
...
The Western experience of God seemed
particularly traumatic
...
They used very
daring imagery to express the complexity of the reality they experienced, which went far beyond the orthodox theology
...
The work of
the late American scholar Joseph Campbell has become extremely popular: he has explored the perennial mythology of mankind, linking
ancient myths with those still current in traditional societies, is often assumed that the three God-religions are devoid of mythology and poetic
symbolism
...
Mystics have seen God incarnated a woman, for example
...

This brings me to a difficult point
...
In recent
years, feminists have understandably objected to this
...
Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the
masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English
...
Thus in Arabic alLah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God - al-Dhat - is feminine
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Yet monotheists have all been very positive about language at the same time as they
have denied its capacity to express the transcendent reality
...

His Word is crucial in all three faiths
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We have to decide whether the word 'God' has
any meaning for us today
...
I have therefore had recourse to the alternatives 'BCE' (Before the Common Era) and

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1 - In the Beginning
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He was not represented by
images and had no temple or priests in his service
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Gradually he faded from the
consciousness of his people
...
Eventually he was said to have
disappeared
...
Schmidt
suggested that there had been a primitive monotheism before men and women had started to worship a number of gods
...
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
...
Yet he is strangely absent from their
daily lives: he has no special cult and is never depicted in effigy
...
Some people say that he has 'gone away'
...
So too, Schmidt's theory goes, in ancient times, the High God was replaced by
the more attractive gods of the Pagan pantheons
...
If there is so, then monotheism was one of the
earliest ideas evolved by human beings to explain the mystery and tragedy of life
...

It is impossible to prove this one way or the other
...
Yet it seems that creating gods is
something that human beings have always done
...
These ideas disappear
quietly, like the Sky God, with no great fanfare
...
Some have actually claimed that he has died
...
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 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
...
Our
scientific culture educates us to focus our attention on the physical and material world in front of us
...
One of its consequences, however, is that we have, as it were, edited out the sense of the 'spiritual' or the 'holy' which
pervades the lives of people in more traditional societies at every level and which was once an essential component of our human experience of
the world
...
It was believed to reside in the tribal chief, in plants, rocks or animals
...
Naturally people wanted to get in
touch with this reality and make it work for them, but they also simply wanted to admire it
...

Rudolf Otto, the German historian of religion who published his important book The Idea of the Holy in 1917, believed that this sense of the
'numinous' was basic to religion
...
The numinous
power was sensed by human beings in different ways -sometimes it inspired wild, bacchanalian excitement; sometimes a deep calm; sometimes
people felt dread, awe and humility in the presence of the mysterious force inherent in every aspect of life
...
The symbolic stories, cave paintings
and carvings were an attempt to express their wonder and to link this pervasive mystery with their own lives; indeed, poets, artists and
musicians are often impelled by a similar desire today
...
Artists carved those statues
depicting her as a naked, pregnant woman which archaeologists have found all over Europe, the Middle East and India
...
Like the old Sky God, she was absorbed into later pantheons and took her place alongside the
older deities
...
She was called Inana in ancient Sumeria, Ishtar in Babylon, Anat in Canaan, Isis in Egypt and Aphrodite in Greece, and remarkably
similar stories were devised in all these cultures to express her role in the spiritual lives of the people
...
These

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Indeed, it seems that in the ancient world people believed that it was only by participating in this divine life that they would become truly
human
...
Thus it was said that the gods had shown men how to build their cities and temples,
which were mere copies of their own homes in the divine realm
...
Everything on earth was thus believed to be a replica of something in the divine world, a perception that
informed the mythology, ritual and social organisation of most of the cultures of antiquity and continues to influence more traditional societies
in our own day
...
This is a perspective that is difficult for us to appreciate in the modern world, since we see
autonomy and independence as supreme human values
...
The imitation of a god is still an important religious notion: resting on the Sabbath or washing somebody's feet on Maundy Thursday actions that are meaningless in themselves - are now significant and sacred because people believe that they were once performed by God
...
The Tigris-Euphrates valley, in what is now Iraq, had been inhabited
as early as 4000 BCE by the people known as the Sumerians who had established one of the first great cultures of the Oikumene (the civilised
world)
...
Not long afterwards the region was invaded by the Semitic Akkadians, who
had adopted the language and culture of Sumer
...
Finally, some 500 years later, the Assyrians had settled in nearby Ashur and eventually conquered
Babylon itself during the eighth century BCE
...
Like other people in the ancient world, the Babylonians attributed their cultural
achievements to the gods, who had revealed their own lifestyle to their mythical ancestors
...
This link with the divine world was celebrated and perpetuated annually in
the great New Year Festival, which had been firmly established by the seventeenth century BCE
...
Yet this political stability
could only endure in so far as it participated in the more enduring and effective government of the gods, who had brought order out of
primordial chaos when they had created the world
...
A scapegoat was killed to cancel the old, dying year; the public
humiliation of the king and the enthronement of a carnival king in his place re-produced the original chaos; a mock-battle re-enacted the
struggle of the gods against the forces of destruction
...
Culture was felt to be a fragile achievement, which could always fall prey to the forces of
disorder and disintegration
...
The story was not a factual account of the physical gins of life
upon earth but was a deliberately symbolic attempt to suggest a great mystery and to release its sacred power
...

A brief look at the Enuma Elish gives us some insight into the spirituality which gave birth to our own Creator God centuries later
...
The story begins with the creation of the gods
themselves - a theme which, as we shall see, would be very important in Jewish and Muslim mysticism
...
In Babylonian myth - as later in the Bible there was no creation out of nothing, an idea that was alien to the ancient world
...
When the Babylonians tried to imagine this primordial divine stuff, they thought that it must have
been similar to the swampy wasteland of Mesopotamia, where floods constantly threatened to wipe out the frail works of men
...
{2}
Then three gods did emerge from the primal wasteland: Apsu (identified with the sweet waters of the rivers), his wife Tiamat (the salty sea) and
Mummu, the Womb of chaos
...
The names 'Apsu' and

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They share the shapeless inertia of the original formlessness and had not yet
achieved a clear identity
...
The new gods emerged, one from the other, in pairs, each of which had acquired a greater definition than the last as the
divine evolution progressed
...
Next came
Ansher and Kishar, identified respectively with the horizons of sky and sea
...
The divine world had sky, rivers and earth, distinct and separate from one another
...
The younger, dynamic gods rose up
against their parents but even though Ea was able to overpower Apsu and Mummu, he could make no headway against Tiamat, who produced a
whole brood of misshapen monsters to fight on her behalf
...
At a meeting of the Great Assembly of gods, Marduk promised to fight Tiamat on condition that he became
their ruler
...
In this myth, creativity is a struggle,
achieved laboriously against overwhelming odds
...
Order must be achieved
...
It had to be re-established, by means of a special liturgy, year after year
...
The result was the great ziggurat in honour of Marduk,
'the earthly temple, symbol of infinite heaven'
...
{3} These laws and rituals are binding upon everybody; even the gods
must observe them to ensure the survival of creation
...
They
knew perfectly well that their own ancestors had built the ziggurat but the story of the Enuma Elish articulated their belief that their creative
enterprise could only endure if it partook of the power of the divine
...
The myth also
expressed their conviction that Babylon was a sacred place, the centre of the world and the home of the gods - a notion that was crucial in
almost all the religious systems of antiquity
...

Finally, almost as an afterthought, Marduk created humanity
...
The gods watched in astonishment and admiration
...
But the story made another important point
...
There was no gulf between human beings and the gods
...
The pagan
vision was holistic
...
There was thus no need for a special revelation of the gods or for a divine law to descend to earth from on high
...

This holistic vision was not confined to the Middle East but was common in the ancient world
...

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
...
{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
...

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

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The story of Baal's battle with Yam-Nahar, the god of
the seas and rivers, is told on tablets that date back to the fourteenth century BCE
...

At the Council of El, Yam demands that Baal be delivered up to him
...
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 almost all cultures, the
dragon symbolises the latent, the unformed and the undifferentiated
...
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
...
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
...
{5} When she finds
his body, she makes a funeral feast in his honour, seizes Mot, cleaves him with her sword, winnows, burns and grinds him like corn before
sowing him in the ground
...
The victory of Anat, however, must be perpetuated year after year in ritual celebration
...
This apotheosis of wholeness and harmony, symbolised by
the union of the sexes, was celebrated by means of ritual sex in ancient Canaan
...
The death of a god, the quest of the goddess and the
triumphant return to the divine sphere were constant religious themes in many cultures and would recur in the very different religion of the One
God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims
...
We have no contemporary record of Abraham but scholars think that he may have been one of the wandering
chieftains who had led their people from Mesopotamia towards the Mediterranean at the end of the third millennium BCE
...
They were not regular desert nomads like the Bedouin, who migrated with their flocks according to the cycle of the seasons, but were
more difficult to classify and, as such, were frequently in conflict with the conservative authorities
...
Some served as mercenaries, others became government employees, others worked as merchants, servants or tinkers
...
The stories about Abraham in the book of Genesis show him serving the King
of Sodom as a mercenary and describe his frequent conflicts with the authorities of Canaan and its environs
...

The Genesis account of Abraham and his immediate descendants may indicate that there were three main waves of early Hebrew settlement in
Canaan, the modern Israel
...
A second wave of immigration
was linked with Abraham's grandson Jacob, who was renamed Israel ('May God show his strength!'); he settled in Shechem, which is now the
Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank
...
The third wave of Hebrew settlement occurred in about 1200 BCE when tribes who claimed to be
descendants of Abraham, arrived in Canaan from Egypt
...
After they had forced their way into Canaan, they allied themselves with the
Hebrews there and became known as the people of Israel
...
The biblical account was
written down centuries later, however, in about the eighth century BCE, though it certainly drew on earlier narrative sources
...

These were later collated into the final text of what we know as the Pentateuch during the fifth century BCE
...
The two earliest
biblical authors, whose work is found in Genesis and Exodus, were probably writing during the eighth century, though some would give them
an earlier date
...

By the eighth century, the Israelites had divided Canaan into two separate kingdoms
...
(See Map p
...
We will discuss the two other sources of the Pentateuch - the Deuteronomist (D) and
Priestly (P) accounts of the ancient history of Israel - in Chapter Two
...
J, for example, starts his history of
God with an account of the creation of the world which, compared with the Enuma Elish, is startlingly perfunctory:

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However, a flood was rising
from the earth and watering all the surface of the soil
...
Then
he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and thus man became a living being
...
Instead of concentrating on the creation of the world and on the prehistoric period like his pagan
contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Canaan, J is more interested in ordinary historical time
...
J is
not absolutely clear that Yahweh is the sole creator of heaven and earth
...
Instead of being composed of the same divine stuff as his god, man (adam), as the pun indicates, belongs to the
earth (adamah)
...
He hurries through the events of prehistory until he comes to the end of the mythical period, which includes such stories as the
Flood and the Tower of Babel, and arrives at the start of the history of the people of Israel
...
We have been told that his father Terah, a pagan, had already migrated
westward with his family from Ur
...
J's account
of the call of Abraham sets the tone for the future history of this God
...
Marduk, Baal and Anat were not expected to involve themselves in the ordinary, profane lives of their worshippers: their actions had
been performed in sacred time
...
He was experienced
as an imperative in the here and now
...

But who is Yahweh? Did Abraham worship the same God as Moses or did he know him by a different name? This would be a matter of prime
importance to us today but the Bible seems curiously vague on the subject and gives conflicting answers to this question, J says that men had
worshipped Yahweh ever since the time of Adam's grandson but in the sixth century, 'P' seems to suggest that the Israelites had never heard of
Yahweh until he appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush
...
{7} The discrepancy does not seem to worry either the biblical writers or their editors unduly
...
Israelite religion was pragmatic and less concerned with
the kind of speculative detail that would worry us
...
We are so familiar with the Bible story and the subsequent history of Israel that we tend to project our knowledge of later Jewish religion
back on to these early historical personages
...
This does not seem to have been the case
...
They would certainly have believed in the
existence of such deities as Marduk, Baal and Anat
...
{8}
We can go further
...
The deity introduces himself to Abraham as El
Shaddai (El of the Mountain), which was one of El's traditional tides
...
The name of the Canaanite High God is preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El or Ishma-El
...
We shall see that centuries later Israelites found the mana or 'holiness' of
Yahweh a terrifying experience
...
In comparison, Abraham's god El is a very mild deity
...
This type of divine apparition, known as an epiphany, was quite common in the pagan world of
antiquity
...
The Iliad is full of such epiphanies
...
At the very end of
the Iliad, Priam is guided to the Greek ships by a charming young man who finally reveals himself as Hermes
...
These stories of epiphanies expressed the holistic pagan vision: when the divine was not essentially distinct from either nature or
humanity, it could be experienced without a great fanfare
...
It seems that ordinary folk may have believed that such divine encounters were
possible in their own lives: this may explain the strange story in the Acts of the Apostles when, as late as the first century CE, the apostle Paul
and his disciple Barnabas were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes by the people of Lystra in what is now Turkey
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

In much the same way, when the Israelites looked back to their own golden age, they saw Abraham, Isaac and Jacob living on familiar terms
with their god
...
Occasionally they seem to see him in human form - an idea that would later be anathema to the Israelites
...
Abraham had looked up and noticed three
strangers approaching his tent during the hottest part of the day
...
In the course of conversation, it transpired, quite naturally, that one of these men was none other
than his god, whom J always calls 'Yahweh'
...
Nobody seems particularly surprised by this revelation
...
J's contemporary, 'E', finds the old stories about the patriarchs' intimacy with God unseemly: when E tells stories about
Abraham's or Jacob's dealings with God, he prefers to distance the event and make the old legends less anthropomorphic
...
J, however, does not share this squeamishness and preserves the ancient flavour of these primitive
epiphanies in his account
...
On one occasion, he had decided to return to Haran to find a wife among his relatives there
...
That night he dreamed of a ladder which stretched
between earth and heaven: angels were going up and down between the realms of god and man
...
At the top of his own ladder, Jacob
dreamed that he saw El, who blessed him and repeated the promises that he had made to Abraham: Jacob's descendants would become a
mighty nation and possess the land of Canaan
...
Pagan
religion was often territorial: a god only had jurisdiction in a particular area and it was always wise to worship the local deities when you went
abroad
...
' {12} The story of this early epiphany shows that the High God of Canaan was beginning to acquire a more universal
implication
...
He was filled with the wonder that often inspired pagans when they encountered
the sacred power of the divine: 'How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God (beth-El); this is the gate of
heaven
...
Jacob decided to consecrate this holy ground in the traditional pagan manner of the country
...
Henceforth the place would no longer be called Luz but BethEl, the House of El
...
Although later Israelites vigorously condemned this type of religion, the pagan sanctuary of Beth-El was associated in
early legend with Jacob and his God
...
Jacob had decided that if El (or Yahweh, as J calls him) could really look after him in Haran, he
was particularly effective
...
Israelite belief in God was deeply pragmatic
...
In the ancient world, mana was a self-evident fact of life and a god
proved his worth if he could transmit this effectively
...
People would continue
to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound
...
As he re-entered the land of Canaan, he experienced another strange
epiphany
...
At daybreak, like most spiritual beings,
his opponent said that he had to leave but Jacob held on to him: he would not let him go until he had revealed his name
...
As the
strange encounter developed, Jacob became aware that his opponent had been none other than El himself:
Jacob then made this request, 'I beg you, tell me your name
...
Jacob named the place Peni-El [El's Face] 'Because I have seen El face to face,' he said, 'and I have survived
...

Yet even though these early tales show the patriarchs encountering their god in much the same way as their pagan contemporaries, they do
introduce a new category of religious experience
...
Today we tend to define faith as an
intellectual assent to a creed but, as we have seen, the biblical writers did not view faith in God as an abstract or metaphysical belief
...
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trust, in rather the same way as when we say that we have faith in a person or an ideal
...
How could Abraham be the father of a great nation when his
wife Sarah was barren? Indeed, the very idea that she could have a child was so ridiculous - eventually Sarah had passed the menopause - that
when they heard this promise both Sarah and Abraham burst out laughing
...
The joke turns sour, however, when God makes an appalling demand: Abraham must sacrifice his only
son to him
...
It was cruel but had a logic and rationale
...
In begetting the child, the god's energy had been depleted, so
to replenish this and to ensure the circulation of all the available mana, the first-born was returned to its divine parent
...
Isaac had been a gift of God but not his natural son
...
Indeed, the sacrifice would make a nonsense of Abraham's entire life, which had been based on the promise that he would be the
father of a great nation
...
He did not
share the human predicament; he did not require an input of energy from men and women
...
Abraham decided to trust his god
...
Isaac, who knew nothing of the divine command, even had to carry the wood for his own
holocaust
...
Abraham had proved himself worthy of becoming the father of a mighty nation, which would be as numerous as the stars in
the sky or the grains of sand on the sea-shore
...
The myth of the Exodus from Egypt, when God led Moses and the children of Israel to
freedom, is equally offensive to modern sensibilities
...
Pharaoh was reluctant to let the people of Israel go, so to force
his hand, God sent ten fearful plagues upon the people of Egypt
...
Finally God unleashed the most terrible plague of all: he sent the Angel of Death to kill the
first-born sons of all the Egyptians, while sparing the sons of the Hebrew slaves
...
He caught up with them at the Sea of Reeds but God saved the Israelites by opening
the sea and letting them cross dry-shod
...

This is a brutal, partial and murderous god: a god of war who would be known as Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Armies
...
If Yahweh had remained such a savage god, the
sooner he vanished, the better it would have been for everybody
...
It would, however, have had a clear message for the people of the ancient Middle East, who
were used to gods splitting the seas in half
...
There is little attempt at realism
...
Instead, they wanted to bring out the significance of the original event, whatever that may have been
...
{15} This would have been an extremely rare occurrence at the time and would have made an indelible impression on
everybody involved
...

We shall see that Yahweh did not remain the cruel and violent god of the Exodus, even though the myth has been important in all three of the
monotheistic religions
...
Yet the bloody story of the Exodus would continue to inspire dangerous conceptions of the divine and a vengeful theology
...
Like any human idea, the notion of God can be
exploited and abused
...
Yet the Deuteronomist has
also preserved an interpretation of the Exodus myth that has been equally and more positively effective in the history of monotheism, which
speaks of a God who is on the side of the impotent and the oppressed
...
The Israelites are commanded to present the firstfruits of the harvest to the priests of Yahweh and make this affirmation:
My father was a wandering Aramaean
...
The Egyptians ill-treated us, they gave us no peace and inflicted harsh slavery upon us
...
Yahweh heard our voice and saw our misery, our toil and our oppression; and Yahweh
brought us out of Egypt with mighty hand and outstretched arm, with great terror, and with signs and wonders
...
Here then I bring the firstfruits of the produce of the

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...
{16}
The God who may have inspired the first successful peasants' uprising in history is a God of revolution
...

The Israelites called Yahweh 'the God of our fathers' yet it seems that he may have been quite a different deity from El, the Canaanite High
God worshipped by the patriarchs
...
In all his early appearances
to Moses, Yahweh insists repeatedly and at some length that he is indeed the God of Abraham, even though he had originally been called El
Shaddai
...
It has been suggested
that Yahweh was originally a warrior god, a god of volcanoes, a god worshipped in Midian, in what is now Jordan
...
Again, this would be a very important question for us
today but it was not so crucial for the biblical writers
...
All we can be sure of is that, whatever his provenance, the events of the Exodus made
Yahweh the definitive God of Israel and that Moses was able to convince the Israelites that he really was one and the same as El, the God
beloved by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
...
It will be recalled that Moses had been forced to flee Egypt for killing an Egyptian who was illtreating an Israelite slave
...
When he went closer to investigate, Yahweh had called to him by name and
Moses had cried: 'Here I am!' (hineni!), the response of every prophet of Israel when he encountered the God that demanded total attention and
loyalty:
'Come no nearer' [God] said, 'Take off your shoes for the place on which you stand is holy ground
...
' At that Moses covered his face, afraid to look at God
...
He inspires terror and insists upon distance
...
Instead of revealing his name directly, he answers:
'I Am Who I Am (Ehyeh asher ehyeh)
...
Hebrew did not have such a metaphysical dimension at this stage and it would be nearly 2000 years before it acquired one
...
Ehyeh asher ehyeh is a Hebrew idiom to express a deliberate vagueness
...
So when Moses asks who he is,
God replies in effect: 'Never you mind who I am!' or 'Mind your own business!' There was to be no discussion of God's nature and certainly no
attempt to manipulate him as pagans sometimes did when they recited the names of their gods
...
He will be exactly as he chooses and will make no guarantees
...
The myth of the Exodus would prove decisive: it was able to engender hope for the future, even in impossible circumstances
...
The old Sky Gods had been experienced as too remote from human concerns;
the younger deities like Baal, Marduk and the Mother Goddesses had come close to mankind but Yahweh had opened the gulf between man
and the divine world once again
...
When they arrived at the mountain, the people were told
to purify their garments and keep their distance
...

Whoever touches the mountain will be put to death
...
Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God and they
stood at the bottom of the mountain
...
Like smoke from a furnace, the smoke went up and the whole mountain shook violently
...
Instead of experiencing the principles of order, harmony and justice in
the very nature of things, as in the pagan vision, the Law is now handed down from on high
...

In the final text of Exodus, edited in the fifth century BCE, God is said to have made a covenant with Moses on Mount Sinai (an event which is
supposed to have happened around 1200)
...
But whatever its date, the idea of the covenant tells us that the Israelites were not yet
monotheists, since it only made sense in a polytheistic setting
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

but promised, in their covenant, that they would ignore all the other deities and worship him alone
...
Even the Ten Commandments delivered on Mount Sinai take the existence of other gods
for granted: 'There shall be no strange gods for you before my face
...
To ignore a potential source of mana
seemed frankly foolhardy and the subsequent history of the Israelites shows that they were very reluctant to neglect the cult of the other gods
...
When they settled in Canaan, the Israelites turned instinctively to the
cult of Baal, the Landlord of Canaan, who had made the crops grow from time immemorial
...
Indeed, the Bible tells us that
while Moses was up on Mount Sinai, the rest of the people turned back to the older pagan religion of Canaan
...
The placing of this incident in stark juxtaposition to the awesome revelation
on Mount Sinai may be an attempt by the final editors of the Pentateuch to indicate the bitterness of the division in Israel
...

Yet the Israelites had promised to make Yahweh their only god after the Exodus and the prophets would remind them of this agreement in later
years
...
Yahweh had warned them that if they broke this agreement, he would destroy them mercilessly
...
In the book of Joshua we find what may be an early text of the celebration
of this covenant between Israel and its God
...
It followed a set form
...
Finally, it stated the terms, conditions and penalties
that would accrue if the covenant were neglected
...
In the fourteenth
century covenant between the Hittite King Mursilis II and his vassal Duppi Tashed, the King made this demand: 'Do not turn to anyone else
...
With my friend you shall be friend and with my enemy you shall be enemy
...
The ceremony was conducted by Moses's successor Joshua, who represented Yahweh
...
Yahweh was introduced; his dealings with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob recalled; then the events of the Exodus were related
...
But if you will not serve Yahweh, choose today whom you wish to serve, whether the gods your
ancestors served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are now living
...
They did not hesitate
...
His powerful intervention in their affairs had demonstrated beyond
reasonable doubt that Yahweh was up to the job of being their elohim: they would worship him alone and cast away the other gods
...
If they neglected the terms of the covenant, he would destroy them
...
Then cast away the alien gods from among you!' Josuah cried, 'and give your hearts to Yahweh, the
God of Israel!' {23}
The Bible shows that the people were not true to the covenant
...
Although Yahweh's cult was
fundamentally different in its historical bias, it often expressed itself in terms of the old paganism
...
It
consisted of three square areas, which culminated in the small, cube-shaped room known as the Holy of Holies which contained the Ark of the
Covenant, the portable altar which the Israelites had with them during their years in the wilderness
...

The Israelites continued to worship Yahweh in the ancient shrines which they had inherited from the Canaanites at Beth-El, Shiloh, Hebron,
Bethlehem and Dan, where there were frequently pagan ceremonies
...
The Israelites began to see the Temple as the replica of Yahweh's heavenly court
...
It has been suggested that some
of the psalms celebrated the enthronement of Yahweh in his Temple on the Feast of Tabernacles, which, like the enthronement of Marduk, reenacted his primal subjugation of chaos
...


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...
This became particularly acute
during the latter half of the ninth century
...
His wife Jezebel,
daughter of the King of Tyre and Sidon in what is now Lebanon, was an ardent pagan, intent upon converting the country to the religion of
Baal and Asherah
...
Ahab remained true to Yahweh but did not try to curb Jezebel's proselytism
...
He summoned King Ahab and the people to a contest on
Mount Carmel between Yahweh and Baal
...
They
would call upon their gods and see which one sent down fire from heaven to consume the holocaust
...
The prophets of
Baal shouted his name for the whole morning, performing their hobbling dance round their altar, yelling and gashing themselves with swords
and spears
...
Elijah jeered: 'Call louder!' he cried, 'for he is a god: he is preoccupied or he is busy, or he has
gone on a journey; perhaps he is asleep and he will wake up
...
'
Then it was Elijah's turn
...
Then Elijah called upon Yahweh
...
The people fell upon their faces: 'Yahweh is God,' they cried, 'Yahweh is God
...
'Seize the prophets of Baal!' he ordered
...

{25} Paganism did not usually seek to impose itself on other people - Jezebel is an interesting exception - since there was always room for
another god in the pantheon alongside the others
...
After the massacre, Elijah climbed up to the top
of Mount Carmel and sat in prayer with his head between his knees, sending his servant from time to time to scan the horizon
...
Almost as he spoke, the sky darkened with stormy clouds and the rain fell in torrents
...
By sending rain, Yahweh had usurped the function of Baal, the Storm God,
proving that he was just as effective in fertility as in war
...
There he experienced a theophany which manifested the new Yahwist spirituality
...
Thence came a mighty wind, so strong it tore the mountains and shattered the rocks before
Yahweh
...
After the wind came an earthquake
...
After the
earthquake came a fire
...
And after the fire came the sound of a gentle breeze
...
{26}
Unlike the pagan deities, Yahweh was not in any of the forces of nature but in a realm apart
...
The story of Elijah contains the last mythical account of the past in the Jewish
scriptures
...
The period 800-200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age
...
The new religious systems reflected the
changed economic and social conditions
...
There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of
a merchant class
...
The new wealth led to intellectual and
cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience
...
Each region
developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India
and philosophical rationalism in Europe
...
Strange as it may seem, the idea of 'God', like the other great religious insights
of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism
...

The religious experience of India developed along similar lines but its different emphasis will illuminate the peculiar characteristics and
problems of the Israelite notion of God
...

In the seventeenth century BCE, Aryans from what is now Iran had invaded the Indus valley and subdued the indigenous population
...
There we find a multitude of gods,
expressing many of the same values as the deities of the Middle East and which presented the forces of nature as instinct with power, life and
file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Yet there were signs that people were beginning to see that the various gods might simply be manifestations of one divine
Absolute, that transcended them all
...
When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had
evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody -not even the gods - could understand the mystery of existence:
Who then knows whence it has arisen,
Whence this emanation hath arisen,
Whether God disposed it, or whether he did not, Only he who is its overseer in highest heaven knows
...
Instead, it was
designed to help people to come to terms with the wonder and terror of existence
...

By the eighth century BCE, when J and E were writing their chronicles, changes in the social and economic conditions of the Indian
subcontinent meant that the old Vedic religion was no longer relevant
...
The revived interest in karma, the notion that one's destiny
is determined by one's own actions, made people unwilling to blame the gods for the irresponsible behaviour of human beings
...
Vedic religion had become preoccupied with the rituals of sacrifice but the revived
interest in the old Indian practice of yoga (the 'yoking' of the powers of the mind by special disciplines of concentration) meant that people
became dissatisfied with a religion that concentrated on externals
...
We shall note that the prophets of Israel felt the same dissatisfaction
...

The gods were no longer very important in India
...
It was a remarkable assertion of the value of humanity and the desire to take control of destiny: it would be the great
religious insight of the subcontinent
...
In their view, such repression and denial would be damaging
...
During the eighth century, sages began to address these issues in the treatises called the Aranyakas and
the Upanishads, known collectively as the Vedanta: the end of the Vedas
...
It is impossible to generalise about the religion we call Hinduism because it eschews systems and
denies that one exclusive interpretation can be adequate
...

In Vedic religion, people had experienced a holy power in the sacrificial ritual
...
The priestly caste
(known as Brahmanas) were also believed to possess this power
...
The whole world was seen as the divine activity welling up from the
mysterious being of Brahman, which was the inner meaning of all existence
...
It was a process of revelation in the literal meaning of the word: it was an unveiling of the hidden ground of all being
...

Some of the Upanishads saw Brahman as a personal power but others saw it as strictly impersonal
...
Brahman does not speak to mankind
...
Nor does it respond to us in a personal way: sin does not 'offend' it and it cannot be
said to 'love' us or be 'angry'
...

This divine power would be utterly alien were it not for the fact that is also pervades, sustains and inspires us
...
These disciplines of posture, breathing, diet and mental concentration have also been developed independently
in other cultures, as we shall see, and seem to produce {11} experience of enlightenment and illumination which have been interpreted
differently but which seem natural to humanity
...
The eternal principle within each individual was called Atman: it was a new version of the old
holistic vision of paganism, a rediscovery in new terms of the One Life within us and abroad which was essentially divine
...
A young man called Sretaketu had studied the Vedas for twelve years and was rather full of
himself
...
He told his son to put a piece of salt into water and report back to him the following
morning
...
Uddalaka proceeded to
question him:

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...

'Salt
...
What is it like?'
'Salt
...
What is it like?'
'Salt
...
'
He did as he was told but [that did not stop the salt from] remaining the same
...
This
first essence - the whole universe has as its Self: That is the Real: That is the Self: that you are, Sretaketu!'
Thus even though we cannot see it, Brahman pervades the world and, as Atman, is found eternally within each one of us
...
God is not seen in
Hinduism as a Being added on to the world as we know it, therefore, nor is it identical with the world
...
It is only 'revealed' to us by an experience (anubhara) which cannot be expressed in words or concepts
...
What cannot be thought with the mind, but that whereby the mind can
think
...
It is a Reality
that can only be discerned in ecstasy in the original sense of going beyond the self: God
comes to the thought of those who know It beyond thought, not to those who imagine It can be attained by thought
...

It is known in the ecstasy of an awakening that opens the door of life eternal
...
The experience of Brahman or Atman cannot be explained rationally any more than a piece
of music or a poem
...
This will also be a constant theme in the history of God
...
In about 538 BCE, a young man named Siddhartha Gautama also left his
beautiful wife, his son, his luxurious home in Kapilavashtu, about 100 miles north of Benares, and became a mendicant ascetic
...

For six years, he sat at the feet of various Hindu gurus and undertook fearful penances but made no headway
...
It was not until he abandoned these methods completely and put himself
into a trance one night that he gained enlightenment
...

Yet again, as in the pagan vision, the gods, nature and mankind were bound together in sympathy
...
Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One
...

But two of the gods of the traditional pantheon - Maha Brahma and Sakra, Lord of the devas - came to the Buddha and begged him to explain
his method to the world
...
This was Dharma, the truth about right living, which alone could free us from pain
...
The Buddha believed implicitly in the existence of the gods since they were a part of his cultural baggage but
he did not believe them to be much use to mankind
...
Yet at crucial moments of
his life - as when he made the decision to preach his message - he imagined the gods influencing him and playing an active role
...
When Buddhists experience bliss or
a sense of transcendence in meditation, they do not believe that this results from contact with a supernatural being
...
Instead of relying on a god,
therefore, the Buddha urged his disciples to save themselves
...
It consisted entirely of suffering; life was wholly awry
...
Nothing has permanent
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...
Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong
...
The Buddha taught that it was possible to gain release from dukkha by
living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately and refraining from anything like drugs or
intoxicants that cloud the mind
...
He insisted that he had discovered it: 'I have seen an
ancient path, an ancient Road, trodden by Buddhas of a bygone age
...
It had objective reality not because it could be demonstrated by logical proof but
because anybody who seriously tried to live that way would find that it worked
...

Karma bound men and women to an endless cycle of rebirth into a series of painful lives
...
The Buddha compared the process of rebirth to a flame which lights a lamp, from which a second lamp is lit, and so
on until the flame is extinguished
...
But if the
fire is put out, the cycle of suffering will cease and nirvana will be attained
...
It is not a
merely negative state, however, but plays a role in Buddhist life that is analagous to God
...
{32}
Some Buddhists might object to this comparison because they find the concept of 'God' too limiting to express their conception of ultimate
reality
...
Like the sages of
the Upanishads, the Buddha insisted that nirvana could not be defined or discussed as though it were any other human reality
...
The Buddha always refused to answer questions about nirvana
or other ultimate matters because they were 'improper' or 'inappropriate'
...
Experience was the only reliable 'proof
...

There is, monks, an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, uncompounded
...
But because
there is an unborn, an unbecome, an unmade, an uncompounded, therefore, there is an escape from the born, the become, the
made, the compounded
...
All that the Buddha could do was provide them with a raft to take them across to
'the farther shore'
...
It was like
asking what direction a flame went when it 'went out'
...
We shall find that over the centuries, Jews, Christians and Muslims have made
the same reply to the question of the 'existence' of God
...
Again, he did not deny reason but insisted on the importance of clear and accurate thinking and use of
language
...
They
could be interesting but not a matter of final significance
...

The Greeks, on the other hand, were passionately interested ii logic and reason
...
Much of his early work was devoted to the defence of Socrates, who had forced men to clarify their
ideas by his thought-provoking questions but had been sentenced to death in 399 on the charges of impiety and the corruption of youth
...
Plato had also been influenced by the sixth century philosopher Pythagoras, who may have been
influenced by ideas from India, transmitted via Persia and Egypt
...
He had articulated the common human experience of feeling a stranger in a world
that does not seem to be our true element
...
Plato also believed in the existence of a divine, unchanging reality beyond the world of
the senses, that the soul was a fallen divinity, out of its element, imprisoned in the body but capable of regaining its divine status by the
purification of the reasoning powers of the mind
...
But gradually he can be drawn out and achieve

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...

Later in his life, Plato may have retreated from his doctrine of the eternal forms or ideas but they became crucial to many monotheists when
they tried to express their conception of God
...
They are fuller, more permanent and effective realities than the shifting, flawed material phenomena we encounter with our senses
...
There is an idea corresponding to every
general conception we have, such as Love, Justice and Beauty
...
Plato had cast the
ancient myth of the archetypes into a Philosophical form
...
He did not discuss the nature of God but confined himself to the divine world of the forms,
though occasionally it seems that ideal Beauty or the Good do represent a supreme reality
...
The Greeks saw movement and change as signs of inferior reality: something that had true identity remained always the same,
characterised by permanence and immutability
...
This utterly static image of divinity
would have an immense influence on Jews, Christians and Muslims, even though it had little in common with the God of revelation, who is
constantly active, innovative and, in the Bible, even changes his mind, as when he repents of having made man and decides to destroy the
human race in the Flood
...
Plato's divine forms were not realities 'out there' but could
be discovered within the self
...
He makes Diotima, Socrates's mentor, explain that this Beauty is unique,
eternal and absolute, quite unlike anything that we experience in this world:
This Beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away; neither waxes nor wanes; next it is not beautiful in
part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful
here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear to the imagination like the beauty of
a face or hands or anything else corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or science, or like beauty which has its seat in
something other than itself, be it in a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatsoever; he will see it as absolute,
existing alone within itself, unique, eternal
...
Yet despite its transcendence, the ideas were to be
found within the mind of man
...
Plato envisaged it as something which
happens to the mind: the objects of thought were realities that were active in the intellect of the man who contemplates them
...
Because human beings
were fallen divinities, the forms of the divine world were within them and could be 'touched' by reason, which was not simply a rational or
cerebral activity but an intuitive grasp of the eternal reality within us
...

Plato believed that the universe was essentially rational
...
Aristotle (384-322) took it a
step further
...
As well as attempting a theoretical understanding of the truth in the
fourteen treatises known as the Metaphysics (the term was coined by his editor, who put these treatises 'after the Physics': meta ta physika), he
also studied theoretical physics and empirical biology
...
There has been much
controversy about his assessment of Plato's work
...
Aristotle maintained that the forms only had reality in so far as they existed in
concrete, material objects in our own world
...
He pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any
facts 'but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition'
...
The Greek tragedies, which originally
formed part of a religious festival, did not necessarily present a factual account of historical events but were attempting to reveal a more serious
truth
...
Hence poetry is
something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular
...
Aristotle's account of the katharsis of tragedy
was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of
events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

Aristotle's idea of God had an immense influence on later monotheists, particularly on Christians in the Western world
...
He developed what amounted to a philosophical version of the
old emanation accounts of creation: there was a hierarchy of existences, each one of which imparts form and change to the one below it, but
unlike the old myths, in Aristotle's theory the emanations grew weaker the further they were from their source
...
This God was pure being and, as such, eternal, immobile and spiritual
...
Since matter is flawed and mortal, there is no material element in God or the higher grades of being
...
He activates the
world by a process of attraction, since all beings are drawn towards Being itself
...

This godly capacity of reason puts him above plants and animals
...
It is his duty to become immortal and divine by purifying
his intellect
...
Theoria was not achieved by logic alone but was a disciplined
intuition resulting in an ecstatic self-transcendence
...

Despite the important position of the Unmoved Mover in his system, Aristotle's God had little religious relevance
...
Even though everything yearns towards him, this God
remains quite indifferent to the existence of the universe, since he cannot contemplate anything inferior to himself
...
It is an open question whether God even knows of the
existence of the cosmos, which has emanated from him as a necessary effect of his existence
...
Aristotle himself may have abandoned his theology later in life
...
Yet their thought was elitist
...

In the new ideologies of the Axial Age, therefore, there was a general agreement that human life contained a transcendent element that was
essential
...
They had not jettisoned the older mythologies absolutely but reinterpreted them and
helped people to rise above them
...
But how would irascible Yahweh
measure up to these other lofty visions?

2 - One God
In 742 BCE, a member of the Judaean royal family had a vision of Yahweh in the Temple which King Solomon had built in Jerusalem
...
King Uzziah of Judah had died that year and was succeeded by his son Ahaz, who would encourage his
subjects to worship pagan gods alongside Yahweh
...
In 722, his successor King Sargon II would conquer the northern Kingdom and
deport the population: the ten northern tribes of Israel were forced to assimilate and disappeared from history, while the little kingdom of Judah
feared for its own survival
...
Isaiah may have been a member of the
ruling class but he had populist and democratic views and was highly sensitive to the plight of the poor
...

Suddenly he seemed to see Yahweh himself sitting on his throne in heaven directly above the Temple, which was the replica of his celestial
court on earth
...
They cried out to one another antiphonally: 'Holy! holy! holy is Yahweh Sabaoth
...
' {1} At the
sound of their voices, the whole Temple seemed to shake on its foundations and was filled with smoke, enveloping Yahweh in an impenetrable
cloud, similar to the cloud and smoke that had hidden him from Moses on Mount Sinai
...
The Hebrew kaddosh, however, was nothing to do with morality as such but means otherness, a radical separation
...

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...

In his classic book The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto described this fearful experience of transcendent reality as mysterium terrible et
fascinans: it is terrible because it comes as a profound shock that severs us from the consolations of normality and fascinans because,
paradoxically, it exerts an irresistible attraction
...
Indeed, this sense of the Wholly Other
cannot even be said to 'exist' because it has no place in our normal scheme of reality
...
Nor was he simply a tribal deity, who was passionately biased in favour of Israel:
his glory was no longer confined to the Promised Land but filled the whole earth
...
He had not become the perfected teacher of men
...
{3}
Overcome by the transcendent holiness of Yahweh, he was conscious only of his own inadequacy and ritual impurity
...
It had come upon him out of the blue and he was
completely shaken by its devastating impact
...
Many of the prophets were either unwilling to speak on God's behalf or unable to do so
...
{4} God had made allowances for this impediment and permitted his brother Aaron to speak in
Moses's stead
...
The prophets were not
eager to proclaim the divine message and were reluctant to undertake a mission of great strain and anguish
...

Hindus would never have described Brahman as a great king because their God could not be described in such human terms
...
The psalms often describe Yahweh
enthroned in his temple as king, just as Baal, Marduk and Dagon, {5} the gods of their neighbours, presided as monarchs in their rather similar
temples
...
Despite his terrifying otherness, Yahweh can speak and Isaiah can answer
...

Yahweh asked: 'Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?' and, like Moses before him, Isaiah immediately replied: 'Here I am! (hineni!)
send me!' The point of this vision was not to enlighten the prophet but to give him a practical job to do
...
The prophet
will not be characterised by mystical illumination but by obedience
...
With typical Semitic
paradox, Yahweh told Isaiah that the people would not accept it: he must not be dismayed when they reject God's words: 'Go and say to this
people: "Hear and hear again, but do not understand; see and see again, but do not perceive
...
{7} Humankind cannot bear very much reality
...
Isaiah would live to see the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722 and the
deportation of the ten tribes
...

{8} Isaiah had the thankless task of warning his people of these impending catastrophes:
There will be great emptiness in the country and, though a tenth of the people remain, it will be stripped like a terebinth of
which, once felled, only the stock remains
...
What was chillingly original in Isaiah's message
was his analysis of the situation
...
It was not S argon II and Sennacherib who would drive the Israelites into exile and devastate the country
...
{10}
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...
The God of Israel had originally distinguished himself from the
pagan deities by revealing himself in concrete current events not simply in mythology and liturgy
...
He had all the nations in his pocket
...
{11} Since Yahweh had foretold the ultimate destruction of Assyria, there was a distant hope for the future
...
Nobody would have been happy to hear that Yahweh had masterminded the successful Assyrian campaigns of 722 and 701, just as
he had captained the armies of Joshua, Gideon and King David
...
Instead of offering the people a panacea, Yahweh was being
used to make people confront unwelcome reality
...

While the God of Moses had been triumphalist, the God of Isaiah was full of sorrow
...
{12} Yahweh was utterly revolted by the animal sacrifices in the Temple, sickened by the fat of calves, blood of bulls and
goats and the reeking blood that smoked from the holocausts
...
{13}
This would have shocked Isaiah's audience: in the Middle East these cultic celebrations were of the essence of religion
...
Now
Yahweh was actually saying that these things were utterly meaningless
...
Israelites must discover the inner meaning of their religion
...

Your hands are covered with blood,
wash, make yourselves clean
...

Cease to do evil
...
{14}
The prophets had discovered for themselves the overriding duty of compassion, which would become the hallmark of all the major religions
formed in the Axial Age
...
It was no longer sufficient to combine the observance to the Temple and
to the extra-temporal world of myth
...

The social ideal of the prophets had been implicit in the cult of Yahweh since Sinai: the story of the Exodus had stressed that God was on the
side of the weak and oppressed
...
At the time of Isaiah's
prophetic vision, two prophets were already preaching a similar message in the chaotic northern kingdom
...
In about 752, Amos had also been
overwhelmed by a sudden imperative that had swept him to the kingdom of Israel in the north
...
Amaziah, the priest of Beth-El, had tried to send him away
...
He naturally imagined that Amos belonged to one of
the guilds of soothsayers, who wandered round in groups telling fortunes for a living
...
'Get back to the land
of Judah; earn your bread there, do your prophesying there
...
' Unabashed, Amos drew himself to his full height and replied scornfully that he was no guild prophet but had a direct mandate from
Yahweh: 'I was no prophet, neither did I belong to any of the brotherhoods of prophets
...
" ' {IS} So the people of Beth-El
did not want to hear Yahweh's message? Very well, he had another oracle for them: their wives would be forced on to the streets, their children
slaughtered and they themselves would die in exile, far from the land of Israel
...
Like Amos he was on his own; he had broken with the rhythms and duties of his past
...
It seemed as though he had been jerked out of the normal patterns
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...
He was forced to prophesy, whether he wanted to or not
...
Amos was the first of the prophets to emphasise the importance of social justice and compassion
...
In Amos's oracles, Yahweh is speaking on behalf of the oppressed, giving voice to the
voiceless, impotent suffering of the poor
...
The people of Israel are
just as bad as the goyim, the Gentiles: they might be able to ignore the cruelty and oppression of the poor but Yahweh could not
...
" " {7} Did they really have the temerity to look forward to the Day of the Lord, when Yahweh would exalt
Israel and humiliate the goyim} They had a shock coming: 'What will this Day of Yahweh mean to you? It will mean darkness not light!' {18}
They thought they were God's Chosen People? They had entirely misunderstood the nature of the covenant, which meant responsibility not
privilege: 'Listen sons of Israel, to this oracle Yahweh speaks against you!' Amos cried, 'against the whole family I brought out of the land of
Egypt:
You alone, of all the families of the earth, have I acknowledged,
therefore it is for your sins that I mean to punish you
...
God did not simply intervene in
history to glorify Israel but to secure social justice
...

Not surprisingly, most Israelites declined the prophet's invitation to enter into a dialogue with Yahweh
...
This continues to be the case: the religion of
compassion is only followed by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque
...
In the tenth century, King Jeroboam I had set up two cultic bulls at the
sanctuaries of Dan and Beth-El
...
{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'
...
Like all of the new prophets, he was concerned
with the inner meaning of religion
...
' {21} He did not mean theological knowledge: the word daath comes from the Hebrew verb yada: to know, which has sexual
connotations
...
{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
...
{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
...
{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
...
At the very beginning of his career, Yahweh
seemed to have issued a shocking command
...
{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
...
His marriage was, therefore, an emblem of Yahweh's relationship with the faithless Israel
...
His eldest son was called Jezreel, after a famous battlefield, their daughter was LoRuhamah (Unloved) and their younger son Lo-Ammi (Not-My-People)
...
' {26} We shall see that the prophets were often inspired to perform elaborate mimes to demonstrate the
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...
The text makes it clear that Gomer
did not become an esheth zeuunim until after their children had been born
...
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
...
But Hosea still loved Gomer and eventually he went after
her and bought her back from her new master
...

When they attributed their own human feelings and experiences to Yahweh, the prophets were in an important sense creating a god in their own
image
...
Amos had ascribed his own empathy with the suffering poor to
Yahweh; Hosea saw Yahweh as a jilted husband, who still continued to feel a yearning tenderness for his wife
...
A deity which is utterly remote from humanity, such as Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, cannot inspire a spiritual quest
...
It has to be said that this imaginative portrayal of
God in human terms has inspired a social concern that has not been present in Hinduism
...
The Jews would be the first people in the ancient world to establish a welfare system that
was the admiration of their pagan neighbours
...
He contemplated the divine vengeance that the northern tribes would
bring upon themselves by worshipping gods that they had actually made themselves:
And now they add sin to sin,
they smelt images from their silver,
idols of their own manufacture,
smith's work, all of it
...

Men blow kisses to calves! {27}
This was, of course, a most unfair and reductive description of Canaanite religion
...
The effigy had been a symbol of
divinity
...

The statue of Marduk in the Temple of Esagila and the standing stones of Asherah in Canaan had never been seen as identical with the gods but
had been a focus that had helped people to concentrate on the transcendent element of human life
...
These home-made gods, in their view, are nothing but gold and silver; they
have been knocked together by a craftsman in a couple of hours; they have eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear; they cannot walk and
have to be carted about by their worshippers; they are brutish and stupid subhuman beings that are no better than scarecrows in a melon patch
...
The goyim who worship them are fools and Yahweh hates them
...
Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith: provided that old cults were not
threatened by the arrival of a new deity, there was always room for another god alongside the traditional pantheon
...
We have
seen that in Hinduism and Buddhism people were encouraged to go beyond the gods rather than to turn upon them with loathing
...
In the Jewish scriptures, the new sin of
'idolatry', the worship of 'false' gods, inspires something akin to nausea
...
As such, it is not a rational, considered reaction but expressive of deep anxiety and repression
...
At this point, most Israelites believed implicitly in
the existence of the pagan deities
...
But it was obviously difficult for the
irredeemably masculine Yahweh to usurp the function of a goddess like Asherah, Ishtar or Anat who still had a great following among the
Israelites, particularly among the women
...
In part, this was due to his origins as a tribal god of war
...
It seems that in more primitive societies, women were sometimes held in higher esteem than men
...
The rise of the cities, however, meant that the

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...
Henceforth women were marginalised and
became second-class citizens in the new civilisations of the Oikumene
...
The democratic ideal did not extend to the women of
Athens, who lived in seclusion and were despised as inferior beings
...
In the early
days, women were forceful and clearly saw themselves as the equal of their husbands
...
Israelites
would continue to celebrate such heroic women as Judith and Esther but after Yahweh had successfully vanquished the other gods and
goddesses of Canaan and the Middle East and become the only God, his religion would be managed almost entirely by men
...

We shall see that Yahweh's victory was hard-won
...
Yahweh did not seem able to
transcend the older deities in a peaceful natural manner
...
Thus in Psalm Eighty-two we see him making a play for the
leadership of the Divine Assembly, which had played such an important role in both Babylonian and Canaanite myth:
Yahweh takes his stand in the Council of El
to deliver judgments among the gods
...

I once said, 'You too are gods,
sons of El Elyon, all of you';
but all the same, you shall die like men;
as one man, gods, you shall fall
...
He represents the modern compassionate ethos of the prophets but his divine colleagues have done
nothing to promote justice and equity over the years
...
They would wither away like mortal men
...

Despite the bad press it has in the Bible, there is nothing wrong with idolatry per se: it only becomes objectionable or naive if the image of
God, which has been constructed with such loving care, is confused with the ineffable reality to which it refers
...
Others, however, never quite managed to take this step but assumed that their conception of God was
identical with the ultimate mystery
...
He was anxious to reverse the syncretist policies of his predecessors, King Manasseh (687-42) and King Amon (642-40) who had
encouraged their people to worship the gods of Canaan alongside Yahweh
...
Since most Israelites were devoted to Asherah and some thought that she was Yahweh's wife, only
the most strict Yahwists would have considered this blasphemous
...
While the workmen were turning everything upside down, the High Priest Hilkiah is said to have
discovered an ancient manuscript which purported to be an account of Moses's last sermon to the children of Israel
...
When he heard it, the young king tore his garments in horror: no wonder Yahweh
had been so angry with his ancestors! They had totally failed to obey his strict instructions to Moses
...
There have
been various theories about its timely 'discovery' by the reforming party
...
We shall never know for certain but
the book certainly reflected an entirely new intransigence in Israel, which reflects a seventh century perspective
...
Yahweh had marked his people out from all the
other nations, not because of any merit of their own but because of his great love
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

rejection of all other gods
...
Let these words I urge upon you today be written on your hearts
...
They 'must make no covenant with them or show them any pity'
...
Above all, they were to wipe out the Canaanite religion: 'Tear down their altars, smash their standing
stones, cut down their sacred poles and set fire to their idols,' Moses commands the Israelites, 'For you are a people consecrated to Yahweh
your Elohim; it is you that Yahweh our Elohim has chosen to be his very own people out of all the peoples in the earth
...
The Deuteronomist had not
yet reached this perspective
...

Other gods were still a threat: their cults were attractive and could lure Israelites from Yahweh, who was a jealous God
...
Yahweh will scatter you among the peoples, from one
end of the earth to the other; there you will serve other gods of wood and of stone that neither you nor your fathers have
known
...
In the morning you will say, 'how I wish it were evening!' and in the
evening, 'how I wish it were morning!' such terror will grip your heart, such sights your eyes will see
...
They had managed to keep the Assyrians at bay and had thus avoided the fate of the ten northern tribes, who had endured the
punishments described by Moses
...

In this climate of extreme insecurity, the Deuteronomist's policies made a great impact
...
Josiah instantly began a reform, acting with exemplary zeal
...
Josiah also pulled down the large effigy of Asherah and destroyed the apartments of the
Temple prostitutes, who wove garments for her there
...
Henceforth the priests were only allowed to offer sacrifice to Yahweh in the purified Jerusalem Temple
...

He burned the bones of their priests on their altars, and so purified Judah and Jerusalem; he did the same in the towns of
Manasseh, Ephraim, Simeon, and even Naphtali, and in the ravaged districts around them
...
{36}
We are far from the Buddha's serene acceptance of the deities he believed he had outgrown
...

The reformers rewrote Israelite history
...
Yahweh was now the author of a holy war of extermination in Canaan
...
No more Anakim were left in
Israelite territory except at Gaza, Gath and Ashod
...
Now,
however, the bloodshed had been given a religious rationale
...
Instead of making God a
symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it
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...
It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being
...

The Jews have often been criticised for their belief that they are the Chosen People, but their critics have often been guilty of the same kind of
denial that fuelled the diatribes against idolatry in biblical times
...
Western
Christians have been particularly prone to the flattering belief that they are God's elect
...
Calvinist theologies of election have been largely instrumental in encouraging Americans to believe that they are God's own nation
...
It is for this reason, perhaps, that it has gained a new lease of life in the various forms of fundamentalism that are rife among
Jews, Christians and Muslims at the time of writing
...

We should note that not all the Israelites subscribed to Deuteronomism in the years that led up to the destruction of Jerusalem by
Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE and the deportation of the Jews to Babylon
...
{39} They would go into exile for seventy years
...
Fearing for his
life, Jeremiah was forced to go into hiding
...
He hated being a prophet
and was profoundly distressed to have to condemn the people he loved
...
When
the call had come to him, he cried out in protest: 'Ah, Lord Yahweh; look, I do not know how to speak: I am a child!' and Yahweh had to 'put
out his hand' and touched his lips, putting his words on his mouth
...
' {41} It demanded an agonising tension between irreconcilable
extremes
...
{42} The
prophetic experience of the mysterium terrible et fascinans was at one and the same time rape and seduction:
Yahweh, you have seduced me and I am seduced,
You have raped me and I am overcome
...
'
Then there seemed to be a fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones
...
{43}
God was pulling Jeremiah in two different directions: on the one hand, he felt a profound attraction towards Yahweh that had all the sweet
surrender of a seduction but at other times he felt ravaged by a force that carried him along against his will
...
Unlike the other areas of the Oikumene at this time, the Middle East did not adopt a
broadly united religious ideology
...
In the agony of Jeremiah, we can see what an immense wrench and
dislocation this involved
...
Even the Deuteronomist, whose image of God was less threatening, saw a meeting with Yahweh as an abrasive
confrontation: he makes Moses explain to the Israelites, who are appalled by the prospect of unmediated contact with Yahweh, that God will
send them a prophet in each generation to bear the brunt of the divine impact
...
Yahweh was experienced as an
external, transcendent reality
...
The political situation was deteriorating:
the Babylonians invaded Judah and carried the king and the first batch of Israelites off into exile; finally Jerusalem itself was besieged
...
The anger that Jeremiah feels welling up in his own heart is not his own but the wrath of Yahweh
...
Indeed, God is
dependent upon man when he wants to act in the world - an idea that would become very important in the Jewish conception of the divine
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

human condition
...
Once
Jerusalem had been conquered by the Babylonians in 587, the oracles from Yahweh became more comforting: he promised to save his people,
now that they had learned their lesson, and bring them home
...
" ' {46} Not surprisingly, some people blamed Yahweh for the catastrophe
...
Their women claimed that everything had been fine as long as
they had performed the traditional rites in honour of Ishtar, Queen of Heaven, but as soon as they stopped them, at the behest of the likes of
Jeremiah, disaster, defeat and penury had followed
...
{47} After the fall of Jerusalem
and the destruction of the Temple, he began to realise that such external trappings of religion were simply symbols of an internal, subjective
state
...
' {48}
Those who had gone into exile were not forced to assimilate, as the ten northern tribes had been in 722
...
Among the first batch of exiles to be deported in 597 had been a priest called Ezekiel
...
Then he had a shattering vision of Yahweh, which literally knocked him out
...
Ezekiel had seen a cloud of light, shot through with lightning
...
In the midst of this stormy
obscurity, he seemed to see - he is careful to emphasise the provisional nature of the imagery - a great chariot pulled by four strong beasts
...
Each one of the wheels rolled in a different direction from the others
...
The beating of the creatures' wings was
deafening; it 'sounded like rushing water, like the voice of Shaddai, a voice like a storm, like the noise of a camp'
...
It
was also 'something that looked like the glory (kavod) of Yahweh'
...

The voice called Ezekiel 'son of man' as if to emphasise the distance that now exists between humanity and the divine realm
...
Ezekiel was to speak the word of God to the rebellious sons of Israel
...
Ezekiel is commanded to eat the scroll, to ingest the Word of God and make it part of himself
...
Finally, Ezekiel says, 'the spirit lifted me and took me; my heart,
as I went, overflowed with bitterness and anger, and the hand of Yahweh lay heavy on me
...

Ezekiel's strange career emphasises how alien and foreign the divine world has become to humanity
...
Yahweh frequently commanded him to perform weird mimes, which set him apart from normal beings
...
Thus, when his wife died, Ezekiel was forbidden to mourn; he had to lie on one side for 390 days and for forty on the other; once
he had to pack his bags and walk around Tel Aviv like a refugee, with no abiding city
...
On another occasion, he was forced to eat excrement, as a sign of the starvation that his
fellow-countrymen would have to endure during the siege of Jerusalem
...

The pagan vision, on the other hand, had celebrated the continuity that was felt to exist between the gods and the natural world
...
During one of his visions, he was conducted on a guided tour of the
Temple in Jerusalem
...
The Temple itself had become a nightmarish place: the walls of its rooms were painted with writhing
snakes and repulsive animals; the priests performing the 'filthy' rites were presented in a sordid light, almost as if they were engaged in backroom sex: 'Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the throne of Israel do in the dark, each in his painted room?' {51} 1° another room,
women sat weeping for the suffering god Tammuz
...
Finally, the prophet watched the strange chariot he had seen in his first
vision fly away, taking the 'glory' of Yahweh with it
...
In the final days before the destruction of
Jerusalem, Ezekiel depicts him fulminating against the people of Israel in a vain attempt to catch their attention and force them to acknowledge
him
...
Alien as Yahweh frequently seemed, he was encouraging Israelites like
Ezekiel to see that the blows of history were not random and arbitrary but had a deeper logic and justice
...


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...

Pagan gods had always been territorial and for some it seemed impossible to sing the songs of Yahweh in a foreign country: they relished the
prospect of hurling Babylonian babies against a rock and dashing their brains out
...
We
know nothing about him and this may be significant because his oracles and psalms give no sign of a personal struggle, such as those endured
by his predecessors
...
In exile, some of the Jews
would have gone over to the worship of the ancient gods of Babylon, but others were pushed into a new religious awareness
...
In Babylon they could not take part in the liturgies that had been
central to their religious life at home
...
Second Isaiah took this one step further and declared that Yahweh was the only
God
...

as there was for Israel
when it came out of Egypt
...
If Yahweh had rescued Israel once in the past, he could do it again
...
He was indeed the only God who counted
...
{54} Their day was over: 'Am I not Yahweh?' he asks
repeatedly, 'there is no other god beside me
...

I, I am Yahweh,
there is no other saviour but me
...
He calmly
assumed that Yahweh - not Marduk or Baal - had performed the great mythical deeds that brought the world into being
...
They were not, of course, attempting a scientific account of the physical origins of the universe but were trying to find comfort in the
harsh world of the present
...
Seeing the similarity between the Exodus myth and the pagan tales of victory over watery chaos at the beginning of time,
Second Isaiah urged his people to look forward confidently to a new show of divine strength
...

Did you not split Rahab in two,
and pierce the Dragon (tannim) through?
Did you not dry up the sea,
the waters of the great Abyss (tehom),
to make the seabed a road
for the redeemed to cross? {57}
Yahweh had finally absorbed his rivals in the religious imagination of Israel; in exile, the lure of paganism lost its attraction and the religion of
Judaism had been born
...

Yahweh, therefore, had become the one and only God
...
As always, the new theology
succeeded not because it could be demonstrated rationally but because it was effective in preventing despair and inspiring hope
...
It spoke profoundly to their
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...

Yet there was nothing cosy about Second Isaiah's image of God
...

Yes, the heavens are as high above earth
as my ways are above your ways,
my thoughts above your thoughts
...
Nor would Yahweh always do what his people expected
...
Yahweh would say: 'Blessed be my People Egypt, Assyria my creature, and Israel my heritage
...

When Cyrus, King of Persia, conquered the Babylonian empire in 539 BCE, it seemed as though the prophets had been vindicated
...
He also
restored the effigies of the gods belonging to the peoples conquered by the Babylonians to their original homes
...
It would
ease the burden of rule if his subject peoples worshipped their own gods in their own territories
...
He was an example of the tolerance and
breadth of vision of some forms of pagan religion
...
Most of them, however, elected to stay behind: henceforth only a minority would live in the Promised Land
...

We can see what this entailed in the writings of the Priestly tradition (P), which were written after the exile and inserted into the Pentateuch
...
As we might expect, P
had an exalted and sophisticated view of Yahweh
...
Sharing many of the perspectives of Ezekiel, he believed that there was a distinction between the human perception of God and the
reality itself
...
' {60} Instead, Moses must shield himself from the divine impact in a crevice of the rock, where he will catch a glimpse of Yahweh as
he departs, in a kind of hindsight
...
Men and women can
only see an afterglow of the divine presence, which he calls 'the glory (kavod) of Yahweh', a manifestation of his presence, which is not to be
confused with God himself
...

The 'glory' of Yahweh was a symbol of his presence on earth and, as such, it emphasised the difference between the limited images of God
created by men and women and the holiness of God himself
...
When P
looked back to the old stories of the Exodus, he did not imagine that Yahweh had himself accompanied the Israelites during their wanderings:
that would be unseemly anthropomorphism
...
Similarly it
would only be the 'glory of Yahweh' that would dwell in the Temple
...
P began with the waters of the primordial abyss (tehom, a corruption of Tiamat), out of which Yahweh fashions the heavens and
earth
...
Yahweh alone was responsible for calling all things
into being
...
Naturally, P did not conceive the
world as divine, composed of the same stuff as Yahweh
...
At each stage, Yahweh blessed and sanctified the
creation and pronounced it good'
...
Men
and women may not share the divine nature but they had been created in the image of God: they must carry on his creative tasks
...
In P, the sabbath stood in symbolic contrast to
the primordial chaos that had prevailed on Day One
...
{64}
Naturally the new Temple was central to P's Judaism
...
Templebuilding had been an act of imitatio dei, enabling humanity to participate in the creativity of the gods themselves
...
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Jews had found consolation in the old stories of the Ark of the Covenant, the portable shrine in which God had 'set up his tent' (shakan) with his
people and shared their homelessness
...
Its architectural design was not original but a copy of the divine model: Moses is given very long and detailed instructions by
Yahweh on Sinai: 'Build me a sanctuary so that I may dwell among you
...
' {65} The long account of the construction of this sanctuary is clearly not intended to be taken literally; nobody
imagined that the ancient Israelites had really built such an elaborate shrine of 'gold, silver and bronze, purple stuffs, of violet shade and red,
crimson stuffs, fine linen, goats hair, rams skin, acacia wood
...
{66} This lengthy interpolation is heavily reminiscent of P's
creation story
...

The sanctuary is built on the first day of the first month of the year; Bezalel, the architect of the shrine, is inspired by the spirit of God (ruach
elohim) which also brooded over the creation of the world; and both accounts emphasise the importance of the sabbath rest
...

In Deuteronomy the sabbath had been designed to give everybody, slaves included, a day off and to remind the Israelites of the Exodus
...
When
they observed the sabbath rest, Jews were participating in a ritual that God had originally observed alone: it was a symbolic attempt to live the
divine life
...
Now Jews were encouraged to come closer to Yahweh by observing the Torah of Moses
...
During and immediately after the exile, this had been elaborated
into a complex legislation consisting of the 613 commandments (mitzvot) in the Pentateuch
...
Jews did not find them a crushing burden, as
Christians tend to imagine, but found that they were a symbolic way of living in the presence of God
...
{69} P also saw them as a ritualised attempt to share the holy separateness of God, healing the painful
severance between man and the divine
...

The work of the Priestly tradition was included in the Pentateuch alongside the narratives of J and E and the Deuteronomist
...
Some Jews would always feel more drawn to the
Deuteronomic God, who had chosen Israel to be aggressively separate from the goyim; some extended this into the Messianic myths that
looked forward to the Day of Yahweh at the end of time, when he would exalt Israel and humiliate the other nations
...
It had been tacitly agreed that after the exile, the era of prophecy had ceased
...

One of these distant heroes, venerated in Babylon as an example of patience in suffering, was Job
...
In the old story, Job had
been tested by God; because he had borne his unmerited sufferings with patience, God had rewarded him by restoring his former prosperity
...
Together with his three
comforters, Job dares to question the divine decrees and engages in a fierce intellectual debate
...
The prophets had claimed that God had allowed Israel to suffer
because of its sins; the author of Job shows that some Israelites were no longer satisfied by the traditional answer
...
He reveals himself to Job in a vision, pointing to the
marvels of the world he has created: how could a puny little creature like Job dare to argue with the transcendent God? Job submits, but a
modern reader, who is looking for a more coherent and philosophical answer to the problem of suffering, will not be satisfied with this solution
...
Intellectual speculation must give way to a direct revelation from God, such as the prophets received
...
In 332 BCE
Alexander of Macedonia defeated Darius III of Persia and the Greeks began to colonise Asia and Africa
...
The Jews of Palestine and the diaspora were surrounded by an Hellenic
culture which some found disturbing but others were excited by Greek theatre, philosophy, sport and poetry
...
Some fought as mercenaries in the Greek armies
...
Thus some Greeks came to know the God of Israel and decided to worship Yahweh (or lao, as
they called him) alongside Zeus and Dionysius
...
There they read their scriptures, prayed and listened to sermons
...
Since there was no ritual or sacrifice, it must have seemed more like a school of philosophy and
many flocked to the synagogue if a well-known Jewish preacher came to town, as they would queue up to hear their own philosophers
...
During the fourth century BCE, there were isolated
instances of Jews and Greeks merging Yahweh with one of the Greek gods
...
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Most Jews held aloof, however, and tension developed between Jews and Greeks in the Hellenistic cities of the Middle East
...
The gods were extremely important to the city and it was believed that they would withdraw their
patronage if their cult were neglected
...
By the
second century BCE this hostility was entrenched: in Palestine there had even been a revolt when Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid governor,
had attempted to Hellenise Jerusalem and introduce the cult of Zeus into the Temple
...
Wisdom literature was a well-established genre in the Middle East; it
tried to delve into the meaning of life, not by philosophical reflection, but by inquiring into the best way to live: it was often highly pragmatic
...
This idea would be very important
to the early Christians, as we shall see in Chapter Four
...

From everlasting I was firmly set,
from the beginning, before earth came into being
...
{70}
Wisdom was not a divine being, however, but is specifically said to have been created by God
...
In the second century BCE, Jesus ben Sira, a devout Jew of
Jerusalem, painted a similar portrait of Wisdom
...
{71}
Like the 'glory' of Yahweh, the figure of Wisdom was a symbol of God's activity in the world
...
Like P they preferred to distinguish the God we could know
and experience from the divine reality itself
...
Wisdom literature acquired a polemic edge in Alexandria in about 50 BCE
...
Writing in Greek, he also
personified Wisdom (Sophia) and argued that it could not be separated from the Jewish God:
[Sophia] is the breath of the power of God,
pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
hence nothing impure can find a way into her
...
{72}
This passage would also be extremely important to Christians when they came to discuss the status of Jesus
...
She is God-as-he-has-revealedhimself-to-man, the human perception of God, which was mysteriously distinct from the full reality of God which would always elude our
understanding
...
We have seen that there is a
crucial and, perhaps, an irreconcilable difference between the God of Aristotle, which is scarcely aware of the world it has created, and the God
of the Bible who is passionately involved in human affairs
...
A chasm separated Yahweh from the world but Greeks believed that the gift of reason made
human beings kin to God; they could, therefore, reach him by their own efforts
...
This will be one of the major themes of our story
...
3O BCE - 45 CE)
...
He wrote in beautiful Greek and does not seem to have spoken Hebrew, yet he was also
a devout Jew and an observer of the mitzvot
...
It has to be said,
file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
For one thing, Philo seemed embarrassed by the historical books of the Bible,
which he tried to turn into elaborate allegories: Aristotle, it will be recalled, had considered history to be unphilosophical
...
All we can know about God is the bare fact of his existence
...
How had this been possible?
Philo explained the problem by making an important distinction between God's essence (ousia), which is entirely incomprehensible, and his
activities in the world, which he called his 'powers' (dynameis) or 'energies' (energeiai)
...
We can never know God as he is in himself
...
' {73} To adapt himself to our limited intellect, God
communicates through his 'powers' which seem equivalent to Plato's divine forms (though Philo is not always consistent about this)
...
Philo sees them emanating from God, rather as Plato and Aristotle had seen the cosmos
emanating eternally from the First Cause
...
Philo called them the Kingly power, which reveals
God in the order of the universe, and the Creative power, whereby God reveals himself in the blessings he bestows upon humanity
...
They simply enable us to
catch a glimpse of a reality which is beyond anything we can conceive
...
When he interprets the story of Yahweh's visit to Abraham at Mamre with the two angels, for
example, he argues that this is an allegorical presentation of God's ousia - He Who Is - with the two senior powers
...
Christians,
however, would find him enormously helpful and the Greeks, as we shall see, seized upon this distinction between God's unknowable 'essence'
and the 'energies' that make him known to us
...
Like the Wisdom writers, Philo
imagined that God had formed a masterplan (logos) of creation, which corresponded to Plato's realm of the forms
...
Again, Philo is not always consistent
...
When we contemplate the Logos,
however, we form no positive knowledge of God: we are taken beyond the reach of discursive reason to an intuitive apprehension which is
'higher than a way of thinking, more precious than anything which is merely thought'
...
Philo insisted that we will never reach God as he is in himself: the highest truth we can apprehend is the rapturous recognition that
God utterly transcends the human mind
...
Philo described a passionate, joyful voyage into the unknown, which brought him liberation and creative
energy
...
It must ascend to God, its true home, leaving passion,
the senses and even language behind, because these bind us to the imperfect world
...
We have seen that the conception of God has often been an imaginative exercise
...
Philo shows that religious contemplation had
much in common with other forms of creativity
...
have suddenly become full, the ideas descending like snow, so that under the impact of divine possession, I have been filled
with Corybantic frenzy and become ignorant of everything, place, people, present, myself, what was said and what was written
...
{76}
Soon it would be impossible for Jews to achieve such a synthesis with the Greek world
...
When the Romans had established their empire m North
Africa and the Middle East in the first century BCE they had themselves succumbed to the Greek culture, merging their ancestral deities with
the Greek pantheon and adopting Greek philosophy with enthusiasm
...

Indeed, they often favoured the Jews over the Greeks, regarding them as useful allies in Greek cities where there was residual hostility to
Rome
...
Relations between Jews
and Romans were usually good even in Palestine, where foreign rule was accepted less easily
...
One tenth of the whole empire was Jewish: in Philo's Alexandria, forty per cent of the population were
Jews
...

The Romans were drawn to the high moral character of Judaism
...
They were on the increase: it has even been
suggested that one of the Flavian emperors might have converted to Judaism, as Constantine would later convert to Christianity
...
In 66 CE they orchestrated a rebellion against Rome and, incredibly,
managed to hold the Roman armies at bay for four years
...
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were forced to crush it mercilessly
...
Yet again the Jews were forced into exile
...

Various sects had sprung up in the Holy Land, which had in different ways dissociated themselves from the Jerusalem Temple
...
They believed that they were building a new Temple, not made with hands
...
God would live in a loving brotherhood, not in a stone temple
...
In the New Testament,
the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites
...
The Pharisees
were passionately spiritual Jews
...
God could be present in the
humblest home as well as in the Temple
...
They insisted on eating their meals in a state of ritual purity because they believed that the table
of every single Jew was like God's altar in the Temple
...
Jews could
now approach him directly without the mediation of a priestly caste and an elaborate ritual
...
During the early years of the century, two rival schools had emerged: one led by Shammai the Elder, which was more rigorous,
and the other led by the great Rabbi Hillel the Elder, which became by far the most popular Pharisaic party
...
Hillel replied: 'do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you
...
' {77}
By the disastrous year 70, the Pharisees had become the most respected and important sect of Palestinian Judaism; they had already shown their
people that they did not need a Temple to worship God, as this famous story shows:
Once as Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai was coming forth from Jerusalem, Rabbi Joshua followed after him and beheld the Temple
in ruins
...
We have another atonement as effective as this
...
" ' {78}
It is said that after the conquest of Jerusalem, Rabbi Yohannan had been smuggled out of the burning city in a coffin
...
The Romans allowed him to found a self-governing Pharisaic
community at Jabneh, to the west of Jerusalem
...

These communities produced the scholars known as the tannaim, including rabbinic heroes like Rabbi Yohannan himself, Rabbi Akiva the
mystic and Rabbi Ishmael: they compiled the Mishnah, the codification of an oral law which brought the Mosaic law up to date
...
In fact
two Talmuds had been compiled; the Jerusalem Talmud, which was completed by the end of the fourth century, and the Babylonian Talmud,
which is considered the more authoritative and which was not completed until the end of the fifth century
...
This legal contemplation is not as
desiccated as outsiders tend to imagine
...

Yahweh had always been a transcendent deity, who directed human beings from above and without
...
After the loss of the Temple and the harrowing experience of yet another exile, the Jews needed
a God in their midst
...
Instead, they experienced him as an almost tangible
presence
...
{79} In the very earliest passages of the Talmud, God was
experienced in mysterious physical phenomena
...
Others heard it in the clanging of a bell or a sharp knocking sound
...
{80}
So strong was their sense of presence that any official, objective doctrines would have been quite out of place
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

that on Mount Sinai, each one of the Israelites who had been standing at the foot of the mountain had experienced God in a different way
...
{81} As one Rabbi put it, 'God does not come to man
oppressively but commensurately with a man's power of receiving him
...
Each individual would
experience the reality of 'God' in a different way to answer the needs of his or her own particular temperament
...
We shall see that other
monotheists would develop a very similar notion
...

Any official doctrine would limit the essential mystery of God
...
Not even Moses
had been able to penetrate the mystery of God: after lengthy research, King David had admitted that it was futile to try to understand him,
because he was too much for the human mind
...
We could
admire God's deeds in nature but, as Rabbi Huna said, this only gave us an infinitesimal glimpse of the whole reality: 'Man cannot conceive the
meaning of thunder, hurricane, storm, the order of the universe, his own nature; how then can he boast of being able to understand the ways of
the King of all Kings?' {84} The whole point of the idea of God was to encourage a sense of the mystery and wonder of life, not to find neat
solutions
...
{85}
How did this transcendent and incomprehensible being relate to the world? The Rabbis expressed their sense of this in a paradox: 'God is the
place of the world, but the world is not his place': {86} God enveloped and encircled the world, as it were, but he did not live in it as mere
creatures did
...
Again, they said that God was like the rider of a horse: while he is on the horse, the rider depends upon the animal, but he is superior to it
and has control of the reins
...
When they spoke of God's presence on earth, they were as careful as the biblical
writers to distinguish those traces of God that he allows us to see from the greater divine mystery which is inaccessible
...

One of their favourite synonyms for God was the Shekinah, which derived from the Hebrew shakan, to dwell with or to pitch one's tent
...
Some said that the Shekinah, who dwelt with his people on earth, still lived on the Temple Mount, even though the
Temple was in ruins
...
{87} Like the divine 'glory' or the Holy Spirit, the Shekinah was not conceived as a separate divine being but as the
presence of God on earth
...
' And when in the future Israel will be redeemed, the Shekinah will then be with them, as
it is said, 'The Lord thy God will turn thy captivity
...
{88}
The connection between Israel and its God was so strong that, when he had redeemed them in the past, the Israelites used to tell God: 'Thou
hast redeemed thyself
...

The image of the Shekinah helped the exiles to cultivate a sense of God's presence wherever they were
...

{90} Like the early Christians, the Israelites were encouraged by their Rabbis to see themselves as a united community with 'one body and one
soul'
...
But he hates any lack of harmony in the
community and returns to heaven, where the angels chant the divine praises 'with one voice and one melody'
...
{93}
In exile, the Jews felt the harshness of the surrounding world; this sense of presence helped them to feel enveloped by a benevolent God
...
That

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Instead they should allow the performance of these mitzvot to nudge them into an awareness of God's enveloping love;
'Israel is beloved! The Bible surrounds him with mitzvot: tfillin on the head and arm, a mezuzah on the door, zizit on their clothes
...
It was not easy
...
{95} The spirituality of the Rabbis became normative in
Judaism, not merely among those who had fled Jerusalem but among Jews who had always lived in the diaspora
...
The religion of the Rabbis was accepted
because it worked
...

This type of spirituality was for men only, however, since women were not required - and therefore not permitted - to become Rabbis, to study
Torah or to pray in the synagogue
...
The woman's
role was to maintain the ritual purity of the home
...
In practice, this
meant that they were regarded as inferior
...
Yet marriage was regarded as a sacred duty and family life was
holy
...

When sexual intercourse is forbidden during menstruation, this was not because a woman was to be regarded as dirty or disgusting
...
' {96} Before going to the synagogue on a festival day, a man was commanded to take a
ritual bath, not because he was unclean in any simplistic way but to make himself more holy for the sacred divine service
...
The idea that sex could be holy in this way would be alien to Christianity, which would sometimes see sex and God as
mutually incompatible
...

On the contrary, they insisted that Jews had a duty to keep well and happy
...
{97} Sometimes they made them quote Psalm Twenty-two when
they felt the Spirit leave them: 'My God, my God, why have you deserted me?' This raises an interesting question about Jesus's mysterious cry
from the cross, when he quoted these words
...
The body should be honoured
and cared for, since it was in the image of God: it could even be sinful to avoid such pleasures as wine or sex, since God had provided them for
man's enjoyment
...
When they urged their people to practical ways of 'possessing' the Holy
Spirit, they were in one sense asking them to create their own image of God for themselves
...
The prophets had always made God audible on earth by attributing their own insights to him
...
When they formulated new legislation, it was seen both as God's and their
own
...
They
themselves came to be revered as the incarnations of Torah; they were more 'like God' than anybody else because of their expertise in the Law
...
Rabbi Akiva taught that the mitzvah: 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself was 'the great principle of Torah'
...
It was tantamount to atheism, a blasphemous attempt to ignore God
...
' {100}
Serving another human being was an act of imitatio dei: it reproduced God's benevolence and compassion
...
{101} God created adam, a single man, to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had
destroyed the whole world; similarly to save a life was to redeem the whole world
...
To humiliate anybody, even
a goy or a slave, was one of the most serious offences, because it was equivalent to murder, a sacrilegious denial of God's image
...
Spreading scandal about somebody was tantamount to denying the existence of God
...

Animals have no difficulty in living up to their nature but men and women seem to find it hard to be fully human
...
But over the centuries Yahweh had become an idea that could help
people to cultivate a compassion and respect for their fellow human beings, which had always been a hallmark of the religions of the Axial

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
The ideals of the Rabbis were close to the second of the God-religions, which had its roots in exactly the same tradition
...
We know very little about Jesus
...
By that time, historical facts had been
overlaid with mythical elements, which expressed the meaning Jesus had acquired for his followers more accurately than a straight biography
would have done
...
Like the Buddha, Jesus had seemed
to encapsulate some of the deepest aspirations of many of his contemporaries and to have given substance to dreams that had haunted the
Jewish people for centuries
...
Yet
despite the scandal of a Messiah who had died like a common criminal, his disciples could not believe that their faith in him had been
misplaced
...
Some said that his tomb had been found empty three days after his crucifixion;
others saw him in visions and on one occasion 500 people saw him simultaneously
...
His followers worshipped in the
Temple every day as fully observant Jews
...

By the time of Jesus's death in about 30 CE, the Jews were passionate monotheists so nobody expected the Messiah to be a divine figure: he
would simply be an ordinary, if privileged, human being
...
In that sense, therefore, the Messiah could be said to have been 'with God' from before the beginning of time in the same symbolic
way as the figure of divine Wisdom in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus
...
The Psalms sometimes called David
or the Messiah 'the Son of God' but that was simply a way of expressing his intimacy with Yahweh
...

Mark's Gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that
included brothers and sisters
...
He had not been marked out during his infancy or
adolescence as remarkable in any way
...
Mark begins his narrative with Jesus's career
...
He urged the populace to repent and to accept the Essene rite of purification by
baptism in the river Jordan
...
Jesus had made the long journey from Nazareth to Judaea
to be baptised by John
...
And a voice came from heaven, "You are my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests upon you
...
The next thing we hear about Jesus is that he began to preach in all the
towns and villages of Galilee, announcing: 'The Kingdom of God has arrived!' {2}
There has been much speculation about the exact nature of Jesus's mission
...

Nevertheless there are clues that point to the essentially Jewish nature of his career
...
Like Jesus again, these
Galilean holy men often had a large number of women disciples
...
{3}
Certainly Jesus's teaching was in accord with major tenets of the Pharisees, since he also believed that charity and loving-kindness were the
most important of the mitzvot
...
{4} He also taught a version of Hillel's Golden Rule, when he argued that the whole of the Law could be summed
up in the maxim: do unto others as you would have them do unto you
...
{6} Apart from this being a libellous distortion of the facts and a flagrant breach of the charity that was supposed to
characterise his mission, the bitter denunciation of the Pharisees is almost certainly inauthentic
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

really had been the sworn enemies of Jesus who had hounded him to death
...
The Gospels often show Jesus arguing with the Pharisees but the discussion is either amicable or
may reflect a disagreement with the more rigorous school of Shammai
...
This did not happen immediately; as we shall see, the doctrine that Jesus had
been God in human form was not finalised until the fourth century
...
Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God
...
There was nothing particularly unusual about such a
proclamation from above: the Rabbis often experienced what they called a bat qol (literally, 'Daughter of the Voice'), a form of inspiration that
had replaced the more direct prophetic revelations
...
Jesus himself used to call himself 'the Son of
Man'
...
If this is so, Jesus seems to have gone out of his way to emphasise that he was a frail human being who
would one day suffer and die
...
When people saw Jesus in action, therefore, they had a living, breathing
image of what God was like
...
The story has been
preserved in all three of the Synoptic Gospels and would be very important to later generations of Christians
...
There he was 'transfigured'
before them: 'his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as the light
...
Peter was quite overcome and cried aloud, not knowing what
he said, that they should build three tabernacles to commemorate the vision
...
Listen to him
...

They also noted that Jesus had never claimed that these divine 'powers' (which, like Philo, they called dynameis) were confined to him alone
...
By faith, of course, he did not
mean adopting the correct theology but cultivating an inner attitude of surrender and openness to God
...
Like the Rabbis, Jesus did not believe that the Spirit was just for a
privileged elite but for all men of good will: some passages even suggest that, again like some of the Rabbis, Jesus believed that even the
goyim could receive the Spirit
...
Not only would they be able to forgive
sins and exorcise demons but they would be able to hurl a mountain into the sea
...

After his death, the disciples could not abandon their faith that Jesus had somehow presented an image of God
...
St Paul believed that the powers of God should be made accessible to the goyim and preached the Gospel in what is now
Turkey, Macedonia and Greece
...
This offended the original group of disciples, who wanted to remain a more exclusively Jewish sect, and they broke
with Paul after a very passionate dispute
...
Paul never called Jesus 'God'
...
Not surprisingly, in the Gentile world the new Christians did not always
retain the sense of these subtle distinctions so that eventually a man who had stressed his weak, mortal humanity was believed to have been
divine
...
It is a
difficult doctrine with certain dangers; Christians have often interpreted it crudely
...

We can see the religious impulse behind this startling divinisation of Jesus by looking briefly at some developments in India at about the same
time
...
This kind of personal devotion, known as bhakti, expressed what seems to be a perennial human yearning
for humanised religion
...

After the Buddha had died at the end of the sixth century BCE, people naturally wanted a memento of him, yet they felt that a statue was
inappropriate, since in nirvana he no longer 'existed' in any normal sense
...
The power and inspiration of such images gave them a central importance in Buddhist spirituality, even though

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
All religions change and develop
...
The majority of Buddhists found bhakti extremely valuable and felt that it reminded them of some
essential truths which were in danger of being lost
...

Yet by the first century BCE, Buddhist monks who were locked away in their monasteries trying to reach nirvana on their own count, seemed
to have lost sight of this
...
During the first century CE, a new
kind of Buddhist hero emerged: the bodhisattva, who followed the Buddha's example and put off his own nirvana, sacrificing himself for the
sake of the people
...
As the Prajna-paramita Sutras (Sermons on the Perfection
of Wisdom), which were compiled at the end of the first century BCE, explain, the bodhisattvas
do not wish to attain their own private nirvana
...
They have set out for the benefit of the world,
for the ease of the world, out of pity for the world
...
' {11}
Further, the bodhisattva had acquired an infinite source of merit, which could help the less spiritually gifted
...

The texts emphasise that these ideas were not to be interpreted literally
...
In the early second century CE, Nagarjuna, the philosopher who founded the Void School, used
paradox and a dialectical method to demonstrate the inadequacy of normal conceptual language
...
Even the Buddha's teachings were conventional, man-made ideas that did no
justice to the reality he had tried to convey
...
The Absolute, which is the inner essence of all things, is a void, a nothing, which has no
existence in the normal sense
...
Since a Buddha such as Gautama had attained nirvana, it
followed that in some ineffable way he had become nirvana and was identical with the Absolute
...

It is not difficult to see that this bhakti (devotion) to the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas was similar to the Christian devotion to Jesus
...
There had been a similar welling
up of bhakti in Hinduism at the same time, which centered on the figures of Shiva and Vishnu, two of the most important Vedic deities
...
In effect, Hindus developed a Trinity: Brahman,
Shiva and Vishnu were three symbols or aspects of a single, ineffable reality
...
In popular legend, Shiva was also a great Yogi, so he also inspired his devotees to
transcend personal concepts of divinity by means of meditation
...
He liked to show himself to
mankind in various incarnations or avatars
...
Popular legend loved the stories of his dalliance with the cowgirls, which depicted God as the Lover
of the Soul
...
{12}
Everything is somehow present in the body of Krishna: he has no beginning or end, he fills space, and includes all possible deity: 'Howling
storm gods, sun gods, bright gods and gods of ritual
...
{14} All things rush
towards Krishna, as rivers roil towards the sea or as moths fly into a blazing flame
...

The development of bhakti answered a deep-rooted popular need for some kind of personal relationship with the ultimate
...
The evolution of the bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism and the avatars of Vishnu seem to represent another stage in religious
development when people insist that the Absolute cannot be less than human
...
These myths
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...

By the first century CE, there had been a similar thirst for divine immanence in Judaism
...

St Paul, the earliest Christian writer who created the religion that we now know as Christianity, believed that Jesus had replaced the Torah as
God's principal revelation of himself to the world
...
Paul's letters were occasional
responses to specific questions rather than a coherent account of a fully articulated theology
...
Paul also talked about the man Jesus as though he had
been more than an ordinary human being, even though, as a Jew, Paul did not believe that he had been God incarnate
...
{16} This was not a truth which Paul argued logically
...
{17} was a subjective and mystical experience that made him describe Jesus as a sort of atmosphere in
which 'we live and move and have our being'
...

When Paul explained the faith that had been handed on to him, he said that Jesus had suffered and died 'for our sins', {19} showing that at a
very early stage, Jesus's disciples, shocked by the scandal of his death, had explained it by saying that it had somehow been for our benefit
...
The early Christians felt that Jesus was in some mysterious way still alive and that the 'powers' that he had possessed were
now embodied in them, as he had promised
...
Church services were noisy, charismatic affairs, quite different from a tasteful evensong
today at the parish church
...
{20}
There were, however, no detailed theories about the crucifixion as an atonement for some 'original sin' of Adam: we shall see that this theology
did not emerge until the fourth century and was only important in the West
...
Yet the notion of Christ's sacrificial death was similar to the ideal of the
bodhisattva, which was developing at this time in India
...
Paul insisted that Jesus's sacrifice had been unique
...
{21} There
is a potential danger here
...
The single incarnation of Christianity, suggesting that the whole of the inexhaustible reality of
God had been manifest in just one human being, could lead to an immature type of idolatry
...
Paul developed this insight by arguing that Jesus had been the first
example of a new type of humanity
...
{22} Again, this is not dissimilar to the
Buddhist belief that, since all Buddhas had become one with the Absolute, the human ideal was to participate in Buddhahood
...
He tells his converts that they must have the same self-sacrificing attitude as Jesus,
Who subsisting in the form of God
did not cling
to his equality with God
but emptied himself,
to assume the condition of a slave,
and became as men are;
and being as men are,
he was humbler yet,
even to accepting death,
death on a cross
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

should bend the knee at the name of Jesus
and that every tongue should acclaim
Jesus Christ as Lord (kyrios)
to the glory of God the Father
...
Paul was
too Jewish to accept the idea of Christ existing as a second divine being beside YHWH from all eternity
...
He cannot assume it himself but is
given this title only 'to the glory of God the Father'
...
1oo) made a similar suggestion
...
' {24} The author was not using the Greek word logos in the same way as Philo: he appears to have been more in tune
with Palestinian than Hellenised Judaism
...
It performs the same function as other technical
terms like 'glory', 'Holy Spirit' and 'Shekinah' which emphasised the distinction between God's presence in the world and the incomprehensible
reality of God itself
...
When Paul and John speak about Jesus as
though he had some kind of pre-existent life, they were not suggesting that he was a second divine 'person' in the later Trinitarian sense
...
Because the 'power' and 'wisdom' that he re-presented
were activities that derived from God, he had in some way expressed 'what was there from the beginning'
...
In the Acts of the Apostles, written as late as 100 CE, we can see that the first Christians still had an entirely Jewish conception of
God
...
They heard 'what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven
...
{26} The Holy Spirit had manifested itself to these first Jewish Christians as it
had to their contemporaries, the tannaim
...
{27} To
their amazement, everybody heard the disciples preaching in his own language
...
The prophets had foretold the day when God
would pour out his Spirit upon mankind so that even women and slaves would have visions and dream dreams
...
Peter did not claim that Jesus of Nazareth was God
...
After his cruel
death, God had raised him to life and had exalted him to a specially high status 'by God's right hand'
...
{29} This speech appears to
have been the message (kerygma) of the earliest Christians
...
Paul's reformed Judaism appeared to
address many of their dilemmas
...
Many diaspora Jews had
come to regard the Temple in Jerusalem, drenched as it was in the blood of animals, as a primitive and barbarous institution
...
In his last impassioned speech, Stephen had claimed that the Temple was an insult to
the nature of God: 'The Most High does not live in a home that human hands have built
...
It was, of course, especially attractive to the Godfearers, who could become full
members of the New Israel without the burden of all 613 mitzvot
...
There were some acrimonious disputes in the eighties with the Jews when Christians were formally ejected from the
synagogues because they refused to observe the Torah
...
The defection of the Godfearers to Christianity
made Jews suspicious of converts and they were no longer anxious to proselytise
...
It was not until the end of the second century that
highly-educated pagans became Christians and were able to explain the new religion to a suspicious pagan world
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

In the Roman empire, Christianity was first seen as a branch of Judaism but when Christians made it clear that they were no longer members of
the synagogue, they were regarded with contempt as a religion of fanatics who had committed the cardinal sin of impiety by breaking with the
parent faith
...
'Progress' was seen as
a return to a Golden Age not as a fearless march forward into the future
...
Innovation was regarded as dangerous and subversive
...
There was a
spirit of restlessness and anxiety in the empire, however
...
They were looking for new spiritual solutions
...
During the first century CE, the new mystery
religions offered their initiates salvation and what purported to be inside knowledge of the next world
...
The Eastern deities did not demand a radical conversion and a rejection of the familiar rites but were like
new saints, providing a fresh and novel outlook and a sense of a wider world
...

Nobody expected religion to be a challenge or to provide an answer to the meaning of life
...
In the Roman empire of late antiquity, people worshipped the gods to ask for help during a crisis, to secure a divine blessing for
the state and to experience a healing sense of continuity with the past
...
This is not an unfamiliar attitude today: many of the people who attend religious
services in our own society are not interested in theology, want nothing too exotic and dislike the idea of change
...
They do not expect brilliant ideas from the sermon and are
disturbed by changes in the liturgy
...

The old rituals gave them a sense of identity, celebrated local traditions and seemed an assurance that things would continue as they were
...
They would feel obscurely threatened if a new cult set out to abolish the faith of their fathers
...
It lacked the venerable antiquity of Judaism and had none of the attractive rituals of paganism, which everybody could see and
appreciate
...

Christianity seemed an irrational and eccentric movement to the Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius (70-160), a superstitio nova et prava,
which was 'depraved' precisely because it was 'new'
...
Their saints and luminaries were such philosophers of antiquity as Plato,
Pythagoras or Epictetus
...
The philosophers
had maintained a cool respect for religion but saw it as essentially different from what they were doing
...
Both Socrates and Plato had been 'religious' about their philosophy, finding that their scientific and metaphysical studies had inspired
them with a vision of the glory of the universe
...
Christianity seemed a barbaric creed
...
It was one thing to suggest that men of the calibre of Plato or Alexander the Great had been
sons of a god, but a Jew who had died a disgraceful death in an obscure corner of the Roman empire was quite another matter
...
The new Platonists of the first and second century were not attracted to
Plato the ethical and political thinker but to Plato the mystic
...
It was a noble system, which used cosmology as an image of
continuity and harmony
...
All existence derived from the One as a necessary consequence of its pure being: the eternal forms had emanated from the One
and had in their turn animated the sun, stars and the moon, each in their respective sphere
...
The Platonist needed no barbaric tales of a deity who
suddenly decided to create the world or who ignored the established hierarchy to communicate directly with a small group of human beings
...
Since he was akin to the God who had given life to all things, a philosopher
could ascend to the divine world by means of his own efforts in a rational, ordered way
...
Moreover, Christians would have found it hard to list their 'beliefs' and may not have been conscious of

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
In this they resembled their pagan neighbours
...
When they recited their 'creeds', they were not assenting to a set
of propositions
...
When they said ' credo? (orpisteno in
Greek), this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position
...
{32}
Later Christians would need to give a more theoretical account of their faith and would develop a passion for theological debate that is unique
in the history of world religion
...
The early Christians would have shared this attitude
...
One of the first of these apologists was Justin of Caesarea (100-165), who died a
martyr for the faith
...
Justin was neither a profound nor a
brilliant thinker
...
He lacked the temperament and intelligence for philosophy but seemed to need more
than the worship of cult and ritual and found his solution in Christianity
...
150 and 155), he argued that Christians were
simply following Plato, who had also maintained that there was only one God
...

He also argued that Jesus was the incarnation of the logos or divine reason, which the Stoics had seen in the order of the cosmos, the logos had
been active in the world throughout history, inspiring Greeks and Hebrews alike
...

In particular, the gnostikoi, the Knowing Ones, turned from philosophy to mythology to explain their acute sense of separation from the divine
world
...

Basilides, who taught in Alexandria between 130 and 160, and his contemporary Valentinus, who left Egypt to teach in Rome, both acquired a
huge following and showed that many of the people who converted to Christianity felt lost, adrift and radically displaced
...
There was nothing at all that we could say about it, since it entirely eludes the grasp of our limited minds
...
dwelling in invisible and unnamable heights: this is the pre-beginning and forefather and depth
...
With It was thought, which
is also called Grace and Silence
...
It is impossible to describe the Godhead,
which is neither 'good' nor 'evil' and cannot even be said to 'exist'
...
{34}
But this Nothingness had wished to make itself known and was not content to remain alone in Depth and Silence
...
The first of these emanations was the 'God', which we know and pray to
...
Consequently new emanations proceeded from God in pairs, each of which expressed one of his divine attributes
...
Each pair of emanations grew weaker and more attenuated, since they were getting ever
further from their divine Source
...
The Gnostics were not proposing an entirely outrageous cosmology, since everybody believed that the cosmos was
teeming with such aeons, demons and spiritual powers
...

There had been a catastrophe, a primal fall, which the Gnostics described in various ways
...
Because of her overweening
file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Exiled and lost, Sophia had wandered
through the cosmos, yearning to return to her divine Source
...
Other Gnostics taught that 'God' had not
created the material world, since he could have had nothing to do with base matter
...
He had become envious of 'God' and aspired to be the centre of the Pleroma
...
As Valentinus explained, he had 'made heaven without knowledge; he formed man in ignorance of man;
he brought earth to light without understanding earth'
...
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
...
'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
...
Learn who it is within you makes everything his own and says, My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body
...
Learn how it happens that one watches without willing, loves without willing
...
{36}
The Pleroma represented a map of the soul
...
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
...
They did not experience the world as 'good', the work of a benevolent deity
...
Jesus had said that a sound tree
produced good fruit: {37} how could the world have been created by a good God when it was manifestly full of evil and pain? Marcion was
also appalled by the Jewish scriptures, which seemed to describe a harsh, cruel God who exterminated whole populations in his passion for
justice
...
But Jesus had revealed that another God existed, who had never been mentioned by the Jewish scriptures
...
{39} He was entirely different from the cruel 'juridical' Creator of the
world
...
The
popularity of Marcion's teachings showed that he had voiced a common anxiety
...
He had put his finger on something important in the Christian experience; generations of Christians have found it difficult to
relate positively to the material world and there are still a significant number who do not know what to make of the Hebrew God
...
This serene deity, who had nothing to do with this flawed world, was far closer to the Unmoved
Mover described by Aristotle than the Jewish God of Jesus Christ
...
In about 178 the pagan philosopher Celsus accused the Christians of adopting a
narrow, provincial view of God
...
' {40} When Christians were persecuted by the Roman
authorities, they were accused of 'atheism' because their conception of divinity gravely offended the Roman ethos
...
Christianity seemed a
barbarous creed, that ignored the achievements of civilisation
...
The first of these was Clement of Alexandria (c
...
Clement had no doubt that Yahweh and the God of the Greek philosophers was one and the same:
he called Plato the Attic Moses
...
Like the God of Plato and Aristotle,
Clement's God was characterised by his apatheia: he was utterly impassible, unable to suffer or change
...
Clement devised a rule of life that was remarkably similar to the
detailed rules of conduct prescribed by the Rabbis except that it had more in common with the Stoic ideal
...

By this diligent exercise of studied calm, Christians would become aware of a vast Quietness within, which was the image of God inscribed in

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...
There was no gulf between God and humanity
...
{41}
Yet Clement also believed that Jesus was God, 'the living God that suffered and is worshipped'
...
{43} If Christians imitated Christ, they too would become deified: divine,
incorruptible and impassible
...
{44} In the West, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (130-200), had taught a similar doctrine
...
When he had become man, he had sanctified each stage of human development and become a model for Christians
...
{45} Clement and Irenaeus were both adapting the Jewish God to notions that were characteristic of their own time and
culture
...
In the Greek world, people longed to rise above
the mess of emotion and mutability and achieve a superhuman calm
...

Clement's theology left crucial questions unanswered
...
In the early years of the
century in Rome, one Sabellius, a rather shadowy figure, had suggested that the biblical terms 'Father', 'Son' and 'Spirit' could be compared to
the masks (personae) worn by actors to assume a dramatic role and to make their voices audible to the audience
...
Sabellius attracted some disciples but most Christians were distressed by his theory: it
suggested that the impassible God had in some sense suffered when playing the role of the Son, an idea that they found quite unacceptable
...
Paul's theology was condemned at a synod at Antioch in 264, though
he managed to hold on to his see with the support of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra
...

When Clement had left Alexandria in 202 to become a priest in the service of the Bishop of Jerusalem, his place at the catechetical school was
taken by his brilliant young pupil Origen, who was about twenty years old at the time
...
His father Leonides had died in the arena four years earlier and Origen had tried to join him
...
Origen had started by believing that the Christian life meant turning against the world but he later
abjured this position and developed a form of Christian Platonism
...

His was a spirituality of light, optimism and joy
...

As a Platonist, Origen was convinced of the kinship between God and the soul: the knowledge of the divine was natural to humanity
...
To adapt his Platonic philosophy to the Semitic scriptures, Origen developed a symbolic
method of reading the Bible
...
He also adopted some of the ideas of the Gnostics
...
But they had grown tired of this
perfect contemplation and fallen from the divine world into bodies, which had arrested their fall
...
The soul could
ascend to God in a long, steady journey that would continue after death
...
By means of contemplation (theoria), the soul would advance in the knowledge (gnosis) of God which would
transform it until, as Plato himself had taught, it would itself become divine
...
Contemplation of the
Logos was natural to us, since all spiritual beings (logikof) had originally been equal to one another
...

Belief in the divinity of Jesus the man was only a phase; it would help us on our way, but would eventually be transcended when we would see
God face to face
...
Neither Origen nor Clement believed that God had created
the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), which would later become orthodox Christian doctrine
...
The point is that when Origen and Clement were writing and teaching their Christian
Platonism there was no official doctrine
...
The
turbulent events of the fourth and fifth centuries would lead to a definition of orthodox belief only after an agonising struggle
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

Origen is, perhaps, best known for his self-castration
...

Castration was quite a common operation in late antiquity; Origen did not rush at himself with a knife nor was his decision inspired by the kind
of neurotic loathing of sexuality that would characterise some Western theologians, such as St Jerome (342-420)
...
Apparently immutable factors such as gender would be left behind in the long process of divinisation, since in God there was
neither male nor female
...

Plotinus (205-270) had studied in Alexandria under Origen's old teacher Ammonius Saccus and had later joined the Roman army, hoping that it
would take him to India, where he was anxious to study
...
Later he
founded a prestigious school of philosophy in Rome
...
Like Celsus, Plotinus found Christianity a thoroughly objectionable creed, yet he
influenced generations of future monotheists in all three of the God-religions
...
Plotinus has been described as a watershed: he had absorbed the main currents of some 800 years of Greek speculation and
transmitted it in a form which has continued to influence such crucial figures in our own century as T
...
Eliot and Henri Bergson
...
Again, he was not at all interested in finding a
scientific explanation of the universe nor attempting to explain the physical origins of life; instead of looking outside the world for an objective
explanation, Plotinus urged his disciples to withdraw into themselves and begin their exploration in the depths of the psyche
...
Conflict and a lack of simplicity seem to characterise our existence
...
When we glance at a person, we do not see a leg, an arm, another arm and
a head but automatically organise these elements into an integrated human being
...
To find the underlying truth of reality, the soul must re-fashion
itself, undergo a period of purification (katharsis) and engage in contemplation (theoria), as Plato had advised
...
This will not be an ascent to a
reality outside ourselves, however, but a descent into the deepest recesses of the mind
...

The ultimate reality was a primal unity, which Plotinus called the One
...
Because the One is
simplicity itself, there was nothing to say about it: it had no qualities distinct from its essence that would make ordinary description possible
...
Consequently, the One is nameless: 'If we are to think positively of the One,' Plotinus explained, 'there would be more truth in
Silence
...
{47} Indeed, Plotinus
explained, it 'is Everything and Nothing; it can be none of the existing things, and yet it is all'
...

But this Silence cannot be the whole truth Plotinus argued, since we are able to arrive at some knowledge of the divine
...
The One must have transcended itself, gone beyond its Simplicity
in order to make itself apprehensible to imperfect beings like ourselves
...
' {49} There was nothing personal in all this; Plotinus saw the One as
beyond all human categories, including that of personality
...
One of Plotinus's favourite similes was the comparison of
the One to the point at the centre of a circle, which contained the possibility of all the future circles that could derive from it
...
Unlike the emanations in a myth such as the Enuma Elish, where each pair of gods
that evolved from one another became more perfect and effective, the opposite was the case in Plotinus's scheme
...

Plotinus regarded the first two emanations to radiate from the One as divine since they enabled us to know and to participate in the life of God
...
Mind
(nous), the first emanation, corresponded in Plotinus's scheme to Plato's realm of ideas: it made the simplicity of the One intelligible but
knowledge here was intuitive and immediate
...
Soul (psyche), which emanates from Mind in the same way as Mind
emanates from the One, is a little further from perfection and in this realm knowledge can only be acquired discursively so that it lacks absolute
simplicity and coherence
...
Again, it must be emphasised that Plotinus did not envisage this trinity of One,

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
The divine comprised the whole of existence
...
{50}
The outward flow of emanation was arrested by a corresponding movement of return to the One
...
Again, this is not an
ascent to an external reality but an interior descent into the depths of the mind
...
Since all souls were animated by the same Reality, humanity could be compared to a chorus standing round a conductor
...
{51}
The One is strictly impersonal; it has no gender and is entirely oblivious of us
...
Unlike the
biblical God, it does not come out to meet us and guide us home
...
It has no
knowledge of anything beyond itself
...
Plotinus's
philosophy was not a logical process but a spiritual quest:
We here, for our part, must put aside all else and be set on This alone, become This alone, stripping off all our encumbrances;
we must make haste to escape from here, impatient of our earthly bonds, to embrace God with all our being, that there may be no
part of us that does not cling to God
...
{53}
This god was not an alien object but our best self
...
{54}
Christianity was coming into its own in a world where Platonic ideas predominated
...
The notion of an enlightenment
that was impersonal, beyond human categories and natural to humanity was also close to the Hindu and Buddhist ideal in India, where Plotinus
had been so keen to study
...
It seems that when human beings contemplate the absolute, they have very similar ideas and experiences
...

Some Christians were determined to make friends with the Greek world
...
During an outbreak of
persecution in the 1708, a new prophet called Montanus arose in Phrygia in modern Turkey, who claimed to be a divine avatar
...
' His companions Priscilla and Maximilla made similar
claims
...
Not only were its adherents obliged to turn
their backs upon the world and lead celibate lives but they were told that martyrdom was the only sure path to God
...
This terrible creed
appealed to a latent extremism in the Christian spirit: Montanism spread like wildfire in Phrygia, Thrace, Syria and Gaul
...
Their cult of Baal which had entailed the sacrifice
of the first-born had only been suppressed by the emperor during the second century
...
In the East, Clement and Origen preached a peaceful, joyous return to God but in the
Western church a more frightening God demanded hideous death as a condition of salvation
...

Yet in the East Christianity was making great strides and by 235 it had become one of the most important religions of the Roman empire
...
These orthodox theologians had
outlawed the pessimistic visions of the Gnostics, Marcionites and Montanists and had settled for the middle road
...
It was beginning to appeal to highly intelligent
men who were able to develop the faith along lines that the Greco-Roman world could understand
...

Christianity had all the advantages that had once made Judaism such an attractive faith without the disadvantages of circumcision and an alien
Law
...
During its long struggle to survive persecution from without and dissension from within, the Church had also
evolved an efficient organisation that made it almost a microcosm of the empire itself: it was multi-racial, catholic, international, ecumenical
and administered by efficient bureaucrats
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

Milivian Bridge in 312 and legalised Christianity the following year
...
Even though paganism flourished for another two centuries, Christianity became the state religion of the
empire and began to attract new converts who made their way into the Church for material advancement
...
The reasons for the triumph of
Christianity are obscure; it certainly would not have succeeded without the support of the Roman empire, though this inevitably brought its
own problems
...
One of the first problems that had to be solved was
the doctrine of God: no sooner had Constantine brought peace to the Church, than a new danger arose from within which split Christians into
bitterly warring camps
...
Sailors and travellers were singing versions
of popular ditties that proclaimed that the Father alone was true God, inaccessible and unique, but that the Son was neither coeternal nor
uncreated, since he received life and being from the Father
...
People
were discussing these abstruse questions with the same enthusiasm as they discuss football today
...
He had issued a
challenge which his Bishop Alexander found impossible to ignore but even more difficult to rebut: how could Jesus Christ have been God in
the same way as God the Father? Arius was not denying the divinity of Christ; indeed, he called Jesus 'strong God' and 'full God' {2} but he
argued that it was blasphemous to think that he was divine by nature: Jesus had specifically said that the Father was greater than he
...
Arius was asking vital questions
about the nature of God
...

The controversy became so heated that the emperor Constantine himself intervened and summoned a synod to Nicaea in modern Turkey to
settle the issue
...
There was nothing new about his claim: Origen, whom both sides held in high
esteem, had taught a similar doctrine
...
Arius, Alexander and Athanasius, for example, had
come to believe a doctrine that would have startled any Platonist: they considered that God had created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo),
basing their opinion on scripture
...
The Priestly author had implied that God had created the world out
of the primordial chaos and the notion that God had summoned the whole universe from an absolute vacuum was entirely new
...
But by
the fourth century, Christians shared the Gnostic view of the world as inherently fragile and imperfect, separated from God by a vast chasm
...
God and humanity were no longer akin, as in Greek thought
...
There was no longer a great chain of being emanating eternally from God; there was no
longer an intermediate world of spiritual beings who transmitted the divine mana to the world
...
Only the God who had drawn them from nothingness in the first place and kept them perpetually in
being could assure their eternal salvation
...
Somehow Christ had enabled them to cross the gulf that separated God from
humanity
...
Either Christ, the Word, belonged to the divine realm (which was now the domain of God alone) or he
belonged to the fragile created order
...

Arius wanted to emphasise the essential difference between the unique God and all his creatures
...
{3} Arius knew the scriptures well and he produced an armoury of texts to support his claim that Christ the Word
could only be a creature like ourselves
...
{4} This text also stated that Wisdom had been the agent of creation, an idea repeated in the
Prologue of St John's Gospel
...
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Through him all things came to be,
not one thing had its being but through him
...
It was, therefore, entirely different from all other beings
and of exceptionally high status but because it had been created by God, the Logos was essentially different and distinct from God himself
...
{6} Yet he was not God by nature, Arius insisted, but had
been promoted by God to divine status
...
God had foreseen that when the Logos became man he would obey him perfectly and had, so to speak, conferred divinity upon Jesus in
advance
...
Again, Arius could produce many texts that seemed to support
his view
...
Arius also emphasised the biblical passages that stressed the humility and vulnerability of Christ
...
He had a lofty notion of Christ's virtue and obedience unto death, which had assured our
salvation
...
The Stoics, for example, had always taught that it was possible for a virtuous human being to become divine; this had also
been essential to the Platonic view
...

This was only possible because Jesus had blazed a trail for us
...
{1} If Jesus had not been a human being, there would be no hope for us
...
It was by contemplating Christ's life of perfectly obedient sonship
that Christians would become divine themselves
...
{8}
But Athanasius had a less optimistic view of man's capacity for God
...
When he contemplated his creation, therefore, God
saw that all created nature, if left to its own principles, was in flux and subject to dissolution
...
{9}
It was only by participating in God, through his Logos, that man could avoid annihilation because God alone was perfect Being
...
The Logos had been made flesh to give us life
...
But this
salvation would have been impossible if the Logos himself had been a frail creature, who could himself lapse back into nothingness
...
As
Athanasius said, the Word became man in order that we could become divine
...
Most held a
position midway between Athanasius and Arius
...
This made creation ex nihilo an
official Christian doctrine for the first time, insisting that Christ was no mere creature or aeon
...

We believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
maker of all things, visible and invisible,
and in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the Son of God,
the only-begotten of the Father,
that is, of the substance (ousia) of the Father,
God from God,
light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten not made,
of one substance (homoousion) with the Father,
through whom all things were made,
those things that are in heaven and
those things that are on earth,
who for us men and for our salvation

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...

And we believe in the Holy Spirit
...

After the council, the bishops went on teaching as they had before and the Arian crisis continued for another sixty years
...
Athanasius was exiled no less than five times
...
In particular the term homoousion (literally, made of the same stuff) was highly controversial because it was unscriptural and had
materialistic association
...

Further, Athanasius's creed begged many important questions
...
In 339 Marcellus, Bishop of Ancyra - a loyal friend and colleague of Athanasius, who had
even gone into exile with him on one occasion -argued that the Logos could not possibly be an eternal divine being
...
Instead of the controversial homoousion, Marcellus proposed the compromise term homoousion, of like or similar nature
...
What is remarkable, however, is the tenacity with which Christians held on to their sense that the divinity of
Christ was essential, even though it was so difficult to formulate in conceptual terms
...
Marcellus seems to have believed that the Logos was only a passing phase: it had emerged from God at the creation,
had become incarnate in Jesus and, when the redemption was complete, would melt back into the divine nature, so that the One God would be
all in all
...
Those who said that the Logos was of the same nature as the Father and those who believed that he was
similar in nature to the Father were 'brethren, who mean what we mean and are disputing only about terminology'
...
To an outsider, these
theological arguments inevitably seem a waste of time: nobody could possibly prove anything definitively, one way or the other, and the
dispute proved to be simply divisive
...

Arius, Athanasius and Marcellus were all convinced that something new had come into the world with Jesus and they were struggling to
articulate this experience in conceptual symbols to explain it to themselves and to others
...
Unfortunately, however, a dogmatic intolerance was creeping into Christianity, which would
ultimately make the adoption of the 'correct' or orthodox symbols crucial and obligatory
...
Christianity had always been a paradoxical faith: the powerful
religious experience of the early Christians had overcome their ideological objections to the scandal of a crucified Messiah
...

In his Life of Antony, the famous desert ascetic, Athanasius tried to show how his new doctrine affected Christian spirituality
...
Yet in The Sayings of the Fathers, an anonymous
anthology of maxims of the early desert monks, he comes over as a human and vulnerable man, troubled by boredom, agonising over human
problems and giving simple, direct advice
...
He is, for example,
transformed into an ardent opponent of Arianism; he had already begun to enjoy a foretaste of his future deification, since he shares the divine
apatheia to a remarkable degree
...
He was a perfect Christian, whose serenity and impassibility sets him apart from other men: 'his soul was
unperturbed, and so his outward appearance was calm
...
Athanasius never mentions contemplation,
which according to such Christian Platonists as Clement or Origen had been the means of deification and salvation
...
Instead, Christians must imitate the descent of the Word
made flesh into the corruptible, material world
...
They were Basil, Bishop of Caesarea (32979), his younger brother Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (335-95) and friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329-91)
...
They thoroughly enjoyed speculation and philosophy but were convinced that religious experience alone could

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...
Trained in Greek philosophy, they were all aware of a crucial distinction between the factual content of
truth and its more elusive aspects
...
We have
seen that Aristotle had made a similar distinction when he had noted that people attended the mystery religions not to learn (mathein) anything
but to experience (pathein) something
...
Both kinds of Christian teaching were essential to religion
...

Dogma, however, represented the deeper meaning of biblical truth, which could only be apprehended through religious experience and
expressed in symbolic form
...
so as to safeguard by this silence the
sacred character of the mystery
...
{14}
Behind the liturgical symbols and the lucid teachings of Jesus, there was a secret dogma which represented a more developed understanding of
the faith
...
It was not to be confined to Greek
Christians but Jews and Muslims would also develop an esoteric tradition
...
Basil was
not talking about an early form of Freemasonry
...
Some religious insights had an inner resonance that could only be apprehended by each individual
in his own time during what Plato had called theoria, contemplation
...
If they did not 'see' these truths with the eye of the spirit, people who were
not yet very experienced could get quite the wrong idea
...

The Buddha had also noted that certain questions were 'improper' or inappropriate, since they referred to realities that lay beyond the reach of
words
...
The attempt to describe them in words was likely to be as grotesque as a verbal account of one of Beethoven's late quartets
...
' {5}
Western Christianity would become a much more talkative religion and would concentrate on the kerygma: this would be one of its chief
problems with God
...
As Gregory of Nyssa said, every
concept of God is a mere simulacrum, a false likeness, an idol: it could not reveal God himself
...
{17} In his
Life of Moses, Gregory insisted that 'the true vision and the knowledge of what we seek consists precisely in not seeing, in an awareness that
our goal transcends all knowledge and is everywhere cut off from us by the darkness of incomprehensibility'
...
Basil reverted to
the distinction that Philo had made between God's essence (ousia) and his activities (energeiai) in the world: 'We know our God only by his
operations (energeiai) but we do not undertake to approach his essence
...

The Cappadocians were also anxious to develop the notion of the Holy Spirit, which they felt had been dealt with very perfunctorily at Nicaea:
'And we believe in the Holy Spirit' seemed to have been added to Athanasius's creed almost as an afterthought
...
Was it simply a synonym for God or was it something more? 'Some have conceived [the Spirit] as an activity,' noted Gregory of
Nazianzus, 'some as a creature, some as God and some have been uncertain what to call him
...
It followed, therefore, that the Holy Spirit, whose
presence within us was said to be our salvation, must be divine not a mere creature
...

Instead of beginning their consideration of God with his unknowable ousia, the Cappadocians began with mankind's experience of his
Hypostases
...
This did not mean that the Cappadocians believed in three divine beings, however, as some Western theologians
imagined
...
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essences
...
Thus the ousia of an object was that which made something what it was; it was usually applied to an object as it was within itself
...
Sometimes the Cappadocians liked to use the word prosopon
instead of hypostasis
...
Consequently, like hypostasis, prosopon meant the exterior expression of somebody's inner
nature, or the individual self as it was presented to an onlooker
...
But when he allows something of himself
to be glimpsed by his creatures, he is three prosopoi
...
{21} Yet these terms have symbolic value because they translate the ineffable reality into images that we can understand
...

But these three Hypostases are only partial and incomplete glimpses of the Divine Nature itself, which lies far beyond such imagery and
conceptualisation
...

In his letter To Alabius: That there Are Not Three Gods, Gregory of Nyssa outlined his important doctrine of the inseparability or co-inherence
of the three divine persons or Hypostases
...
God expressed himself wholly and totally in each one of these three manifestations when he wished to reveal himself to the
world
...
But the
Divine Nature is equally present in each phase of the operation
...
The Spirit accompanies the divine Word of the Father, just as the breath (Greek, pneuma; Latin, spiritus)
accompanies the word spoken by a man
...
We can compare them to the presence
of different fields of knowledge in the mind of an individual: philosophy may be different from medicine, but it does not inhabit a separate
sphere of consciousness
...
{23}
Ultimately, however, the Trinity only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience: it had to be lived, not thought, because God went far
beyond human concepts
...
Gregory of
Nazianzus made this clear when he explained that contemplation of the Three in One induced a profound and overwhelming emotion that
confounded thought and intellectual clarity
...
When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the
greater part of what I am thinking escapes me
...
For many
Western Christians, however, the Trinity is simply baffling
...
Logically, of course, it made no sense at all
...
{25} It should prevent us from making facile statements about a God who, when he reveals himself, can only express his
nature in an ineffable manner
...
This lay beyond words, concepts and human powers of analysis
...
When
Christians in the West became embarrassed by this dogma during the eighteenth century and tried to jettison it, they were trying to make God
rational and comprehensible to the Age of Reason
...
One of the reasons why the Cappadocians evolved this imaginative paradigm was to prevent God from
becoming as rational as he was in Greek philosophy, as understood by such heretics as Arius
...
The Trinity reminded Christians that the reality that we called 'God' could not be grasped by the human intellect
...
People might start thinking about God himself in too
human a way: it might even be possible to imagine 'him' thinking, acting and planning like us
...
The Trinity was an attempt to correct this tendency
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

of seeing it as a statement of fact about God, it should, perhaps, be seen as a poem or a theological dance between what is believed and
accepted by mere mortals about 'God' and the tacit realisation that any such statement or kerygma could only be provisional
...
In Eastern Christianity, theoria would always mean
contemplation
...
Developing a 'theory' about
God implied that 'he' could be contained in a human system of thought
...
Most Western
Christians were not up to this level of discussion and, since they would not understand some of the Greek terminology, many felt unhappy with
the doctrine of the Trinity
...
Every culture has to create its own idea of God
...

The Latin theologian who defined the Trinity for the Latin Church was Augustine
...
As he explained, misunderstanding
was often simply due to terminology:
For the sake of describing things ineffable that we may be able in some way to express what we are in no way able to express
fully, our Greek friends have spoken of one essence and three substances, but the Latins of one essence or substance and three
persons (personae)
...
Greek Christians
venerated Augustine, seeing him as one of the great Fathers of the Church, but they were mistrustful of his Trinitarian theology, which they felt
made God seem too rational and anthropomorphic
...

Augustine can be called the founder of the Western spirit
...
We
know him more intimately than any other thinker of late antiquity, largely because of his Confessions, the eloquent and passionate account of
his discovery of God
...
He saw God as essential to humanity: 'Thou hast made
us for thyself,' he tells God at the beginning of the Confessions, 'and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee!' {28} While teaching rhetoric in
Carthage, he was converted to Manicheism, a Mesopotamian form of Gnosticism, but eventually he abandoned it because he found its
cosmology unsatisfactory
...
Yet Augustine was
reluctant to take the final step and accept baptism
...
' {29}
His final conversion was an affair of Sturm und Drang, a violent wrench from his past life and a painful rebirth, which has been characteristic
of Western religious experience
...
That precipitated a vast storm bearing a massive downpour of tears
...
I
threw myself down somehow under a certain figtree and let my tears flow freely
...
Augustine's conversion seems like a psychological abreaction, after which the convert falls
exhausted into the arms of God, all passion spent
...
He opened it at St Paul's words to the Romans: 'Not in riots and
drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh
and its lusts
...
'At once, with the last words of this
sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded my heart
...
' {31}
God could also be a source of joy, however: not long after his conversion, Augustine experienced an ecstasy one night with his mother Monica
at Ostia on the River Tiber
...
As a Platonist, Augustine knew that God was to be found in
the mind and in Book X of the Confessions, he discussed the faculty of what he called Memoria, memory
...
For Augustine, memory represented
the whole mind, conscious and unconscious alike
...
It was an 'awe-inspiring mystery',
an unfathomable world of images, presences of our past and countless plains, caverns and caves
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

that Augustine descended to find his God who was paradoxically both within and above him
...
He could only be discovered in the real world of the mind:
Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you
...
You were with me, and
I was not with you
...
{33}
God, therefore, was not an objective reality but a spiritual presence in the complex depths of the self
...
Yet his was not an impersonal deity but the
highly personal God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition
...
You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness
...
I tasted you and I feel but hunger and thirst for you
...
{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
...
Since God had made us in his own image, we should be able to discern a trinity in the depths of our minds
...
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
...
{35} Try as we might, we cannot recapture that moment of
inarticulate longing
...

{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 towards our Archetype - the original pattern on which we were formed
...
But unless the mind is aware of itself,
with what we should call self-consciousness, it cannot love itself
...
Even our experience of doubt makes us conscious of ourselves
...

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
...
' {38} Like the Divine Trinity described by the Cappadocians, all
three properties, therefore, 'constitute one life, one mind, one essence'
...
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
...
{41} But how do we get beyond this image, reflected as in a glass darkly, to God himself? The immense distance between God and man
cannot be traversed by human effort alone
...
We open ourselves to the divine activity which will transform us by a
threefold discipline, which Augustine calls the trinity of faith: retineo (holding the truths of the incarnation in our minds), contemplatio
(contemplating them) and dilectio (delighting in them)
...
{42} This knowledge was not just the cerebral acquisition of information but a creative discipline that would
transform us from within by revealing a divine dimension in the depths of the self
...
The barbarian tribes were pouring into Europe and bringing down the Roman empire:
the collapse of civilisation in the West inevitably affected Christian spirituality there
...
The Church had to preserve its doctrines intact, and, like the
pure body of the Virgin Mary, it must remain unpenetrated by the false doctrines of the barbarians (many of whom had converted to Arianism)
...
Augustine believed that God had condemned humanity to an eternal damnation, simply because
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...
The inherited guilt was passed on to all his descendants through the sexual act, which was polluted by what Augustine
called 'concupiscence'
...
This image of reason dragged down by the chaos of sensations and lawless passions was disturbingly similar to
Rome, source of rationality, law and order in the West, brought low by the barbarian tribes
...
So the matter
stood; the damned lump of humanity was lying prostrate, no, was wallowing in evil, it was falling headlong from one wickedness
to another; and joined to the faction of the angels who had sinned, it was paying the most righteous penalty of its impious
treason
...
Unique to the West, the doctrine compounds the harsh portrait of God suggested earlier by Tertullian
...
A religion which teaches men and women to regard their humanity as chronically flawed can alienate them from
themselves
...
Even though
Christianity had originally been quite positive for women, it had already developed a misogynistic tendency in the West by the time of
Augustine
...
Tertullian had castigated women as
evil temptresses, an eternal danger to mankind:
Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity
live too
...
You so carelessly destroyed man, God's image
...
{44}
Augustine agreed; 'What is the difference,' he wrote to a friend, 'whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must
beware of in any woman
...
{46} Woman's only function was the child-bearing which passed the contagion of Original Sin to the next generation, like a venereal
disease
...
Western Christianity never fully recovered from this
neurotic misogyny, which can still be seen in the unbalanced reaction to the very notion of the ordination of women
...

This is doubly ironic, since the idea that God had become flesh and shared our humanity, should have encouraged Christians to value the body
...
During the fourth and fifth centuries, 'heretics' such as Appollinarius, Nestorius and
Eutyches asked very difficult questions
...
Cyril, Bishop of
Alexandria, reiterated the faith of Athanasius: God had indeed descended so deeply into our flawed and corrupt world that he had even tasted
death and abandonment
...
The remote God of the Greeks, characterised chiefly by the divine apatheia, seemed an entirely different deity from the
God who was supposed to have become incarnate in Jesus Christ
...
The paradox of the incarnation seemed an antidote to the
Hellenic God who did nothing to shake our complacency and who was so entirely reasonable
...
Pagan philosophy went underground and seemed defeated by the new religion of
Christianity
...
They were, in fact, written by a sixth-century Greek Christian, who has preserved his anonymity
...


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...
Like Basil, he took the distinction between kerygma and dogma very seriously
...
The kerygmatic gospel was clear and
knowable; the dogmatic gospel was silent and mystical
...
One
was 'symbolic and presupposing initiation', the other 'philosophical and capable of proof- and the ineffable is woven with what can be uttered'
...
There was a religious truth which could not adequately be conveyed by words, logic or rational discourse
...
{49}
The hidden or esoteric meaning was not for a privileged elite but for all Christians
...
The liturgy, attended by all the faithful, was the chief path to God and dominated his theology
...
The humility which had inspired the Cappadocians to claim that all
theology should be apophatic became for Denys a bold method of ascending to the inexpressible God
...

He preferred to use Proclus's term theurgy, which was primarily liturgical: theurgy in the pagan world had been a tapping of the divine mana by
means of sacrifice and divination
...
He agreed with the Cappadocians that all our words and concepts for God were inadequate and must not be taken as an
accurate description of a reality which lies beyond our ken
...
{50} Christians must realise that God is not the Supreme Being, the highest being of all heading a hierarchy of lesser beings
...
God is not
one of the things that exist and is quite unlike anything else in our experience
...
{51} ' He is above all names just as he is
above all being
...

God had revealed some of his Names to us in scripture, such as 'Father', 'Son' and 'Spirit', yet the purpose of this had not been to impart
information about him but to draw men and women towards himself and enable them to share his divine nature
...
He then proceeds to
show that although God has revealed something of himself in these titles, what he reveals is not himself
...
Thus we must say that he is both 'God' and 'not-God', 'good' and then go on to say that he
is 'not-good'
...
Thus, we begin by saying that:
of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, imagination, name and many other things
...
He is not one of the things that are
...
This method is a theurgy, a tapping of the divine power that enables us to ascend to God himself and, as Platonists had always
taught, become ourselves divine
...
We call a halt
to the activities of our minds
...
Then and only then shall we achieve an
ecstatic union with God
...
This is something that every Christian can manage in this paradoxical method of prayer and theoria
...
' {55} Like Gregory of Nyssa, he found the story of Moses's ascent of Mount Sinai instructive
...
He
had been enveloped by a thick cloud of obscurity and could see nothing: thus everything that we can see or understand is only a symbol (the
word Denys uses is 'paradigm') which reveals the presence of a reality which is beyond all thought
...

This is only possible because, as it were, God comes to meet us on the mountain
...
The God of the Greek philosophers was unaware of the mystic who

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...
God also achieves an
'ecstasy' which took 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
...
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
...
Denys's way of negation and paradox
was not just something that we do but something that happens to us
...
Denys saw ecstasy as
the constant state of every Christian
...
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
...
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
...
He 'stays within himself in his eternal mystery, at the same time as he is totally immersed in creation
...
Denys's method became normative in Greek theology
...
Some imagined that when they said 'God', the divine reality actually coincided with the idea in their minds
...
The God of Greek Orthodoxy, however, would remain mysterious and the Trinity would continue to remind Eastern Christians of
the provisional nature of their doctrines
...

Greeks and Latins also developed significantly different views of the divinity of Christ
...
This approximates more closely to the Buddhist ideal
than does the Western view
...
'God' was thus not an optional extra, an alien, external reality tacked on
to the human condition
...
The Logos
had not become man to make reparation for the sin of Adam; indeed, the incarnation would have occurred even if Adam had not sinned
...
On
Mount Tabor, Jesus's glorified humanity showed us the deified human condition to which we could all aspire
...
{57} Just as enlightenment and Buddhahood did not involve invasion by a supernatural reality
but were an enhancement of powers that were natural to humanity, so too the deified Christ showed us the state that we could acquire by means
of God's grace
...

Where the Greek view of incarnation brought Christianity closer to the oriental tradition, the Western view of Jesus took a more eccentric
course
...
Sin, he
argued, had been an affront of such magnitude that atonement was essential if God's plans for the human race were not to be completely
thwarted
...
God's justice demanded that the debt be repaid by one who was
both God and man: the magnitude of the offence meant that only the Son of God could effect our salvation but, as a man had been responsible,
the redeemer also had to be a member of the human race
...
It also reinforced the Western image of a harsh God who could only be satisfied by the hideous
death of his own Son, who had been offered up as a kind of human sacrifice
...
People tend to imagine three divine figures or else ignore the
doctrine altogether and identify 'God' with the Father and make Jesus a divine friend - not quite on the same level
...
Yet we shall see that in both Judaism and Islam mystics developed remarkably similar
conceptions of the divine
...
In the Trinity, the Father transmits all that he is to the Son, giving up everything - even the possibility of expressing himself in another
Word
...
The Father, therefore, has no identity, no 'I' in the normal sense and confounds our notion of personality
...
Since the Father is commonly
presented as the End of the Christian quest, the Christian journey becomes a progress towards no place, no where and No One
...
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personal God or a personalised Absolute has been important to humanity: Hindus and Buddhists had to permit the personalistic devotionalism
of bhakti
...

The doctrine of the incarnation can be seen as another attempt to neutralise the danger of idolatry
...
Other religious traditions have attempted to prevent this by insisting that the Absolute is somehow bound up with the human condition,
as in the brahman-atman paradigm
...
True, their solutions were more rational but dogma as opposed to kerygma - should not be confined by the wholly explicable, any more than poetry or music
...

In the West, where the incarnation was not formulated in this way, there has been a tendency for God to remain external to man and an
alternative reality to the world that we know
...

Yet by making Jesus the only avatar, we have seen that Christians would adopt an exclusive notion of religious truth: Jesus was the first and
last Word of God to the human race who rendered future revelation unnecessary
...
Yet the new version of monotheism, which eventually became known as 'Islam', spread with astonishing rapidity
throughout the Middle East and North Africa
...


5 - Unity: The God of Islam
In about the year 610 an Arab merchant of the thriving city of Mecca in the Hijaz, who had never read the Bible and probably never heard of
Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, had an experience that was uncannily similar to theirs
...

This was quite a common practice among the Arabs of the peninsula
...
He probably also spent much time in anxious
thought
...
Only two generations earlier, the Quraysh had lived a harsh nomadic life in the Arabian steppes, like the other Bedouin tribes: each
day had required a grim struggle for survival
...
They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams
...
People felt obscurely disoriented and lost
...

At this time, any political solution tended to be of a religious nature
...
This was hardly surprising, because they must have felt that their new wealth had 'saved' them from the perils of the nomadic life,
cushioning them from the malnutrition and tribal violence that were endemic to the steppes of Arabia where each Bedouin tribe daily faced the
possibility of extinction
...
They
felt that they had become the masters of their own fate and some even seem to have believed that their wealth would give them a certain
immortality
...
In the old
nomadic days the tribe had had to come first and the individual second: each one of its members knew that they all depended upon one another
for survival
...
Now individualism had replaced
the communal ideal and competition had become the norm
...
Each of the clans, or smaller family groups of the tribe, fought one another for a share of the wealth of Mecca and some of the least
successful clans (like Muhammad's own clan of Hashim) felt that their very survival was in jeopardy
...

In the rest of Arabia the situation was also bleak
...
To help the people cultivate the communal spirit that was essential for survival,
the Arabs had evolved an ideology called muruwah, which fulfilled many of the functions of religion
...
There was a pagan pantheon of deities and the Arabs worshipped at their shrines, but they had not developed a

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...
They had no notion of an afterlife but believed
instead that dark, which can be translated as time or fate, was supreme - an attitude that was probably essential in a society where the mortality
rate was so high
...
The virtues of muruwah required an Arab to obey his sayyid or
chief at a second's notice, regardless of his personal safety; he had to dedicate himself to the chivalrous duties of avenging any wrong
committed against the tribe and protecting its more vulnerable members
...
It is here that we see the communal ethic most clearly: there was no duty to punish the killer himself
because an individual could vanish without trace in a society like pre-Islamic Arabia
...
The vendetta or blood-feud was the only way of ensuring a modicum of social security in a region where there was
no central authority, where every tribal group was a law unto itself and where there was nothing comparable to a modern police force
...
The vendetta was thus a rough and
ready form of justice which meant that no one tribe could easily gain ascendancy over any of the others
...

Brutal as it undoubtedly was, however, muruwah had many strengths
...
These qualities would become very
important in Islam, as we shall see
...
During the last phase of the pre-Islamic period, which Muslims call the jahiliyyah (the time of ignorance) there
seems to have been widespread dissatisfaction and spiritual restlessness
...
Modern ideas were beginning to
penetrate Arabia from the settled lands; merchants who travelled into Syria or the Iraq brought back stories of the wonders of civilisation
...
The tribes were involved in constant warfare which made it impossible for them to
pool their meagre resources and become the united Arab people that they were dimly aware of being
...
Instead they were constantly open to exploitation by the great powers: indeed, the more
fertile and sophisticated region of Southern Arabia in what is now the Yemen (which had the benefit of the monsoon rains) had become a mere
province of Persia
...
The Christian doctrine of the afterlife, for example, made the eternal fate of each individual a sacred value: how could that
be squared with the tribal ideal which subordinated the individual to the group and insisted that a man or woman's sole immortality lay in the
survival of the tribe?
Muhammad was a man of exceptional genius
...
He had brought the Arabs a spirituality that was uniquely suited to their own traditions and which unlocked such
reserves of power that within a hundred years they had established their own great empire which stretched from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees
and founded a unique civilisation
...
Like many of the Arabs, Muhammad had come to believe that al-Lah, the High
God of the ancient Arabian pantheon whose name simply meant 'the God', was identical to the God worshipped by the Jews and the Christians
...
Indeed, the Arabs were unhappily aware that al-Lah had never sent them a prophet or a scripture of their own, even
though they had had his shrine in their midst from time immemorial
...

All Meccans were fiercely proud of the Kabah, which was the most important holy place in Arabia
...
All violence was forbidden in the
sanctuary, the sacred area around the Kabah, so that in Mecca the Arabs could trade with one another peacefully, knowing that old tribal
hostilities were temporarily in abeyance
...
Yet though al-Lah had clearly singled the Quraysh out for his special favour, he had never sent them a messenger like
Abraham, Moses or Jesus and the Arabs had no scripture in their own language
...
Those Jews and Christians with whom the Arabs came in contact used to
taunt them for being a barbarous people who had received no revelation from God
...
Judaism and Christianity had made little headway in the region, even though the Arabs

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...
There were some Jewish tribes of doubtful
provenance in the settlements of Yathrib (later Medina) and Fadak, to the north of Mecca, and some of the northern tribes on the borderland
between the Persian and Byzantine empires had converted to Monophysite or Nestorian Christianity
...
They were
probably also instinctively aware that they had suffered enough cultural dislocation, as their own traditions eroded
...

Some Arabs seem to have attempted to discover a more neutral form of monotheism, which was not tainted by imperialistic associations
...
Shortly before Muhammad received his own prophetic call, his first biographer Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d
...
Some Western scholars have argued that this
little hanifiyyah sect is a pious fiction, symbolising the spiritual restlessness of the jahiliyyah but it must have some factual basis
...
There is a story that one day, before he had left Mecca to search in Syria and the Iraq
for the religion of Abraham, Zayd had been standing by the Kabah, leaning against the shrine and telling the Quraysh who were making the
ritual circumambulations around it in the time-honoured way: 'O Quraysh, by him in whose hand is the soul of Zayd, not one of you follows the
religion of Abraham but I
...
' {1}
Zayd's longing for a divine revelation was fulfilled on Mount Hira in 610 on the seventeenth night of Ramadan, when Muhammad was torn
from sleep and felt himself enveloped by a devastating divine presence
...
He said that an angel had appeared to him and given him a curt command: 'Recite!' (iqra!) Like the Hebrew prophets who were often
reluctant to utter the Word of God, Muhammad refused, protesting 'I am not a reciter!' He was no kahin, one of the ecstatic soothsayers of
Arabia who claimed to recite inspired oracles
...
Just as he felt that he could bear it no longer, the angel released him and again
commanded him to 'Recite!' (iqra!)
...
Finally, at the end of a third terrifying embrace, Muhammad found the first words of a new scripture pouring from his mouth:
Recite in the name of thy Sustainer, who has created - created man out of a germ-cell! Recite - for thy Sustainer is the Most
Bountiful, One who has taught [man] the use of the pen - taught him what he did not know! {2}
The word of God had been spoken for the first time in the Arabic language and this scripture would ultimately be called the Qur´an: the
Recitation
...
A kahin was supposedly possessed by a jinni, one of the sprites that were thought to haunt the
landscape and who could be capricious and lead people into error
...
Thus
Hassan ibn Thabit, a poet of Yathrib who later became a Muslim, says that when he received his poetic vocation his jinni had appeared to him,
thrown him to the ground and forced the inspired words from his mouth
...
He
thoroughly despised the kahins, whose oracles were usually unintelligible mumbo-jumbo and was always very careful to distinguish the Koran
from conventional Arabic poetry
...
But on the
mountainside he had another vision of a being which, later, he identified with the angel Gabriel:
When I was midway on the mountain, I heard a voice from heaven saying, 'O Muhammad! thou art the apostle of God and I am
Gabriel
...
I stood gazing at him, moving neither backward or forward; then I began to turn my face away from him, but towards
whatever region of the sky I looked, I saw him as before
...
This was no pretty
naturalistic angel but an overwhelming ubiquitous presence from which escape was impossible
...
They too had felt
near to death and at a physical and psychological extremity when they experienced it
...
The terrifying experience seemed to have fallen upon him out of the blue and left
him in a state of profound shock
...


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...
'Cover me! cover me!' he cried, begging her to
shield him from the divine presence
...
You help the poor and forlorn and bear their burdens
...
You honour the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress
...
Khadija suggested that they consult her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal,
now a Christian and learned in the scriptures
...
Eventually, after a period of several years, Muhammad was convinced that this
was indeed the case and began to preach to the Quraysh, bringing them a scripture in their own language
...
The revelations continued to be a painful
experience
...

{5} He had to listen to the divine words intently, struggling to make sense of a vision and significance that did not always come to him in a
clear, verbal form
...

But at other times the revelation was distressingly inarticulate: 'Sometimes it comes unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the
hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message
...
In
the Koran, God tells Muhammad to listen to the incoherent meaning carefully and with what Wordsworth would call 'a wise passiveness'
...

Thus when We recite it, follow thou its wordings [with all thy mind]: and then, behold, it will be for Us to make its meaning
clear
...
Muhammad used to enter a tranced state and sometimes seemed to lose consciousness; he used to
sweat profusely, even on a cold day, and often felt an interior heaviness like grief that impelled him to lower his head between his knees, a
position adopted by some contemporary Jewish mystics when they entered an alternative state of consciousness though Muhammad could not
have known this
...
He believed that he was putting the
ineffable Word of God into Arabic, for the Koran is as central to the spirituality of Islam as Jesus, the Logos, is to Christianity
...
He did not see at the
outset all that he had to accomplish, but this was revealed to him little by little, as he responded to the inner logic of events
...
In this
sacred book, God seems to comment on the developing situation: he answers some of Muhammad's critics, explains the significance of a battle
or a conflict within the early Muslim community and points to the divine dimension of human life
...
As each new segment was revealed,
Muhammad, who could neither read nor write, recited it aloud, the Muslims learned it by heart and those few who were literate wrote it down
...
The editors put the longest suras at the
beginning and the shortest at the end
...
Instead, it reflects on various themes: God's presence in the natural world, the lives of the prophets or
the Last Judgement
...
It
seems to go over the same ground again and again
...
When Muslims
hear a sura chanted in the mosque, they are reminded of all the central tenets of their faith
...
He did not believe that he was founding a new
universal religion but saw himself bringing the old religion of the one God to the Quraysh
...
{9} He had no dreams of founding a theocracy and would probably
not have known what a theocracy was: he himself should have no political function in the city but was simply its nadhir, the Warner
...
His early message was not doom-laden, however
...
Muhammad did not have to prove the existence of God to the Quraysh
...
His existence was taken for granted
...
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says to Muhammad in an early sura of the Koran:
And thus it is [with most people]: if thou ask them, 'Who is it that has created the heavens and the earth and made the sun and
moon subservient [to his laws]? - they will surely answer al-Lah
...
"
The trouble was that the Quraysh were not thinking through the implications of this belief
...
Consequently the early verses of the Koran all encourage the Quraysh to become aware
of God's benevolence, which they can see wherever they look
...

Nay but [man] has never yet fulfilled what he has enjoined upon him
...
' {3}
The existence of God is not in question, therefore
...

The Koran was not teaching the Quraysh anything new
...
Frequently the Koran introduces a topic with a phrase like: 'Have you not seen
...
?' The
Word of God was not issuing arbitrary commands from on high but was entering into a dialogue with the Quraysh
...

The Quraysh loved to make the ritual circumambulations around the shrine but when they put themselves and their own material success into
the centre of their lives they had forgotten the meaning of these ancient rites of orientation
...
If they failed to reproduce God's benevolence in their own society, they would be out of touch with
the true nature of things
...
This external gesture
would help Muslims to cultivate the internal posture and re-orient their lives
...
The Quraysh were horrified when they saw these first Muslims making the salat: they found it unacceptable that a
member of the haughty clan of Quraysh with centuries of proud Bedouin independence behind him should be prepared to grovel on the ground
like a slave and the Muslims had to retire to the glens around the city to make their prayer in secret
...

In practical terms, Islam meant that Muslims had a duty to create a just, equitable society where the poor and vulnerable are treated decently
...
{14} Alms-giving (zakat) accompanied by prayer (salat) were two of
the five essential 'pillars' (rukn) or practices of Islam
...
There were no obligatory doctrines about God: indeed, the Koran is highly suspicious of
theological speculation, dismissing it as zanna, self-indulgent guess-work about things that nobody can possibly know or prove
...
Instead, as in Judaism, God was experienced as a moral imperative
...

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
He lacks the pathos and passion of the biblical God
...
{15} Constantly, therefore, the
Koran urges Muslims to see the world as an epiphany; they must make the imaginative effort to see through the fragmentary world to the full
power of original being, to the transcendent reality that infuses all things
...
' {6}
The Koran constantly stresses the need for intelligence in deciphering the 'signs' or 'messages' of God
...
It was this attitude that later enabled Muslims to build a fine tradition of natural science,
which has never been seen as such a danger to religion as in Christianity
...

But the greatest sign of all was the Koran itself: indeed its individual verses are called ayat
...
Arabic is particularly difficult to translate: even ordinary literature and the mundane utterances of
politicians frequently sound stilted and alien when translated into English, for example, and this is doubly true of the Koran, which is written in
dense and highly allusive, elliptical speech
...
Muslims often say that when they read the Koran in a translation, they feel that they are reading a different book because
nothing of the beauty of the Arabic has been conveyed
...
Muslims say that when they hear the Koran chanted in the mosque they feel enveloped in a divine dimension of
sound, rather as Muhammad was enveloped in the embrace of Gabriel on Mount Hira or when he saw the angel on the horizon no matter where
he looked
...
It is meant to yield a sense of the divine, and must not be read in haste:
And thus have We bestowed from on high this [divine writ] as a discourse in the Arabic tongue, and have given therein many
facets to all manner of warnings, so that men might remain conscious of Us, or that it give rise to a new awareness in them
...
Reading the Koran is therefore a spiritual discipline, which
Christians may find difficult to understand because they do not have a sacred language, in the way that Hebrew, Sanscrit and Arabic are sacred
to Jews, Hindus and Muslims
...
Jews, however,
have a similar attitude towards the Torah
...

Frequently they recite the words aloud, savouring the words that God himself is supposed to have used when he revealed himself to Moses on
Sinai
...
Obviously Jews who read their Bible in this
way are experiencing a very different book from Christians who find most of the Pentateuch extremely dull and obscure
...

Many were converted on the spot, believing that God alone could account for the extraordinary beauty of the language
...
Thus the young Quraysh!
Umar ibn al-Khattab had been a virulent opponent of Muhammad; he had been devoted to the old paganism and ready to assassinate the
Prophet
...
There are two versions of his
conversion story, which are both worthy of note
...
'What was that
balderdash?' he had roared angrily as he strode into the house, knocking poor Fatimah to the ground
...
He picked up the manuscript, which the visiting Koran-reciter had dropped in the
commotion, and, being one of the few Qurayshis who were literate, he started to read
...
'How
fine and noble is this speech!' he said wonderingly, and was instantly converted to the new religion of al-Lah
...
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The beauty of the words had reached through his reserves of hatred and prejudice to a core of receptivity that he had not been conscious of
...
In the other version
of Umar's conversion, he encountered Muhammad one night at the Kabah, reciting the Koran quietly to himself before the shrine
...
As he said, 'There was nothing between us but the cover of the Kabah' - all his defences but one
were down
...
' {19} It was the Koran which prevented God from being a mighty reality 'out there' and brought him into the mind, heart and being of each
believer
...
It is an invasion or an annunciation, which breaks into 'the small house
of our cautionary being' and commands us imperatively: 'change your life!' After such a summons, the house 'is no longer habitable in quite the
same way as it was before'
...
Even those Qurayshis who refused to accept Islam were disturbed by the
Koran and found that it lay outside all their familiar categories: it was nothing like the inspiration of the kahin or the poet; nor was it like the
incantations of a magician
...
It is as though Muhammad had created an entirely new literary form that some people were not ready for but which
thrilled others
...
We have seen that it took the
ancient Israelites some seven hundred years to break with their old religious allegiances and accept monotheism but Muhammad managed to
help the Arabs achieve this difficult transition in a mere twenty-three years
...

During the first years of his mission, Muhammad attracted many converts from the younger generation, who were becoming disillusioned with
the capitalistic ethos of Mecca, as well as from underprivileged and marginalised groups, which included women, slaves and members of the
weaker clans
...
The richer establishment, who were more than happy with the status quo, understandably held aloof but there was no formal rupture
with the leading Qurayshis until Muhammad forbade the Muslims to worship the pagan gods
...
But when he condemned these ancient cults as idolatrous,
he lost most of his followers overnight and Islam became a despised and persecuted minority
...
Like the early Christians, the first Muslims were accused of an 'atheism' which was deeply
threatening to society
...

The Quraysh seem to have found a rupture with the ancestral gods profoundly threatening and it would not be long before Muhammad's own
life was imperiled
...
Three of the Arabian deities were particularly dear to the Arabs of the
Hijaz: al-Lat (whose name simply meant 'the Goddess') and al-Uzza (the Mighty One), who had shrines at Taif and Nakhlah respectively, to the
south-east of Mecca, and Manat, the Fateful One, who had her shrine at Qudayd on the Red Sea coast
...
They were often called the banat al-Lah, the Daughters of God, but this does not necessarily imply a fullydeveloped pantheon
...
The term banat al-Lah may simply have signified 'divine beings'
...
Like Mecca with its Kabah, the shrines at Taif, Nakhlah and Qudayd
had become essential spiritual landmarks in the emotional landscape of the Arabs
...

The story of the Satanic Verses is not mentioned in either the Koran or in any of the early oral or written sources
...
923)
...
In these so-called 'Satanic' verses, the three goddesses were not on a par with al-Lah but were lesser spiritual beings who could
intercede with him on behalf of mankind
...
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imagination:
Have you, then, ever considered [what you are worshipping in] al-Lat, al-Uzza, as well as [in] Manat, the third and last [of this
triad]?
...
They [who worship them] follow nothing but surmise and their own wishful
thinking -although right guidance has now indeed come unto them from their Sustainer
...
From this point, Muhammad became a jealous monotheist and shirk (idolatry;
literally, associating other beings with al-Lah) became the greatest sin of Islam
...
It is also incorrect to
imagine that the role of 'Satan' meant that the Koran was momentarily tainted by evil: in Islam Satan is a much more manageable character than
he became in Christianity
...
{22} The incident may indicate the difficulty Muhammad certainly experienced when he tried
to incarnate the ineffable divine message in human speech: it is associated with canonical Koranic verses which suggest that most of the other
prophets had made similar 'Satanic' slips when they conveyed the divine message but that God always rectified their mistakes and sent down a
new and superior revelation in their stead
...

The sources show that Muhammad absolutely refused to compromise with the Quraysh on the matter of idolatry
...
As the Koran has it: 'I do not worship that which you worship, and neither do you worship that which I worship
...

The perception of God's uniqueness was the basis of the morality of the Koran
...
The Koran pours scorn on the pagan deities in almost exactly the same way as the Jewish
scriptures: they are totally ineffective
...
Instead the Muslim must realise that al-Lah is the ultimate and unique reality:
Say: 'He is the One God;
God, the Eternal, the Uncaused Cause of all being
...
They had expressed this
insight in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation
...
There is no deity but al-Lah the Creator of heaven and earth who alone can save man and send him the spiritual and
physical sustenance that he needs
...

Muhammad knew that monotheism was inimical to tribalism: a single deity who was the focus of all worship would integrate society as well as
the individual
...
This single deity is not a being like ourselves whom we can know and understand
...
Yet this incomprehensible and inaccessible God had wanted to make himself
known
...
Hence, I created the world so
that I might be known
...
Like the two older religions, Islam makes it
clear that we only see God in his activities, which adapt his ineffable being to our limited understanding
...
' {26} Like the Christian Fathers, the Koran sees God as the Absolute, who alone has true existence: 'All that lives on earth or in the
heavens is bound to pass away: but forever will abide thy Sustainer's Self, full of majesty and glory
...
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In the Koran, God is given ninety-nine names or attributes
...
Thus the world only exists because he is al-Ghani (rich and infinite); he is the giver of life (al-Muhyi), the knower of all things
(al-Alim), the producer of speech (al-Kalimah): without him, therefore, there would not be life, knowledge or speech
...
Yet frequently the divine names seem to cancel one another out
...
The Names of God play a central role in Muslim piety:
they are recited, counted on rosary beads and chanted as a mantra
...

The first of the 'pillars' of Islam would be the Shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith: 'I bear witness that there is no god but al-Lah and that
Muhammad is his Messenger
...
He was the only true reality, beauty or perfection: all the beings that seem to exist and possess these
qualities have them only in so far as they participate in this essential being
...

The assertion of the unity of God was not simply a denial that deities like the banat al-Lah were worthy of worship
...
The unity of God could be
glimpsed in the truly integrated self
...
Because there
was only one God, all rightly guided religions must derive from him alone
...
One of the divine names of the Koran is an-Nur, the Light
...
The parable of his light is, as it were (ka), that of a niche containing a lamp; the
lamp is [enclosed] in glass, the glass [shining] like a radiant star: [a lamp] lit from a blessed tree - an olive tree that is neither
of the east nor of the west - the oil whereof [is so bright that it] would well-nigh give light [of itself] even though fire had not
touched it: light upon light
...
An-Nur, the Light, is not God himself,
therefore, but refers to the enlightenment which he bestows on a particular revelation [the lamp] which shines in the heart of an individual [the
niche]
...
As Muslim commentators pointed out
from the very earliest days, light is a particularly good symbol for the divine Reality, which transcends time and space
...
When the Christian Waraqa ibn Nawfal had acknowledged Muhammad as a true prophet, neither he nor Muhammad
expected him to convert to Islam
...

The Koran did not see revelation as cancelling out the messages and insights of previous prophets but instead it stressed the continuity of the
religious experience of mankind
...
Yet from the start, Muslims saw revelation in less exclusive terms than either Jews or Christians
...
The Koran does not condemn other religious traditions as false or incomplete but shows each new prophet as confirming
and continuing the insights of his predecessors
...
Thus the Koran repeatedly points
out that it is not bringing a message that is essentially new and that Muslims must emphasise their kinship with the older religions:
Do not argue with the followers of earlier revelation otherwise than in the most kindly manner - unless it be such of them as are
set on evil doing - and say: 'We believe in that which has been bestowed upon us, as well as that which has been bestowed upon
you: for our God and your God is one and the same, and it is unto him that we [all] surrender ourselves
...
It also mentions Hud and Salih, who had been sent to the ancient Arab peoples of Midian and Thamood
...
On the same principle, Muslims argue, the Koran would also
have honoured the shamans and holy men of the American Indians or the Australian Aborigines
...
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Muhammad's belief in the continuity of the religious experience was soon put to the test
...
The slaves and freedmen who had no tribal protection were persecuted so severely that some died under the
treatment and Muhammad's own clan of Hashim were boycotted in an attempt to starve them into submission: the privation probably caused
the death of his beloved wife Khadija
...
The pagan Arabs of the northern settlement of
Yathrib had invited the Muslims to abandon their clan and to emigrate there
...
Yathrib had been torn by apparently incurable warfare
between its various tribal groups and many of the pagans were ready to accept Islam as a spiritual and political solution to the problems of the
oasis
...
This meant that
they were not as offended as the Quraysh by the denigration of the Arabian deities
...

In the year before the Hijra or migration to Yathrib (or Medina, the City, as the Muslims would call it), Muhammad had adapted his religion to
bring it closer to Judaism as he understood it
...
Thus he prescribed a fast for Muslims on the Jewish Day of Atonement and commanded
Muslims to pray three times a day like the Jews, instead of only twice as hitherto
...
Above all Muslims must now pray facing Jerusalem like the Jews and Christians
...
Eventually, however, they
turned against Muhammad and joined those pagans who were hostile to the newcomers from Mecca
...
They were expecting a Messiah but
no Jew or Christian at this stage would have believed that they were prophets
...
Muhammad, however, had
joined both these tribes with the Quraysh in the new Muslim ummah, a kind of super-tribe of which the Jews were also members
...
They used to assemble in the mosque 'to listen to the stories of the Muslims and
laugh and scoff at their religion'
...
They also jeered at Muhammad's pretensions, saying that it was very odd
that a man who claimed to be a prophet could not even find his camel when it went missing
...

But some of the Jews were friendly and seem to have joined the Muslims in an honorary capacity
...

For the first time Muhammad learned the exact chronology of the prophets, about which he had previously been somewhat hazy
...
Hitherto Muhammad probably thought that Jews and
Christians both belonged to one religion but now he learned that they had serious disagreements with one another
...
Muhammad also learned that in their own scriptures the Jews were called a faithless people, who had
turned to idolatry to worship the Golden Calf
...

From the friendly Jews of Medina, Muhammad also learned the story of Ishmael, Abraham's elder son
...
To comfort
Abraham, God promised that Ishmael would also be the father of a great nation
...
Later Abraham had visited Ishmael and
together father and son had built the Kabah, the first temple of the one God
...
This must have been music to Muhammad's ears: he was bringing the Arabs their own scripture and now he could
root their faith in the piety of their ancestors
...
Muhammad commanded the Muslims to pray facing Mecca instead of Jerusalem
...
By prostrating themselves in the
direction of the Kabah, which was independent of the two older revelations, Muslims were tacitly declaring that they belonged to no
established religion but were surrendering themselves to God alone
...
Instead they were returning to the primordial religion of Abraham, who had been the first Muslim to surrender to God
and who had built his holy house:

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...
Say: 'nay, but [ours is] the creed of Abraham, who
turned away from all that is false and was not of those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God
...
And
it is unto him that we surrender ourselves
...

Muslims date their era not from the birth of Muhammad nor from the year of the first revelations - there was, after all, nothing new about these
- but from the year of the Hijra (the migration to Medina) when Muslims began to implement the divine plan in history by making Islam a
political reality
...

Muhammad had not intended to become a political leader at the outset but events that he could not have foreseen had pushed him towards an
entirely new political solution for the Arabs
...
In the West, Muhammad has often been presented as a warlord, who forced Islam on a reluctant world by force of
arms
...
Muhammad was fighting for his life, was evolving a theology of the just war in the Koran with which
most Christians would agree, and never forced anybody to convert to his religion
...
In the Koran war is held to be abhorrent; the only just war is a war of self-defence
...
Muhammad had political gifts of a very high order
...
In 630 the city of Mecca opened its gates to Muhammad who was able to take it without bloodshed
...

All Muslims have a duty to make the hajj at least once in a lifetime if their circumstances permit
...
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
...
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
...
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
...
Suddenly, you are floating, carried on by the flood
...
You are now part of the People; you are now a Man, alive and
eternal
...
You have become part of this universal system
...
You have been transformed into a particle that is gradually
melting and disappearing
...
{34}
Jews and Christians have also emphasised the spirituality of community
...
As in most religions, peace and harmony are important pilgrimage themes and
once the pilgrims have entered the sanctuary all violence of any kind is forbidden
...

Hence the outrage throughout the Muslim world during the hajj of 1987, when Iranian pilgrims instigated a riot in which 402 people were
killed and 649 injured
...
After his death, some of the Bedouin tried to break away from the ummah but
the political unity of Arabia held firm
...
The religion
of al-Lah introduced the compassionate ethos which was the hallmark of the more advanced religions: brotherhood and social justice were its
crucial virtues
...

During Muhammad's lifetime, this had included the equality of the sexes
...
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misogynistic religion but, like Christianity, the religion of al-Lah was originally positive for women
...
Polygamy, for example, was common
and wives remained in their father's households
...
Women had been among Muhammad's earliest converts and their emancipation was a project that was dear to his heart
...
It also gave women legal
rights of inheritance and divorce: most Western women had nothing comparable until the nineteenth century
...
On one
occasion, for example, the women of Medina had complained to the Prophet that the men were outstripping them in the study of the Koran and
asked him to help them catch up
...
One of their most important questions was why the Koran addressed men only when
women had also made their surrender to God
...
{35} Thereafter the Koran quite frequently addressed women explicitly, something that rarely
happens in either the Jewish or Christian scriptures
...
The Koran does not prescribe the veil for all women but only for Muhammad's wives, as a mark of their status
...
They
adopted the customs of veiling women and secluding them in harems from Persia and Christian Byzantium, where women had long been
marginalised in this way
...
Today Muslim feminists urge their men folk to return to the original spirit of the Koran
...
The first of these - that between the Sunnah and Shiah - was prefigured in the struggle for the leadership after Muhammad's sudden
death
...
Ali himself accepted Abu Bakr's leadership but during the next few years he seems to have
been the focus of the loyalty of dissidents who disapproved of the policies of the first three caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab and
Uthman ibn Affan
...

Concerned with the leadership, the split between Sunnis and Shiis was political rather than doctrinal and this heralded the importance of
politics in Muslim religion, including its conception of God
...

All Muslims regard the immoral slaughter of Husayn with horror but he has become a particular hero of the Shiah, a reminder that it is
sometimes necessary to fight tyranny to the death
...
The first four caliphs had
been concerned only to spread Islam among the Arabs of the Byzantine and Persian empires, which were both in a state of decline
...

Nobody in the new empire was forced to accept the Islamic faith; indeed, for a century after Muhammad's death, conversion was not
encouraged and, in about 700, was actually forbidden by law: Muslims believed that Islam was for the Arabs as Judaism was for the sons of
Jacob
...

When the Abbasid caliphs began to encourage conversion, many of the Semitic and Aryan peoples in their empire were eager to accept the new
religion
...
Politics is not extrinsic to a
Muslim's personal religious life, as in Christianity which mistrusts mundane success
...
The ummah has sacramental importance, as a 'sign' that God has blessed this endeavour
to redeem humanity from oppression and injustice; its political health holds much the same place in a Muslim's spirituality as a particular
theological option (Catholic, Protestant, Methodist, Baptist) in the life of a Christian
...

In the early years of Islamic history, therefore, speculation about the nature of God often sprang from a political concern about the state of the
caliphate and the establishment
...
After the period of the rashidun (the first four 'rightly-guided' caliphs),
Muslims found that they were living in a world very different from the small, embattled society of Medina
...
There was a luxury and corruption among the aristocracy and
in the court that was very different from the austere lives led by the Prophet and his Companions
...
A number of different solutions
and sects emerged
...
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The most popular solution was found by legists and traditionists who attempted to return to the ideals of Muhammad and the rashidun
...

A bewildering number of oral traditions were in circulation about the words (hadith) and practice (sunnah) of Muhammad and his early
companions and these were collected during the eighth and ninth centuries by a number of editors, the most famous of whom were Muhammad
ibn Ismail al-Bukhari and Muslim ibn al-Hijjaj al-Qushayri
...
Thus by imitating the way Muhammad spoke, loved, ate, washed and worshipped, the Islamic Holy
Law helped Muslims to live a life that was open to the divine
...
Thus when Muslims follow a sunnah by greeting one another with the words 'Salaam alaykum' (Peace be with you) as
Muhammad used to do, when they are kind to animals, to orphans and the poor as he was and are generous and reliable in their dealings with
others, they are reminded of God
...
There has
been much debate about the validity of the sunnah and hadith: some are regarded as more authentic than others
...

The hadith or collected maxims of the Prophet are mostly concerned with everyday matters but also with metaphysics, cosmology and
theology
...
These hadith qudsi (sacred traditions)
emphasise God's immanence and presence in the believer: one famous hadith, for example, lists the stages whereby a Muslim apprehends a
divine presence which seems almost incarnate in the believer: you begin by observing the commandments of the Koran and Shariah and then
progress to voluntary acts of piety:
My servant draws near to me by means of nothing dearer to me than that which I have established as a duty to him
...
{36}
As in Judaism and Christianity, the transcendent God is also an immanent presence encountered here below
...

The Muslims who promoted this type of piety based on the imitation of Muhammad are generally known as the ahl al-hadith, the Traditionists
...
They opposed the luxury of the Ummayad and Abbasid
courts but were not in favour of the revolutionary tactics of the Shiah
...
Yet by stressing the divine nature of the Koran and the sunnah, they provided each Muslim with the
means of direct contact with God that was potentially subversive and highly critical of absolute power
...
Each Muslim was responsible before God for his or her own fate
...
Their doctrine of the uncreated Koran meant that when it was recited, Muslims could
hear the invisible God directly
...
His speech was on their lips when they recited
its sacred words and when they held the holy book it was as though they had touched the divine itself
...
{37}
The exact status of Jesus, the Word, had greatly exercised Christians
...

The Shiah, however, gradually evolved ideas that seemed even closer to Christian incarnation
...
As
his cousin and son-in-law, Ali had a double blood-tie with Muhammad
...
In the Koran, prophets often ask God to bless their descendants
...
They alone could provide the
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...
If a descendant of Ali came to power, Muslims could look forward to a Golden Age of justice and the ummah
would be led according to God's will
...
Some of the more radical Shii groups would elevate Ali and his
descendants to a position above that of Muhammad himself and give them near-divine status
...
By the end of the Ummayad period, some
Shiis had come to believe that the authoritative Urn was retained in one particular line of Ali's descendants
...
Whether he was in power or not, his guidance was absolutely
necessary, so every Muslim had a duty to look for him and accept his leadership
...

When each Imam died, he would choose one of his relatives to inherit the Urn
...
His
words, decisions and commands were God's
...

The various branches of the Shiah traced the divine succession differently
...
The Ismailis, known as the Seveners, believed that the seventh of these Imams had been the last
...
These were obviously dangerous ideas
...
The more extreme Shiis developed an
esoteric tradition, therefore, based on a symbolic interpretation of the Koran, as we shall see in the next chapter
...
Since the Iranian revolution, we have tended in the West to depict Shiism as an inherently fundamentalist sect of Islam but
that is an inaccurate assessment
...
In fact, Shiis had much in common with those Muslims who
attempted to apply rational arguments systematically to the Koran
...

The political question inspired a theological debate about God's government of human affairs
...
The Koran has a very strong conception of God's absolute omnipotence and omniscience and many texts could be used to support
this view of predestination
...
' Consequently the critics of the establishment stressed free will and moral responsibility
...
They defended free will in order to safeguard the ethical nature
of humanity
...
A God who
violated all decent principles and got away with it simply because he was God would be a monster, no better than a tyrannical caliph
...

Here they came into conflict with the Traditionists, who argued that by making man the author and creator of his own fate, the Mutazilis were
insulting the omnipotence of God
...
They adopted the
doctrine of predestination in order to emphasise God's essential incomprehensibility: if we claimed to understand him, he could not be God but
was a mere human projection
...
The Mutazilis were wrong to say that justice, a purely human ideal, was of the essence of God
...
An impersonal
God, such as Brahman, can more easily be said to exist beyond 'good' and 'evil', which are regarded as masks of the inscrutable divinity
...
It is all too easy to
make this 'God' a larger-than-life tyrant or judge and make 'him' fulfil our expectations
...
The danger of this has led some to see a personal God as an unreligious idea, because it simply
embeds us in our own prejudice and makes our human ideas absolute
...
They claimed that some of those attributes which enabled the transcendent God to relate to the world -such as power,
knowledge, will, hearing, sight and speech, which are all attributed to al-Lah in the Koran - had existed with him from all eternity in much the
same way as the uncreated Koran
...
Just as
Jews had imagined that God's Wisdom or the Torah had existed with God from before the beginning of time, Muslims were now developing a
similar idea to account for the personality of God and to remind Muslims that he could not be wholly contained by the human mind
...
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the Caliph al-Mamun (813-832) sided with the Mutazilis and attempted to make their ideas official Muslim doctrine, this abstruse argument
would probably have affected a mere handful of people
...
Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), a leading Traditionist who narrowly escaped
death in al-Mamun's inquisition, became a popular hero
...

Ibn Hanbal refused to countenance any kind of rational discussion about God
...
859)
put forward a compromise solution - that the Koran considered as God's speech was indeed uncreated but that when it was put into human
words it became a created thing - Ibn Hanbal condemned the doctrine
...
Ibn Hanbal, however, declared that
this was unlawful too because it was useless and dangerous to speculate about the origin of the Koran in this rationalistic way
...
He accused the Mutazilis of draining God of all mystery and making him an abstract
formula that had no religious value
...
He can
perhaps be compared to radical Christians like Athanasius, who insisted on an extreme interpretation of the doctrine of incarnation against the
more rational heretics
...

Yet the Koran constantly emphasises the importance of intelligence and understanding and Ibn Hanbal's position was somewhat simpleminded
...
A compromise was found by Abu al-Hasan ibn Ismail al-Ashari (878-941)
...
AlAshari then went to the other extreme, became an ardent Traditionist and preached against the Mutzilah as the scourge of Islam
...
Where the
Mutazilis claimed that God's revelation could not be unreasonable, al-Ashari used reason and logic to show that God was beyond our
understanding
...
Indeed, like Denys the Areopagite, he believed that paradox would enhance our appreciation of
God
...
The divine attributes of
knowledge, power, life and so on were real; they had belonged to God from all eternity
...
He could not be regarded as a complex being because he was simplicity itself; we could not
analyse him by donning his various characteristics or splitting him up into smaller parts
...

Al-Ashari was trying to find a middle course between deliberate obscurantism and extreme rationalism
...
Hisham ibn Hakim went so far as to say that:
Allah has a body, defined, broad, high and long, of equal dimensions, radiating with light, of a broad measure in its three
dimensions, in a place beyond place, like a bar of pure metal, shining as a round pearl on all sides, provided with colour, taste,
smell and touch
...
The Mutazilis insisted that when the
Koran speaks of God's 'hands', for example, this must be interpreted allegorically to refer to his generosity and munificence
...
But he also opposed the
Traditionist wholesale rejection of reason
...

Constantly al-Ashari opted for a compromise position
...
He condemned the Mutazili doctrine of free will, because God alone could be
the 'creator' of man's deeds but he also opposed the Traditionist view that men did not contribute at all to their salvation
...
Unlike Ibn Hanbal, however, al-Ashari was
prepared to ask questions and to explore these metaphysical problems, even though ultimately he concluded that it was wrong to try to contain
the mysterious and ineffable reality that we call God in a tidy, rationalistic system
...
His successors in the tenth and eleventh centuries refined the methodology
of Kalam and developed his ideas
...

The first major theologian of the Asharite school was Abu Bakr al-Baqillani (d
...
In his treatise al-Tawhid (Unity), he agreed with the
Mutazilah that men could prove the existence of God logically with rational arguments: indeed the Koran itself shows Abraham discovering the
eternal Creator by meditating systematically on the natural world
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

without a revelation, since these are not natural categories but have been decreed by God: al-Lah is not bound by human notions of what is
right or wrong
...
He claimed that everything in the world is absolutely dependent
upon God's direct attention
...
The phenomenal universe was reduced to nothingness by al-Baqillani as radically as it had been by
Athanasius
...
He sustained the universe and summoned his creation into
existence at every second
...
Although other Muslims were applying
themselves to science with great success, Asharism was fundamentally antagonistic to the natural sciences yet it had a religious relevance
...
If used as a discipline rather than a factual account of reality it could help Muslims to develop that God-consciousness prescribed by the
Koran
...
It could effect a dislocation between the way a Muslim viewed God and the way he regarded other matters
...
This
was important
...
We have seen that the
Greeks had decided on balance that it was not and that silence was the only appropriate form of theology
...

Muhammad and his companions had belonged to a far more primitive society than that of al-Baqillani
...
Muhammad had
instinctively re-lived much in the old Hebrew encounter with the divine and later generations also had to live through some of the problems
encountered by the Christian churches
...
The Islamic venture shows that the notion of a transcendent yet personal God tends to bring up the same kind of problems
and lead to the same type of solutions
...
Kalam never became as important as theology in Western Christianity
...
Rationalism continued to
influence future thinkers throughout the medieval period but it remained a minority pursuit and most Muslims came to distrust the whole
enterprise
...
Other Muslims were attempting an even more radical Hellenisation of the Islamic God and introduced a
new philosophical element into the three monotheistic religions
...


6 - The God of the Philosophers
During the ninth century, the Arabs came into contact with Greek science and philosophy and the result was a cultural florescence which, in
European terms, can be seen as a cross between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
...
Arab Muslims now studied astronomy, alchemy, medicine and
mathematics with such success that, during the ninth and tenth centuries, more scientific discoveries had been achieved in the Abbasid empire
than in any previous period of history
...
This is usually translated
'philosophy' but has a broader, richer meaning: like the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, the Faylasufs wanted to live rationally in
accordance with the laws that they believed governed the cosmos and which could be discerned at every level of reality
...
They
believed that the God of the Greek philosophers was identical with al-Lah
...
The Faylasufs,
however, came to the opposite conclusion: they believed that rationalism represented the most advanced form of religion and had evolved a
higher notion of God than the revealed God of scripture
...
As good Muslims, they were politically aware, despised the luxury of the court and wanted to reform their society
according to the dictates of reason
...
It can be most unhealthy to relegate
God to a separate intellectual category and to see faith in isolation from other human concerns
...
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religion but wanted to purify it of what they regarded as primitive and parochial elements
...

There were problems, however
...
Indeed history, the major theophany of the monotheistic faiths, had been
dismissed by Aristotle as inferior to philosophy
...
The
Faylasufs wanted to get beyond history, which was a mere illusion, to glimpse the changeless ideal world of the divine
...
It took great courage to believe that the cosmos, where chaos and pain seemed more in
evidence than a purposeful order, was really ruled by the principle of reason
...
There was a nobility in Falsafah, a search for objectivity and a timeless
vision
...
Instead of seeing God as a mystery, the Faylasufs believed that he was reason itself
...
This perspective was impossible for anybody in the ninth and tenth centuries, but the experience of
Falsafah is relevant to our current religious predicament
...
As in our own day, the scientific discoveries demanded the cultivation of a different mentality that
transformed the way the Faylasufs viewed the world
...
Like the prophet or the mystic, the
scientist also forces himself to confront the dark and unpredictable realm of uncreated reality
...
In the same way, the scientific vision of our own day
has made much classic theism impossible for many people
...
The Faylasufs attempted to wed their new insights with mainstream Islamic faith and came up with some
revolutionary Greek-inspired ideas about God
...

The Faylasufs were attempting a more thoroughgoing merging of Greek philosophy and religion than any previous monotheists
...

Kalam was based on the traditionally monotheistic view of history as a theophany; it argued that concrete, particular events were crucial
because they provided the only certainty we had
...
Though this
atomism had a religious and imaginative value, it was clearly alien to the scientific spirit and could not satisfy the Faylasufs
...
Their God was to be
discovered in logical arguments, not in particular revelations at various moments in time to individual men and women
...
A God who was
not the same for everybody, give or take inevitable cultural coloration, could not provide a satisfactory solution to the fundamental religious
question: 'What is the ultimate meaning of life?' You could not seek scientific solutions that had a universal application in the laboratory and
pray to a God who was increasingly regarded by the faithful as the sole possession of the Muslims
...
The Faylasufs did not feel that
there was any need to jettison the Koran
...
They saw no fundamental contradiction between revelation and science, rationalism and faith
...
They wanted to find the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of all the various historical religions,
which, since the dawn of history, had been trying to define the reality of the same God
...
In their
Middle Eastern colonies, the Greeks had tended to follow a standard curriculum, so that though there were different emphases in Hellenistic
philosophy, each student was expected to read a set of texts in a particular order
...
But the
Faylasufs did not observe this curriculum but read the texts as they became available
...
Besides
their own distinctively Islamic and Arab insights, their thinking was also affected by Persian, Indian and Gnostic influence
...
c
...
He had been educated at Basra but settled in Baghdad where he enjoyed the patronage of
the Caliph al-Mamun
...
But his chief concern was
religion
...
Most later Faylasufs would not share this perspective
...
Truth was one and it was the task of the philosopher to search for it in

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...

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to
us by former generations and foreign peoples
...
{1}
Here al-Kindi was in line with the Koran
...
He used Aristotle's arguments for the existence of a Prime Mover
...
There
must, therefore, be an Unmoved Mover to start the ball rolling
...

But having reached this conclusion, al-Kindi departed from Aristotle by adhering to the Koranic doctrine of creation ex nihilo
...
This, al-Kindi maintained, was God's prerogative
...

Falsafah came to reject creation ex nihilo, so al-Kindi cannot really be described as a true Faylasuf
...
His successors were more radical
...
c
...
He also rejected the Aristotelian
solution of a Prime Mover as well as the Koranic doctrines of revelation and prophecy
...
Ar-Razi was
not really a monotheist, therefore: he was perhaps the first free-thinker to find the concept of God incompatible with a scientific outlook
...

Most Faylasufs did not take their rationalism to such an extreme
...
Reliance on revealed
doctrines was useless because the religions could not agree
...
What about the common people? he asked
...
It necessarily only appealed to those with a certain IQ and was thus against the egalitarian spirit that was
beginning to characterise Muslim society
...
980) dealt with the problem of the uneducated masses, who were not capable of philosophic
rationalism
...
Al-Farabi was
what we would call a Renaissance Man; he was not only a physician but also a musician and a mystic
...
In the Republic, Plato had argued
that a good society must be led by a philosopher who ruled according to rational principles, which he was able to put across to the ordinary
people
...
He had expressed the
timeless truths in an imaginative form that the people could understand, so Islam was ideally suited to create Plato's ideal society
...
Even though he was a
practising Sufi, al-Farabi saw revelation as a wholly natural process
...
That did
not mean that God was remote from al-Farabi's main concerns, however
...
This was the God of Aristotle and Plotinus, however: he was the First of all beings
...

But al-Farabi stayed close to Aristotle
...
That would have involved the
eternal and static God in unseemly change
...
Once we arrive in our own sublunary world, we become aware of a hierarchy of being that evolves in the opposite
direction, beginning with inanimate matter, progressing through plants and animals to culminate in humanity, whose soul and intellect partakes
of the divine Reason, while his body comes from the earth
...

There were obvious differences from the Koranic vision of reality but al-Farabi saw philosophy as a superior way of understanding truths
which the prophets had expressed in a poetic, metaphorical way, in order to appeal to the people
...
By the
middle of the tenth century, an esoteric element was beginning to enter Islam
...
Sufism and Shiism
also interpreted Islam differently from the ulema, the clerics who adhered solely to the Holy Law and the Koran
...
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adventurous and inventive versions of Islam could easily be misunderstood
...
In these esoteric sects, initiates were carefully prepared for the reception of
these difficult notions, by means of special disciplines of mind and heart
...
The West did not develop an esoteric tradition but adhered to the kerygmatic interpretation of
religion, which was supposed to be the same for everybody
...
In Islamdom, esoteric thinkers usually died in their beds
...
Mystics, as we shall see, also found the notion of emanation
more sympathetic than the doctrine of the creation ex nihilo
...
This was
particularly evident in the Shiah
...
The most successful of these Shii ventures was the
establishment of a caliphate in Tunis in 909 in opposition to the Sunni caliphate in Baghdad
...

The Ismailis broke away from the Twelvers after the death of Jafar ibn Sadiq, the saintly Sixth Imam, in 765
...
The Ismailis, however, remained true
to Ismail and believed that the line had ended with him
...

The veneration of the Imams was no mere political enthusiasm, however
...
They had evolved an esoteric piety of their own which depended upon a symbolic
reading of the Koran
...
Each of the Imams embodied the 'Light of
Muhammad' (al-nur al-Muhammad), the prophetic spirit which had enabled Muhammad to surrender perfectly to God
...
The Nestorians had held a similar view of Jesus
...
This ilm was not simply secret information but a means of
transformation and inner conversion
...
This so transformed him that he was able to understand the esoteric interpretation of the Koran
...

I am that precious stone, my Sun is he
by whose rays this tenebrous world is filled with light
...
He
is the teacher, healer of souls, favoured by God,
image of wisdom, fountain of knowledge and truth
...
{3}
As Christ on Mount Tabor represented deified humanity to Greek Orthodox Christians and as the Buddha embodied that enlightenment that is
possible for all mankind, so too had the human nature of the Imam been transfigured by his total receptivity to God
...
They had, for example, opposed the free-thinker ar-Razi
...

Contemplating the abstractions of science and mathematics purified their minds of sensual imagery and freed them from the limitations of their

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Instead of using science to gain an accurate and literal understanding of external reality, as we do, the Ismailis used it
to develop their imaginations
...
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
...
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
...
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
...
Al-Farabi had envisaged ten emanations between God and the material
world which presided over the Ptolemaic spheres
...
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
...
She was, therefore, the Mother of Islam and corresponded with Sophia, the divine Wisdom
...
This had not just been a succession of external,
mundane events - many of them tragic
...
{4}
We should not be too quick to deride this as a delusion
...
Like poets or painters, they used
symbolism that bore little relation to logic but which they felt revealed a deeper reality than could be perceived by the senses or expressed in
rational concepts
...
They felt that
this would take them back to the original archetypal Koran, which had been uttered in the menok at the same time as Muhammad had recited it
in the getik
...
It was as
though the Ismaili could hear a 'sound' - a verse of the Koran or a hadith - on several levels at the same time; he was trying to train himself to
hear its heavenly counterpart as well as the Arabic words
...
As he listened to the silence, he became aware of the gulf that
exists between our words and ideas of God and the full reality
...
971), explained
...
Instead, he advocated the
use of the double negative
...
But we should immediately negate that rather lifeless and abstract negation, saying that God is 'not
not-ignorant' or that he is not 'No-thing' in the way that we normally use the word
...
By a
repeated use of this linguistic discipline, the batini would become aware of the inadequacy of language when it tried to convey the mystery of
God
...
1021), a later Ismaili thinker, described the immense peace and satisfaction that this exercise produced in his Rahaf
al-aql (Balm for the Intellect)
...
Ismaili writers frequently spoke of their batin in terms of illumination and transformation
...
Nor was it
escapism
...
Indeed, Jafar ibn Sadiq, the Sixth Imam, had defined faith as action
...

These ideals were also shared by the Ikwan al-Safa, the Brethren of Purity, an esoteric society that arose in Basra during the Shii century
...
Like the Ismailis, they dedicated themselves to the pursuit of science, particularly
mathematics and astrology, as well as to political action
...
Their Epistles (Rasail), which became an encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences, were extremely popular and spread as far west as
Spain
...
Mathematics was seen as a prelude to philosophy and psychology
...
Just as St Augustine had seen self-knowledge as indispensable to the knowledge of God, a deep understanding of the self
became the king-pin of Islamic mysticism
...
' This was quoted in the First Epistle of the Brethren
...
The Brethren were also very close to the Faylasufs
...
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Like the Muslims rationalists, they emphasised the unity of truth, which must be sought everywhere
...
{7} They developed a Neoplatonic conception of God, whom they saw as the ineffable,
incomprehensible One of Plotinus
...

Falsafah reached its apogee in the work of Abu Ali ibn Sina (980-1037)
...
Born of a family of Shii
officials near Bukhara in Central Asia, Ibn Sina was also influenced by the Ismailis who used to come and argue with his father
...
He had difficulty with Aristotle, however, but saw the light when he came across al-Farabi's Intentions of Aristotle's Metaphysics
...
At one point he became the
vizier of the Shii Buyid dynasty which ruled in what is now western Iran and southern Iraq
...
He was also a sensualist and was said to have died at the quite early age of fifty-eight because of excessive indulgence in wine and sex
...
The Abbasid caliphate was in decline
and it was no longer so easy to see the caliphal state as the ideal philosophic society described by Plato in the Republic
...
He believed that if Falsafah was to live up to its claims of presenting a complete
picture of reality, it must make more sense of the religious belief of ordinary people, which -however one chose to interpret it - was a major fact
of political, social and personal life
...
This was similar to the mystical experience of the Sufis and had been described by Plotinus himself as the highest form of wisdom
...
Ibn Sina worked out a rational demonstration of the existence of God
based on Aristotle's proofs which became standard among later medieval philosophers in both Judaism and Islam
...
They never doubted that unaided human reason could arrive at a knowledge of the existence of a
Supreme Being
...

Ibn Sina saw it as a religious duty for those who had the intellectual ability to discover God for themselves in this way to do so, because reason
could refine the conception of God and free it of superstition and anthropomorphism
...
They wanted to use reason to discover as
much as they could about the nature of God
...
Wherever we look in the world, we see composite beings that consist
of a number of different elements
...
When we try to understand something, we
'analyse' it, breaking it up into its component parts until no further division is possible
...
We are continually looking for simplicity, therefore, for beings that are irreducibly
themselves
...
Like all Platonists, Ibn Sina felt that the multiplicity we see all around us must be dependent upon a primal unity
...
Multiple things are contingent and contingent beings are inferior to the realities upon which they depend, rather as in
a family children are inferior in status to the father who gave them being
...
Is there such a being? A Faylasuf like Ibn Sina took it for
granted that the cosmos was rational and in a rational universe there must be an Uncaused Being, an Unmoved Mover at the apex of the
hierarchy of existence
...
The absence of such a supreme being would mean that our
minds were not in sympathy with reality as a whole
...
This utterly
simple being upon which the whole of multiple, contingent reality depended was what the religions called 'God'
...
But because its existence was so different from that of anything else, it
was not just another item in the chain of being
...
It follows, therefore, that he cannot be analysed
or broken down into component parts or attributes
...
God cannot be the object of discursive thought, because our brains cannot deal with
him in the way that they deal with everything else
...
Consequently when we talk about God it is better to use negatives to distinguish him absolutely from everything
else that we talk about
...
Because we know that goodness
exists, God must be essential or 'necessary' Goodness; because we know that life, power and knowledge exist, God must be alive, powerful and
intelligent in the most essential and complete manner
...

This did not agree with the portrait of God in revelation, who is said to know all things and to be present and active in the created order
...

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
' {8} God could not sully himself with some of the really
base and trivial minutiae of life on earth
...
He knows that he is the cause of contingent creatures
...
But God knows us and
our world only in general and universal terms; he does not deal in particulars
...
Interested in religious psychology, he used the Plotinan scheme of emanation to explain the experience of prophecy
...
These Intelligences also possess imagination; indeed, they are Imagination in its pure state and it is through this
intermediate realm of imagination - not through discursive reason - that men and women reach their most complete apprehension of God
...

The human soul is composed of practical intellect, which relates to this world, and the contemplative intellect, which is able to live in close
intimacy with Gabriel
...
The experience of the Sufis showed that it was possible for people to attain a vision
of God that was philosophically sound without using logic and rationality
...
The Prophet Muhammad had perfected this direct union with the divine world
...

Indeed at the end of his life Ibn Sina seems to have become a mystic himself
...
He was turning towards what he called 'Oriental
Philosophy' (al-hikmat al-mashriqiyyeh)
...
He intended to
write an esoteric treatise in which the methods would be based on a discipline of illumination (ishraq) as well as ratiocination
...
But, as we shall also see in the next chapter, the great Iranian philosopher
Yahya Suhrawardi would found the Ishraqi school, which did fuse philosophy with spirituality in the way envisaged by Ibn Sina
...
They began to write
their own philosophy in Arabic, introducing a metaphysical and speculative element into Judaism for the first time
...
They felt that they had to answer the challenge of Islam on its own terms and that involved squaring the personalistic God of
the Bible with the God of the Faylasufs
...
They worried about the problem of the creation of the
world and about the relation between revelation and reason
...
Thus Saadia ibn Joseph (882-942), the first to undertake a philosophical interpretation of Judaism, was a Talmudist but
also a Mutazili
...
Like a Faylasuf, he saw the attainment
of a rational conception of God as a mitzvah, a religious duty
...
The reality of the Creator God seemed so obvious to Saadia that it was the possibility of religious doubt rather than faith that
he felt needed to be proven in his Book of Beliefs and Opinions
...
But that did not mean that God was entirely
accessible to human reason
...
How
could a material world have its origin in a wholly spiritual God? Here we had reached the limits of reason and must simply accept that the
world was not eternal, as Platonists believed, but had a beginning in time
...
Once we have accepted this, we can deduce other facts about God
...
These attributes are not separate Hypostases, as the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity suggested, but mere aspects of God
...
If we want to be as exact about God as possible, we can
only properly say that he exists
...
When, for example, he tries to explain the suffering that we see
in the world, Saadia resorts to the solutions of the Wisdom writers and the Talmud
...
This would not have satisfied a true Faylasuf because it makes God far too human and attributes
plans and intentions to him
...
The prophets were
superior to any philosopher
...

Other Jews went further
...
He claimed that God had willed or

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
But Gabirol failed to explain adequately how matter could derive from God
...
Bahya ibn Pakudah (d
...
1080) was not a strict Platonist but retreated to the methods of Kalam whenever it suited him
...
The world had certainly not come into being by accident: that would
be as ridiculous an idea as imagining that a perfectly-written paragraph came into being when ink was spilled on a page
...
Having thus put forward this highly unphilosophical
doctrine, Bahya switched from Kalam to Falsafah, listing Ibn Sina's proof that a Necessary, Simple Being had to exist
...
The prophet had a direct, intuitive
knowledge of God, the philosopher a rational knowledge of him
...
They were like blind men, led by other human beings, if they did not try to prove the existence and unity of God for
themselves
...
As its title suggests, his treatise Duties of the Heart used reason to help us to cultivate a proper attitude towards God
...
His religious experience of God took precedence over any rationalistic
method
...
Born in Khurasan,
he had studied Kalam under Juwayni, the outstanding Asharite theologian, to such effect that at the age of thirty-three he was appointed
director of the prestigious Nizamiyyah mosque in Baghdad
...

Al-Ghazzali, however, had a restless temperament that made him struggle with truth like a terrier, worrying problems to the bitter death and
refusing to be content with an easy, conventional answer
...
I have scrutinised
the creed of every sect, I have tried to lay bare the inmost doctrines of every community
...
{9}
He was searching for the kind of indubitable certainty that a philosopher like Saadia felt, but he became increasingly disillusioned
...
His contemporaries sought God in several ways, according to their personal and
temperamental needs: in Kalam, through an Imam, in Falsafah and in Sufi mysticism
...
{10} The disciples of all four of the main versions of Islam
that he researched claimed total conviction but, al-Ghazzali asked, how could this claim be verified objectively?
Al-Ghazzali was as aware as any modern sceptic that certainty was a psychological condition that was not necessarily objectively true
...
But the reality that we call 'God' cannot be tested empirically, so how could
we be sure that our beliefs were not mere delusions? The more conventionally rational proofs failed to satisfy al-Ghazzali's strict standards
...
The Ismailis
depended on the teachings of a hidden and inaccessible Imam, but how could we be certain that the Imam was divinely inspired and if we
cannot find him what is the point of this inspiration? Falsafah was particularly unsatisfactory
...
Believing that they could only be refuted by an expert in
their own discipline, al-Ghazzali studied Falsafah for three years until he had completely mastered it
...
If Falsafah confined itself to mundane, observable phenomena as in
medicine, astronomy or mathematics, it was extremely useful but it could tell us nothing about God
...

But where did that leave the honest seeker after truth? Was a sound, unshakeable faith in God impossible? The strain of his quest caused alGhazzali such personal distress that he had a breakdown
...
Finally in about 1094 he found that he could not speak or give his lectures:
God shriveled my tongue until I was prevented from giving instruction
...
{12}
He fell into a clinical depression
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

anxiety, he would never recover
...

There he found what he was looking for
...
The British scholar
John Bowker shows that the Arabic word for existence (wujud) derives from the root wajada: he found
...
An Arabic-speaking
philosopher who attempted to prove that God existed did not have to produce God as another object among many
...
The only absolute proof of God's wujud would appear - or not - when the believer came face to face with the divine reality
after death, but the reports of such people as the prophets and mystics who claimed to have experienced it in this life should be considered
carefully
...
Admittedly those reports could be
mistaken in their claims but after living for ten years as a Sufi, al-Ghazzali found that the religious experience was the only way of verifying a
reality that lay beyond the reach of the human intellect and cerebral process
...

Al-Ghazzali therefore formulated a mystical creed that would be acceptable to the Muslim establishment, who had often looked askance at the
mystics of Islam, as we shall see in the following chapter
...
The visible world (alam al-shahadah) is an inferior replica of what he called the world of the Platonic
intelligence (alam al-malakut), as any Faylasuf acknowledged
...
Man straddled both realms of reality: he belonged to the physical as well as the higher world of the spirit because God had inscribed the
divine image within him
...
{14} The light in these verses refers both to God and to the other illuminating objects: the lamp, the star
...
Not only does it enable us to perceive other objects but, like God himself, it can transcend time and space
...
But in order to make it clear that by 'reason' he did not merely refer to our cerebral, analytic powers, alGhazzali reminds his readers that his explanation cannot be understood in a literal sense: we can only discuss these matters in the figurative
language that is the preserve of the creative imagination
...
People who lack this faculty
should not deny that it exists simply because they have no experience of it
...
We can learn something about God by means of our reasoning
and imaginative powers but the highest type of knowledge could only be attained by people like the prophets or the mystics who had this
special God-enabling faculty
...
Not everybody has this
mystical talent
...
This results in the
fading away of self and an absorption in God
...
Indeed, everything other than he is pure non-being and, considered from the standpoint of the being which it
receives from the First Intelligence [in the Platonic scheme], has being not in itself but in regard to the face of its Maker, so that
the only thing which truly is is God's Face
...

Al-Ghazzali eventually returned to his teaching duties in Baghdad but never lost his conviction that it was impossible to demonstrate the
existence of God by logic and rational proof
...
He himself had been brought to the
brink of scepticism (safsafah) when he realised that it was absolutely impossible to prove God's existence beyond reasonable doubt
...
For those who were not blessed with the special mystical or prophetic talent, al-Ghazzali devised a discipline to enable
Muslims to cultivate a consciousness of God's reality in the minutiae of daily life
...
Never again
would Muslims make the facile assumption that God was a being like any other, whose existence could be demonstrated scientifically or
philosophically
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
The Spanish philosopher Joseph ibn Saddiq (d
...
If we claimed to
understand God that would mean that he was finite and imperfect
...
We can speak about God's activity in the world in positive terms but not
about God's essence (al-Dhat) which will always elude us
...
God
could not be proven rationally; that did not mean that faith in God was irrational but simply that a logical demonstration of his existence had no
religious value
...
When the philosophers claim that
they became united to the divine Intelligence that informs the cosmos through the exercise of reason, they are deluding themselves
...

Halevi did not understand philosophy as well as al-Ghazzali but he agreed that the only reliable knowledge of God was by religious experience
...
He tried to soften this
by suggesting that the goyim could come to a knowledge of God through the natural law, but the purpose of The Kuzari, his great philosophical
work, was to justify the unique position of Israel among the nations
...
The God he would encounter was not an objective fact whose existence could be
demonstrated scientifically but an essentially subjective experience
...
It is just as the soul which waits for its entry into the foetus until the latter's vital
powers are sufficiently completed to enable it to receive this higher state of things
...
' {6}
God is not an alien, intrusive reality, therefore, nor is the Jew an autonomous being sealed off from the divine
...
Halevi is careful to distinguish the God that Jews are able to experience from the
essence of God himself
...

Falsafah was not entirely dead as a result of al-Ghazzali's polemic, however
...
Abu al-Walid ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd (1126-1198), known in Europe as Averroes,
became an authority in the West among both Jews and Christians
...
In the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan would hail him as a free spirit, the champion of rationalism against blind faith
...
In his career and his posthumous effect, we can see a parting of the ways between East
and West in their approach to and conception of God
...

Unlike his predecessors al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, he was a Qadi, a jurist of the Shariah law, as well as a philosopher
...

He was convinced that there was no contradiction whatsoever between religion and rationalism
...
Not everybody was capable of philosophical thought, however, so Falsafah was only for an
intellectual elite
...
Hence the importance of the
esoteric tradition, which kept these dangerous doctrines from those unfitted to receive them
...
Kalam was equally dangerous
...
Consequently it merely stirred up fruitless doctrinal disputes, which could only
weaken the faith of uneducated people and make them anxious
...
The Faylasufs were the
chief authorities on doctrine: they alone were capable of interpreting the scriptures and were the people described in the Koran as 'deeply
rooted in knowledge
...
But even the Faylasufs had to subscribe to the 'creed' of obligatory doctrines, which Ibn Rushd listed as follows:
q

q
q

1
...

2
...

3
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
The uniqueness and incomparability of God, clearly asserted in Koran 42:9: 'There is nothing like unto him
...
The creation of the world by God
...
The validity of prophecy
...
The justice of God
...
The resurrection of the body on the Last Day
...
Falsafah had not always subscribed to
belief in the creation of the world, for example, so it is not clear how such Koranic doctrines should be understood
...

This left the Faylasuf free to adopt the belief of the rationalists
...
The Koran does not necessarily
contradict the philosophers, therefore, when it says that God knows everything that we do
...
Ibn Rushd was a revered but secondary figure in Islam but he became very important indeed in the West, which discovered
Aristotle through him and developed a more rationalistic conception of God
...
Hence it is often assumed that the career of Ibn Rushd marked the
end of Islamic philosophy
...
Yahya Suhrawardi and Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi followed in the footsteps of Ibn Sina rather than
Ibn Rushd and attempted to fuse philosophy with mystical spirituality
...

Ibn Rushd's great disciple in the Jewish world was the great Talmudist and philosopher Rabbi Moses ibn Maimon (i 135-1204), who is usually
known as Maimonides
...
Maimonides was forced to flee Spain, however, when
it fell prey to the fanatical Berber sect of the Almoravids which persecuted the Jewish community
...
He and his parents settled in Egypt, where he held high office in the
government and even became the physician of the sultan
...
Like Ibn Rushd, Maimonides believed that
Falsafah was the most advanced form of religious knowledge and the royal road to God, which must not be revealed to the masses but should
remain the preserve of a philosophical elite
...
He also believed that certain doctrines were necessary for
salvation and published a creed of thirteen articles that was markedly similar to Ibn Rushd's:
q

q
q
q
q
q
q
q
q
q
q
q
q

1
...

2
...

3
...

4
...

5
...

6
...

7
...

8
...

9
...

10
...

11
...

12
...

13
...
{19}

This was an innovation in Judaism and never became entirely accepted
...
The creeds of Ibn Rushd and Maimonides suggest that a rationalistic and intellectualist approach to
religion leads to dogmatism and to an identification of 'faith' with 'correct belief
...
He proves God's
existence by means of the arguments of Aristotle and Ibn Sina but insisted that God remains ineffable and indescribable because of his absolute
simplicity
...
We know that God cannot be compared to any of the things that exist
...
Instead of saying that 'he exists', we should deny his non-existence and so on
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

reality was quite distinct from any idea that we poor humans can conceive of him
...
This is a way of excluding our imperfections from God, preventing us from projecting our hopes
and desires on to him
...
We can, however, use the Via Negativa to form some positive
notions of God
...
Since God is 'not imperfect' his actions must also be perfect
...
This kind of deduction can only be made about God's activities, not about his essence
which remains beyond the reach of our intellect
...
Even though
the doctrine of the creation ex nihilo was philosophically unorthodox, Maimonides adhered to the traditional biblical doctrine and jettisoned the
philosophic idea of emanation
...
Again,
he considered prophecy to be superior to philosophy
...
He had a direct, intuitive knowledge of God which was higher than the knowledge achieved by
discursive reasoning
...
He speaks of the trembling excitement that accompanied
this kind of intuitive experience of God, an emotion 'consequent upon the perfection of the imaginative faculties'
...

His ideas spread among the Jews of Southern France and Spain, so that by the beginning of the fourteenth century, there was what amounted to
a Jewish philosophical enlightenment in the area
...
Thus
Levi ben Gerson (1288-1344) of Bagnols in Southern France denied that God had knowledge of mundane affairs
...
Inevitably a reaction set in
...
Others recoiled from philosophy when tragedy struck, finding that the remote God of Falsafah was unable to console
them
...
Eventually this would culminate in the destruction of Spanish Jewry and during
the sixteenth century the Jews turned away from Falsafah and developed an entirely new conception of God that was inspired by mythology
rather than scientific logic
...
The First Crusade of 1096-99 had been
the first co-operative act of the new West, a sign that Europe was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the Dark
Ages
...
But the
Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons and the Franks was rudimentary
...
During the eleventh century, the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Cluny and its affiliated houses had tried to tether their
martial spirit to the church and teach them true Christian values by means of such devotional practices as the pilgrimage
...
Soldier saints like St George, St Mercury and St Demetrius figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed
little from pagan deities
...
As they began their journey, some of the crusaders resolved to avenge his death by
slaughtering the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley
...
During the
long terrible march to Jerusalem, when the crusaders narrowly escaped extinction, they could only account for their survival by assuming that
they must be God's Chosen People who enjoyed his special protection
...
In practical terms, their God was still the primitive tribal deity of the early books of the Bible
...

Thenceforth Christians in Europe regarded Jews and Muslims as the enemies of God; for a long time they had also felt a deep antagonism
towards the Greek Orthodox Christians of Byzantium, who made them feel barbarous and inferior
...

During the ninth century, some of the more educated Christians of the West had been inspired by Greek theology
...
He
passionately believed that faith and reason were not mutually exclusive
...
Plato and Aristotle were the masters of those who demanded a rational account of the Christian religion
...
{22}

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Both the positive and the negative approaches to God were valid
...
We remind ourselves of this by going on to make a negative
statement, saying 'God is not wise'
...
' This was what the Greeks called an apophatic statement because we do not understand what 'more than wise' can possibly
mean
...

When he applied this method to the statement 'God exists', Erigena arrived, as usual, at the synthesis: 'God is more than existence
...
Again, this was an
incomprehensible statement, because, Erigena comments, 'what that is which is more than "being" it does not reveal
...
{23} In fact, God is 'Nothing'
...
His method was devised to remind us that God is not an
object; he does not possess 'being' in any sense that we can comprehend
...
{24} His
mode of existence is as different from ours as our being is from an animal's and an animal's from a rock
...
Every one
of his creatures, therefore, is a theophany, a sign of God's presence
...
Man, who in the Neoplatonic scheme sums up the whole
of creation in himself, is the most complete of these theophanies and, like Augustine, Erigena taught that we can discover a trinity within
ourselves, albeit in a glass darkly
...
Thus when he replies to a student who had asked him what Denys had meant
when he had called God Nothing, Erigena replies that the divine Goodness was incomprehensible because it was 'super essential' - that is, more
than Goodness itself- and 'supernatural'
...
{25}
When, therefore, we consider the divine reality in itself, 'it is not unreasonably called "Nothing" ', but when this divine Void decides to proceed
'out of Nothing into Something', every single creature it informs 'can be called a theophany, that is, a divine apparition'
...
We only see the God which animates the created world and
reveals himself in flowers, birds, trees and other human beings
...
What about evil?
Is this, as Hindus maintain, also a manifestation of God in the world? Erigena does not attempt to deal with the problem of evil in sufficient
depth but Jewish Kabbalists would later attempt to locate evil within God: they also developed a theology that described God proceeding from
Nothingness to become Something in a way that is remarkably similar to Erigena's account, though it is highly unlikely that any of the
Kabbalists had read him
...
The conflict had a political dimension, which I shall not
discuss, but it also centered on a dispute about the Trinity
...
This stated that the Holy Spirit proceeded not only from the Father but also from the Son
(filioque)
...

Making the Spirit proceed from both the Father and the Son, they thought, would stress their equal status
...
The Greeks, however,
condemned it
...
Thus St Augustine had seen the Holy Spirit
as the principle of unity in the Trinity, maintaining that he was the love between Father and Son
...

But the Greeks had always distrusted Augustine's Trinitarian theology, because it was too anthropomorphic
...
They thought that the Latins made the Trinity too comprehensible and they also
suspected that the Latin language was not able to express these Trinitarian ideas with sufficient precision
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

incomprehensibility of God, the addition made the Trinity too rational
...
In fact there was
nothing heretical about the Latin assertion, even though it did not suit the Greeks' apophatic spirituality
...
What the filioque rift had revealed was that the
Greeks and Latins were evolving quite different conceptions of God
...
The Greeks felt that by emphasising the unity of God in this way, the West was identifying God himself with a
'simple essence' that could be defined and discussed, like the God of the philosophers
...
To all intents and purposes, many Western Christians are not really Trinitarians
...

After the schism, Greeks and Latins took divergent paths
...
It was
confined to the contemplation of God in the essentially mystical doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation
...
The West, however, was increasingly concerned to define these questions and to form a correct opinion that
was binding on everybody
...
Western Christians continually challenged the Greeks to give their
opinion on these contentious issues but the Greeks lagged behind and, if they did reply, their answer frequently sounded rather cobbled
together
...
Metaphysics was acceptable in secular studies but increasingly Greeks felt that it could endanger the faith
...
In 1082, the philosopher and humanist John halos was tried for heresy because of his
excessive use of philosophy and his Neoplatonic conception of creation
...

It is, therefore, rather poignant and ironic that Western Christians should have begun to get down to Falsafah at the precise moment when
Greeks and Muslims were starting to lose faith in it
...
The discovery of philosophy was stimulating and exciting
...
His God was not Nothing
but the highest being of all
...
{28} Yet he also insisted that God could only be known in faith
...
In his famous prayer, Anselm reflected on the words of Isaiah: 'Unless you have faith, you will not understand
...
For I do not seek to understand in order to
have faith but I have faith in order to understand (credo ut intellegam)
...
{29}
The oft-quoted credo ut intellegam is not an intellectual abdication
...
His assertion should really be translated: 'I commit myself in order that I may understand
...
It is important to note that even in the
first flush of Western rationalism, the religious experience of God remained primary, coming before discussion or logical understanding
...
Anselm defined God as 'something than which nothing greater can be
thought' (aliquid quo nihil mains cogitari possti)
...
Anselm argued that this Something must exist
...
Anselm's proof was ingenious
and effective in a world dominated by Platonic thought, where ideas were believed to point to eternal archetypes
...
As the Jesuit theologian John Macquarrie has remarked, you may imagine that you have £100 but unfortunately that will not
make the money a reality in your pocket
...
He was willing to speak about God in far more positive
terms than most of the previous Faylasufs
...

Once he had proved God's existence to his satisfaction, Anselm set out to demonstrate the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity which the
Greeks had always insisted defied reason and conceptualisation
...
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he relies on logic and rational thought more than revelation - his quotations from the Bible and the Fathers seem purely incidental to the thrust
of his argument which, as we saw, ascribed essentially human motivation to God
...
His contemporary Peter Abelard (1079-1147), the charismatic philosopher of Paris, had also evolved an
explanation of the Trinity which emphasised the divine unity somewhat at the expense of the distinction of the Three Persons
...

Abelard was primarily a philosopher, however, and his theology was usually rather conventional
...
This had brought him into conflict with Bernard,
the charismatic Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Clairvaux in Burgundy, who was arguably the most powerful man in Europe
...
When
Bernard preached the Second Crusade in 1146, the people of France and Germany - who had previously been somewhat apathetic about the
expedition - almost tore him to pieces in their enthusiasm, flocking to join the army in such numbers that, Bernard complacently wrote to the
Pope, the countryside seemed deserted
...
Cistercian piety seems to
have influenced the legend of the Holy Grail which describes a spiritual journey to a symbolic city that is not of this world but which represents
the vision of God
...
He accused
Abelard of 'attempting to bring the merit of the Christian faith to naught because he supposes that by human reason he can comprehend all that
is God'
...
' {33} Love and the exercise of reason, therefore, were incompatible
...
That was not difficult to do since, by this time, Abelard had probably developed Parkinson's Disease
...

It was a symbolic moment, which marked a split between mind and heart
...
Muslim Faylasufs such as Ibn Sina and al-Ghazzali may have decided that the intellect alone could not find God but they had both
eventually envisaged a philosophy which was informed by the ideal of love and by the disciplines of mysticism
...
Bernard, however, seemed afraid of the intellect and wanted to keep it
separate from the more emotional, intuitive parts of the mind
...
The crusade preached by Bernard was a disaster partly because it relied on an
idealism untempered by common sense and which was in flagrant denial of the Christian ethos of compassion
...
Bernard was right to fear a rationalism that attempted to explain the mystery of God and threatened to dilute the
religious sense of awe and wonder, but unbridled subjectivity that fails to examine its prejudice critically can lead to the worst excesses of
religion
...

Few thinkers have made such a lasting contribution to Western Christianity as Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) who attempted a synthesis of
Augustine and the Greek philosophy which had recently been made available in the West
...
With the help of Muslim and Jewish intellectuals they undertook a vast
translation project to bring this intellectual wealth to the West
...
The translators also worked on
more recent Muslim scholarship, including the work of Ibn Rushd as well as the discoveries of Arab scientists and physicians
...

The Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas was an attempt to integrate the new philosophy with the Western Christian tradition
...
Yet unlike Anselm and Abelard he did not believe that such mysteries as
the Trinity could be proved by reason and distinguished carefully between the ineffable reality of God and human doctrines about him
...
' {35} There is a story that when he
had dictated the last sentence of the Summa, Aquinas had laid his head sadly into his arms
...

Aquinas's attempt to set his religious experience in the context of the new philosophy was necessary in order to articulate faith with other

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Excessive intellectualism is damaging to the faith but if God is not to become an
indulgent endorsement of our own egotism, religious experience must be informed by an accurate assessment of its content
...
' Aristotle had said that God was Necessary Being; Aquinas
accordingly linked the God of the philosophers with the God of the Bible by calling God 'He Who Is' (Qui est)
...
The definition of God as Being Itself was appropriate 'because it does
not signify any particular form [of being] but rather being itself (esse seipsum)'
...

Unfortunately, however, Aquinas gives the impression that God can be discussed in the same way as other philosophical ideas or natural
phenomena by prefacing his discussion of God with a demonstration of his existence from natural philosophy
...
He lists five 'proofs' for God's existence that would become immensely important
in the Catholic world and would also be used by Protestants:
1
...

2
...

3
...

4
...

5
...

These proofs do not hold water today
...
He is the Supreme
Being, the Necessary Being, the Most Perfect Being
...
This was certainly Aquinas's
intention
...
This is reductive and can make tins Super Being an idol, created in our own image and easily turned into a celestial
Super Ego
...

It was important to try to link God with the new vogue for Aristotelianism in Europe
...
In each generation, the idea and experience of God would have to be
created anew
...
We have seen that Aristotle's discussion of the
nature of God had been dubbed meta ta physica ('After the Physics') by the editor of his work: his God had simply been a continuation of
physical reality rather than a reality of a totally different order
...
Reason alone could not reach a religious understanding of the reality we call 'God' but religious experience needed
to be informed by the critical intelligence and discipline of philosophy if it were not to become messy, indulgent - or even dangerous - emotion
...
He also tried to articulate philosophy with religious
experience to the mutual enrichment of both spheres
...
He genuinely believed that the Trinity
could be proved by unaided natural reason but avoided the dangers of rationalist chauvinism by stressing the importance of spiritual experience
as an essential component of the idea of God
...
By
looking at the events of his life, a theologian such as himself could find evidence for the doctrines of the Church
...
This personalistic approach to God looked back to St Augustine
...
He argued that
Francis had achieved an excellence in this life that seemed more than human, so it was possible for us, while still living here below, to 'see and
understand that the "best" is
...
{38} The very fact that we could form such a concept as 'the
best' proved that it must exist in the Supreme Perfection of God
...
{39} This introspection was essential
...
{40}
Both Bonaventure and Aquinas had seen the religious experience as primary
...

They had evolved rational proofs of God's existence to articulate their religious faith with their scientific studies and to link it with other more

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...
They did not personally doubt God's existence and many were well aware of the limitations of their achievement
...
This natural theology was, therefore,
not a prelude to religious experience but an accompaniment: the Faylasufs did not believe that you had to convince yourself of God's existence
rationally before you could have a mystical experience
...
In the Jewish, Muslim and Greek Orthodox
worlds, the God of the philosophers was being rapidly overtaken by the God of the mystics
...
The personal God has helped monotheists to value the sacred and inalienable rights of the individual and to cultivate an
appreciation of human personality
...

These values were originally enshrined in a personal God who does everything that a human being does: he loves, judges, punishes, sees, hears,
creates and destroys as we do
...
Later he became a
symbol of transcendence, whose thoughts were not our thoughts and whose ways soared above our own as the heavens tower above the earth
...
Thus personalism has been an
important and - for many - an indispensable stage of religious and moral development
...
Christianity made a human person
the centre of the religious life in a way that was unique in the history of religion: it took the personalism inherent in Judaism to an extreme
...

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability
...
We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend
them
...
A facile belief that a disaster is
the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable
...
A personal God can be dangerous, therefore
...
Instead of inspiring the
compassion that should characterise all advanced religion, 'he' can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalise
...
The world religions all seem to have recognised this danger and
have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality
...
Christianity, arguably the most personalised religion of the three monotheistic faiths, tried to quality the cult of God
incarnate by introducing the doctrine of the transpersonal Trinity
...
All three of the monotheistic religions developed a mystical tradition, which
made their God transcend the personal category and become more similar to the impersonal realities of nirvana and Brahman-Atman
...

Historical monotheism was not originally mystical
...
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all essentially active faiths, devoted to ensuring that God's will is done on earth
as it is in heaven
...
This God is
experienced as an imperative to action; he calls us to himself; gives us the choice of rejecting or accepting his love and concern
...
He utters a Word, which becomes the chief focus of devotion
and which has to be painfully incarnated in the flawed and tragic conditions of earthly life
...
But the point of love is that the ego has, in some sense, to be annihilated
...
Language itself can be a limiting faculty since it embeds us in the concepts of our mundane
experience
...
When monotheists turned to mysticism, however, mythology reasserted itself as the chief vehicle of religious experience
...
All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to
close the eyes or the mouth
...
' They are not popular words in the
West today
...
A
politician or a film star will dismiss scurrilous reports of their activities by saying that they are 'myths' and scholars will refer to mistaken views
of the past as 'mythical'
...
It is frequently associated

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...
In the United States, a detective story is called a 'mystery' and it is of the essence of this genre that the problem be
solved satisfactorily
...
Similarly
'mysticism' is frequently associated with cranks, charlatans or indulgent hippies
...

Yet there are signs that the tide may be turning
...
The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell on mythology has enjoyed a recent vogue
...
Mythology has often been an attempt to explain the inner world of the psyche and both Freud and Jung turned
instinctively to ancient myths, such as the Greek story of Oedipus, to explain their new science
...

Mystical religion is more immediate and tends to be more help in time of trouble than a predominantly cerebral faith
...
Yet the early Jewish
mysticism that developed during the second and third centuries, which was very difficult for Jews, seemed to emphasise the gulf between God
and man
...
They
imagined God as a mighty king who could only be approached in a perilous journey through the seven heavens
...
The Rabbis hated this spirituality and
the mystics were anxious not to antagonise them
...
The classic texts of Throne Mysticism, which were edited in Babylon in the fifth and sixth centuries,
suggest that the mystics, who were reticent about their experiences, felt a strong affinity with rabbinic tradition, since they make such great
tannaim as Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Yohannan the heroes of this spirituality
...

The Rabbis had had some remarkable religious experiences, as we have seen
...
The chariot and the mysterious figure that Ezekiel had glimpsed sitting upon its throne seem to have been the subject of early
esoteric speculation
...
The earliest account we have of the mystical ascent to God's throne in the highest heavens emphasised the immense perils
of this spiritual journey:
Our Rabbis taught: Four entered an orchard and these are they: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher and Rabbi Akiva
...
Of him, Scripture says: 'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the
death of his saints
...
Of him Scripture says: 'Hast thou found honey? Eat as much as is
sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it
...
Rabbi Akiva departed
in peace
...
A journey to the depths of the mind involves great personal risks
because we may not be able to endure what we find there
...
All mystics stress the need for intelligence and
mental stability
...
The
strange and outlandish behaviour of some European Catholic saints who were revered as mystics must be regarded as aberrations
...
A mystic also had to be married, to ensure that he was in good
sexual health
...
Yet this was only an imaginary flight
...
Rabbi Akiva's strange warning
about the 'stones of pure marble' may refer to the password that the mystic had to utter at various crucial points in his imaginary journey
...
Today we know that the unconscious is a teeming mass of imagery that surfaces in
dreams, in hallucinations and in aberrant psychic or neurological conditions such as epilepsy or schizophrenia
...
This demanded great skill and a certain disposition and training
...
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disciplines of Zen or Yoga, which also help the adept to find his way through the labyrinthine paths of the psyche
...
The 'orchard' refers to the mystical ascent
of the soul to the 'Heavenly Halls' (hekhalot) of God's palace
...
It will not happen spontaneously
...
As a result he will gaze in the innermost recesses of his heart and it will
seem as if he saw the seven halls with his own eyes, moving from hall to hall to observe that which is therein to be found
...
Thus St Paul refers to a friend 'who belonged to the Messiah' who had been caught up to the third heaven some fourteen years earlier
...
{4}
The visions are not ends in themselves but means to an ineffable religious experience that exceeds normal concepts
...
A Jewish visionary will see visions of the seven heavens because his religious imagination is
stocked with these particular symbols
...
It is a
mistake for the visionary to see these mental apparitions as objective or as anything more than a symbol of transcendence
...

One of the strangest and most controversial of these early Jewish visions is found in the Shiur Qomah (The Measurement of the Height), a fifthcentury text which describes the figure that Ezekiel had seen on God's throne
...
Its
peculiar description of this vision of God is probably based on a passage from the Song of Songs, which was Rabbi Akiva's favourite biblical
text
...

His head is golden, purest gold,
his locks are palm fronds
and black as the raven
...

His lips are lilies,
distilling pure myrrh,
His hands are golden, rounded,
set with jewels of Tarshish
...

His legs are alabaster columns
...
In this strange text, the measurements of God are baffling
...
The 'parasang' - the basic unit - is
equivalent to 180 billion 'fingers' and each 'finger' stretches from one end of the earth to the other
...
That is the point
...
The mere attempt to do so demonstrates the impossibility of the project and gives
us a new experience of God's transcendence
...
That is why an esoteric text such as the Shiur was kept hidden from the unwary
...
It is certainly not meant to be taken literally; it certainly conveys no secret
information
...

The Shiur introduces us to two essential ingredients in the mystical portrait of God, which are common in all three faiths
...
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imaginative; secondly, it is ineffable
...
There is absolutely nothing tender, loving or personal about this God; indeed his holiness seems alienating
...
No eyes are able to behold it, neither the
eyes of flesh and blood, nor the eyes of his servants
...
There is no attempt to
describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as
though he were writing a book
...
Each letter of the
Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the
mystic weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words
...
Again, the experience of pushing language to its limits and making it yield a
non-linguistic significance, created a sense of the otherness of God
...

Throne Mysticism was not unique
...
He had been transported in sleep by Gabriel on a celestial horse
...
Then Gabriel and Muhammad
began their perilous ascent up a ladder (miraj) through the seven heavens, each one of which was presided over by a prophet
...
The early sources reverently keep silent about the final vision, to which these verses in the Koran are believed to
refer
...

[And withal] the eye did not waver, nor yet did it stray: truly did he see some of the most profound of his Sustainer's symbols
...
There is no way in which the vision of God can appeal to the normal experiences of thought or language
...

The imagery of ascent is common
...
Step by step we climbed beyond all corporate
objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon and stars shed light on the earth
...
{8}
Augustine's mind was filled with the Greek imagery of the great chain of being instead of the Semitic images of the seven heavens
...
This rapturous flight seems something
given, from without, when he says 'our minds were lifted up' as though he and Monica were passive recipients of grace, but there is a
deliberation in this steady climb towards 'eternal being'
...
{9}
The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly perceptions have been left far behind
...
The Jewish mystics describe anything but God! They tell us about his cloak, his palace,
his heavenly court and the veil that shields him from human gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes
...
{10}
Once the mystic has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he reaches the point where neither concepts nor imagination can take
him any further
...
They 'talked and panted' for God, and 'touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of heart'
...
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Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are quiescent, if the
heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about
itself, if all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language and everything transitory is silent - for if anyone
could hear then this is what all of diem would be saying, 'We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides for
eternity' (Psalm 79:3,5)
...
{12}
This was no naturalistic vision of a personal God: they had not, so to speak, 'heard his voice' through any of the normal methods of naturalistic
communication: through ordinary speech, the voice of an angel, through nature or the symbolism of a dream
...
' {13}
Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of 'ascent' seems an incontrovertible fact of life
...
Monotheists have called the climactic
insight a 'vision of God'; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana
...
The mystical experience of God
has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths
...
Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental
exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares
...
Pope Gregory the Great (540-604), who was an acknowledged master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff,
disagreed
...
He used the metaphors of cloud, fog
or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of the divine
...
God
was a distressing experience for Gregory
...
There was certainly no way we could talk about him
familiarly, as though we had something in common
...
We could make no predictions about his behaviour on
the basis of our knowledge of people: 'Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot
fully know anything about him
...
The joy and peace of
contemplation could only be attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle
...
It meanwhile pants and struggles and endeavours to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered with
weariness, into its own familiar darkness
...
The path to
God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, 'the soul could do nothing but weep'
...
{16} Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West
continued to find God a strain
...
The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism,
which is also found world-wide
...
They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God
...
' The aim of the contemplative was to
go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction
...
{17} This attitude was
called hesychia, 'tranquillity' or 'interior silence'
...
Only then could it
hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive
...

Since we could never know God as he is in himself, it was the 'energies' not the 'essence' that we experienced in prayer
...
They manifested a God who was utterly silent and unknowable
...
" {18} In the Old Testament, this divine 'energy' had been called God's 'glory' (kavod)
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

forth in the person of Christ on Mount Tabor, when his humanity had been transfigured by the divine rays
...
As the word 'energeiai' implied, this was an active and dynamic conception of God
...

When we experienced the 'energies' in prayer, therefore, we were in some sense communing with God directly, even though the unknowable
reality itself remained in obscurity
...
It was important,
therefore, for hesychasts to strip their souls naked: 'When you are praying,' he told his monks, 'do not shape within yourself any image of the
deity and do not let your mind be shaped by the impress of any form
...

{19} Evagrius was proposing a sort of Christian Yoga
...

{20} It was rather an intuitive apprehension of God
...

By systematically weaning their minds away from their 'passions' - such as pride, greed, sadness or anger which tied them to the ego hesychasts would transcend themselves and become deified like Jesus on Mount Tabor, transfigured by the divine 'energies'
...
He taught a method of concentration that involved breathing: as they inhaled, hesychasts should pray: 'Jesus Christ,
Son of God'; they should exhale to the words: 'have mercy upon us'
...
They
should breathe ever more slowly in order to direct their attention inwards, to certain psychological foci like the heart
...
Gradually, like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast
would find that he or she could set rational thoughts gently to one side, the imagery that thronged the mind would fade away and they would
feel totally one with their prayer
...
They saw prayer as a
psychosomatic activity, whereas Westerners like Augustine and Gregory thought that prayer should liberate the soul from the body
...
' {21} The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and
clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be divine
...
They found inspiration in the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, just as Buddhists were inspired by the image of the
Buddha, who had attained the fullest realisation of humanity
...
Unlike their Western brethren, the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and
desolation were an inescapable prelude to the experience of God: these were simply disorders that must be cured
...
The dominant motif was Tabor rather than Gethsemane and Calvary
...
In the West, religious art was becoming predominantly representational: it depicted historical events in the lives of Jesus or the saints
...
As the British historian Peter Brown explains, 'Throughout the Eastern
Christian world, icon and vision validated one another
...
ensured that
by the sixth century, the supernatural had taken on the precise lineaments, in dreams and in each person's imagination, in which it was
commonly portrayed in art
...
' {22} Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey
information, ideas or doctrines
...

They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however, that by the eighth century they had become the centre of a passionate
doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church
...
It was
impossible to depict his divinity but if the artist claimed that he was only painting the humanity of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism, the
heretical belief that Jesus's human and divine natures were quite distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to ban icons altogether but icons were
defended by two leading monks: John of Damascus (656-747) of the monastery of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and Theodore (759-826), of the
monastery of Studios near Constantinople
...
Since the Incarnation,
the material world and the human body had both been given a divine dimension and an artist could paint this new type of deified humanity
...
God could not be contained in words or
summed up in human concepts but he could be 'described' by the pen of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy
...
This assertion that God

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...
In his Greater Apology for the Holy
Images, the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons were 'expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the ineffability of a mystery
that transcends being
...
{23} Instead of instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church and helping them to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons
held them in a sense of mystery
...
Emotion and experience are conveyed by music in a way that bypasses words
and concepts
...
They found that God was better expressed in a work of art than in
rationalistic discourse
...

This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949-1022), Abbot of the small monastery of St Macras in Constantinople, who became known as
the 'New Theologian'
...
This, Symeon insisted, would be presumptuous; indeed, to
speak about God in any way at all implied that 'that which is incomprehensible is comprehensible'
...
It was impossible to know God in conceptual terms, as though
he were just an-other being about which we could form ideas
...
A true Christian was one who had a conscious experience of
the God who had revealed himself in the transfigured humanity of Christ
...
At first he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually he
became aware that he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed into a light that was of God himself
...
{25} But this was not an
experience for the elite or for monks only; the kingdom announced by Christ in the Gospels was a union with God that everybody could
experience here and now, without having to wait until the next life
...
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
...
And behold, I have created you, as you see,
and I shall make you God
...
Yet
Symeon's refusal to speak about God did not lead him to break with the theological insights of the past
...
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
...

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
...
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
...
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
...
Consequently, they were known as Sufis
...
{29}
At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects
...
748) had been a disciple of Hasan
al-Basri (d
...

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
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

life
...
Where the Koran speaks of a God of justice who inspires fear and awe, the early woman
ascetic Rabiah (d
...

'Tis selfish love that I do naught
Save think on Thee with every thought
...

Not mine the praise in that or this:
Thine is the praise in both, I wis
...
Sufis may well have been influenced by the Christian ascetics of the Near East but Muhammad remained a crucial
influence
...
Naturally,
they were also inspired by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became the paradigm of their own experience of God
...

Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting the Divine Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of Muslim law
...
The first of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d
...
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
...
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
...
' Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood
...
' {32}
Yet again, this was no external deity 'out there', alien to mankind: God was discovered to be mysteriously identified with the inmost self
...
This state of annihilation ('fana) became central to the
Sufi ideal
...

Other mystics, known as the 'sober' Sufis, preferred a less extravagant spirituality
...
910), who mapped out the ground
plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al-Bistami's extremism could be dangerous
...
Union with God should not destroy our natural capabilities but fulfil them: a Sufi
who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realisation
and self-control
...
When they experienced 'fana and baqa, therefore, Sufis had achieved a state that a Greek
Christian would call 'deification'
...
He was also returning to the Source of his being
...
By means of disciplined, careful work under the
expert guidance of a Sufi master (pir) like himself, al-Junayd taught that a Muslim could be reunited with his Creator and achieve that original
sense of God's immediate presence that he had experienced when, as the Koran says, he had been drawn from Adam's loins
...
God was not a separate, external reality
and judge but somehow one with the ground of each person's being:
Now I have known, O Lord,
What lies within my heart;
In secret, from the world apart,
My tongue hath talked with my Adored
...
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is our estate eternally
...
{33}
The emphasis on unity harks back to the Koranic ideal of tawhid: by drawing together his dissipated self, the mystic would experience the
divine presence in personal integration
...
It would be easy for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the advice of
a pir and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand the ecstasy of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he meant when he said that
he was one with God
...
At this early stage,
Sufism was very much a minority movement and the ulema often regarded it as an inauthentic innovation
...

Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow of the caliphate and the establishment of a new social order, he was imprisoned by the authorities
and crucified like his hero, Jesus
...
The Koran repeatedly condemned the Christian belief in God's incarnation
in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising that Muslims were horrified by al-Hallaj's ecstatic cry
...
Al-Hallaj had been expressing his sense of a union with
God that was so close that it felt like identity
...

If thou seest me, thou seest Him,
And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both
...
Al-Hallaj refused to recant
when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly death
...
Glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou wiliest
...
Later alGhazzali argued that he had not been blasphemous but only unwise in proclaiming an esoteric truth that could be misleading to the uninitiated
...
The Koran taught that God had created
Adam in his own image so that he could contemplate himself as in a mirror
...
The mistake of the Christians had been to assume that one man had contained the whole incarnation of the divine, Sufis would
argue
...
The Sacred Tradition (hadith qudsi) beloved by the Sufis shows God drawing a Muslim towards him so closely that he seems to have
become incarnate in each one of his servants: 'When I love him, I become his Ear through which he hears, his Eye with which he sees, his Hand
with which he grasps, and his Foot with which he walks
...
For the mystic the revelation is an event that happens within his own soul, while for more conventional people like some
of the ulema it is an event that is firmly fixed in the past
...
AlGhazzali had made Sufism acceptable to the establishment and had shown that it was the most authentic form of Muslim spirituality
...
Like al-Hallaj,
however, Suhrawardi was also put to death by the ulema in Aleppo in 1191, for reasons that remain obscure
...
He claimed that all the
sages of the ancient world had preached a single doctrine
...
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prophet known as Idris in the Koran or Enoch in the Bible); in the Greek world it had been transmitted through Plato and Pythagoras and in the
Middle East through the Zoroastrian Magi
...
This perennial philosophy was mystical and
imaginative but did not involve the abandonment of reason
...
As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God and should be sought wherever it could be
found
...
Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself
to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people
...

Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master of Illumination
...
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
...
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
...
Truth must be
sought wherever it could be found
...
Yet no other Faylasuf had ever quoted so extensively from the Koran
...
In his master work 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
...
The true sage, in his opinion, excelled in
both philosophy and mysticism
...
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
...
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
...
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
...

As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God
...
It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged to
material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves
...
It generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending
hierarchy; each light, recognising its dependency on the Light of Lights, developed a shadow-self that was the source of a material realm,
which corresponded to one of the Ptolemaic spheres
...
There was a similar combination of light
and darkness within each one of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit (also known, as in Ibn Sina's scheme, as
the Angel Gabriel, the light of our world)
...

Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat
...
Then he had a vision of the Imam, the qutb, the healer of souls:
Suddenly I was wrapped in gentleness; there was a blinding flash, then a diaphanous light in the likeness of a human being
...
He came towards me, greeting me so kindly that my bewilderment faded and my alarm
gave way to a feeling of familiarity
...

'Awaken to yourself,' he said to me, 'and your problem will be solved
...
It had more in
common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into the religions of God
...
There was no imparting of facts
...

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God-religions had
ostensibly abandoned
...
This could not be perceived by means of reason nor by the senses
...
The alam al-mithal was close to the Ismaili perception of the spiritual history of Islam which was the real meaning of the earthly
events or Ibn Sina's angelology, which we discussed in the last chapter
...
Suhrawardi was examining the visions that are so strikingly similar, whether they are seen by
shamans, mystics or ecstatics, in many different cultures
...
Jung's conception of the
collective unconscious is a more scientific attempt to examine this common imaginative experience of humanity
...
{38}
Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of Scripture - such as Heaven, Hell, or the Last Judgement-were as real as the
phenomena we experience in this world but not in the same way
...
This experience was nonsensical to
anybody who had not had the requisite training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment could only be experienced when the necessary moral and
mental exercises had been undertaken
...
The
Prophet Muhammad, for example, had awakened to this intermediate world during the Night Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of
the divine world
...
The path to God, therefore, did not lie solely through reason, as the
Faylasufs had thought, but through the creative imagination, the realm of the mystic
...
Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty
...
{39} Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that
does not yet exist but which is merely possible
...
The idea of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt
problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years
...
Suhrawardi was
attempting an imaginative explanation of those symbols that have had a crucial influence on human life, even though the realities to which they
refer remain elusive
...
Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object
...
As in art, the most effective religious symbols are those
informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding of the human condition
...
Yoking apparently unrelated things together - science with
mysticism, pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion - he was able to help Muslims create their own symbols and find new meaning and
significance in life
...
His father was a friend of Ibn Rushd, who was very impressed by the piety of the young boy on the one
occasion that they met
...
He made the hajj and spent two years praying and meditating at the Kabah but eventually settled at Malatya on the Euphrates
...
Western Christendom would embrace Ibn Rushd's Aristotelian
God, while most of Islamdom opted, until relatively recently, for the imaginative God of the Mystics
...
This epiphany made him realise that it would be impossible for us to love God if we relied only on the rational arguments of
philosophy
...
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)
...
' {40} The Shahadah reminded us that there was no god, no absolute reality but al-Lah
...
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
...
Love was
file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Nizam had become 'the
object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure'
...
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
...

Some eighty years later, the young Dante Alighieri had a similar experience in Florence when he saw Beatrice Portinari
...
' From
that moment, Dante was ruled by his love of Beatrice, which acquired a mastery 'owing to the power which my imagination gave him'
...
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
...

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
...
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
...
Finally, the cool intellectual imagery expresses the utter transcendence of God, who is beyond all imagination
...

Ibn al-Arabi was also convinced that the imagination was a God-given faculty
...
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
...
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 towards God
...

Ibn al-Arabi did not believe that the God he knew had an objective existence
...
He liked to call himself a disciple of Khidr, a name given to the mysterious figure who appears
in the Koran as the spiritual director of Moses, who brought the external Law to the Israelites
...
{45} It was no good trying to understand religious 'information' that we had not experienced ourselves
...
Even a prophet of Moses's stature cannot
necessarily comprehend esoteric forms of religion, for, in the Koran, he finds that indeed he cannot put up with Khidr's method of instruction
...
People, such as the ulema, might be unable to understand the Islam of a Sufi like Ibn al-Arabi
...
He does not lead
his disciple to a perception of a God which is the same as everybody else's but to a God who is in the deepest sense of the word subjective
...
Despite the fact that Ibn al-Arabi was a Sunni, his teachings were very close to Ismailism and were
subsequently incorporated into their theology - yet another instance of mystical religion being able to transcend sectarian divisions
...
The God of the
mystics yearned to be known by his creatures
...
{46} As the Sacred Hadith had made God say: 'I was a hidden treasure and I yearned to be known
...
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be known by them
...
Since we are created in God's image, we must reflect God, the supreme archetype
...
Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary God sighing with
longing but this sigh (nafas rahmani) was not an expression of maudlin self-pity
...
It follows that each human being is
a unique epiphany of the Hidden God, manifesting him in a particular and unrepeatable manner
...
God
cannot be summed up in one human expression since the divine reality is inexhaustible
...
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
...
' He liked to quote the hadith: 'Meditate upon God's
blessings, but not upon his essence (al-Dhat}
...
Ibn al-Arabi also liked to call God al-Ama, 'the Cloud' or 'The Blindness' {48} to emphasise his inaccessibility
...
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
...

Divinity and humanity were thus two aspects of the divine life that animates the entire cosmos
...
Instead he believed that each human person was a unique avatar of the divine
...
The Prophet Muhammad had been the
Perfect Man of his generation and a particularly effective symbol of the divine
...
It deprived the mystic of the certainties
that characterise the more dogmatic forms of religion
...
There was no objective truth about God to which all must subscribe; since this God
transcended the category of personality, predictions about his behaviour and inclinations were impossible
...
Ibn al-Arabi
developed the positive attitude towards 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
...

Love is the faith I hold: wherever turn
His camels, still the one true faith is mine
...
He often used
the phrase 'the God created by the faiths' (Khalq al-haqq fi'l-itiqad); 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
...
Instead of such idolatry, Ibn alArabi 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 recognise the real truth of the matter
...
Everyone praises what he believes; his god
is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself
...
{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 coloured by the religious tradition into which we were born
...
Consequently he
sees all the different religions as valid theophanies
...

It is true that Ibn al-Arabi's teachings were too abstruse for the vast majority of Muslims but they did percolate down to the more ordinary
file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufism ceased to be a minority movement and became the dominant Islamic mood in many
parts of the Muslim empire
...
The Sufi sheikh had a great influence on the populace and was often revered as a saint in rather the same way as the Shii
Imams
...
People wanted a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the Faylasufs and the legalistic God
of the ulema
...
The Sufi
disciplines of concentration, with their carefully prescribed techniques of breathing and posture, helped people to experience a sense of
transcendent presence within
...
Some orders used music and dancing to
enhance concentration and their pirs became heroes to the people
...
Their stately and
dignified dance was a method of concentration
...
The founder of the order was Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-73), known to his disciples
as Mawlana, our Master
...
His mysticism can be seen as a Muslim response to this scourge, which might have caused many to lose faith in al-Lah
...
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
...
He had a dubious reputation and was known not to observe the
Shariah, the Holy Law of Islam, thinking himself above such trivialities
...
When Shams was killed in a riot, Rumi was inconsolable and devoted still more time to mystical music and dancing
...
Whether they realised it or not, everybody was searching for the absent God, obscurely aware that he or she was separated from the
Source of being
...
Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has
caused men and women to moan
...
{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
...
Some of these revealed God's wrath or severity, while others
expressed those qualities of mercy which were intrinsic to the divine nature
...
The Masnawi challenged the Muslim to find
the transcendent dimension in human life and to see through appearances to the hidden reality within
...
Again,
Rumi emphasised that God could only be a subjective experience
...
One day Moses overheard a shepherd talking familiarly to God: he wanted to help
God, wherever he was - to wash his clothes, pick the lice off, kiss his hands and feet at bedtime
...
' Moses was horrified
...
He did not want orthodox words but burning love and humility
...

Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
These mean nothing to Me
...

Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another
...

The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...

It's the worshippers! I don't hear the words
they say
...

That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology
...

Be Friends
with your burning
...

By this time tragedy had also helped the Jews of Europe to form a new conception of God
...
During the ninth century, the Kalonymos family had emigrated from southern Italy to Germany and had brought some
mystical literature with them
...
i23o) who edited a number of treatises and mystical texts
...
They had been
greatly impressed by the dry Faylasuf Saadia ibn Joseph, whose books had been translated into Hebrew, and by such Christian mystics as
Francis of Assisi
...

The Rabbis, it will be recalled, had declared it sinful to deny oneself pleasure created by God
...
A Jew would only see the Shekinah in the next world if he turned his back on pleasure and gave up such
pastimes as keeping pets or playing with children
...
But God could be addressed as Friend
...
This familiarity crept into the liturgy, depicting a God who was immanent and
intimately present at the same time as he was transcendent:
Everything is in Thee and Thou art in everything; Thou fillest everything and dost encompass it; when everything was created,
Thou was in everything; before everything was created, Thou wast everything
...
The Pietists were not worried by the apparent inconsistency
...
Silence was essential; a Pietist should close his eyes tightly, cover his head with a prayer shawl to avoid
distraction, pull in his stomach and grind his teeth
...
Instead of simply repeating the words of the liturgy, the Pietist should count the letters of each word, calculating their numerical
value and getting beyond the literal meaning of the language
...

The situation of the Jews in the Islamic empire, where there was no anti-Semitic persecution, was far happier and they had no need of this
Ashkenazi pietism
...
Just as the Jewish Faylasufs
had attempted to explain the God of the Bible philosophically, other Jews tried to give their God a mystical, symbolic interpretation
...
Theirs was an esoteric discipline, handed on from master to disciple: they called it Kabbalah or
inherited tradition
...

Philosophy threatened to turn God into a remote abstraction but the God of the mystics was able to touch those fears and anxieties that lie
deeper than the rational
...
Instead of speculating rationally about the nature of God and the metaphysical
problems of his relationship with the world, the Kabbalists turned to the imagination
...
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in revelation and creation
...
They called the hidden God En Sof, (literally,
'without end')
...
An anonymous thirteenthcentury author wrote that En Sof is incapable of becoming the subject of a revelation to humanity
...
Indeed it is more accurate to refer to the Godhead as 'It'
...
The Kabbalists evolved their own mythology to help them to explore a new realm of the religious
consciousness
...
Like the Sufis, they imagined a process whereby the hidden God
made himself known to humanity
...
Each sefirah represented a stage in En Sof s
unfolding revelation and had its own symbolic name, but each of these divine spheres contained the whole mystery of God considered under a
particular heading
...

Ibn al-Arabi had seen God's sigh of compassion, which had revealed him to mankind, as the Word which had created the world
...
Together these ten
names formed his one great Name, which was not known to men
...
They are usually listed as follows:
q

q
q
q
q
q
q
q
q
q

1
...

2
...

3
...

4
...

5
...

6
...

7
...

8
...

9
...

10
...


Sometimes the sefiroth are depicted as a tree, growing upside down with its roots in the incomprehensible depths of En Sof, [see diagram] and
its summit in the Shekinah, in the world
...
En Sof is the sap that runs through
the branches of the tree and gives them life, unifying them in a mysterious and complex reality
...
The sefiroth represent the worlds of light that
manifest the darkness of En Sof which remains in impenetrable obscurity
...
The world of the sefiroth is not an alternative reality 'out there' between the Godhead and the
world, however
...
Because God is
all in all, the sefiroth are present and active in everything that exists
...
Yet again, God and man are depicted as inseparable
...
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The Tree of the Sefiroth
Some Kabbalists saw the sefiroth as the limbs of primordial man as originally intended by God
...

The images of God as a tree or as a man were imaginative depictions of a reality that defied rational formulation
...

The most influential Kabbalistic text was The Zohar, which was probably written in about 1275 by the Spanish mystic Moses of Leon
...
The Zohar
(The Book of Splendour) is a sort of mystical novel, which depicts the third-century Talmudist Simeon ben Yohai wandering round Palestine
with his son Eliezar, talking to his disciples about God, nature and human life
...
Such an approach would be alien to the spirit of The Zohar, whose God resists any neat system of thought
...
The Zohar shows the mysterious emanation of the ten
sefiroth as a process whereby the impersonal En Sof becomes a personality
...
As 'he' descends through the middle sefiroth Hesed, Din, Tifereth, Netsah, Hod and Yesod - 'he' becomes 'you'
...
It is at this point, where God has, as it were, become an individual and his self-expression is complete, that man can begin his
mystical journey
...
It is a return to the
unimaginable Source of our being and the hidden world of uncreated reality
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

simply the last and outermost shell of the divine reality
...
The Zohar sees the
Genesis account as a symbolic version of a crisis within En Sof, which causes the Godhead to break out of Its unfathomable introspection and
reveal Itself
...
A dark flame sprang forth
from the innermost recesses of En Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white
nor black, red nor green and of no colour whatever
...
It has no colour or form:
other Kabbalists prefer to call it Nothing (ayin)
...
All the other sefiroth, therefore, emerge from the womb of
Nothingness
...
The process of the Godhead's self-expression
continues as the welling of light, which spreads in ever wider spheres
...
For in the inmost centre a well sprang
forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En Sof
...
It was entirely recognisable until under the impact of its
breakthrough, i hidden supernal point shone forth
...
{56}
This 'point' is Hokhmah (Wisdom), the second sefirah which contains the ideal form of all created things
...
These three highest sefiroth represent the limit of human comprehension
...
But it is not possible to get an
answer
...

The next seven sefiroth are said to correspond to the seven days of creation in Genesis
...
But as Kabbalists struggled to express the mystery of God, the old
mythologies reasserted themselves, albeit in a disguised form
...
Again Yesod, the ninth sefirah inspires some phallic speculation: it is depicted as
the channel through which the divine life pours into the universe in an act of mystical procreation
...
In the Talmud, the Shekinah was a neutral figure: it
had neither sex nor gender
...
The Bahir (c
...

The Zohar links this 'exile of the Shekinah' with the fall of Adam as recounted in Genesis
...
Instead of worshipping the seven sefiroth together, he chose to venerate the
Shekinah alone, sundering life from knowledge and rupturing the unity of the sefiroth
...
But by observing the Torah, the community of Israel could heal the exile of the Shekinah
and reunite the world to the Godhead
...
The female Shekinah brought some sexual balance into the notion of God which tended to be too heavily weighted towards the
masculine and clearly fulfilled an important religious need
...
The Zohar constantly
defines evil as something which has become separated or which has entered into a relationship for which it is unsuited
...
Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be
able to endure it within ourselves
...
The terrifying image of Satan in Western
Christendom was such a distorted projection
...
Din
is depicted as God's left hand, Hesed (Mercy) as his right
...
But if it breaks away and becomes separate from the other sefiroth, it becomes evil and destructive
...
In the next chapter, we shall see that later Kabbalists reflected on the problem of evil, which they saw as the result
of a kind of primordial 'accident' that occurred in the very early stages of God's self-revelation
...
When disaster and tragedy engulfed Spanish Jewry during the fifteenth century,
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...

We can see the psychological acuity of Kabbalah in the work of the Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia (i 24O-after 1291)
...
These methods are similar to those employed today by psychoanalysts in their secular quest for enlightenment
...
He evolved
a Jewish form of Yoga, using the usual disciplines of concentration such as breathing, the recitation of a mantra and the adoption of a special
posture to achieve an alternative state of consciousness
...
He was a highly erudite man, who had studied
Torah, Talmud and Falsafah before being converted to mysticism by an overwhelming religious experience at the age of thirty-one
...
Accordingly, he travelled extensively throughout Spain
making disciples and even ventured as far as the Near East
...
Although Abulafia was often
very outspoken in his criticism of Christianity, he seems to have appreciated the similarity between the Kabbalistic God and the theology of the
Trinity
...
Abulafia himself liked to speak about God in a trinitarian manner
...
The phrase 'untying the knots' is
also found in Tibetan Buddhism, another indication of the fundamental agreement of mystics worldwide
...
As a Kabbalist, Abulafia was
more concerned with the divine energy that animates the whole of creation but which the soul cannot perceive
...
By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia
taught his disciples to go beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world
...
The Kabbalist was to combine the letters
of the divine name in different combinations with a view to divorcing his mind from the concrete to a more abstract mode of perception
...
Abulafia himself compared it
to the sensation of listening to musical harmonies, the letters of the alphabet taking the place of notes in a scale
...
Again, this is said to have achieved astonishing results
...
{57} In this way, the
'seals' of the soul were unlocked and the initiate discovered resources of psychic power that enlightened his mind and assuaged the pain of his
heart
...
He was well aware of the dangers because he himself had suffered
from a devastating religious experience in his youth which had almost caused him to despair
...
Similarly Abulafia wrote that the Kabbalist would often
'see' and 'hear' the person of his spiritual director, who becomes 'the mover from inside, who opens the closed doors within him'
...
A disciple of Abulafia gave
another interpretation of the ecstasy: the mystic, he said, became his own Messiah
...
and of this secret our teachers said [in the Talmud]: 'Great is the
strength of the prophets, who compare the form of Him who formed it' [that is, 'who compare men to God']
...
Abulafia and his disciples would only say that by experiencing union with a
spiritual director or by realising a personal liberation the Kabbalist had been touched by God indirectly
...

In the West Christians were slower to develop a mystical tradition
...
During the fourteenth century, however, there was a veritable explosion of
mystical religion, especially in Northern Europe
...
England also made a significant contribution to this Western
development and produced four great mystics who quickly attracted a following on the continent as well as in their own country: Richard Rolle
of Hampole (1290-1349), the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton (d
...
13421416)
...
Richard Rolle, for example, seems to have got trapped in the cultivation of
exotic sensations and his spirituality was sometimes characterised by a certain egotism
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
A
Dominican friar, he was a brilliant intellectual and lectured on Aristotelian philosophy at the University of Paris
...
Yet even some of
Eckhart's severest critics believed that he was orthodox: the mistake lay in interpreting some of his remarks literally instead of symbolically, as
intended
...
While he believed that it was rational to believe in God, he
denied that reason alone could form any adequate conception of the divine nature: 'The proof of a knowable thing is made either to the senses
or the intellect,' he argued, 'but as regards the knowledge of God there can be neither a demonstration from sensory perception, since He is
incorporeal, nor from the intellect, since He lacks any form known to us
...

God, Eckhart declared, was Nothing
...
He also called God 'darkness', not to denote the absence of light but to indicate the presence of something brighter
...
{61} As a Westerner, Eckhart liked to use Augustine's analogy of the Trinity in the
human mind and implied that even though the doctrine of the Trinity could not be known by reason, it was only the intellect which perceived
God as Three persons: once the mystic had achieved union with God, he or she saw him as One
...
He liked to talk about the Father engendering the Son
in the soul, rather as Mary had conceived Christ in the womb
...
It was, Eckhart insisted, an allegory of the cooperation of the soul with God
...
It was better to speak of him in negative terminology, as Maimonides had suggested
...
We should even avoid
using the term 'God' itself
...
' {62} It would be a painful process
...
In
a process similar to that 'fana described by the Sufis, Eckhart spoke of 'detachment' or, rather, 'separateness' (Abgeschieden) {63} In much the
same way as a Muslim considers the veneration of anything other than God himself as idolatry (shirk), Eckhart taught that the mystic must
refuse to be enslaved by any finite ideas about the divine
...
{64} Since God was the ground of being, there was no need to seek him 'out there' or
envisage an ascent to something beyond the world we knew
...
Since God was essentially inaccessible, how could he communicate himself to mankind? If there was a distinction between God's
essence and his 'activities' or 'energies', as the Fathers had taught, surely it was blasphemous to compare the 'God' that a Christian encountered
in prayer with God himself? Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Saloniki, taught that, paradoxical as it might seem, any Christian could enjoy
such a direct knowledge of God himself
...
A Jewish mystic would have agreed: God En Sof would always remain shrouded
in impenetrable darkness but his sefiroth (which corresponded to the Greeks' 'energies') were themselves divine, flowing eternally from the
heart of the Godhead
...
Nobody had ever seen God's essence, but that did not mean that a direct experience of God himself was impossible
...
It had long been agreed by the Greeks that any statement about God had to
be a paradox
...
Palamas put it this way:
We attain to participation in the divine nature, and yet at the same time it remains totally inaccessible
...
{65}
There was nothing new in Palamas's doctrine: it had been outlined during the eleventh century by Symeon the New Theologian
...
He opposed the traditional Greek distinction between God's 'essence' and his 'energies', accusing Palamas of splitting God into two
separate parts
...

Greek philosophers like Aristotle who, Barlaam claimed, had been specially enlightened by God, taught that God was unknowable and remote
from the world
...
Barlaam was condemned by a Council of the Orthodox Church in 1341 but was supported by other monks
who had also been influenced by Aquinas
...
Barlaam and his supporters Gregory Akindynos (who liked to quote the Greek version of the Summa Theologiae), Nicephoras
Gregoras and the Thomist Prochoros Cydones had all become alienated from the apophatic theology of Byzantium with its stress on silence,
paradox and mystery
...

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...

The Greeks had always distrusted this tendency in Western thought and, in the face of this infiltration of rationalistic Latin ideas, Palamas
reasserted the paradoxical theology of Eastern Orthodoxy
...
He
agreed with Barlaam that God was unknowable but insisted that he had nonetheless been experienced by men and women
...
The liturgy which, according to Greek theology, enshrined orthodox opinion, proclaimed that on Tabor: 'We have seen the Father as
light and the Spirit as light
...
{66}
Again, what we 'saw' when we contemplated God in this life was not a substitute for God but was somehow God himself
...

Barlaam had tried to make the concept of God too consistent: in his view, either God was to be identified with his essence or he was not
...
But that was
to think about God as though he were any other phenomenon and was based on purely human notions of what was or was not possible
...
' {67} The victory of Palamas, whose theology remained normative in Orthodox Christianity, over the Greek
rationalists of the fourteenth century represents a wider triumph for mysticism in all three monotheistic religions
...
To rely on reason alone was like attempting to eat soup with a fork
...
In the next chapter we shall
see that the God of the Kabbalists became dominant in Jewish spirituality during the sixteenth century
...
Its God could address more primitive hopes, fears and anxieties before
which the remote God of the philosophers was impotent
...
But mysticism in the West would never become as widespread as in the other traditions
...

In the Roman Catholic Church, leading mystics like St Teresa of Avila were often threatened by the Inquisition of the Counter-Reformation
...


8 - A God for Reformers
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were decisive for all the people of God
...
These centuries saw the Italian
Renaissance, which quickly spread to Northern Europe, the discovery of the New World and the beginning of the scientific revolution which
would have fateful consequences for the rest of the world
...
It was, therefore, a time of transition and, as such, characterised by anxiety as well as achievement
...
Despite their secular success, people in Europe were more concerned about their faith than ever
before
...

Great reformers gave voice to this disquiet and discovered new ways of considering God and salvation
...
During the Reformation, Catholic
and Protestant reformers urged the faithful to rid themselves of peripheral devotion to saints and angels and to concentrate on God alone
...
Yet by the beginning of the seventeenth century, some were fantasising about 'atheism'
...
In 1453 the Ottoman Turks conquered the Christian capital of Constantinople and
destroyed the empire of Byzantium
...

In January 1492, the year of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the New World, Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada in Spain, the last
Muslim stronghold in Europe: later Muslims would be expelled from the Iberian peninsula which had been their home for 800 years
...
In March 1492, a few weeks after the conquest of Granada, the Christian monarchs gave
Spanish Jews the choice of baptism or expulsion
...
Some 150,000 Jews refused baptism, however, and were forcibly deported from Spain: they
took refuge in Turkey, the Balkans and North Africa
...
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destruction of the Temple in CE 70
...

These were also complex years for Muslims in other parts of the world
...
In the fifteenth century, the Sunni ulema of the Madrasas, the
schools of Islamic studies, decreed that 'the gates of ijtihad (independent reasoning) had been closed'
...
It was unlikely that there would be
innovative ideas about God in this conservative climate or, indeed, anything else
...
As Marshall G
...
Hodgson points out in The Venture of Islam,
Conscience and History in a World Civilisation, we simply do not know enough about this period to make such sweeping generalisations
...

The conservative tendency had surfaced during the fourteenth century in champions of the Shariah like Ahmad ibn Taymiyah of Damascus
(d
...
Ibn Taymiyah, who was dearly loved by the people, wanted to extend the Shariah to enable it
to apply to all the circumstances in which Muslims were likely to find themselves
...
The Shariah should
provide them with a clear, logical answer to their practical religious problems
...
Like any reformer, he wanted to go back to the sources - to the Koran and the hadith (on which the Shariah had
been based) - and to shed all later accretions: 'I have examined all the theological and philosophical methods and found them incapable of
curing any ills or of quenching any thirst
...
' {1} His pupil al-Jawziyah added Sufism to this list of
innovations, advocating a literalist interpretation of scripture and condemning the cult of Sufi saints in a spirit that was not entirely dissimilar to
that of the later Protestant Reformers in Europe
...
Hodgson warns us not
to dismiss the so-called conservatism of this period as 'stagnation'
...
{2} Western scholars have often chided the Muslims of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for failing
to take account of the Italian Renaissance
...
The Renaissance
was crucial to the West but nobody could have foreseen the birth of the modern-technical age, which, with hindsight, we can see that it
foreshadowed
...
Muslims were, not surprisingly, more concerned with their own not inconsiderable achievements during the fifteenth century
...
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, three new Muslim empires were founded: by the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor and
Eastern Europe, by the Safavids in Iran and by the Moghuls in India
...
Each of the
empires achieved its own remarkable cultural florescence: the Safavid renaissance in Iran and central Asia was interestingly similar to the
Italian Renaissance: both expressed themselves pre-eminently in painting and felt that they were returning creatively to the pagan roots of their
culture
...

Where earlier mystics and philosophers like al-Farabi and Ibn al-Arabi had been conscious of breaking new ground, this period saw a subtle
and delicate restatement of old themes
...

There were parallels with contemporary Western developments, however
...
Hitherto Shiis had
had much in common with the more intellectual or mystical Sunnis
...
Shah Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, had come to power in
Azerbaijan in 1503 and had extended his power into western Iran and Iraq
...
He saw himself as the Imam of his generation
...
The reformed Shiis abolished the Sufi tariqas in their territories in a way that recalls the Protestant
dissolution of the monasteries
...
Seeing themselves on the front line of the latest holy war against the crusading West, the Ottomans
also cultivated a new intransigence towards their Christian subjects
...
The Shii ulema of Iran looked askance at this reformed Shiah: unlike their Sunni counterparts, they refused to 'close
the gates of ijtihad' and insisted on their right to interpret Islam independently of the Shahs
...
Instead they allied themselves with the people against the rulers and became the champions of
the ummah against royal oppression in Isfahan and, later, Teheran
...
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the poor against the encroachments of the Shahs and it was this that enabled them to mobilise the people against Shah Muhammad Reza
Pahlavi's corrupt regime in 1979
...
Mir Dimad (d
...
He identified the divine Light with the enlightenment of such symbolic figures as
Muhammad and the Imams
...
The supreme
exponent of this Iranian school, however, was Mir Dimad's disciple Sadr al-Din Shirazi, who is usually known as Mulla Sadra (1571-1640)
...
He is only just becoming known in the West, however, and at the time of
writing only one of his many treatises has been translated into English
...
The
olam al-mithal described by Suhrawardi was crucial to his thought: he himself saw dreams and visions as the highest form of truth
...
Mulla Sadra taught that the imitatio dei, the approximation of God, was the goal of philosophy and could not be confined to any
one creed or faith
...
Mulla Sadra was not a pantheist
...
Yet God also transcends mundane
reality
...
Like Ibn al-Arabi, Mulla Sadra distinguished between God's essence or 'the Blindness' and its various manifestations
...
He saw the whole cosmos radiating from the Blindness to form a 'single jewel'
with many layers which can also be said to correspond to the gradations of God's unfolding self-revelation in his attributes or 'signs' (ayat)
...

Union with God was not reserved for the next world
...
Needless to say, he did not mean cerebral, rational knowledge alone: in his ascent to God the mystic had to travel through
the dam al-mithal, the realm of vision and imagination
...
When the Koran or the hadith speak of Paradise, Hell or the throne of God, they are not referring to
a reality that was in a separate location but to an inner world, hidden beneath the veils of sensible phenomena:
Everything to which man aspires, everything he desires, is instantaneously present to him, or rather one should say: to picture
his desire is itself to experience the real presence of its object
...
{3}
Like Ibn al-Arabi, whom he greatly revered, Mulla Sadra did not envisage God sitting in another world, an external, objective heaven to which
all the faithful would repair after death
...
No two people would have exactly the same heaven or the same God
...
In India, many of the Muslims had cultivated a similar tolerance towards other traditions
...
The subcontinent had long been free of religious intolerance and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the most creative forms
of Hinduism stressed the unity of religious aspiration: all paths were valid, provided that they stressed an interior love for the One God
...
Some Muslims and Hindus formed
inter-faith societies, the most important of which became Sikhism, founded by Guru Namak during the fifteenth century
...
On the Muslim side, the Iranian scholar Mir Abu al-Qasim Findiriski
(d
...
It would be difficult to imagine a Roman Catholic expert on Thomas Aquinas at this time showing a similar
enthusiasm for a religion that was not even in the Abrahamic tradition
...
Out of sensitivity to the Hindus, he became a vegetarian, gave up hunting - a sport he greatly
enjoyed - and forbade the sacrifice of animals on his birthday or in the Hindu holy places
...
Here, apparently, the Jesuit missionaries from Europe were the most aggressive
...
Akbar's own life was eulogised by Abulfazl Allami (1551-1602) in his Akbar-Namah (The Book
of Akbar), which attempted to apply the principles of Sufism to the history of civilisation
...
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the Perfect Man of his time
...
Islam in its original sense of 'surrender' to God could be achieved by any faith: what he certainly called 'Muhammad's
religion' did not have the monopoly of God
...

His tolerant policy could only be sustained while the Moghuls were in a position of strength
...

The emperor Aurengzebe (1618-1707) may have believed that unity could be restored by greater discipline within the Muslim camp: he
enacted legislation to put a stop to various laxities like wine-drinking, made co-operation with Hindus impossible, reduced the number of
Hindu festivals and doubled the taxes of Hindu merchants
...
These policies, which had completely reversed the tolerant approach of Akbar, were abandoned after
Aurengzebe's death but the Moghul empire never recovered from the destructive bigotry he had unleashed and sanctified in the name of God
...
Sirhindi stood out against the mystical tradition of Ibn alArabi, whose disciples had come to see God as the only reality
...
It was a mystical restatement of the Shahadah: there was no reality but al-Lah
...
Sirhindi, however, dismissed this perception as purely subjective
...
Indeed, to speak of any unity or identity between God and the world was an awful misconception
...
' {4} There could be no relation between God and the world, except indirectly through the contemplation of the
'signs' of nature
...
He used mysticism and religious experience to reaffirm belief in the distant God of the philosophers, who was an
objective but inaccessible reality
...

While Muslims like Findiriski and Akbar were seeking understanding with people of other faiths, the Christian West had demonstrated in 1492
that it could not even tolerate proximity with the two other religions of Abraham
...
They were driven out of Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma in
1488, Lucca and Milan in 1489 and from Tuscany in 1494
...
The Spanish Jews who had settled in the Ottoman empire continued to suffer from a sense of dislocation coupled with
the irrational but indelible guilt of the survivor
...

This new form of Kabbalism probably originated in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire, where many of the Sephardim had
established communities
...
Some Jews led by Joseph Karo and Solomon Alkabaz migrated from Greece to Palestine, the homeland of Israel
...
They wanted, they said, 'to raise the Shekinah from
the dust'
...
They
settled in Safed in Galilee and initiated a remarkable mystical revival which discovered a profound significance in their experience of
homelessness
...
The consolations of philosophy now seemed hollow: Aristotle sounded arid and his God distant and inaccessible
...
Its universality
and accommodation of Gentile philosophy had persuaded too many Jews to accept baptism
...

People longed for a more direct experience of God
...
Kabbalists used to wander
through the hills of Palestine and lie on the graves of the great Talmudists, seeking, as it were, to absorb their vision into their own troubled
lives
...
They found that
the mythology and disciplines of Kabbalah broke down their reserves and touched the pain in their souls in a way that metaphysics or the study
of Talmud no longer could
...
They came up with an extraordinarily imaginative
solution which equated absolute homelessness with absolute Godliness
...
Not only was the whole of creation no longer in its proper place but God was in exile from himself
...
This extraordinary success shows that the strange and

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
It was the last Jewish movement to be
accepted by almost everybody and wrought a profound change in the religious consciousness of world Jewry
...

In order to do justice to this new vision of God, we must understand that these myths were not intended to be taken literally
...
But any talk about God was problematic, not least the biblical doctrine of the creation of the universe
...
Both accepted the Platonic metaphor of emanation, which involves God with the world
that eternally flows from him
...
How could he be separate from the world if he was all-in-all? Moses ben Jacob
Cordovero of Safed (1522-1570) saw the paradox clearly and attempted to deal with it
...
' {5} He was very close to the monism of Ibn alArabi and Mulla Sadra
...
Most Jewish mystics were very reticent about their
experience of the divine
...
Kabbalists were wary of this, however
...
He was not a writer and our knowledge of his Kabbalistic system is based on the
conversations recorded by his disciples Hayim Vital (1553-1620) in his treatise Ets Hayim (The Tree of Life) and Joseph ibn Tabul, whose
manuscript was not published until 1921
...
In order to make room for the world, Luria taught, En Sof had, as it were,
vacated a region within himself
...
It was a daring attempt to illustrate the difficult doctrine of
creation out of nothing: the very first act of En Sof was a self-imposed exile from a part of himself
...
It is an idea that is not dissimilar to the primordial kenosis that Christians have imagined in the
Trinity, whereby God emptied himself into his Son in an act of self-expression
...

The 'empty space' created by God's withdrawal was conceived as a circle, which was surrounded on all sides by En Sof
...
Before the recoil of tsimtsum, all God's various 'powers' (later to become the sefiroth) mingled
harmoniously together
...
In particular, God's Hesed (Mercy) and Din (Stern Judgement) existed
within God in perfect harmony
...
Thus tsimtsum was not simply an act of self-emptying love but could be seen as a sort of divine purge:
God had eliminated his Wrath or Judgement (which The Zohar had seen as the root of evil) from his inmost being
...
Now that Din was separate from Hesed and the rest of God's attributes, it was potentially
destructive
...
A 'thin line' of the divine light penetrated this circle, which took the form of
what The Zohar had called Adam Kadmon, Primordial Man
...
Luria taught that the sefiroth had formed in
Adam Kadmon: the three highest sefiroth - Kether (The Crown), Hokhmah (Wisdom) and Binah (Intelligence) - radiated from his 'nose', 'ears'
and 'mouth' respectively
...
The sefiroth
needed to be contained in special coverings or 'vessels' to distinguish and separate them from one another and to prevent them from merging
again into their former unity
...
When the three highest sefiroth had radiated from Adam Kadmon, their vessels had
functioned perfectly
...
Consequently the light was scattered
...
Thenceforth nothing was in its proper place
...
The original harmony had been ruined and the divine sparks were lost in the formless waste of tohu bohu,
in exile from the Godhead
...
It expresses the tension involved in the whole creative
process, which is far closer to the Big Bang envisaged by scientists today than the more peaceful orderly sequence described by Genesis
...
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not easy for En Sof to emerge from his hidden state: he could only do so - as it were - in a sort of trial and error
...
They had said that God had made other worlds and had destroyed them before he created this one
...
Some
Kabbalists compared this 'Breaking' (Shevirath) to the breakthrough of birth or the bursting of a seed pod
...
Although everything was in disarray, En Sof would bring new life out of this apparent chaos by means of the process
of Tikkun or re-integration
...
This time the sefiroth were
reorganised into new configurations: they were no longer to be generalised aspects of God
...

Luria was trying to find a new way of expressing the old Kabbalistic idea of the inscrutable God giving birth to himself as a person
...
It is complicated and perhaps best explained in diagrammatic form
...
Kether (The Crown), the highest sefirah, which The Zohar had called 'Nothing', becomes the first parzuf, called 'Arik' Anpin:
the Forebearing One
...
Hokhmah (Wisdom) becomes the second parzuf, called Abba: Father
...
Binah (Intelligence) becomes the third parzuf, called Ima: Mother
...
Din (Judgement); Hesed (Mercy); Rahamin (Compassion); Netsah (Patience); Hod (Majesty); Yesod (Foundation) all become
the fourth parzuf, called Zeir Anpin: the Impatient One
...
The last sefirah called Malkuth (Kingdom) or the Shekinah: it becomes the fifth parzuf, which is called Nuqrah de Zeir: Zeir's
Woman
...
The two 'couples' - Abba and Ima, Zeir and Nuqrah - engage in ziwwug (copulation) and this
mating of the male and female elements within God symbolise the restored order
...
It is a fiction designed to hint at a process of integration that cannot be described in clear, rational terms and to neutralise the
overwhelmingly masculine imagery of God
...
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
...
Had he not done so, the original harmony would have been restored and the divine exile ended on the first Sabbath
...

The created order fell and the divine light in his soul was scattered abroad and imprisoned in broken matter
...
He had chosen Israel to be his helpmate in the struggle for sovereignty and control
...
As long as the divine sparks are
separated and lost in matter, God is incomplete
...
In this vision of salvation, God is not gazing down on humanity condescendingly but, as
Jews had always insisted, is actually dependent on mankind
...

Luria gave a new meaning to the original image of the exile of the Shekinah
...
The Zohar had identified the Shekinah with the last
sefirah and made it the female aspect of divinity
...
In
the first stage of Tikkun, she had become Nuqrah and by mating with Zeir (the six 'Middle' sefiroth) had almost been reintegrated into the
divine world
...
Luria was most unlikely to
have encountered the writings of those Christian Gnostics who had developed a very similar mythology
...
Tales of divine copulation and the exiled goddess had been
rejected by the Jews during the biblical period, when they were evolving their doctrine of the One God
...
Instead, Luria's mythology was embraced eagerly by Jews from Persia to England,
Germany to Poland, Italy to North Africa, Holland to the Yemen; recast in Jewish terms, it was able to touch a buried chord and give new hope
in the midst of despair
...

The Jews could end the exile of the Shekinah
...
It is interesting to compare
this myth with the Protestant theology that Luther and Calvin were creating in Europe at about the same time
...
Luria, however, preached a doctrine of works: God needed human beings and would remain somehow incomplete
without their prayer and good deeds
...
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about humanity than the Protestants
...
Where the Christians of Europe - Catholic and
Protestant alike -were formulating more and more dogmas, Luria revived the mystical techniques of Abraham Abulafia to help Jews transcend
this kind of intellectual activity and to cultivate a more intuitive awareness
...
In Luria's mythology,
it also symbolised the restructuring and re-formation of the divine
...
He felt that he was in another world, would find himself shaking and trembling as though possessed by a force outside himself
...
Luria insisted that before he began his spiritual exercises, the Kabbalist must achieve peace of mind
...
Vital insisted that the Shekinah
cannot live in a place of sorrow and pain - an idea that we have seen to be rooted in the Talmud
...
There should be no anger or aggression in the Kabbalist's heart
for anybody whatsoever - even the goyim
...
It is easy
to criticise Lurianic mysticism
...
Yet Luria's conception of God was able to help Jews to cultivate a spirit of joy and kindness, together
with a positive view of humanity at a time when the guilt and anger of the Jews could have caused many to despair and to lose faith in life
altogether
...
They too had endured historical disasters that could not be
assuaged by the philosophical religion of the scholastics
...
Humanity seemed unable to extricate itself from its fearful predicament without God's help
...
Men and women could contribute nothing to their salvation; good deeds were not meritorious in themselves but
only because God had graciously decreed that they were good
...
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'
...
As Thomas a
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
...
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
...
The practice of making the stations of the cross dwelt in particular detail on Jesus's
physical pain and sorrow
...

Immediately he should begin to contemplate Jesus's trial and follow his progress to Calvary, hour by hour
...
{9} In this dismal
programme, there is little emphasis on the resurrection
...
A violence of emotion and
what strikes the modern reader as morbid curiosity characterises many of these descriptions
...
It became more pale, deathly and lifeless
...
For me his passion was shown primarily through his
blessed face, and particularly by his lips
...
It was a sorry business to see him change as he progressively died
...
{10}
This reminds us of the German crucifixes of the fourteenth century with their grotesquely twisted figures and gushing blood, which, of course,
reached a climax in the work of Matthias Grunewald (1480-1528)
...
But the strength of Western concentration on the
human Christ seemed too powerful to resist
...
The medieval cult of Mary and of the saints increased alongside

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...
Enthusiasm for relics and holy places also distracted Western Christians from the one thing necessary
...

The dark side of the Western spirit was even manifest during the Renaissance
...
They disliked the scholastics intensely, feeling that their abstruse speculations made God sound alien and
boring
...
The medievals had revered Augustine as a
theologian, but the humanists rediscovered the Confessions and saw him as a fellow man on a personal quest
...
Lorenzo Valla (1405-59) stressed the futility of mixing sacred dogma with 'tricks of dialectics' and
'metaphysical quibbles': {11} these 'futilities' had been condemned by St Paul himself
...
{12} The
humanists had rediscovered the dignity of humanity but this did not cause them to reject God: instead, as true men of their age, they stressed
the humanity of God who had become man
...
The Renaissance men were deeply aware of the fragility of our
knowledge and could also sympathise with Augustine's acute sense of sin
...
God indeed is the best: and I am the worst
...
Yet the German philosopher and churchman Nicholas of Cusa (1400-64) was more
confident about our ability to understand God
...
Mathematics, for example, which dealt only with pure abstractions, could supply a certainty that was impossible in
other disciplines
...
This 'coincidence of opposites' contained the idea of God: the idea of ‘the maximum' includes everything; it implies notions of
unity and necessity which point directly to God
...
Yet Nicholas's clever demonstration has little religious meaning
...
But his conviction that 'God embraces everything, even contradictions" {14} was close to the Greek Orthodox perception
that all true theology must be paradoxical
...
The face of God will remain shrouded in 'a secret and mystic silence'
...
Not long after Nicholas's
death, a particularly noxious phobia erupted in his native Germany and spread throughout northern Europe
...
It revealed the dark underside of the Western
spirit
...
They
said that they had had sexual intercourse with demons, had flown hundreds of miles through the air to take part in orgies where Satan was
worshipped instead of God in an obscene Mass
...
The fantasy was linked with anti-Semitism and a deep sexual fear
...
This had not happened in the other God-religions
...

Some of the Sufis claimed that he had fallen from grace because he had loved God more than any of the other angels
...
In the West, however, Satan became a figure of ungovernable evil
...
As Norman Cohn has suggested in his book Europe's Inner Demons, this portrait of Satan was not only a
projection of buried fear and anxiety
...
In their torture chambers, Inquisitors and 'witches' together created a fantasy which was an inversion of
Christianity
...
' {16}
Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a firm believer in witchcraft and saw the Christian life as a battle against Satan
...
It is, of course, simplistic
to call the immense cycle of religious change that took place in Europe during the sixteenth century 'the Reformation'
...
The various reformers - Catholic as well as Protestant - were all trying to
articulate a new religious awareness that was strongly felt but had not been conceptualised or consciously thought out
...
The changes were not wholly due to the corruption
of the Church, as is often supposed, nor to a decline in religious fervour
...
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which led people to criticise abuses which they had previously taken for granted
...
The rise of nationalism and of the cities in Germany and Switzerland also played a part as did the new piety and
theological awareness of the laity during the sixteenth century
...
Instead of expressing their faith in external, collective ways, the people of Europe were
beginning to explore the more interior consequences of religion
...

Before his conversion, Luther had almost despaired of the possibility of pleasing a God he had come to hate:
Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God
...
Far from loving that righteous God who punished sinners, I actually loathed him
...

All my companions in the monastery would confirm this
...
You weren't contrite enough
...
' {17}
Many Christians today - Protestant as well as Catholic - will recognise this syndrome, which the Reformation could not entirely abolish
...
None of the saints, prophets or psalmists had been able to endure this divine anger
...
Because God was eternal and omnipotent, 'his fury or wrath towards self-satisfied sinners is also immeasurable
and infinite'
...
Observance of the Law of God or the rules of a religious order could not save us
...
Instead of bringing a message of hope, the
Law revealed 'the wrath of God, sin, death and damnation in the sight of God'
...
Man could not save himself
...
God is active and humans only passive
...
We are able to observe the precepts of
religion simply because God has saved us
...
There was nothing new about
Luther's theory: it had been current in Europe since the early fourteenth century
...
The revelation that ensued 'made me feel as though I had been born again, and as though I had entered through open gates
into paradise itself
...
By the year 1520 he had developed what he called his Theology of the Cross
...
{21} God justified 'sinners' who, by purely human standards, could only
be regarded as worthy of punishment
...
Where Luria had taught his
Kabbalists that God could only be found in joy and tranquillity, Luther claimed that 'God can be found only in suffering and the Cross'
...
{23} The doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation seemed suspect in the way they
had been formulated by the Fathers of the Church; their complexity suggested the false 'theology of glory'
...
Indeed, his theory of justification depended upon the divinity of Christ and his Trinitarian
status
...
'What does it matter to me?' he asked, when confronted with the complex
Christological doctrines: all he needed to know was that Christ was his redeemer
...
The only 'God' who could be deduced by logical arguments, such as those
used by Thomas Aquinas, was the God of the pagan philosophers
...
'Faith does not require information, knowledge and certainty,' he preached in one of his sermons, 'but a
free surrender and a joyful bet on his unfelt, untried and unknown goodness
...
Faith did not mean assent to the propositions of a creed and it was not 'belief in orthodox opinion
...
It was 'a sort of knowledge and darkness that can see nothing'
...
To attempt to reach him by means of reason alone could be dangerous and lead to
despair, since all that we would discover were the power, wisdom and justice of God which could only intimidate convicted sinners
...
Luther
showed how this should be done in the creed he composed in his Small Catechism:
I believe that Jesus Christ, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also the man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord; who has
redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, and delivered me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not
with silver and gold but with his holy and precious blood and with his innocent sufferings and death, in order that I may be his,

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...
{28}
Luther had been trained in scholastic theology but had reverted to simpler forms of faith and had reacted against the arid theology of the
fourteenth century, which could do nothing to calm his fears
...
Augustine, Luther's hero, had taught that the righteousness bestowed upon the sinner was not his own but God's
...
Augustine had said that this divine righteousness became a part of us; Luther insisted that it remained outside
the sinner but that God regarded it as though it were our own
...

Luther claimed that he had been reborn when he had formulated his doctrine of justification but in fact it does not seem as though all his
anxieties had been allayed
...
All the major religious traditions claim that the acid test of any
spirituality is the degree to which it has been integrated with daily life
...
A sense of peace, serenity and loving-kindness are the hallmarks of all true religious
insight
...
His vision of a wrathful God had filled him with personal rage and it has been suggested that his
belligerent character did great harm to the Reformation
...
{29}
In the long term, Luther was less important than John Calvin (1509-64) whose Swiss reformation, based more than Luther's on the ideals of the
Renaissance, had a profound effect on the emerging Western ethos
...
Calvinistic ideas inspired the Puritan revolution in England under Oliver Cromwell in 1645 and the colonisation of New
England in the 16205
...
His
disciples developed his teaching and effected the second wave of the Reformation
...
Yet
Calvinism makes its own impression: once discarded, it can be expressed in secular ways
...
Many Americans who no longer believe in God subscribe to the Puritan work ethic and to the Calvinist notion of election, seeing
themselves as a 'chosen nation', whose flag and ideals have a semi-divine purpose
...
They had developed at a time when the wealthy merchant classes were gaining an
ascendancy over the old pagan establishment and wanted to take their destiny into their own hands
...

Like the earlier Swiss theologian Huldreich Zwingli (1485-1531), Calvin was not particularly interested in dogma: his concern was centered on
the social, political and economic aspects of religion
...
As he wrote in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, God had declared that he
was One but 'clearly sets this before us as existing in three persons'
...
Servetus had fled Catholic Spain and had taken refuge in Calvin's Geneva, claiming that he was returning to the faith
of the apostles and the earliest Fathers of the Church who had never heard of this extraordinary doctrine
...

The doctrine of the Trinity was a human fabrication which had 'alienated the minds of men from the knowledge of the true Christ and presented
us with a tripartite God'
...
They did not believe that men and women were justified by Christ's death but simply by their
'faith' or trust in God
...
He had not died to atone for our sins but was simply
a teacher who 'showed and taught the way of salvation'
...
{33}
After the execution of Servetus, Blandrata and Socinus both fled to Poland and Transylvania, taking their 'Unitarian' religion with them
...
This was not simply
an intellectual conviction but the result of an intensely personal experience
...
He felt completely helpless, realising
that there was absolutely nothing he could do to save himself
...
Instead he threw himself on God's mercy
...
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Do as you will
for I lack nothing
...
{34}
His surrender was similar to the ideal of Islam: like Jews and Muslims at a comparable stage of their development, Western Christians were no
longer willing to accept methators but were evolving a sense of their inalienable responsibility before God
...
He has not left us with a full account of his conversion experience
...
He had been completely enthralled by the institutional Church and 'the superstitions of the
papacy'
...
By a sudden conversion to docility, he tamed a mind too stubborn for its years
...

The radical conversion had been characteristic of Western Christianity since the time of Augustine
...

{36} Christians were being 'born again' to a new faith in God and a rejection of the host of intermediaries that had stood between them and the
divine in the medieval Church
...
Yet in their rejection of the cult of the saints, Protestants often betrayed an equal anxiety
...

The English humanist Thomas More detected a personal hatred in many of the diatribes against the 'idolatry' of saint-worship
...
Many Protestants and Puritans took the condemnation of graven images in the Old Testament very
seriously when they shattered the statues of the saints and the Virgin Mary and hurled whitewash over the frescoes in the churches and
cathedrals
...
It also showed that this zeal to worship God alone did not spring from a calm conviction but from the
anxious denial that had caused the ancient Israelites to tear down the poles of Asherah and pour torrents of abuse upon their neighbours' gods
...
The problem of reconciling God's omnipotence and omniscience with human free will springs from an
anthropomorphic conception of God
...
The problem had never troubled the Greek
Orthodox Christians, who enjoyed paradox and found it a source of light and inspiration but it had been a bone of contention in the West,
where a more personalistic view of God prevailed
...
Yet the Catholic Church had condemned the idea that God had predestined the damned to hell for all eternity
...
Calvin gave very little space to the topic of predestination in the Institutes
...
Why did some respond to the
Gospel while others remained indifferent? Was God acting in a way that was arbitrary or unfair? Calvin denied this: the apparent choice of
some and the rejection of others was a sign of the mystery of God
...
This did not trouble Calvin overmuch, since he was not very interested in dogma
...
He ironed out the paradox with relentless logic
...
God was changeless and his decrees were just and eternal: thus he had decided
from all eternity to save some but had predestined the rest to eternal damnation
...
In the Low Countries, Jakob Arminius argued that this was an example of bad
theology, since it spoke of God as though he were a mere human being
...
Like other Protestants and Catholics, they were developing a new Aristotelian-ism, which stressed the importance of
logic and metaphysics
...
They wanted to present Christianity as a coherent and rational system that could be
derived from syllogistic deductions based on known axioms
...
The latter-day Calvinist theology of predestination showed what could happen when the paradox and mystery
file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Once the Bible begins to be interpreted
literally instead of symbolically, the idea of its God becomes impossible
...
The 'God' of the Bible ceases to be a symbol of a transcendent reality and becomes a cruel
and despotic tyrant
...

Puritans based their religious experience on Calvin and clearly found God a struggle: he did not seem to imbue them with either happiness or
compassion
...

Conversion became a central preoccupation, a violent, tortured drama where the 'sinner' and his spiritual director 'wrestled' for his soul
...
Often the conversion represented a psychological abreaction, an unhealthy swing from extreme desolation to elation
...
Puritans attributed this to Satan, who seemed as powerful a presence in their lives as God
...
Its urgent
apocalyptic spirituality inspired some to colonise the New World
...

Catholics and Protestants now regarded one another as enemies but in fact their conception and experience of God was remarkably similar
...
Reformers like Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, shared the Protestant emphasis
on direct experience of God and the need to appropriate revelation and make it uniquely one's own
...

With its emphasis on self-examination and personal decision, this thirty-day retreat undertaken on a one-to-one basis with a director was not
dissimilar to Puritan spirituality
...
Mystics had often evolved
disciplines that were similar to those used today by psychoanalysts and it is, therefore, interesting that the Exercises are also being used today
by Catholics and Anglicans to provide an alternative type of therapy
...
Like Luria he stressed the importance of serenity and joy, warning his disciples
against the extremes of emotion that pushed some Puritans over the edge in his Rules for the Discernment of Spirits
...
God was to be experienced as peace, hope, joy and an 'elevation of mind', while disquiet, sadness, aridity and distraction came
from 'the evil spirit'
...
But he distrusted violent swings of emotion and stressed the need for discipline in his journey to a new self
...
{40} For Ignatius the world was full of God
...
At the sight of a little plant, a leaf, a flower or a fruit, an insignificant worm or a tiny animal Ignatius could soar free
above the heavens and reach through into things which lie beyond the senses
...
As Puritans
braved the Atlantic to settle in New England, Jesuit missionaries travelled the globe: Francis Xavier (1506-1552) evangelised India and Japan,
Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) took the Gospel to China and Robert de Nobili (1577-1656) to India
...

Yet Catholics seemed as troubled as the Puritans
...
His doctors warned him that if he continued to weep so
bitterly during Mass, he might lose his sight
...
The great saints of the period seemed to regard the world and God as irreconcilable
opposites: to be saved one had to renounce the world and all natural affections
...
Where the
Renaissance had tried to reconcile heaven and earth, the Catholic reformation tried to split them asunder
...
The Reformation period was a time of great fear on both sides:
there were violent repudiations of the past, bitter condemnations and anathemas, a terror of heresy and doctrinal deviation, a hyperactive
awareness of sin and an obsession with Hell
...
Naturally Calvinists praised

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...
{42}
How can we account for this widespread fear and dismay in Europe? It was a period of extreme anxiety: a new kind of society, based on
science and technology, was beginning to emerge that would shortly conquer the world
...
The Christians of the West had always
seemed to find that God was something of a strain and the Reformers, who had sought to allay these religious anxieties, seem ultimately to
have made matters worse
...
Could it be that a deliberately
imaginative conception of God, based on mythology and mysticism, is more effective as a means of giving his people courage to survive
tragedy and distress than a God whose myths are interpreted literally?
Indeed, by the end of the sixteenth century, many people in Europe felt that religion had been gravely discredited
...
Hundreds of people had died as martyrs for holding views that it was
impossible to prove one way or the other
...
There was now too much theological choice: many felt paralysed and distressed by the variety of religious
interpretations on offer
...
It was, therefore, significant that at this point
in the history of the Western God, people started spotting 'atheists', who seemed to be as numerous as the 'witches', the old enemies of God and
allies of the devil
...
Yet in fact a full-blown atheism in the sense that we use the word today was impossible
...
From birth and baptism to death and burial in the churchyard, religion dominated the life of
every single man and woman
...
As Febvre points
out, God and religion were so ubiquitous that nobody at this stage thought to say: 'So our life, the whole of our life, is dominated by
Christianity! How tiny is the area of our lives that is already secularised, compared to everything that is still governed, regulated and shaped by
religion!' {43} Even if an exceptional man could have achieved the objectivity necessary to question the nature of religion and the existence of
God, he would have found no support in either the philosophy or the science of his time
...
Without this support, such a denial could only be a personal whim or a
passing impulse that was unworthy of serious consideration
...
Such words as 'absolute', 'relative', 'causality', 'concept' or 'intuition' were not yet in use
...
Not until the very
end of the eighteenth century would a few Europeans find it possible to deny the existence of God
...
Thus Pierre Carrin, the friend of Michel Montaigne, had defended Catholicism in his treatise Les Trois Verites (i 589) but in his chief
work De La Sagesse he had stressed the frailty of reason and claimed that man could only reach God through faith
...
Another of the 'unbelievers' he denounced was the Italian rationalist Giordano Bruno (1558-1600),
even though Bruno believed in a sort of Stoic God who was the soul, origin and end of the universe
...
In rather the same way, pagans of the
Roman empire had called Jews and Christians 'atheists' because their opinion of the divine had differed from their own
...
Indeed, it was possible to call any of your enemies an
'atheist' in much the same way as people were dubbed 'anarchists' or 'communists' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
...
Like 'the witch' (or, indeed, 'the anarchist' or 'the
communist'), 'the atheist' was the projection of a buried anxiety
...
In the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker (1554-1600)
claimed that there were two kinds of atheists: a tiny group who did not believe in God and a much larger number who lived as though God did
not exist
...
Thus in The Theatre of God's
Judgements (1597), Thomas Beard's imaginary 'atheist' denied the providence of God, the immortality of the soul and the after-life but not,
apparently, the existence of God
...
' {45} For the Welsh poet William Vaughan (1577-1641), who helped in the colonisation of Newfoundland, those who raised rents
or enclosed commons were obvious atheists
...
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gluttons, the vainglorious and prostitutes were all atheists
...
Nobody would have dreamed of called himself an atheist
...
Yet
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people in the West would cultivate an attitude that would make the denial of God's existence
not only possible but desirable
...
Yet the God of the Reformers could be seen to favour the
new science
...
They believed that nature was as passive as the Christian, who could only accept the gift of salvation from
God and could do nothing for himself
...
There could be no conflict between science and scripture: God had adapted himself to our human limitations in the
Bible, just as a skilful speaker adjusts his thought and speech to the capacity of his audience
...
{46} It was not to be taken literally
...
In 1530 the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus had completed
his treatise De revolutionibus, which claimed that the sun was the centre of the universe
...
In 1613 the Pisan mathematician Galileo Galilei claimed that the telescope he had
invented proved that Copernicus's system was correct
...
Not all Catholics agreed with this decision but the Roman
Catholic Church was as instinctively opposed to change as any other institution at this period when the conservative spirit prevailed
...
Inevitably the condemnation of Galileo inhibited scientific study in Catholic countries, even
though many distinguished scientists of the early period such as Marin Mersenne, Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal remained loyal to their
Catholic faith
...
One fact emerges, however, that is
important in our story: the Roman Catholic Church did not condemn the heliocentric theory because it endangered belief in God the Creator but
because it contradicted the word of God in Scripture
...
Neither Luther nor Calvin had condemned Copernicus but Luther's associate
Philip Melancthon (1497-1560) rejected the idea of the earth's motion around the sun because it was in conflict with certain passages of the
Bible
...
After the Council of Trent, Catholics had developed a new enthusiasm for their own scripture: the
Vulgate, St Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible
...
' {47} In the past, as we have seen, some rationalists and mystics had gone out of their way to depart
from a literal reading of the Bible and the Koran in favour of a deliberately symbolic interpretation
...
The scientific discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus might not have
disturbed Ismailis, Sufis, Kabbalists or hesychasts but they did pose problems for those Catholics and Protestants who had embraced the new
literalism
...
If, as he said, there could be life on the moon, how could these men have
descended from Adam and how had they got out of Noah's ark? How could the theory of the motion of the earth be squared with Christ's
ascension into heaven? Scripture said that the heavens and the earth had been created for man's benefit
...
Hell, for example, was widely believed to be situated at the centre of the earth, where Dante had put it
...
' He concluded that it must be
at the centre of the earth, basing his final argument on 'natural reason':
The last is natural reason
...
The abode of the blessed (as our adversaries
agree) is heaven, and no place is further removed from heaven than the centre of the earth
...
Even the most literal Christians no longer imagine that hell is at the centre of the earth
...

At a time when Mulla Sadra was teaching Muslims that heaven and hell were located in the imaginary world within each individual,
sophisticated churchmen such as Bellarmine were strenuously arguing that they had a literal geographic location
...
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Catholics and Protestants were insisting that the Bible was factually true in every detail
...
The theologians were not
preparing their people well for this approaching challenge
...
This would ultimately enable the
new 'atheists' of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to get rid of God altogether
...
The existence of this God can be demonstrated scientifically like any of the other facts of
life
...
There is
nothing specifically Christian about Lessius's God, however: he is a scientific fact who can be discovered by any rational human being
...
He gives the impression that the existence of God could be deduced by common sense from ordinary observation,
philosophy, the study of comparative religion and common sense
...

The Faylasufs had not doubted the validity of their proofs for the existence of God but their co-religionists had finally decided that this God of
the philosophers had little religious value
...
But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of
God on entirely rational grounds
...
When the arguments were disproved by the new science,
the existence of God himself came under attack
...
In a theologian such as Lessius we can see that as Europe approached modernity, the
theologians themselves were handing the future atheists the ammunition for their rejection of a God who had little religious value and who
filled many people with fear rather than with hope and faith
...


9 - Enlightenment
By the end of the sixteenth century, the West had embarked on a process of technicalisation that would produce an entirely different kind of
society and a new ideal of humanity
...
The achievements of the newlyindustrialised and efficient West also changed the course of world history
...
Because no
other society had ever achieved anything similar, the West created problems that were entirely new and therefore very difficult to deal with
...

Even though its fifteenth-century Renaissance had put Western Christendom ahead of Islamdom in some respects, the various Muslim powers
were easily able to contain the challenge
...
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Europe had
begun to dominate the world and the very nature of its achievement meant that it was impossible for the rest of the world to catch up
...
The process of Westernisation had
begun and with it the cult of secularism that claimed independence of God
...
As its name implied, civilisation had
been the achievement of the cities, where an elite had lived upon the agricultural surplus produced by the peasantry and had the leisure and
resources to create the various cultures
...
All such agrarianate civilisations were vulnerable, however
...
As each empire spread and increased its number of commitments and responsibilities, it ultimately outran its
limited resources
...
The new West, however, was not
dependent upon agriculture
...

The accumulation of capital had been built into the economic resources that - until recently - seemed to be indefinitely renewable
...
Naturally these immense changes affected the way men and women
perceived themselves and made them revise their relationship with the ultimate reality that they traditionally called 'God'
...
Scientists, for example, depended upon the increased efficiency of instrument-makers; industry
demanded new machines and sources of energy, as well as theoretical input from science
...
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gradually interdependent: one specialism inspired another in a different and perhaps hitherto unrelated field
...

The achievements of one specialisation were increased by their usage in another and this in turn affected its own efficiency
...

The interlocking changes acquired a progressive and apparently unstoppable momentum! More and more people of all ranks were drawn into
the process of modernisation in an increasing number of spheres
...

Ultimately it would become necessary for these lower orders to become literate and to share - to some degree - in the wealth of society if the
overriding need for efficiency was to be preserved
...
The new efficiency was also felt in matters of social organisation, which gradually brought the West
up to the standards already achieved in other parts of the world, such as China and the Ottoman empire, and then enabled it to surpass them
...
The various governments in Europe found it
necessary to reconstitute themselves and engage in a continuous revision of their laws in order to meet the ever-changing conditions of
modernity
...
It is a sign of the
new autonomy that technicalisation was bringing to Western society: men and women felt that they were in charge of their own affairs as never
before
...
The modern technical society introduced by the West, however, was
based on the expectation of constant development and progress
...
Indeed, such institutions as
the Royal Society in London were dedicated to the collection of new knowledge to replace the old
...
Instead of keeping their discoveries secret, the new scientific institutions wanted to
disseminate knowledge in order to advance future growth in their own and other fields
...
Instead of fearing that the younger generation was going to the dogs, as in former times, the older generation
expected their children to live better than they
...
It achieved great things
but now that damage to the environment has made us realise that this way of life is as vulnerable as the old, we are, perhaps, beginning to
realise that it is as fictitious as most of the other mythologies that have inspired humanity over the centuries
...

Hitherto it had been possible for an intellectual to keep abreast of knowledge on all fronts
...
Indeed, Falsafah had offered its disciples a coherent and inclusive account of what was
believed to be the whole of reality
...
The various disciplines of astronomy, chemistry and geometry were beginning to become
independent and autonomous
...
It followed that every major intellectual saw himself less as a conserver of tradition than as a pioneer
...
He was venturing into hitherto uncharted realms for the sake of his society
...

There was new optimism about humanity as control over the natural world, which had once held mankind in thrall, appeared to advance in
leaps and bounds
...
This new confidence
in the natural powers of human beings meant that people came to believe that they could achieve enlightenment by means of their own
exertions
...

Yet the experience of specialisation meant that people involved in the process of specialisation were increasingly unable to see the whole
picture
...
They felt that their own enhanced knowledge and effectiveness gave them the duty to look again at the traditional Christian
explanations of reality and bring them up to date
...
We have
seen that the old rationalism of Falsafah had depended on an initial act of faith in a rational universe
...
The old 'proofs' for God's existence were no longer entirely satisfactory and natural scientists
and philosophers, full of enthusiasm for the empirical method, felt compelled to verify the objective reality of God in the same way as they
proved other demonstrable phenomena
...
As we shall see, most of the philosophers of the Enlightenment believed implicitly in the existence of a
God
...
Perhaps one of the first people to appreciate this

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
A sickly, precocious child, he
had been closeted from other children and educated by his scientist father, who discovered that the eleven-year-old Blaise had secretly worked
out for himself the first twenty-three propositions of Euclid
...
Later he devised a calculating machine, a barometer and a hydraulic
press
...
Blaise's sister, Jacqueline, entered
the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal in south-west Paris and became one of the Catholic sect's most passionate advocates
...
After his death, his 'Memorial' of this revelation was found
stitched into his doublet:
Fire
'God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,' not of philosophers and scholars
...

God of Jesus Christ
...

My God and your God
...
'
The World forgotten and everything except God
...
{1}
This essentially mystical experience meant that the God of Pascal was different from the God of the other scientists and philosophers we shall
consider in this chapter
...

Where Ignatius had seen the world as full of God and had encouraged Jesuits to cultivate a sense of the divine omnipresence and omnipotence,
Pascal and the Jansenists found the world to be bleak and empty, bereft of divinity
...
The Pensees, Pascal's jottings on religious matters which were published posthumously
in 1669, are rooted in a profound pessimism about the human condition
...
{2} The sense of desolation and of God's terrifying absence characterises much of the
spirituality of the new Europe
...

Pascal's scientific achievements, therefore, did not give him much confidence in the human condition
...
Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to
despair
...
Pascal could envisage the full horror
of a world that seemed empty of ultimate meaning or significance
...
Pascal was brutally honest with himself; unlike most of his contemporaries, he was
convinced that there was no way of proving the existence of God
...
This was a new development in the history of monotheism
...
Pascal was the first person to concede that, in this brave new world, belief in God could only be
a matter of personal choice
...

Pascal's approach to the problem of God's existence is revolutionary in its implications but it has never been accepted officially by any Church
...
Such an
approach, however, could only lead to the God of the philosophers not to the God of Revelation experienced by Pascal
...
It was a gamble
...
Reason cannot decide this question
...
At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails
...
To opt for God is an all-win solution
...
As the Christian progresses in the Faith he or she would become aware of a continuous enlightenment, an awareness
file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
It was no good relying on external authority; each Christian was on his own
...
He makes God say: 'You would not seek me, if you had not already found me
...
But by making the personal decision to
surrender to God, the faithful feel themselves transformed, becoming 'faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a true friend'
...
God was a reality because he worked
...

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), another of the new men, had far more confidence in the ability of the mind to discover God
...
He would not have approved of Pascal's wager since it was based on a
purely subjective experience, though his own demonstration of the existence of God depended upon another type of subjectivity
...
Descartes, a mathematician and a convinced Catholic, felt that he had a mission to bring the new empirical rationalism to the fight
against such scepticism
...
Faith told us nothing that could not be demonstrated rationally: St Paul himself had
asserted as much in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans: 'For what can be known about God is perfectly plain to [mankind] since God
himself has made it plain
...
' {7} Descartes went on to argue that God could be known more easily and certainly (facilius et certius}
than any of the other things in existence
...

Using the empirical method of his universal Mathematics, which had progressed logically towards the simples or first principles, Descartes
attempted to establish an equally analytic demonstration of God's existence
...
There was no design in nature
...
It was impossible for us to deduce any certainty about first principles from nature, therefore
...
It could also be found in simple and selfevident propositions, such as: 'What's done cannot be undone', which was irrefutably true
...
Like Augustine, some twelve centuries earlier,
Descartes found evidence of God in human consciousness: even doubt proved the existence of the doubter! We cannot be certain of anything in
the external world, but we can be certain of our own inner experience
...
When we doubt, the limitations and finite nature of the ego are revealed
...
Like Anselm, Descartes concluded that a perfection that did not exist would be a contradiction in
terms
...

Descartes went on to deduce facts about the nature of God from this proof of his existence, in much the same way as he had conducted
mathematical demonstrations
...
' {8} Just as a Euclidian triangle must have angles that add up to two right angles, Descartes's
perfect being had to have certain attributes
...
Instead of using the world to prove the existence of God, therefore, Descartes had used the idea of God to give him faith
in the reality of the world
...
Instead of reaching out towards the world, his
mind recoils upon itself
...
Alienation from the world and a proud self-reliance would lead many people to reject the whole idea of a God who reduces a
man or woman to the condition of a dependant
...
The cult of the holy place had preceded all other reflection upon the world and helped men and women to find a focus in a
terrifying universe
...
Even
Augustine had found the world a place of wondrous beauty, despite his anguished spirituality
...
A sense of mystery was to be avoided at all costs because it represented a
primitive state of mind that civilised man had outgrown
...
' {9} Poets and painters had, therefore, depicted the clouds
as God's throne, had imagined God sprinkling dew upon the clouds or hurling lightning against the rocks with his own hand:
This leads me to hope that if I here explain the nature of the clouds, in such a way that we will no longer have occasion to
wonder at anything that can be seen of them, or anything that descends from them, we will easily believe that it is similarly

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...

Descartes would explain clouds, winds, dew and lightning as mere physical events in order, as he explained, to remove 'any cause to marvel'
...
He was revealed not in the
miracles described in scripture but in the eternal laws that he had ordained: Les meteores also explained that the manna that had fed the ancient
Israelites in the desert was a kind of dew
...
Jesus's feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his
shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them round
...

Descartes was always careful to submit to the rulings of the Roman Catholic Church and saw himself as an orthodox Christian
...
In his treatise Discourse on Method, he argued that there was a system that would enable humanity to
reach all truth
...
All that was necessary -in any discipline - was to apply the method and it would then be possible
to piece together a reliable body of knowledge that would disperse all confusion and ignorance
...

Mysticism had not really had time to take root in Europe before the dogmatic convulsions of the Reformation
...
Even
in Descartes's church, mystics were rare and often suspect
...

The English physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who also reduced God to his own mechanical system, was equally anxious to rid Christianity
of mystery
...
Unlike Descartes, who had proved the existence of the self, God and the natural world in that order, Newton began with an
attempt to explain the physical universe, with God as an essential part of the system
...
Thus, as in Aristotle, God was simply a continuation of the natural, physical order
...
The notion of gravitational force,
which Newton introduced, drew the component parts of his system together
...
Such a view was incompatible with the Protestant idea of the absolute
sovereignty of God
...

Unlike Pascal and Descartes, when Newton contemplated the universe he was convinced that he had proof of God's existence
...
As he explained to his friend Richard Bentley, Dean of St
Paul's, this would have been impossible without an intelligent divine Overseer: 'I do not think it explicable by mere natural causes but am
forced to ascribe it to ye counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent
...
' {12} If, for example, the earth
revolved on its axis at only one hundred miles per hour instead one thousand miles per hour, night would be ten times longer and the world
would be too cold to sustain life; during the long day, the heat would shrivel all the vegetation
...

Besides being intelligent, this Agent had to be powerful enough to manage these great masses
...

Edward Pococke, the first professor of Arabic at Oxford, had told Newton that the Latin deus derived from the Arabic du (Lord)
...
In the
'General Scholium' which concludes the Principia, Newton deduced all God's traditional attributes from his intelligence and power:
This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and
powerful Being
...
We know him only by
his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfection; but we reverence and
adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final
causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature
...
All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could
arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing
...
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Newton does not mention the Bible: we know God only by contemplating the world
...
Now the lew science had moved
the creation to centre stage and made a literal and mechanical understanding of the doctrine crucial to the conception of God
...

Newton himself had to resort to some startling solutions to find room for God in his system, which had of its very nature to be comprehensive
...
In the early essay De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum, he
had returned to the old Platonic doctrine of emanation
...
Space is an effect of God's existence,
emanating eternally from the divine omnipresence
...
In the same way, because God himself is eternal, he emanates time
...
Matter, on the other hand, was created by God on the day of
creation by a voluntary act
...
It was possible to stand by the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing because God had brought forth material substance from
empty space: he had produced matter out of the void
...
He was anxious to purge Christianity of
the miraculous, even if that brought him into conflict with such crucial doctrines as the divinity of Christ
...
Arius had been right: Jesus Christ had certainly not been God and those passages of the New Testament that were used
to 'prove' the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation were spurious
...
' {14}
To expunge this mumbo-jumbo from the Christian faith became something of an obsession for Newton
...
This argued that
Noah had founded the primordial religion - a Gentile theology - which had been free of superstition and had advocated a rational worship of
one God
...
Men were commanded to contemplate Nature, the only temple of
the great God
...
Some had fallen back into idolatry and
superstition
...
Pythagoras had learned about this religion and brought it to
the West
...
The book of Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism - 'this strange religion of ye West', 'the cult of three equal
Gods' - as the abomination of desolation
...
Newton had clearly no understanding of the role of mystery in the religious life
...
For a scientist like Newton, however, it was very difficult to cultivate such an attitude
...
Religion, however, like art often consists of a dialogue with
the past in order to find a perspective from which to view the present
...
Religion and art, therefore, do not work like science
...
In England, radical theologians like Matthew Tindal and John Toland were anxious to go back to basics, purge
Christianity of its mysteries and establish a true rational religion
...
' {16} It was offensive to imagine that God was incapable of expressing himself clearly
...
In Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), Tindal tried, like Newton, to recreate the primordial religion and purge it of later
accretions
...
' {17} Consequently revelation was
unnecessary because the truth could be found by our own rational inquiries; mysteries like the Trinity and the Incarnation had a perfectly
reasonable explanation and should not be used to keep the simple faithful in thrall to superstition and an institutional church
...
Thus in 1699 Gottfried
Arnold published his nonpartisan History of the Churches from the Beginning of the New Testament to 1688, arguing that what was currently
regarded as orthodox could not be traced back to the primitive church
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

veracity
...
It was disturbing for many of the faithful
to see that fundamental dogmas about the nature of God and Christ had developed over the centuries and were not present in the New
Testament: did that mean that they were false? Others went even further and applied this new objectivity to the New Testament itself
...
Once this had happened, the
modern period of scepticism was well and truly launched
...
He pointed out that in the Gospels Jesus never claimed that he had come to atone for the
sins of mankind
...
We should not revere Jesus as God, therefore, but as the teacher of a 'remarkable, simple, exalted and practical religion'
...
One
might object that this kind of criticism was as irrelevant as it might be to art or poetry
...
Western Christians were now committed to a literal understanding
of their faith and had taken an irrevocable step back from myth: a story was either factually true or it was a delusion
...
If Christians were to preserve their integrity in the scientific age, therefore, these questions had to be addressed
...
In his tract Wittenburg's Innocence of a Double Murder (1681), the Lutheran John Friedmann Mayer wrote that the
traditional doctrine of the atonement, as outlined by Anselm, which depicted God demanding the death of his own Son, presented an inadequate
conception of the divine
...
{19} More and more Christians were embarrassed by the
cruelty of so much Christian history, which had conducted fearful crusades, inquisitions and persecutions in the name of this just God
...
The bloodbath unleashed by the Reformation and its aftermath seemed the final straw
...
Yet could a God drained of the mystery that had for centuries made him an effective religious value in other
traditions appeal to the more imaginative and intuitive Christians? The Puritan poet John Milton (1608-74) was particularly disturbed by the
Church's record of intolerance
...
He was also doubtful
about such traditional doctrines as the Trinity
...
Satan has many of the qualities of the new men of Europe: he defies authority, pits himself
against the unknown and in his intrepid journeys from Hell, through Chaos to the newly-created earth, he becomes the first explorer
...
Without the mystical understanding of the Trinity, the position
of the Son is highly ambiguous in the poem
...
At all events, he and the Father are two entirely separate beings who have to engage in lengthy conversations of
deep tedium to find out each other's intentions, even though the Son is the acknowledged Word and Wisdom of the Father
...
Since of necessity God already
knows that Adam and Eve will fall - even before Satan has reached the earth - he has to engage in some pretty specious justification of his
actions before the event
...
Therefore they could not, God argues defensively, justly accuse
Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate;
As if Predestination over-rul'd
Thir will, dispos'd by absolute Decree
Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed
Thir own revolt; not I: if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on thir fault,
Which had no less prov'd certain unforeknown
...
{20}

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...
Forcing God to speak and think like one of us in this way shows the inadequacies of such an
anthropomorphic and personalistic conception of the divine
...

The literal understanding of such doctrines as the omniscience of God will not work
...
In the last two books of Paradise Lost, God sends the Archangel Michael to console Adam for his sin by showing him
how his descendants will be redeemed
...
The inadequacy of the Torah, which oppressed God's unfortunate chosen people for centuries, is, Michael
explains, a ploy to make them yearn for a more spiritual law
...
The fact that this tortuous plan with its constant failures and false starts, is decreed in advance can only
cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its Author
...
It must be significant that after Paradise Lost no
other major English creative writer would attempt to describe the supernatural world
...
Henceforth
the supernatural and the spiritual would become the domain of more marginal writers, such as George MacDonald and C
...
Lewis
...

At the very end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve take their solitary way out of the Garden of Eden and into the world
...
The new religion of reason would be known
as Deism
...
It turned its back on the myth of revelation and on such
traditional 'mysteries' as the Trinity, which had for so long held people in the thrall of superstition
...
Francois-Marie de Voltaire, the embodiment of the movement that would
subsequently become known as the Enlightenment, defined this ideal religion in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
...

Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? that which tended to make men just without making them
absurd? that which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious
to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which
did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism?
...
The reaction was inevitable and could even be positive
...
They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened
mankind with eternal fire
...
But their belief in a Supreme Being
remained intact
...
In the Philosophical Dictionary, he had argued that faith in one god was
more rational and natural to humanity than belief in numerous deities
...
Science and rational philosophy both
pointed to the existence of a Supreme Being: 'What conclusion can we draw from all this?' he asks at the end of his essay on 'Atheism' in the
Dictionary
...
Above all, let me add that there are fewer atheists today than there have ever been, since philosophers have perceived that
there is no vegetative being without germ, no germ without design etc
...
His problem was not God but
the doctrines about him which offended against the sacred standard of reason
...
Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), a Dutch Jew of Spanish descent, had become
discontented with the study of Torah and had joined a philosophical circle of Gentile freethinkers
...
In
1656, at the age of twenty-four, he was formally cast out of the synagogue of Amsterdam
...
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Let him be accursed by day and accursed by night; accursed in his lying down and his rising up, in going out and in coming in
...
{23}
Henceforth Spinoza belonged to none of the religious communities of Europe
...
In the early twentieth century, many people revered Spinoza as the hero of modernity, feeling an
affinity with his symbolic exile, alienation and quest for secular salvation
...
Like the Faylasufs, he
saw revealed religion as inferior to the scientific knowledge of God acquired by the philosopher
...
It had become 'a mere compound of credulity and prejudices', a 'tissue of
meaningless mysteries'
...
The Israelites had called any phenomenon that they could not understand
'God'
...
But this kind of 'inspiration' was not confined to an elite but was available to everybody through natural reason: the rites and
symbols of the faith could only help the masses who were incapable of scientific, rational thought
...
The very idea of 'God' contains a validation of God's existence
because a perfect being which did not exist would be a contradiction in terms
...
Our scientific understanding of the world shows us that it is
governed by immutable laws
...
God is a material
being, identical with and equivalent to the order which governs the universe
...
Because God is inherent and immanent in all things - material and spiritual - it can be defined as the law that orders their existence
...
It was an absolute
denial of transcendence
...
As the aggregate of all the laws in existence, God was the
highest perfection which welded everything into unity and harmony
...
Like Plato, Spinoza believed
that intuitive and spontaneous knowledge reveals the presence of God more than a laborious acquisition of facts
...
There is no need for revelation or divine law: this God is accessible to the whole of humanity and the only
Torah is the eternal law of nature
...
But it was also close to the mystical God experienced by orthodox monotheists within
themselves
...
Indeed, Spinoza had only used the word 'God' for historical reasons: he agreed with atheists who claim that
reality can not be divided into a part which is 'God' and a part which is not-God
...
What Spinoza was saying in effect was that there was no God that corresponded to the meaning we
usually attach to that word
...
Some had said that there was 'Nothing'
apart from the world we know
...

It was the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) who opened the way for Jews to enter modern Europe, however, though at first
he had no intention of constructing a specifically Jewish philosophy
...
In countries like France and
Germany, the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment brought emancipation and enabled Jews to enter society
...
Judaism had never had the
same doctrinal obsession as Western Christianity
...
In Morning Hours, Mendelssohn's
philosophical God was very similar to the God of the Bible
...
Human characteristics such
as wisdom, goodness, justice, loving-kindness and intellect could in their most lofty sense all be applied to this Supreme Being
...
His was a typical Enlightenment faith: cool, dispassionate and tending to ignore the
paradox and ambiguity of religious experience
...
God's goodness is the hinge on which his theology hangs
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

excluded from the divine plan
...
There is a danger in such an approach,
however, because it is all too easy to make such a God conform to our own prejudices and make them absolute
...
A young Swiss pastor, Johann Caspar Lavater, wrote that the author was ripe for conversion to
Christianity and challenged Mendelssohn to defend his Judaism in public
...
He had to tread a fine
line: he did not want to go the way of Spinoza nor bring down the wrath of the Christians upon his own people if his defence of Judaism proved
too successful
...
The doctrine of
the Trinity did not meet his criterion
...
The Jewish conception of God was essentially
identical to the natural religion that belonged to the whole of humanity and could be demonstrated by unaided reason
...
He ended with a plea for toleration
...

Jews were less influenced by Mendelssohn than by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was published in
the last decade of Mendelssohn's life
...
{25} The only way to God lay through the autonomous realm of moral conscience, which he called 'practical reason'
...
But he was not opposed to the idea of God per se
...
But he allowed that
humanity had a natural tendency to transgress these limits and seek a principle of unity that will give us a vision of reality as a coherent whole
...
It was not possible to prove God's existence logically but neither was it possible to disprove it
...

For Kant, therefore, God was simply a convenience, which could be misused
...
It could also be a source of
unnecessary mystification, which leads to acrimonious disputes such as those that have scarred the history of the churches
...
His contemporaries described him as a devout man, who was profoundly aware of mankind's capacity for evil
...
In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argued that in order to live a moral life, men and women
needed a governor, who would reward virtue with happiness
...
The centre of religion was no longer the mystery of God but man himself
...
It would not be long before some would take his ideal of
autonomy one step further and dispense with this somewhat tenuous God altogether
...
They would never appear quite so convincing again
...
In A Plain
Account of Genuine Christianity, John Wesley (1703-91) wrote:
I have sometimes been almost inclined to believe that the wisdom of God has, in most later ages, permitted the external evidence
for Christianity to be more or less clogged and encumbered for this very end, that men (of reflection especially) might not
altogether rest there but be constrained to look into themselves also and attend to the light shining in their hearts
...
Although it was
centered in the heart rather than the head, it shared many of the same preoccupations as Deism
...
Like many of the deists, the disciples of the
Wesley brothers or of the German Pietist Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf (i 706-60) felt that they were shaking off the accretions of
centuries and returning to the 'plain' and 'genuine' Christianity of Christ and the first Christians
...
As a young Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he and his brother Charles had founded a
society for undergraduates, known as the Holy Club
...
In
1735, John and Charles sailed to the colony of Georgia in America as missionaries but John returned disconsolate two years later, noting in his
journal: 'I went to America to convert the Indians; but oh, who will convert me?' {27} During the voyage, the Wesleys had been much
impressed by some missionaries of the Moravian sect which eschewed all doctrine and insisted that religion was simply an affair of the heart
...
Thenceforth he and his disciples
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...

The experience of being 'born again' was crucial
...
{28} Doctrines about God were useless and could be
damaging
...
As in Puritanism, an emotional
experience of religion was the only proof of genuine faith and hence of salvation
...

Mystics had always stressed the perils of the spiritual paths and warned against hysteria: peace and tranquillity were the signs of a true
mysticism
...
It could also
lead to despair: the poet William Cowper (1731-1800) went mad when he no longer felt saved, imagining that this lack of sensation was a sign
that he was damned
...
Thus Count von Zinzendorf, the patron of
several religious communities who lived on his estates in Saxony, argued like Wesley that 'faith was not in thoughts nor in the head, but in the
heart, a light illuminated in the heart'
...
{30} The Incarnation expressed the mystery of the new birth
of an individual Christian, when Christ became 'the King of the heart'
...
It has survived to the present day: many Roman Catholic
churches contain a statue of Christ baring his breast to display a bulbous heart surrounded by a nimbus of flames
...
There is no resemblance between this Christ
and the abrasive figure of the Gospels
...

In 1682 Margaret Mary recalled that Jesus appeared to her at the beginning of Lent:
covered all over with wounds and bruises
...
' {31}
A highly neurotic woman, who confessed to a loathing of the very idea of sex, suffered from an eating disorder and indulged in unhealthy
masochistic acts to prove her 'love' for the Sacred Heart, Margaret Mary shows how a religion of the heart alone can go awry
...
'It shall be the sole delight of all your desires; It
will repair and supply for your defects, and discharge your obligations for you
...

We are clearly far from the cool rationalism of the Enlightenment, yet there was a connection between the religion of the heart, at its best, and
Deism
...
Kant's
proposals for a religion within the bounds of unaided reason is akin to the Pietist insistence on a religion 'laid down in the very constitution of
the soul' {33} rather than in a revelation enshrined in the doctrines of an authoritarian church
...
{34} John
Wesley was fascinated by the Enlightenment and was especially sympathetic to the ideal of liberty
...

The American scholar Albert C
...
Indeed, it seems that a radical piety actually paved the way for the ideals of the Enlightenment
to take root among Jews as well as Christians
...
Many of these sects
seemed to respond to the immense changes of the period by violating religious taboos
...
Many of these sects were Messianic in tone and proclaimed
the imminent arrival of a wholly new world
...
The Puritan authorities had found it difficult to control the religious fervour that erupted in the army and
among the ordinary people, many of whom believed that the Day of the Lord was at hand
...
Cromwell himself seems to have entertained similar hopes, as had
those Puritans who had settled in New England during the 16205
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

property, class distinction and human authority would wither away
...
There was an Inner Light within each individual and once it had been
discovered and nurtured, everybody, irrespective of class or status, could achieve salvation here on earth
...
Hope for liberty, equality and fraternity had surfaced in England some 140
years before the people of Paris stormed the Bastille
...
As the British historian Norman Cohn explains in The Pursuit of the Millennium, Revolutionary Milknnariam and Mystical Anarchists
of the Middle Ages, the Brethren were accused by their enemies of pantheism
...
"Every created thing is divine"
...
The eternal essence of all things, which had emanated from the One, was divine
...
Salvation was achieved by the recognition of one's own divine nature here on earth
...
' The
Brethren repeatedly asserted: 'Every rational creature is in its nature blessed
...
As the Bishop of Strasbourg said, the Brethren 'say they are God by nature, without any distinction
...
{37}
Cohn argues that extremist Christian sects in Cromwell's England, such as the Quakers, the Levellers and the Ranters, were a revival of the
fourteenth-century heresy of the Free Spirit
...
Winstanley probably did not believe in a transcendent God at all, though he - like the other radicals - was reluctant
to formulate his faith in conceptual terms
...
The Christ who mattered to them was a presence diffused through the members of the community which was
virtually indistinguishable from the Holy Spirit
...
Fox taught his Quakers to wait upon God in a silence that was
reminiscent of Greek hesychasm or the via negativa of the medieval philosophers
...
Its hallmark was
Oneness, reflected in the unity and egalitarianism of the various communities
...
As Messiahs, they preached a revolutionary doctrine and a new world order
...
A man baptised with
the Holy Ghost knows all things even as God knows all things, which point is a deep mystery
...
All the earth is the
Saints, and there ought to be a community of goods, and the Saints should share in the lands and Estates of Gentlemen and such
men
...
They deliberately broke Christian taboos in their libertarian creed and blasphemously
claimed that there was no distinction between God and man
...

Several of the Ranters claimed to be the Messiah, a reincarnation of God, who was to establish the new Kingdom
...
Thus William Franklin, a respectable householder, became mentally ill in 1646 after his family had been
smitten by plague
...
He
seemed in full possession of his faculties but he still left his wife and began to sleep with other women, leading an apparently disreputable,
mendicant life
...
She embraced Franklin as her Lord and Christ
...
At about the same time, one John Robbins was also revered as God: he claimed to be God the
Father and believed that his wife would shortly give birth to the Saviour of the world
...
But some texts by notable Ranters like Jacob Bauthumely, Richard Coppin and Laurence

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...
In his treatise The Light and
Dark Sides of God (1650), Bauthumely speaks of God in terms that recall the Sufi belief that God was the Eye, Ear and Hand of the man who
turns to him: 'O God, what shall I say thou art?' he asks
...
' {39} Like the rationalists,
Bauthumely rejects the doctrine of the Trinity and, again like a Sufi, qualifies his belief in the divinity of Christ by saying that while he was
divine, God could not become manifest in only one man: 'He as really and substantially dwells in the flesh of other men and Creatures, as well
as in the man Christ
...
The biblical idea of
God, Bauthumely believed, was inadequate: sin is not an action but a condition, a falling short of our divine nature
...
{41} Bauthumely was denounced an atheist by his enemies
but his book is not far in spirit from Fox, Wesley and Zinzenburg, though it is expressed far more crudely
...
He also shared the rejection of authority and essentially optimistic view of humanity shared later by the philosophers of
the Enlightenment and those who subscribed to a religion of the heart
...
If God was everything, sin was nothing - an
assertion that Ranters like Laurence Clarkson and Alastair Coppe also tried to demonstrate by flagrantly violating the current sexual code or by
swearing and blaspheming in public
...
Once he had become a Ranter, he had
indulged what was obviously a long-suppressed craving to curse and swear
...
This could have been a reaction to the
repressive Puritan ethic, with its unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind
...
He certainly did not encourage his Friends to sin and hated the licentiousness of the Ranters, but he was trying to preach a more
optimistic anthropology and restore the balance
...
God himself had claimed in the Bible that he would make the darkness light
...
Julian of Norwich had believed
that sin was 'behovely' and somehow necessary
...
The extreme libertarianism
of Ranters like Coppe and Clarkson can be seen as a rough and ready attempt to shake off an oppressive Christianity which had terrorised the
faithful with its doctrine of an angry, vengeful God
...

Social historians have noted that Western Christianity is unique among the world-religions for its violent alternations of periods of repression
and permissiveness
...
The more relaxed moral climate
of the Enlightenment would be succeeded in many parts of the West by the repressions of the Victorian period, which was accompanied by an
upsurge of a more fundamentalist religiosity
...
This is a complex phenomenon,
which doubtless has no single cause
...

The theologians and mystics of the Middle Ages may have preached a God of love but the fearful Dooms over the cathedral doors depicting the
tortures of the damned told another story
...

Ranters like Clarkson and Coppe were flouting Christian taboos and proclaiming the holiness of sin at the same time as the witchcraft craze
was raging in various countries of Europe
...

The new born-again Christianity that was beginning to appear in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was frequently
unhealthy and characterised by violent and sometimes dangerous emotions and reversals
...
It had been inspired by the evangelical preaching of George
Whitfield, a disciple and colleague of the Wesleys, and the hell-fire sermons of the Yale graduate Jonathan Edwards (1703-58)
...
He describes his
parishioners there as nothing out of the ordinary: they were sober, orderly and good but lacking in religious fervour
...
But in 1734 two young people died shockingly sudden deaths and this (backed up, it
would appear, by some fearful words by Edwards himself) plunged the town into a frenzy of religious fervour
...

In about six months, there had been about three hundred born-again conversions from all classes of society: sometimes there would be as many
as five a week
...

As he repeatedly said, 'God seemed to have gone out of his usual way' of behaving in New England and was moving the people in a marvellous
and miraculous manner
...

Sometimes, Edwards tells us, they were quite 'broken' by the fear of God and 'sunk into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to

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...
This would be succeeded by an equally extreme elation, when they felt suddenly saved
...
Sometimes they have not been
able to forbear crying out with a loud voice, expressing their great admiration'
...

These intensely emotional reversals have continued to be characteristic of religious revival in America
...
The Awakening spread like a contagion to surrounding towns
and villages, just as it would a century later when New York state would be called the Burned-Over District, because it was so habitually
scorched by the flames of religious fervour
...
They could not tear themselves away from their Bibles and even forgot to eat
...
Again, he
was not speaking metaphorically: Edwards was a true Western literalist in religious matters
...
When God had withdrawn, as abruptly
as he had come, his place was - again, quite literally - taken by Satan
...
First one poor soul killed
himself by cutting his throat and: 'After this multitudes in this and other towns seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon
them, to do as this person had done
...
Now!"' Two people went
mad with 'strange, enthusiastic delusions'
...
The God of Jonathan Edwards and his converts,
who revealed himself in such abnormality and distress, was clearly just as frightening and arbitrary in his dealings with his people as ever
...
It also shows a conviction that we find also in the scientific religion of Newton that God
is directly responsible for everything that happens in the world, however bizarre
...
Edwards had many opponents
who were extremely critical of the Awakening
...
But in Religion and the American Mind; From the Great Awakening to the Revolution, Alan Heimart argues that the new birth
of the Awakening was an evangelical version of the Enlightenment ideal of the pursuit of happiness: it represented an 'existential liberation
from a world in which "everything awakens powerful apprehension"'
...
The experience of being born again, Edwards
had argued, resulted in a feeling of joy and a perception of beauty that was quite different from any natural sensation
...
We
should also recall that the philosophical Enlightenment was also experienced as a quasi-religious liberation
...
The God of Jonathan Edwards also contributed to the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1775
...
It was Edwards and his colleagues who led Americans of the lower classes to take the first steps towards revolution
...

The Awakening itself (despite its tragic finale) made people believe that the process of Redemption described in the Bible had already begun
...
Edwards gave the doctrine of the Trinity a political interpretation: the Son was 'the deity generated by
God's understanding' and thus the blueprint of the New Commonwealth; the Spirit, 'the deity subsisting in act', was the force which would
accomplish this masterplan in time
...

The society would express the 'excellencies' of God himself
...
{46} The God of Jonathan Edwards,
therefore, would be incarnated in the Commonwealth: Christ was seen as embodied in a good society
...
Their God did not necessarily mean obscurantism, as the
American liberals sometimes imagined
...
As we have seen, they preferred a God who was literally active in the world: their doctrine of predestination showed that in their view
God was actually responsible for everything that happened here below, for good or ill
...

In some respects, the Calvinists were more adventurous in their thinking than the Liberals who opposed their revivalism and preferred simple
faith to the 'speculative, perplexing notions' that disturbed them in the preaching of revivalists like Whitfield and Edwards
...
{47}

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...
In the apocalyptic year of 1666, a Jewish Messiah
declared that Redemption was at hand and was accepted ecstatically by Jews all over the world
...
As he grew up he
developed strange tendencies which we would perhaps diagnose today as manic-depressive
...
These were succeeded by an elation that bordered on ecstasy
...
He believed that he was the long-awaited Messiah
...
He became a wanderer among the Jewish communities of the
Ottoman empire
...
In 1662 Shabbetai set off for Jerusalem: at this point he was in a depressive phase and believed that he must
be possessed by demons
...

Like Shabbetai, Nathan had studied the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria
...
When he descended to these depths, he was fighting against the evil powers
of the Other Side, releasing the divine sparks in the realm of the kelipoth which could only be redeemed by the Messiah himself
...
At first Shabbetai would have none of this but eventually
Nathan's eloquence persuaded him
...
Leading Rabbis dismissed all this as dangerous nonsense but many of the Jews of Palestine flocked to
Shabbetai, who chose twelve disciples to be the judges of the tribes of Israel, which would soon reassemble
...
Centuries of persecution and ostracism had isolated the Jews of Europe from the
mainstream and this unhealthy state of affairs had conditioned many to believe that the future of the world depended upon the Jews alone
...
All this helped the cult of Shabbetai Zevi
...
It became dangerous
for Jews who had their reservations about Shabbetai to speak out
...
Pamphlets and broadsheets spread the glad tidings in English, Dutch, German and Italian
...
In the Ottoman empire, prophets wandered through the streets describing visions in which they had seen
Shabbetai seated upon a throne
...
Eventually, when Shabbetai arrived in Istanbul in January 1666, he was arrested as a rebel and imprisoned
in Gallipoli
...
All over the world, Jews had experienced an inner freedom and liberation
that seemed similar to the ecstasy that the Kabbalists had experienced for a few moments when they contemplated the mysterious world of the
sefiroth
...
For the first
time, Jews felt that their lives had value; redemption was no longer a vague hope for the future but was real and full of meaning in the present
...
The eyes of the whole Jewish world were fixed on Gallipoli, where
Shabbetai had even made an impression on his captors
...
Shabbetai began to sign his
letters: 'I am the Lord your God, Shabbetai Zevi'
...
The Sultan gave him the choice of conversion to Islam or death: Shabbetai chose Islam and was immediately released
...

Naturally the appalling news devastated his supporters, many of whom instantly lost their faith
...
To this day, many Jews are embarrassed by
this Messianic debacle and find it hard to deal with
...
Recently, however, scholars
have followed the late Gershom Scholem in trying to understand the meaning of this strange episode and its more significant aftermath
...
The experience of redemption had
been so profound that they could not believe that God had allowed them to be deluded
...
Faced with the choice of abandoning their new-found hope or accepting
an apostate Messiah, a surprising number of Jews of all classes refused to submit to the hard facts of history
...
Yet again, he
had been impelled to violate the deepest sanctities of his people in order to descend into the realm of darkness to liberate the kelipoth
...
In Turkey and
Greece, about two hundred families remained loyal to Shabbetai: after his death they decided to follow his example in order to continue his

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...
They remained secretly loyal to Judaism, keeping in close touch with the Rabbis and
congregating in the clandestine synagogues in one another's houses
...
There is still a small group of Donmeh (apostates) in Turkey,
who live outwardly impeccable Islamic lives but cling passionately to their Judaism in secret
...
There seem to have been more of
these crypto-Sabbatarians than was once believed
...
Scholem argues that even though this Messianism never became a mass movement in
Judaism, its numbers should not be underestimated
...
The notion of apostasy as a mystery assuaged their guilt and sorrow
...
Some, like Benjamin Kohn of Reggio and Abraham Rorigo of
Modena, were eminent Kabbalists who kept their link with the movement secret
...
In 1759 the disciples of the strange
and sinister prophet Jacob Frank followed the example of their Messiah and converted en masse to Christianity, adhering to Judaism in secret
...
Some sixteen hundred years earlier, another group of Jews had been unable to
abandon their hope in a scandalous Messiah, who had died the death of a common criminal in Jerusalem
...
In both cases, the disciples proclaimed the birth of a new form of
Judaism which had replaced the old; they embraced a paradoxical creed
...
Both groups believed that the grain of wheat had to rot in the earth
in order to bear fruit; they believed that the old Torah was dead and had been replaced by the new law of the Spirit
...

Like many Christians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sabbatarians believed that they were standing on the threshold of a new
world
...
Sabbatarians who believed that they were living in the Messianic era felt free to break away from traditional ideas about God, even if
that meant accepting an apparently blasphemous theology
...
i7o6), who had been born a Marrano and had started by
studying Christian theology, believed that because of their sins all Jews had been destined to become apostates
...
But God had saved his people from this terrible fate by allowing the Messiah to make the supreme sacrifice on their behalf
...

Like the Christians and Deists of the Enlightenment, Cardazo was attempting to peel away what he saw as inauthentic accretions from his
religion and to return to the pure faith of the Bible
...
Now Cardazo unconsciously revived this old idea but completely reversed it
...
In every civilisation people had
proved the existence of a First Cause: this was the God of Aristotle, who had been worshipped by the whole pagan world
...
The second God, who had revealed himself to Abraham, Moses and the prophets, was quite different: he had
created the world out of nothing, had redeemed Israel and was its God
...
Consequently they had confused the two Gods and taught the Jews that they
were one and the same
...

How did the two Gods relate to one another? Cardazo evolved a Trinitarian theology to account for this additional deity without abandoning
Jewish monotheism
...
This was the First Cause
...
The third parzufwas the Shekinah, who had been exiled from the Godhead as Isaac Luria had described
...

Cardazo was a moderate Sabbatarian
...
But in proposing a Trinity, he was breaking a taboo
...
But a surprising number of Jews
were drawn to this forbidden vision
...

Sabbatarians like Nehemiah Hayim, Samuel Primo and Jonathan Eibeschutz came to the conclusion that the 'mystery of the Godhead' (sod haelohut) had not been fully revealed in 1666
...
Redemption would be a gradual process and during this time of transition it was permissible to continue to practise the Old Law

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...
This revised Sabbatarianism explained how many Rabbis who
believed that Shabbetai Zevi had been the Messiah were able to stay in the pulpits during the eighteenth century
...
They came to believe that Shabbetai
Zevi had not only been the Messiah but an incarnation of God
...
Abraham Cardazo taught a
doctrine that was similar to St Paul's belief in the glorification of Jesus after his resurrection: when the Redemption had begun at the time of his
apostasy, Shabbetai had been raised to the Trinity of parzufim: 'the Holy One [Malka Kadisha] blessed be He, removed himself upward and
Shabbetai Zevi ascended to be God in his place
...
Soon the Donmeh, who had converted to Islam, took the idea a step further and decided that the God of
Israel had descended and been made flesh in Shabbetai
...
Each generation of apostates, therefore,
had a leader who was an incarnation of the divine
...
He has been described as the most frightening figure in the entire history of Judaism
...
Frank preached that the Old Law
had been abrogated
...
In his Slowa Panskie (The Sayings of the
Lord), he took Sabbatarianism over the edge into nihilism
...
' {50} There is a disturbing similarity to
some of the sayings of Christ, who had also claimed that he had come to bring not peace but the sword
...
His nihilistic creed was not too dissimilar, perhaps, to that of his younger
contemporary the Marquis de Sade
...
This
meant not only the rejection of all religion but the commission of ‘strange acts' that resulted in voluntary abasement and utter shamelessness
...
He believed that each of the three parzufim of the Sabbatarian
Trinity would be represented on earth by a different Messiah
...
The third Messiah, who would incarnate the Shekinah, would be a woman whom Frank called 'the Virgin'
...
It would not be redeemed until men had adopted Frank's nihilistic gospel
...
It is my task to annihilate all this so that the Good God can reveal himself
...
' {52}
In this last saying, we can sense the connection between Frank's dark vision and the rationalist Enlightenment
...
After Frank's death, Frankism lost much of its anarchism, retaining only a belief in Frank as God incarnate and what Scholem calls an
'intense, luminous feeling of salvation'
...
Similarly, the Donmeh who had converted to Islam
would often be active Young Turks in the early years of the twentieth century and many assimilated completely in the secular Turkey of Kemal
Ataturk
...
Sabbatarianism, which had seemed such a backward, obscurantist religion, had helped them to liberate themselves from the old ways
and made them susceptible to new ideas
...
Often these
reforming maskilim had ideas that were a strange amalgam of old and new
...
Not everybody could make their way into
modernity via the difficult paths of science and philosophy: the mystical creeds of radical Christians and Jews enabled them to work towards a
secularism that they would once have found abhorrent by addressing the deeper, more primitive regions of the psyche
...

At the same time as Jacob Frank was evolving his nihilistic gospel, other Polish Jews had found a very different Messiah
...

Many of the most learned and spiritual Jewish families of Poland had either been killed or had migrated to the comparative safety of Western
Europe
...
The Rabbis who remained were often of low calibre and had allowed the house of study to shield them from the grim reality of the
world outside
...
The Shabbetai Zevi disaster had also contributed to the general disillusion and anomie
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

the Christian Pietist movements, which had also sprung up in the Russian Orthodox Church
...
There were reports of Jews falling into ecstasy, breaking into song and clapping their hands during prayer
...

Israel ben Eliezer was not a scholar
...

He and his wife lived in abject poverty in southern Poland in a hut in the Carpathian mountains
...
Then he and his wife became innkeepers
...
He journeyed through the villages of Poland, healing the illnesses of the peasants and townsfolk with herbal
remedies, amulets and prayers
...
Israel had thus
now become a Baal Shem Tov, a Master of the Good Name
...
Most of the healers were content with magic but the Besht was also a mystic
...
Instead of seeing the fall of the divine sparks to the world as a disaster, the Besht
taught his Hasidim to look on the bright side
...
A devout Jew could experience God in the tiniest action of his daily life - while he was eating, drinking or making
love to his wife - because the divine sparks were everywhere
...

The Besht abandoned Luria's grand schemes for the salvation of the world
...
As Hillel Zeitlin, one of the Besht's disciples, explained, the
Hasid has a unique responsibility to his particular environment, which he alone can perform: 'Every man is a redeemer of a world that is all his
own
...
' {54} Kabbalists had
devised a discipline of concentration (devekuth) which helped mystics to become aware of the presence of God wherever they turned
...
{55} This sense
of God's presence had brought them to a tremulous, ecstatic joy
...
This brought him into conflict with the
establishment, who feared that Jews would abandon the study of Torah in favour of these potentially dangerous and eccentric devotions
...
The Besht did not want his disciples to abandon the Torah
...
When a Hasid performed one of the commandments of the Law while practising devekuth, he was binding
himself to God, the Ground of all being, at the same time as he was reuniting the divine sparks in the person or thing he was dealing with at the
moment to the Godhead
...
Sometimes the Hasidim went to somewhat dubious lengths in their zeal to save the world: many of
them took to smoking a great deal to rescue the sparks in their tobacco! Baruch of Medzibozh (1757-1810), another of the Besht's grandsons,
had a splendid court with wonderful furniture and tapestries, which he justified by claiming that he was only concerned for the sparks in these
magnificent trappings
...
i825) used to eat huge meals to reclaim the divine sparks in his food
...
The disciplines of devekuth were an imaginative attempt to
strip the veil of familiarity from the world to discover the glory within
...
The Hasidim also become aware of what they saw as a divine energy coursing through the whole
created world which transformed it into a glorious place, despite the sorrows of exile and persecution
...
{57} The whole world
seemed appareled in celestial light and the Hasidim would shout with joy in their ecstasy, clapping their hands, and break into song
...

Unlike Spinoza and some of the Christian radicals, the Besht did not mean that everything was God but that all beings existed in God who gave
them life and being
...
He did not believe that the Hasidim would become divine through
the practice of devekuth or even achieve unity with God - such temerity seemed extravagant to all Jewish mystics
...
Most were simple, unsophisticated men and they often expressed themselves
extravagantly but they were aware that their mythology was not to be taken literally
...
Their vision was an
imaginative attempt to depict the interdependence of God and mankind
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

that in some sense they were creating him by building him up anew after his disintegration
...
Again, they expressed this insight in the mythological terms of Kabbalah
...
{58} It was a distinctively Jewish expression of the Greek or Buddhist belief in the enlightenment which made human beings aware
of their own transcendent dimension
...
The Hasidim developed their own form of
incarnationalism
...
As Rabbi Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl (1730-1797) wrote, the Zaddik 'is truly a part of God, and has a place, as it were,
with Him'
...
He was a living proof that this enlightenment was possible
...
They would crowd around their Zaddik, hanging on his every word, as he told
them a story about the Besht or expounded a verse of Torah
...

The Hasidim would attempt to follow their Zaddik in his ascent to the ultimate together with their master, in a group
...
The opposition was led by Rabbi Elijah ben Soloman Zalman (1770-1797), the Gaon or head of the academy of Vilna
...
Yet he was an ardent Kabbalist as well as a master of Talmud
...
which he studied with the flame of the love and fear of the divine majesty, with
holiness and purity and a wonderful devekuth'
...
He had marvellous
dreams and revelations, yet always insisted that the study of Torah was his chief way of communing with God
...
As Rabbi Hayyim continues: 'He used to say that God created
sleep to this end only, that man should attain the insights that he cannot attain, even after much labour and effort, when the soul is joined to the
body because the body is like a curtain dividing
...
The Gaon of Vilna's remarks about sleep show a clear
perception of the role of the unconscious: we have all urged friends to 'sleep on' a problem in the hope of finding a solution that has eluded
them in their waking hours
...
This has also been the
experience of such scientists as Archimedes, who discovered his famous Principle in the bath
...
As long as they wrestle with
logic and concepts, they are, necessarily, imprisoned in ideas or forms of thought that have already been established
...
They speak in terms of vision and inspiration
...
Commenting on this experience, the twentieth-century historian Arnold Toynbee described it as a 'communion': 'he
was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow
of a vast tide
...
{62} Albert Einstein also claimed that mysticism was 'the sower of all true art and science':
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty,
which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the centre of all
true religiousness
...
{63}
In this sense, the religious enlightenment discovered by such mystics as the Besht can be seen as akin to some other achievements of the Age of
Reason: it was enabling simpler men and women to make the imaginative transition to the New World of modernity
...
He founded a new form of Hasidism which attempted to blend mysticism with rational contemplation
...
Like earlier mystics who had
amalgamated philosophy with spirituality, Zalman believed that metaphysical speculation was an essential preliminary to prayer because it
revealed the limitations of the intellect
...
Zalman explained: 'From the standpoint of the Infinite, blessed be He,
all the worlds are as if literally nothing and nihility
...
It is only because
of our limited perceptions that it appears to exist separately but this is an illusion
...
Indeed, the doctrine of God's transcendence is another illusion of our
minds which find it almost {m} possible to get beyond sense impressions
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

sensory perception to see things from God's point of view
...

Habad shared the Enlightenment confidence in the ability of the human mind to reach God but did so through the time-honoured method of
paradox and mystical concentration
...
Even if people seemed to lack spiritual talent, they could achieve enlightenment
...
As Rabbi Dov
Baer of Lubavitch (1773-1827), Zalman's son, explained in his Tract on Ecstasy, one had to begin with a heartbreaking perception of
inadequacy
...
It was painful to
give up our intellectual and imaginative prejudices about the world and most people were deeply reluctant to give up their point of view
...
Like the Sufi who had experienced 'fana, the
Hasid would achieve ecstasy
...
' {65} The disciplines of Habad made Kabbalah a tool of psychological analysis and self-knowledge,
teaching the Hasid to descend, sphere by sphere, ever more deeply into his inner world until he reached the centre of himself
...
The mind could discover God by the exercise of reason and imagination but this would not be
the objective God of the philosophers and such scientists as Newton, but a profoundly subjective reality inseparable from the self
...
There had been nothing comparable in the Muslim world at this time, although this is difficult for a
Western person to ascertain because eighteenth-century Islamic thought has not been much studied
...
Recently,
however, this perspective has been challenged as being too simplistic
...
The Indian Sufi Shah Walli-Ullah of Delhi (170362) was perhaps the first to sense the new spirit
...
Even though he did not like the Shiah, he believed that Sunnis and Shiis should find
common ground
...
Walli-Ullah seemed to have had a
presentiment of the consequences of colonialism: his son would lead a jihad against the British
...
Muslims were still happy to draw on the riches of
the past in religious matters and Walli-Ullah is an example of the power that Sufism could still inspire
...

Like the Christian reformers of the sixteenth century, Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab (d 1784), a jurist of Najd in the Arabian peninsula, wanted to
restore Islam to the purity of its beginnings and get rid of all later accretions
...
All suggestion of an
incarnational theology was condemned, including devotion {1} Sufi saints and the Shii Imams
...
Al-Wahhab managed to convert Muhammad ibn Saud, ruler
of a small principality in Central Arabia, and together they initiated a reform which was an attempt to reproduce the ummah of the Prophet and
his Companions
...
They
also waged a jihad against their imperial masters the Ottomans, believing that Arabs, not Turks, should lead the Muslim peoples
...
Pilgrims to Mecca had been impressed by this new piety, which seemed fresher
and more vigorous than much current Sufism
...
Like Jews and Christians, Muslims were
beginning to step back from the mystical ideal and adopt a more rationalistic type of piety
...
In 1729 Jean Meslier, a country priest who had led an exemplary life,
died an atheist
...
This expressed his disgust with humanity and his inability to believe
in God
...
Religion was a device used by the
rich to oppress the poor and render them powerless
...
His denial of God was too strong meat for the philosophers
...
By the end of the century, however, there were a few philosophers who were proud to call themselves
atheists, though they remained a tiny minority
...
Hitherto 'atheist' had been a term of abuse, a particularly
nasty slur to hurl at your enemies
...

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) had taken the new empiricism to its logical conclusion
...
In the Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion, Hume disposed of the argument that purported to prove God's existence from the design of the universe, arguing
that it rested on analogical arguments that were inconclusive
...
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who had written the Dialogues in 1750, wisely left them unpublished
...

Diderot himself denied that he was an atheist
...
When Voltaire objected to his
book, he replied; 'I believe in God, although I live very well with the atheists
...
very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but
to believe or not to believe in God is not important at all
...
Once 'God'
has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, 'he' does not exist
...
The Hidden God had become Deus Otiosus: 'Whether God exists
or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths
...
In his Pensees Phtlosophiques, published in 1746, Diderot had
dismissed Pascal's religious experience as too subjective: he and the Jesuits had both been passionately concerned with God but had very
different ideas about him
...
At this point, three years before the
publication of A Letter to the Blind, Diderot did believe that science - and science alone -could refute atheism
...
Instead of examining the vast motion of the Diverse, he urged people to examine the underlying
structure of nature
...
In the Pensees Diderot
still believed that reason could prove the existence of God
...

Three years later, however, Diderot had come to question Newton and was no longer convinced that the external world provided any evidence
for God
...
But he could only express this revolutionary and
inflammatory thought in fictional terms
...
Diderot makes
Saunderson ask Holmes how the argument from design could be reconciled with such 'monsters' and accidents as himself, who demonstrated
anything but intelligent and benevolent planning:
What is this world, Mr Holmes, but a complex, subject to cycles of change, all of which show a continual tendency to destruction:
a rapid succession of beings that appear one by one, flourish and disappear; a merely transitory symmetry and a momentary
appearance of order
...
To introduce 'God' to explain things that we cannot explain at present was a failure of humility
...
'
In Diderot's view there was no need of a Creator
...
It is this law of matter -not a Divine Mechanick - which is responsible for the apparent design we
think we see
...
Diderot had taken Spinoza one step further
...
He was not alone in his belief: scientists such as Abraham Trembley and John
Turbeville Needham had discovered the principle of generative matter, which was now surfacing as an hypothesis in biology, microscopy,
zoology, natural history and geology
...
Even the philosophers who frequented the
salon of Paul Heinrich, Baron of Holbach (1723-89) did not publicly espouse atheism, though they enjoyed open and frank discussion
...
There was no supernatural alternative to nature, which, Holbach argued, was 'but an immense chain of causes
and effects which unceasingly flow from one another'
...
It was also
an act of despair
...
They turned to the imaginary comforts of religion and philosophy in an attempt to establish some illusory sense of control, trying to
propitiate an 'agency' they imagine lurking behind the scenes to ward off terror and disaster
...
The cradle of religion, therefore, was ignorance and fear and a
mature, enlightened man must climb out of it
...
First men had worshipped the forces of nature
...
The rot had set in when people had started to personify the sun, wind and sea to create gods in their
own image and likeness
...
Poets and theologians had done nothing over the centuries but
make a gigantic, exaggerated man, whom they will render illusory by dint of heaping together incompatible qualities
...
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have formed a being totally inconceivable
...
Because it lacks coherence, the idea of
God is bound to disintegrate
...
The 'hautes perfections' that Descartes claimed to have proved were simply the product of his imagination
...
He had discovered absolute space and created a God out of the void who was simply 'un homme
puissanf, a divine despot terrorising his human creators and reducing them to the condition of slaves
...
Science would replace religion
...
' {70} There are no higher truths or underlying patterns, no grand
design
...
All her works are the
effects of her own energy, and of those agents or causes which she makes, which she contains, which she puts in action
...
By the end of the century, Paul Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) had ejected God from
physics
...
When Napoleon asked him:
'Who was the author of this?' Laplace simply replied; {l} je n 'avals pas besoin de cette hypothese-la'
...
He did not exist like the other
phenomena we experience
...
They had seized upon the new science to prove the objective reality of God as though he could be tested and
analysed like anything else
...
It was not long before other scientists and philosophers triumphantly declared that God was dead
...
The advances in science and technology were creating a new
spirit of autonomy and independence which led some to declare their independence of God
...
Indeed, by the end of the century, a significant number of people were beginning to feel that if God was not yet dead, it was the
duty of rational, emancipated human beings to kill him
...
Or had it? The
West had now seized the initiative and its activities would have fateful consequences for Jews and Muslims, who would be forced to review
their own position
...
The anthropomorphic, personal God of Western
Christendom was vulnerable
...
Yet his demise was not experienced as a joyous liberation but
attended by doubt, dread and, in some cases, agonising conflict
...

There was also a reaction against the cult of reason
...
Some reinterpreted
dogmas and mysteries of Christianity in a secular way
...
One of the themes of this 'natural supernaturalism', as the American literary critic M
...
Abrams has called it, {1}
was that of the creative imagination
...

The English poet John Keats (1798-1821) put it succinctly: 'The imagination is like Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth
...
In the same letter, Keats had written of the imagination as a sacred faculty: 'I am certain of nothing but of
the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination -what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth - whether it existed
before or not
...
Keats also described a state of mind which he called 'Negative
Capability', 'when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'
...

Medieval mystics had described the experience of God in rather the same way
...
Although Keats was critical of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who
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...

Wordsworth's best poetry celebrated the alliance of the human mind and the natural world, which acted and reacted upon one another to create
vision and meaning
...
In the Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, he described the receptive state of mind that resulted in an ecstatic vision of reality:
that blessed mood
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: that serene and blessed mood
In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While, with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things
...
People did not need learned books and theories
...
{6} Insight began with a subjective experience, although this had to be 'wise', not uninformed and self-indulgent
...

Wordsworth had discerned a 'spirit' which was at one and the same time immanent in and distinct from natural phenomena:
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of somediing far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things
...
Wordsworth was careful not to give this experience a
conventionally religious interpretation though he was quite happy to talk about 'God', on other occasions, especially in an ethical context
...
God spoke through the
conscience in the summons of duty; he corrected the desires of the heart but seemed to have little in common with the 'presence' that
Wordsworth had felt in Nature
...
Wordsworth used it to describe the spirit which, with true mystical agnosticism, he refused to
name because it did not fit into any of the categories he knew
...
In his early poetry, William Blake
(1757-1827) had used a dialectical method: terms such as 'innocence' and 'experience', which seemed diametrically opposed to one another,
were discovered to be half-truths of a more complex reality
...
In The Songs of Innocence
and Experience, two contrary states of the human soul are both revealed to be inadequate until they are synthesised: innocence must become
experience and experience itself fall to the lowest depths before the recovery of true innocence
...
{9}

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...
There could be no true vision until human beings recognised
their lapsed condition
...

Blake had rebelled against the vision of the Enlightenment, which had attempted to systematise truth
...
This God had been made to promulgate unnatural laws to
repress sexuality, liberty and spontaneous joy
...
Yet the wholly other God, Creator of the World, undergoes mutation in the
poems
...
{10} He even becomes Satan, the enemy of mankind
...
There is no longer an autonomous deity in a world of his own, who demands that men and women submit to an
external, heteronymous law
...
God has died voluntarily in Jesus and the transcendent, alienating God is no more
...
" {11}
Blake rebelled against the institutional churches but some theologians were attempting to incorporate the Romantic vision into official
Christianity
...
In 1799, the year after Wordsworth and Coleridge had published the Lyrical Ballads in England, Friedrich Schliermacher
(1768-1834) published On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, his own Romantic manifesto, in Germany
...
{12} Religious faith could not be confined to the
propositions of the creeds: it involved an emotional apprehension and an interior surrender
...
When we had come to the limit of reason, feeling would complete the journey to the Absolute
...
Feeling was not opposed
to human reason but an imaginative leap that takes us beyond the particular to an apprehension of the whole
...

Western theology had tended to over-emphasise the importance of rationality ever since Thomas Aquinas, a tendency which had increased
since the Reformation
...
He made it clear that feeling was not an end in
itself and could not provide a complete explanation of religion
...

Schliermacher defined the essence of religion as 'the feeling of absolute dependence'
...
In
context, the phrase refers to the sense of reverence that arises in us when we contemplate the mystery of life
...
The prophets of Israel had experienced this as a profound shock when they had their visions
of holiness
...

Schliermacher's distinguished pupil Rudolf Otto would explore this experience in his important book The Idea of the Holy, showing that when
human beings are confronted with this transcendence, they no longer feel that they are the alpha and omega of existence
...
He was aware that
Christianity was beginning to seem an outmoded creed: some Christian doctrines were misleading and made the faith vulnerable to the new
scepticism
...
Schliermacher's disciple Albrecht Ritschl
(1822-89) saw the doctrine as a flagrant instance of Hellenisation
...

{14} Yet Schliermacher and Ritschl had failed to see that each generation had to create its own imaginative conception of God, just as each
Romantic poet had to experience truth upon his own pulse
...
As the West entered the modern technical age, the older ideas of God would prove to be
inadequate
...
On his deathbed he said: 'I must
think the deepest, speculative thoughts, and they are to me completely at one with the most intimate religious sensations
...

During the nineteenth century, one major philosopher after another rose up to challenge the traditional view of God, at least the 'God' who
prevailed in the West
...
We
have seen that though the idea of God as the Supreme Being had gained ascendancy in the West, other monotheistic traditions had gone out of
their way to separate themselves from this type of theology
...
All had suggested, at one time or another, that

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...

Over the centuries, the West had gradually lost sight of this more imaginative conception of God
...
Not surprisingly
this notion of {Was} quite unacceptable to many people in the post-revolutionary world, since it seemed to condemn human beings to an
ignoble servitude and an unworthy dependence that was incompatible with human dignity
...
Their criticisms inspired many of their contemporaries to do the same; they seemed to be saying
something entirely new yet when they addressed themselves to the question of ‘God', they often unconsciously reiterated old insights by other
monotheists in the past
...
This was ironic,
since he regarded Judaism as an ignoble religion which was responsible for the primitive conception of God that had perpetrated great wrong
...
Jesus had tried to liberate men and
women from this base servitude but Christians had fallen into the same trap as the Jews and promoted the idea of a divine Despot
...
Hegel's highly inaccurate view of Judaism,
based on the New Testament polemic, was a new type of metaphysical anti-Semitism
...
In The Phenomenology of Mind (1817), he substituted the idea of a Spirit which was the life-force of
the world for the conventional deity
...
As in Kabbalah again, the Spirit was dependent upon the world and upon human beings for its fulfilment
...
Like Blake, he expressed this insight dialectically, seeing
humanity and Spirit, finite and infinite, as two halves of a single truth which are mutually interdependent and involved in the same process of
self-realisation
...
Indeed, Hegel's view of the kenosis of the Spirit, which empties itself to become immanent and incarnate in the
world, has much in common with the incarnational theologies that have developed in all three
Hegel was a man of the Enlightenment as well as a Romantic, however, and he therefore valued reason more than the imagination
...
Like the Faylasufs, he saw reason and philosophy as superior to religion, which was stuck in
representational modes of thought
...

His philosophy seemed ludicrously optimistic to Artur Schopenhauer (i 789-1860), who had defiantly scheduled his lectures at the same time as
Hegel's in Berlin in 1819, the year of the publication of his book The World as Will and Idea
...
This bleak vision appealed to the darker spirits of
the Romantic movement
...
Schopenhauer believed that Hinduism and Buddhism (and
those Christians who had asserted that everything was vanity) had arrived at a just conception of reality when they had claimed that every thing
in the world was an illusion
...
Schopenhauer had no time for Judaism and Islam, which had in his view an absurdly simplistic and purposive view of
history
...
Many can no longer subscribe to a God who is Lord of History
...
It had nothing in
common with the Protestant conception of the absolute sovereignty of God, which meant that men and women could contribute nothing
towards their own salvation but were entirely dependent upon a deity outside themselves
...
The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55)
insisted that the old creeds and doctrines had become idols, ends in themselves and substitutes for the ineffable reality of God
...
Others, however, wanted
to root humanity in this world and to cut off the notion of a Great Alternative
...
The idea of God had alienated us
from our own nature by positing an impossible perfection over against our human frailty
...
Feuerbach had put his finger on an essential weakness in the Western tradition which had always been
perceived as a danger in monotheism
...
Other traditions had found various ways of countering this danger but in the West it was unfortunately true that the idea of God had
become increasingly externalised and had contributed to a very negative conception of human nature
...
It is
not surprising that philosophers such as Feuerbach or Auguste Comte (1775-1857) who had a more positive view of humanity, wanted to get
rid of this deity which had caused widespread lack of confidence in the past
...
Jews and Christians had been called 'atheists' because they denied

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...
The new atheists of the nineteenth century were inveighing against the
particular conception of God current in the West rather than other notions of the divine
...
the opium of the people, which made this suffering bearable'
...
Since there was no meaning, value or
purpose outside the historical process, the idea of God could not help humanity
...
Yet
'God' was vulnerable to the Marxist critique, since he had often been used by the establishment to approve a social order in which the rich man
sat in his palace, while the poor man sat at its gate
...
The God who condoned
social injustice would have appalled Amos, Isaiah or Muhammad who had used the idea of God to quite different ends that were quite close to
the Marxist ideal
...

Charles Lyalls Principles of Geology (1830-33), which revealed the vast perspectives of geological time, and Charles Darwin's The Origin of
the Species (1859), which put forward the evolutionary hypothesis, seemed to contradict the biblical account of creation in Genesis
...
Indeed, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo had long been problematic
and had entered Judaism and Christianity relatively late; in Islam the creation of the world by al-Lah is taken for granted but there is no detailed
discussion of how this happened
...

Monotheists in all three religions had regarded the creation as a myth, in the most positive sense of the word: it was a symbolic account which
helped men and women to cultivate a particular religious attitude
...
But in the West there had been a tendency to regard the Bible as factually
true in every detail
...

There were, however, a significant number of Christians who saw immediately that Darwin's discoveries were by no means fatal to the idea of
God
...
It is true, however, that as Western secularism has spread, it has inevitably affected members of other faiths
...

Throughout history people have discarded a conception of God when it no longer works for them
...
In 1882 Friedrich Nietzsche resorted to similarly violent tactics when he proclaimed that God was dead
...
'
"Where has God gone?" he called out
...
We have killed him, - you and I! We are all his murderers!" ' An unimaginable but
irreversible event had torn mankind from its roots, thrown the earth off course and cast it adrift in a pathless universe
...
The death of God would lead to unparalleled despair and panic
...
'Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?" {7}
Nietzsche had realised that there had been a radical shift in the consciousness of the West which would make it increasingly difficult to believe
in the phenomenon most people described as 'God'
...
People felt that they were witnessing a new
dawn
...
To become worthy of
their deicide, human beings would have to become gods themselves
...
He also turned to the
ancient myth of perpetual recurrence and rebirth, found in such religions as Buddhism
...
Whatever goes comes back; whatever dies blooms again; whatever breaks is joined anew
...

The Christian God, Nietzsche taught, was pitiable, absurd and 'a crime against life'
...
There was no ultimate meaning or
value and human beings had no business to offer an indulgent alternative in 'God'
...
He had been used to alienate people from their humanity and from sexual passion by means of a life-denying asceticism
...

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) certainly regarded belief in God as an illusion that mature men and women should lay aside
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

not a lie but a device of the unconscious which needed to be decoded by psychology
...
God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness
...
It had promoted ethical
values which were essential to society
...
Science, the new logos, could
take God's place
...
Freud was emphatic about his faith in science, which
seemed almost religious in its intensity: 'No, our science is not an illusion! An illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give we
can get elsewhere
...
Alfred Adler (1870-1937) allowed that God was a projection but believed that it had
been helpful to humanity; it had been a brilliant and effective symbol of excellence
...
G
...
When asked by John Freeman in the famous Face to Face interview
whether he believed in God, Jung replied emphatically: 'I do not have to believe
...

Like many other Western people, Freud seemed unaware of this internalised, subjective God
...
People must outgrow God in their own good time: to force
them into atheism or secularism before they were ready could lead to an unhealthy denial and repression
...
Some of the atheists who wanted to abolish God certainly showed
signs of strain
...
Nietzsche was a tender-hearted, lonely man, plagued by ill-health, who was very different
from his Superman
...
He did not abandon God joyously, as the ecstasy of his prose might lead us to imagine
...
{20}
Like Hegel's, Nietzsche's theories were used by a later generation of Germans to justify the policies of National Socialism, a reminder that an
atheistic ideology can lead to just as cruel a crusading ethic as the idea of ‘God'
...
His demise was also attended by strain, desolation and dismay
...

Published in 1850, nine years before the publication of The Origin of the Species, the poem shows that Tennyson had already felt his faith
crumbling and himself reduced to
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light
And with no language but a cry
...
The doubt and dismay had spread to the Orthodox world, though the denial of God did not take on the precise lineaments of Western
doubt but was more in the nature of a denial of ultimate meaning
...
I have been tortured with longing to believe - am so, indeed, even now; and the yearning grows stronger the
more cogent the intellectual difficulties that stand in the way
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

His novel is similarly ambivalent
...
Yet he does not find this God acceptable, since he fails to
provide ultimate meaning for the tragedy of life
...
We shall see later in this chapter that Jews
would come to the same conclusion
...
Ambivalence and an obscure sense of dereliction
has continued to haunt the literature of the twentieth century, with its imagery of wasteland and of humanity waiting for a Godot which never
comes
...
By the end of the nineteenth
century, the mission civilisatrice of Europe was well under way
...
Between them they took over Tunisia (1881), Egypt (1882), the Sudan (1898) and Libya and Morocco (1912)
...
This colonial project only made a more silent process of
Westernisation official, since Europeans had been establishing a cultural and economic hegemony during the nineteenth century in the name of
modernisation
...
Trading posts and consular missions had
been established in Turkey and the Middle East which had undermined the traditional structure of these societies long before there was actual
Western rule
...
When the Moghuls had conquered India the Hindu population had absorbed many
Muslim elements into their own culture but eventually the indigenous culture had made a comeback
...

It was impossible for the colonised lands to catch up
...
Some Muslims came to accept the European assessment of them as 'Orientals',
lumped indiscriminately with Hindus and Chinese
...
In Iran, Shah Nasiruddin (184896) insisted that he despised his subjects
...
Innovation had been the essence of the modernising
process in Europe and the United States: it could not be achieved by imitation
...
{23}
On their side Europeans had come to believe that their culture was not only superior at the present time but had always been in the van of
progress
...
Indians, Egyptians and Syrians had to be Westernised for their own good
...
Every Anglo-Indian should always remember that
maxim
...

The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have
studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained
intelligence works like a piece of mechanism
...
Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a
somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty
...
{24}
One of the 'problems' that had to be overcome was Islam
...
During the colonial period, Islam was
viewed as a fatalistic religion that was chronically opposed to progress
...

Muslims had little time or energy to develop their understanding of God in the traditional way
...
Some saw Western secularism as the answer but what was positive and invigorating in Europe could only seem alien and
foreign in the Islamic world, since it had not developed naturally from their own tradition in its own time
...
Cut off from the roots of their culture, people felt disoriented and lost
...
The results were not at all as they had
expected
...
Sufi orders were abolished and went underground; the madrasahs were closed and the state training of the ulema ceased
...
Reza Khan, Shah of Iran
from 1925 to 1941, admired Ataturk and attempted a similar policy: the veil was banned; mullahs were forced to shave and wear the kepi

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...

Freud had wisely seen that any enforced repression of religion could only be destructive
...
If suppressed, the results are likely to be as explosive and destructive as any severe sexual repression
...
In Iran there was already an established tradition whereby the mullahs opposed the
Shahs in the name of the people
...
In 1872, when the Shah sold the monopoly for the
production, sale and export of tobacco to the British, putting Iranian manufacturers out of business, the mullahs issued a fatwa forbidding
Iranians to smoke
...
The holy city of Qom became an alternative to the despotic and
increasingly draconian regime in Teheran
...
In Turkey, the closure of the madrasahs led inevitably to the decline of the authority of the ulema
...

Other reformers were convinced that forcible repression was not the answer
...
There was a great deal that needed to change;
much had become backward-looking; there was superstition and ignorance
...
The Muslim
reformers were not hostile to the West
...
The modernisation of Western
society had - in some respects - created a new type of equality and the reformers told their people that these Christians seemed to live better
Islamic lives than the Muslims
...
The wealthier Muslims
were educated in Europe, absorbed its philosophy, literature and ideals and came back to their own countries eager to share what they had
learned
...

The reformers all had an intellectual bias and yet they were also nearly all associated with some form of Islamic mysticism
...
The
experience of God was not regarded as a clog but as a force for transformation at a deep level that would hasten the transition to modernity
...
As he toured Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt and India, al-Afghani attempted to be all things to all men
...

The mystical disciplines of Ishraqi mysticism help Muslims to feel at one with the world around them and to experience a liberating loss of the
boundaries that hedge in the self
...
{25} Religion was essential, though reform was necessary
...
Because he knew that the
West valued reason and regarded Islam and Orientals as irrational, al-Afghani tried to describe Islam as a faith distinguished by its ruthless cult
of reason
...
Al-Afghani was an activist
rather than a philosopher
...
Nevertheless, the
depiction of Islam in a way calculated to fit what is perceived as a Western ideal shows a new lack of confidence in the Muslim world that
would shortly become extremely destructive
...
He decided to concentrate his activities in Egypt
alone and to focus on the intellectual education of its Muslims
...
Consequently when Abduh began to study at the prestigious al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, he was soon disillusioned by its antiquated
syllabus
...
Some Christians in
the West felt that science was the enemy of faith but Muslim mystics had often used mathematics and science as an aid to contemplation
...
In the Islamic world there are grave reservations about Western politics but few find it a problem to reconcile their faith in God with
Western science
...
He never adopted a wholly Western lifestyle but liked to visit Europe regularly to refresh himself intellectually
...
Far from it; like any reformer, Abduh wanted to return to the roots of his faith
...
This did not entail a fundamentalist rejection of modernity,
however
...

The Shariah Law must be reformed to enable Muslims to get the intellectual freedom they required
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

Islam as a rational faith, arguing that in the Koran reason and religion had marched hand in hand for the first time in human history
...
It had 'advanced proof and demonstration, expounded the views of disbelievers and inveighed against them rationally'
...
It had caused division between piety and rationalism, which
had affected the intellectual standing of the ulema
...
Muslims should, therefore, return
to the more receptive and rational spirit of the Koran
...
He quoted the hadith:
'Reflect upon God's creation but not upon his nature or else you will perish
...
All that we can establish is the fact that God does not resemble any other being
...

In India the leading reformer was Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938) who became for the Muslims of India what Gandhi was for the Hindus
...
He was filled
with enthusiasm for Bergson, Nietzsche and A
...
Whitehead and tried to reinvigorate Falsafah in the light of their insights, seeing himself as a
bridge between East and West
...
Ever since the decline of the Moghul
empire in the eighteenth century, the Muslims of India had felt in a false position
...
Consequently they were even more defensive and insecure before the British
...

From such Western philosophers as Nietzsche, Iqbal had imbibed the importance of individualism
...
In order to realise their own unique nature, all human
beings must become more like God
...
The passivity and craven self-effacement (which Iqbal put down to Persian influence) of the Muslims of India must be laid aside
...
Like al-Afghani and Abduh, Iqbal tried to show that the empirical attitude, which was the key to progress, had
originated in Islam and passed to the West via Muslim science and mathematics during the Middle Ages
...
Muhammad's prophecy was the culmination of these intuitive efforts and rendered any further revelation unnecessary
...

Unfortunately individualism had become a new form of idolatry in the West, since it was now an end in itself
...
The genius of the individual could be used to dangerous effect if allowed absolutely free rein
...
It was the mission of Islam to uphold the nature of true individualism against the
Western corruption of the ideal
...
Unlike the
Superman who saw himself as supreme and despised the rabble, the Perfect Man was characterised by his total receptivity to the Absolute and
would carry the masses along with him
...
Eventually everybody would achieve perfect individuality in God
...
His misgivings about the
superman ideal were amply justified by events in Germany during the last years of his life
...
The year 1920
when Britain and France marched into the Middle East became known as the am-al-nakhbah, the Year of the Disaster, a word that has
connotations of cosmic catastrophe
...
The sense of shame and humiliation was acute
...
' {27} This had crucial religious implications
...

Islam, however, is a religion of success
...
Muslim history had seemed to confirm this
...
His
achievements had been compounded by the phenomenal advance of the Muslim empire during the seventh and eighth centuries
...
Muslim success had continued
...
Over the centuries, the ummah

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Now, however, something seemed to have gone
radically wrong with Muslim history and this inevitably affected the perception of God
...

The sense of shame was exacerbated when closer acquaintance with Europe revealed the depth of Western contempt for the Prophet and his
religion
...
God was no longer
centre stage
...

During that time, the journal had two editors
...
Because it is always difficult - even impossible - to incarnate the divine ideal in human life, Husain was
not dismayed by past or present failures of the ummah
...
Yet it is also clear that Husain could not imagine the predicament of a
person who wanted to but found that he could not believe: the reality of al-Lah is taken for granted
...
Smith notes that the style was essentially reverential and expressed an
intense and lively appreciation of the beauty and sublimity of nature which revealed the divine presence
...
His article is a meditation rather than a logical demonstration of God's existence and he was quite unconcerned that Western scientists
had long exploded this particular 'proof
...
The circulation of the magazine slumped
...
Wajdi's prime consideration was to assure his readers that Islam was 'all right'
...
The prime need is to justify, admire and applaud
...
Like his forebears, he constantly argued that the West was only teaching what Islam had discovered
centuries earlier but, unlike them, he scarcely referred to God
...
Smith concludes:
A true Muslim is not a man who believes in Islam - especially Islam in history; but one who believes in God and is committed to
the revelation through his Prophet
...
But commitment is missing
...
{28}
Instead, there is instability and lack of self-esteem: the opinion of the West has come to matter too desperately
...
People who were in touch with modernity had lost the
sense of God
...

The Jews of Europe had also been affected by hostile criticism of their faith
...
The first
to attempt this reinterpretation of the history of Israel was Solomon Formstecher (1808-89)
...
This Spirit did not depend upon the world, however, as Hegel had argued
...
Where Hegel had decried the use
of representational language, Formstecher argued that symbolism was the only appropriate vehicle for God-talk, since he lay beyond the reach
of philosophical concepts
...

Primitive, pagan religion had identified God with nature, Formstecher argued
...
When human beings had attained a greater degree of self-consciousness, they were ready to progress to a more sophisticated
idea of divinity
...
The prophets who
had arrived at this new conception of the divine preached an ethical religion
...
The Jews had been the first people to attain this ethical conception of God
...
They had thus advanced to a superior type of religious
consciousness, which enabled them to approach God freely
...
Instead they had learned to find God through their minds and individuality
...
Christianity, for example, had retained many pagan elements in its depiction of God
...

Like the Muslim reformers, the exponents of the Science of Judaism were anxious to present their religion as a wholly rational faith
...
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particularly eager to get rid of Kabbalah, which had become an embarrassment since the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco and the rise of Hasidism
...
A human being was
distinguished by the ability to say T
...
Pagan religion had not been able to
cultivate this autonomy, since in the very early stages of human development, the gift of self-consciousness seemed to come from above
...
Abraham, however, had
refused this pagan fatalism and dependence
...
Such a man will find God
in every aspect of life
...
Judaism was not the servile faith that gentiles imagined
...

Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), whose Guide for the Perplexed of our Time was published posthumously in 1841, did not recoil from
mysticism like his colleagues
...
He argued that the achievements of the Jews were not the result of an abject
dependence upon God, but of the workings of the collective consciousness
...
Thus at the time of the Exodus God had had to reveal his presence in miracles
...
The Jewish conception of the
worship of God was not the slavish dependence that the goyim imagined but corresponded almost exactly to the philosophic ideal
...
Yet this type of symbolic language was appropriate, since God exceeds all our ideas about him
...

The new confidence brought by emancipation was dealt a harsh blow with the outbreak of a vicious anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern
Europe under Tsar Nicholas II in 1881
...
In France, the first country to emancipate the Jews, there was an
hysterical surge of anti-Semitism when the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason in 1895
...
Yet in Germany before Adolf Hitler came to power, Jews still imagined that they
were safe
...
Concerned
above all with the accusation that Judaism was a servile faith, Cohen denied that God was an external reality that imposes obedience from on
high
...
Discussing the biblical story of the burning bush, when
God had defined himself to Moses as 'I am what I am' Cohen argued that this was a primitive expression of the fact that what we call 'God' is
simply being itself
...
In The
Religion of Reason Drawn from the sources of Judaism (published posthumously in 1919), Cohen still insisted that God was simply a human
idea
...
A mere ethical idea - such as 'God' - cannot console us
...

These ideas were developed out of all recognition by Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who evolved an entirely different conception of Judaism
which set him apart from his contemporaries
...
His independence can perhaps be explained by the fact that he had left Judaism as young man, become an agnostic and then
considered converting to Christianity before finally returning to Orthodox Judaism
...
Religion was not simply about morality but was essentially a meeting
with the divine
...
He distrusted Hegel's attempt to merge the Spirit with man and nature: if we simply see our
human consciousness as an aspect of the World Soul, we are no longer truly individuals
...
Each one of us is alone, lost and terrified in the crowd of humanity
...
God does not reduce our individuality, therefore, but enables us to attain full selfconsciousness
...
God is the Ground of being, so bound up with our own existence that we cannot
possibly talk to him, as though he were simply another person like ourselves
...
Instead the gulf
between him and human beings is bridged by the commandments of the Torah
...

They are sacraments, symbolic actions that point beyond themselves and introduce Jews to the divine dimension that underlies the being of
each one of us
...
They help us to cultivate a listening,
waiting attitude so that we are poised and attentive to the Ground of our existence
...
They
have to be appropriated by the individual so that each mitzvah ceases to be an external command but expresses my interior attitude, my inner
'must'
...
He, Rosenzweig,
would meet God in the symbolic gestures that were traditionally Jewish but a Christian would use different symbols
...
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The doctrines about God were not primarily confessional statements but they were symbols of interior attitudes
...
The myths of revelation expressed our
personal experience of God
...
As Creator, God is not concerned with his creatures until he reveals
himself to each one of them, but if he were not the Creator, that is, the Ground of all existence, the religious experience would have no meaning
for humanity as a whole
...
Rosenzweig's universal vision of religion made him suspicious of the
new political Judaism that was emerging as a response to the new anti-Semitism
...

But Jews who fell victim to the escalating anti-Semitism did not feel that they could afford this political disengagement
...
In 1882, the year after the first pogroms in
Russia, a band of Jews left Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine
...
The yearning for the return to Zion (the ancient name for 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
...
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
...
Others had no time for these Marxist dreams
...

Despite its avowed secularism, Zionism expressed itself instinctively in conventionally religious terminology and was essentially a religion
without God
...

Zionists even adopted the practice of giving themselves new names as a sign of the redeemed self
...

He was now his own man because he had identified himself with the lew national spirit, though he did not think that a Jewish state was feasible
in Palestine
...
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'
...
Instead of being directed towards a transcendent God, Jews sought fulfilment here below
...
In Zionism, hagshamah came to mean fulfilment, the embodiment of the hopes of Israel in the mundane world
...

Just how holy can be seen in the writings of the early pioneer Aaron B
...
1922), who had been an Orthodox Jew and Kabbalist until
the age of forty-seven when he was converted to Zionism
...
Joy!' In former times, he wrote, the experience of
reunion with the land of Israel would have been called a revelation of the Shekinah
...
When he described this holiness, Gordon used
Kabbalistic terms that had once been applied to the mysterious realm of God:
The soul of the Jew is the offspring of the natural environment of the land of Israel
...
Even the divine unknown seems to disappear in this clarity, slipping from limited manifest light
into infinite hidden light
...
{29}
At first this Middle Eastern landscape had been so different from Russia, his natural fatherland, that Gordon had found it frightening and alien
...
By working the land,
which Zionists claimed had been neglected by the Arabs, the Jews would conquer it for themselves and, at the same time, redeem themselves
from the alienation of exile
...
Their cultivation of the land led to a mystical experience of rebirth and universal love
...
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To the extent that my hands grew accustomed to labour, that my eyes and ears learned to see and hear and my heart to
understand what is in it, my soul too learned to skip upon the hills, to rise, to soar - to spread out the expanses it had not known,
to embrace all the land round about, the world and all that is in it, and to see itself embraced in the arms of the whole universe
...
In about 1927, the younger pioneer and scholar, Avraham Schlonsky (1900-73), who worked as a road
builder, wrote this poem to the land of Israel:
Dress me, good mother, in a glorious robe of many colours,
and at dawn lead me to my toil
...

The houses stand forth like frontlets;
and the rocks paved by hand, stream down like phylactery straps
...

And among the creators is your son Avraham,
a road-building bard in Israel
...

Other Zionists retained a more conventional faith
...
He insisted that as long as the concept of
serving God was defined as the service of a particular Being, separate from the ideals and duties of religion, it would not be 'free from the
immature outlook which is always focused in particular beings'
...
To think of God as a particular being was idolatry and the sign of a primitive mentality
...
true the Labourites believed that they had shaken off religion but this atheistic
Zionism was only a phase
...
Whether they thought so or not, Jews were in their essence inseparable from God and were fulfilling God's plan without realising
it
...
They had hidden the Shekinah away in synagogues and study halls but soon
Israel would become the spiritual centre of the world and reveal the true conception of God to the Gentiles
...
The devotion to the Holy Land would give birth to the idolatry of Jewish fundamentalism in our
own day
...
Both Jews and Muslims were
struggling to find meaning in a dark world
...
The Zionists had been right to fear the final
elimination of their people
...
The Nobel Prize
winner Elie Weisel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud and he
had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah
...
During his
first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were
to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith for ever
...
'Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live', he wrote
years later
...
' {33}
One day the Gestapo hanged a child
...

The child who, Weisel recalled, had the face of a 'sad-eyed angel', was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows
...
The same man asked again: 'Where is God now?' And Weisel heard a voice within him make this answer: 'Where is He?
Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows
...
The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God
...
Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of
God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Weisel, died in Auschwitz
...
If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust
...
Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to
conventional theology
...
There is a story that one day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial
...
Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problem of evil and suffering in
file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and,
presumably, worthy of death
...
Then he looked up and said that the trial was over: it was time for the evening
prayer
...
For decades we have lived with
the knowledge that we have created weapons that could wipe out human life on the planet
...
We are facing the possibility of ecological disaster
...
Within two or three generations, the population will become too great for the planet to support
...
Generations before our own have felt that the end of the world is nigh, yet it does seem that we are facing a future
that is unimaginable
...
Maybe God really is an idea of the past
...
Where the past is analysed and made relative, the present is rendered immune to this
process and our current position becomes an absolute: thus 'the New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in
their time, but the analyst takes the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing'
...

There is much to support this view
...
In the past it was always reduced by a particular idea of God but now it seems to have lost its
inbuilt relationship to theism and become an automatic response to the experience of living in a secularised society
...
Others find his absence a positive relief
...
It is
wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity, who threatens us with eternal damnation if we do not abide by his rules
...
We imagine that the hideous deity we have experienced is the authentic God of Jews, Christians and Muslims
and do not always realise that it is merely an unfortunate aberration
...
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) spoke of the God-shaped hole in the human consciousness, where God had always been
...
Traditional
religion tells us that we must conform to God's idea of humanity to become fully human
...
Sartre's atheism was not a consoling creed but other existentialists saw the absence of God as a positive liberation
...
Because God represents absolute perfection,
there is nothing left for us to do or achieve
...
People should reject God defiantly in order to
pour out all their loving solicitude upon mankind
...
God had indeed been used in the past to stunt creativity;
if he is made a blanket answer to every possible problem and contingency, he can indeed stifle our sense of wonder or achievement
...

During the 1950s, Logical Positivists such as A
...
Ayer (1910-91) asked whether it made sense to believe in God
...
Ayer was not asking whether or not God existed but
whether the idea of God had any meaning
...
To say: 'There is intelligent life on Mars' is not meaningless since we can see how we could verify this once we had the necessary
technology
...
It is the more sophisticated believer who has problems, when he
says: 'God does not exist in any sense that we can understand' or 'God is not good in the human sense of the word
...
As Ayer said: 'Theism is so confused and the sentences in
which "God" appears so incoherent and so incapable of Verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is
logically impossible
...
There is nothing in the concept of 'God' to deny or be
sceptical about
...
Since the 19505, linguistic
philosophers have criticised Logical Positivism, pointing out that what Ayer called the Verification Principle could not itself be verified
...
Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out
that the Logical Positivists set themselves up as scientists during a period when, for the first time in history, science saw the natural world in
explicit disjunction from humanity
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

not suitable for less clear-cut human experiences
...
More
recently linguistic philosophers such as Antony Flew have argued that it is more rational to find a natural explanation than a religious one
...
The argument that we are 'contingent' or 'defective' beings proves
nothing, since there could always be an explanation that is ultimate but not supernatural
...
There is no agonising, no heroic defiance but simply a matter-of-fact commitment to reason and science as the only way
forward
...
Many have
seen the proofs as a red herring
...
Scientists and philosophers who find no room for
God in their systems are usually referring to the idea of God as First Cause, a notion eventually abandoned by Jews, Muslims and Greek
Orthodox Christians during the Middle Ages
...
It could not be located within a physical system of the universe, any more than the Buddhist
nirvana
...
In The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Thomas J
...
' {4} Altizer
spoke in mystical terms of the dark night of the soul and the un of abandonment
...
All our old conceptions of divinity had to die, before theology could be reborn
...
Altizer's theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the dark
God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret
...
In The Secular Meaning of the
Gospel (1963), he claimed that it was no longer possible to speak of God acting in the world
...
Simple faith in the Old Man in the Sky was clearly impossible but so was the more sophisticated belief of the theologians
...
The Gospel was 'the good news of a free man who has set other men free'
...
{5}
In Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), William Hamilton noted that this kind of theology had its roots in the United States, which
had always had a Utopian bent and had no great theological tradition of its own
...
Hamilton himself saw this theological
mood as a way of being Protestant in the twentieth century
...
In the same way, he and the
other Christian radicals were avowedly secular men
...
Modern secular man did not need God
...

There is something rather poignant about this buoyant sixties' optimism
...
Even at the
time, the Death of God theologians were criticised, since their perspective was that of the affluent, middle-class, white American
...
Cone asked how white people felt they had the right to affirm freedom through the death of God when they had
actually enslaved people in God's name
...
He himself was convinced that the deity conceived as a God of History had
died for ever in Auschwitz
...
After the near-extinction of European Jewry, they
must not cut themselves off from their past
...
It was too antiseptic; it ignored the
tragedy of life and assumed that the world would improve
...
He was moved by
Isaac Luria's doctrine of tsimtsum, God's voluntary act of self-estrangement which brought the created world into being
...
Rubenstein agreed with Sartre that life is empty; he saw the God of the
mystics as an imaginative way of entering this human experience of nothingness
...
Hans Jonas believes that after Auschwitz we can no longer believe in
the omnipotence of God
...
He could do
no more now and human beings must restore wholeness to the Godhead and the world by prayer and Torah
...
God does not limit himself, holding his breath, as it were, before exhaling
...
It is better to return to the classic explanation that God is greater than human beings and his thought and
ways are not ours
...
The Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung agrees with Jacobs, preferring a more reasonable explanation for

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
He notes that human beings cannot have faith in a weak God but in the living God who made
people strong enough to Pray in Auschwitz
...
The Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) set his face against the
Liberal Protestantism of Schliermacher with its emphasis on religious experience
...
It
was, he thought, a radical error to seek to explain God in rational terms not simply because of the limitations of the human mind but also
because humanity has been corrupted by the Fall
...
The only valid source of God-knowledge was the Bible
...
It seems unhealthy to combine such radical scepticism in the powers of the intellect with such an uncritical acceptance of the
truths of scripture
...
A deep-rooted anxiety is part of the human condition: this is not neurotic, because it is ineradicable and no therapy
can take it away
...
Tillich agreed
with Nietzsche that the personal God was a harmful idea and deserved to die:
The concept of a 'Personal God' interfering with natural events, or being 'an independent cause of natural events', makes God a
natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless a being
...
{7}
A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant
...
An
omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who made everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which
they controlled
...

Instead we should seek to find a 'God' above this personal God
...
Ever since biblical times, theists had been
aware of the paradoxical nature of the God to which they prayed, aware that the personalised God was balanced by the essentially transpersonal
divinity
...
Tillich preferred the definition of God as the Ground of being
...
It returns us to ourselves
...
For centuries the symbols 'God', 'providence' or 'immortality' have enabled people to
bear the terror of life and the horror of death but when these symbols lose their power there is fear and doubt
...

When Tillich was speaking to laypeople, he preferred to replace the rather technical term 'Ground of being' with 'ultimate concern'
...
You could not say: 'I am now having a special "religious" experience', since the God which is Being precedes and is
fundamental to all our emotions of courage, hope and despair
...
A century earlier Feuerbach had made a similar claim when he had said that God was inseparable from normal
human psychology
...

Liberal theologians were trying to discover whether it was possible to believe and to belong to the modern intellectual world
...
Again, there was nothing new in
this attempt
...
Now the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) combined his belief in God with
modern science
...
He saw the whole evolutionary struggle as a divine force which propelled the universe from matter to spirit to personality and,
finally, beyond personality to God
...
De Chardin
suggested that instead of concentrating on Jesus the man, Christians should cultivate the cosmic portrait of Christ in Paul's epistles to the
Colossians and Ephesians: Christ in this view was the 'omega point' of the universe, the climax of the evolutionary process when God becomes
all in all
...
This unity-in-differentiation was another way of regarding the love that animates the whole of creation
...

In the United States during the 19605, Daniel Day Williams (b
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

unity with the world
...
N
...
Whitehead had been able to make no sense of God as an-other being, self-contained and
impassible, but had formulated a twentieth-century version of the prophetic idea of God's pathos:
I affirm that God does suffer as he participates in the ongoing life of the society of being
...
I am affirming the
divine sensitivity
...
{8}
He described God as 'the great companion, the fellow-sufferer, who understands'
...
{9} It was wrong to set the supernatural order over against the natural world of our
experience
...
This was not reductionist, however
...
It would also include our 'religious experiences', as Buddhists had
always affirmed
...
He hated the old
Greek idea of apatheia, which he found almost blasphemous: it presented God as remote, uncaring and selfish
...
His theology was simply trying to correct an imbalance, which had resulted in an alienating God which was impossible
to accept after Auschwitz and Hiroshima
...
The Jesuit Karl Rahner has developed a more transcendental theology, which sees God as the supreme mystery and Jesus the
decisive manifestation of what humanity can become
...
The unaided intellect cannot reach the vision it seeks: it is continually coming up against barriers to understanding that
demand that we change our attitudes
...
The very nature of humanity, therefore, demands that we transcend ourselves and our current
perceptions and this principle indicates the presence of what has been called the divine in the very nature of serious human inquiry
...
In brilliant studies of Dante and Bonaventure, Balthasar shows that Catholics have 'seen' God in
human form
...

Muslims and Jews have also attempted to look back to the past to ideas of God that will suit the present
...
1959), a
notable Pakistani theologian, turned to the Koran to find a way of seeing God that was not so transcendent that he became a nullity and not so
personal that he became an idol
...
Others have
looked back to the Sufis for insight into God's relationship with the world
...
He qualifies this with the reminder that this is an esoteric truth and can only be understood in the context of the mystical disciplines of
Sufism
...
In the years leading up to the Iranian
revolution, the young lay philosopher Dr Ali Shariati drew enormous crowds from among the educated middle classes
...
During
demonstrations, the crowds used to carry his portrait alongside those of the Ayatollah Khomeini, even though it is not clear how he would have
fared in Khomeini's Iran
...
Muhammad had done the same when he had given the ancient pagan rites of the
hajj a monotheistic relevance
...
Thus, on reaching the Kabah, pilgrims would
realise how suitable it was that the shrine is empty: 'This is not your final destination; the Kabah is a sign so that the way is not lost; it only
shows you the direction
...
Why is the Kabah a simple cube, without decoration or ornament? Because it represents 'the secret of God in the
universe: God is shapeless, colourless, without similarity, whatever form or condition mankind selects, sees or imagines, it is not God'
...
It represents the existential
course of each human being who turns his or her life around and directs it towards the ineffable God
...

Martin Buber (1878-1965) had an equally dynamic vision of Judaism as a spiritual process and a striving for elemental unity
...
There were
two spheres: one the realm of space and time where we relate to other beings as subject and object, as I-It
...
This is the I-Thou realm, which reveals the presence of God
...
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dialogue with God, which does not endanger our freedom or creativity since God never tells us what he is asking of us
...
This meant a break with much Jewish tradition and
Buber's exegesis of traditional texts is sometimes strained
...
Yet the mitzvot are central to much Jewish
spirituality and this may explain why Buber has been more popular with Christians than with Jews
...
'Where would I find a word to equal it, to
describe the same reality?' It bears too great and complex a meaning, has too many sacred associations
...

It is easy to understand why there are some who propose a period of silence about 'the last things' so that the misused words may
be redeemed
...
We cannot cleanup the term 'God' and we cannot make it whole; but,
stained and mauled as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it above an hour of great sorrow
...
The separation of the sparks from the Godhead represent the human experience of alienation
...

Where Buber looked back to the Bible and Hasidism, Abraham Joshua Heschel returned to the spirit of the Rabbis and the Talmud
...
They were actions that fulfilled God's
need rather than our own
...
Consequently religion became dull and insipid; we needed a 'depth theology' to delve below the
structures and recover the original awe, mystery and wonder
...
Faith in God sprang from
an immediate apprehension that had nothing to do with concepts and rationality
...
The mitzvot should also be seen as symbolic gestures that train us to live in God's presence
...
Above all,
we should be aware that God needs human beings
...

Atheistic philosophers have also been attracted by the idea of God during the second half of the twentieth century
...
Some Christians have been inspired by
Heidegger's work, even though its moral value is called in to question by his association with the Nazi regime
...

Since Being is 'Wholly Other', it is in fact Nothing _ no thing, neither an object nor a particular being
...
The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit
...
Theology believed that it had the answer and traced everything back to
Something Else, to God
...

Heidegger had a somewhat reductive idea of the God of religion - though one shared by many religious people - but he often spoke in mystical
terms about Being
...
There is nothing that human beings can do to think Being into
existence
...
In the article written towards the end of his life entitled 'Only a God Can Save Us', Heidegger
suggested that the experience of God's absence in our time could liberate us from preoccupation with beings
...
We could only hope for a new advent in the future
...
The whole of human life was directed towards
the future: we experience our lives as incomplete and rushed
...
It is this which has
forced us to think and develop since at each point of our lives we have to transcend ourselves and go on to the next stage: the baby has to
become a toddler, the toddler has to overcome its disabilities and become a child and so forth
...
Even philosophy begins with wonder, which is the experience of the not-knowing, the not-yet
...
Like Feuerbach, Bloch saw God as the human
ideal that has not yet come to be but instead of seeing this as alienating he found it essential to the human condition
...
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reminiscent of the prophets
...
Without the idea of God there is no
absolute meaning, truth or morality: ethics becomes simply a question of taste, a mood or a whim
...
If there is no absolute, there is no reason why we should not
hate or why war is worse than peace
...
One of our earliest dreams is a longing for
justice (how frequently we hear children complain: 'It's not fair!')
...
It makes us aware of our finite nature; we all hope that the injustice of the world will not be the last
word
...
Yet during the second half of the twentieth century, there has been a move
away from the idea of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of us
...
As we have seen, the Jewish
scriptures, which Christians call their 'Old' Testament, show a similar process; the Koran saw al-Lah in less personal terms than the JudaeoChristian tradition from the very beginning
...
Yet this does not seem to have been made clear to many of the faithful
...
A similar furor has erected various remarks by David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, even though these ideas are commonplace
in academic circles
...
Like
Robinson, Cupitt has arrived intellectually at an insight that mystics in all three faiths have reached by a more intuitive route
...

There is a growing intolerance of inadequate images of the Absolute
...
One of the most characteristic new developments since the 1970s has been the rise of a type of religiosity that we
usually call 'fundamentalism' in most of the major world religions, including the three religions of God
...
In the United States, which has always been prone to extremist and apocalyptic enthusiasm, Christian
fundamentalism has attached itself to the New Right
...
Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority achieved astonishing political power during the Reagan years
...
God will give the believer
anything that he asks for in prayer
...
Christian fundamentalists
seem to have little regard for the loving compassion of Christ
...
Most
would consider Jews and Muslims destined for hellfire and Urquhart has argued that all oriental religions are inspired by the devil
...
Muslim fundamentalists have toppled
governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty
...
Thus they believe that they are paving a way for the advent of the Messiah, which is at hand
...
Thus the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the most extreme member of Israel's Far Right until his assassination in New York in
1990:
There are not several messages in Judaism
...
And this message is to do what God wants
...
But there is only one message: God wanted us to come to this country
to create a Jewish state
...
It is not surprising that
people who hear this kind of profanity, which makes 'God' deny other people's human rights, think that the sooner we relinquish him the better
...
To make such human, historical phenomena as
Christian 'Family Values', 'Islam' or 'the Holy Land' the focus of religious devotion is a new form of idolatry
...
It must be rejected as inauthentic
...
Latterday crusaders who return to this primitive ethos are elevating the values of the tribe to an unacceptably high status and substituting man-made
ideals for the transcendent reality which should challenge our prejudices
...
Ever since the
prophets of Israel reformed the old pagan cult of Yahweh, the God of monotheists has promoted the ideal of compassion
...
The compassionate ideal
even impelled Buddhists to make a major change in their religious orientation when they introduced devotion (bhakti) to the Buddha and
bodhisattvas
...

These insights were developed by Jesus, Paul and the Rabbis, who all shared the same Jewish ideals and suggested major changes in Judaism in

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...
The Koran made the creation of a compassionate and just society the essence of the reformed religion of al-Lah
...
It demands that we go beyond the limitations of our egotism, insecurity and inherited prejudice
...
During the eighteenth
century, Deists rejected traditional Western Christianity largely because it had become so conspicuously cruel and intolerant
...
All too often, conventional believers, who are not fundamentalists, share their aggressive righteousness
...
Yet Jews, Christians and Muslims who punctiliously attend divine
services yet denigrate people who belong to different ethnic and ideological camps deny one of the basic truths of their religion
...
The God of historical
monotheism demands mercy not sacrifice, compassion rather than decorous liturgy
...
The prophets fulminated against their contemporaries who thought that temple worship was sufficient
...
Muhammad came into conflict with those Arabs who wanted to worship the pagan goddesses alongside al-Lah in the ancient rites,
without implementing the compassionate ethos that God demanded as a condition of all true religion
...
It may be that the compassionate religion of the One God has only been observed by a minority; most have found it difficult
to face the extremity of the God-experience with its uncompromising ethical demands
...
Aaron, the high priest, presided over the manufacture of the golden effigy
...

God can also be used as an unworthy panacea, an alternative to mundane life and as the object of indulgent fantasy
...
This is a particular danger when he is conceived as an-other Being - just like us, only bigger
and better - in his own heaven, which is itself conceived as a paradise of earthly delights
...
Even the pagan cult of Yahweh, for all its manifest faults, stressed his
involvement in current events in profane time, as opposed to the sacred time of rite and myth
...
The Christian doctrine of Incarnation stressed the divine immanence in the world of flesh and blood
...
As we have seen, future generations of Muslims have shared his concern to incarnate the divine will in human history by establishing a
just and decent society
...
From the moment when -as either El or
Yahweh - God called Abraham away from his family in Haran, the cult entailed concrete action in this world and often a painful abandonment
of the old sanctities
...
The Holy God, who was wholly other, was experienced as a profound shock by the prophets
...
An entirely new gulf had suddenly yawned between humanity and the divine, rupturing the
holistic vision of paganism
...
It is no accident that monotheism finally took root during the exile to Babylon when the Israelites also
developed the ideal of personal responsibility, which has been crucial in both Judaism and Islam
...
Yet alienation has continued to be a
danger in all three faiths: in the West the experience of God was continually accompanied by guilt and by a pessimistic anthropology
...

Those atheists who preached emancipation from a God who demands such servile obedience were protesting against an inadequate but
unfortunately familiar image of God
...
It interpreted the scriptural
image of God's judgement too literally and assumed that God was a sort of Big Brother in the sky
...
Terrorising the populace into civic obedience with threats is no longer acceptable or even
practicable, as the downfall of the communist regimes demonstrated so dramatically in the autumn of The anthropomorphic idea of God as
Lawgiver and Ruler is not adequate to the temper of post-modernity
...
When people try to find an ultimate meaning and value in human life, their minds seem to go in a certain
direction
...

Yet if feelings are not to degenerate into indulgent, aggressive or unhealthy emotionalism, they need to be informed by the critical intelligence
...
The experiment of Falsafah was an attempt

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...
Eventually Muslims and Jews
retreated from philosophy
...
The Greeks had already sensed this and developed an
early distrust of their native metaphysics
...

Yet the venture of Falsafah was important, since it showed an appreciation of the necessity of relating God to other experiences - if only to
define the extent to which this was possible
...
It
can encourage people to think that it is not necessary to apply normal standards of decency and rationality to behaviour supposedly inspired by
'God'
...
It was their initial enthusiasm for medicine, astronomy and mathematics which had
led the first Muslim Faylasufs to discuss al-Lah in metaphysical terms
...
The philosophic conception of God was markedly different from the
Koranic vision but Faylasufs did recover some insights that were in danger of being lost in the ummah at that time
...
By the ninth century, however, the ulema were beginning to lose sight of this
and were promoting the cult of Islam as the one true religion
...
We have a similar opportunity today
...

We have seen that Albert Einstein had an appreciation of mystical religion
...
During a visit to England in 1921, Einstein was asked by the
Archbishop of Canterbury what were its implications for theology
...
Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to
do with religion
...
Yet creation
was not originally conceived in such a literal manner
...
It was a
conception that was alien to the Greek world: creation ex nihilo was not an official doctrine of Christianity until the Council of Nicaea in 341
...
Jewish and Muslim rationalists found it a difficult and problematic doctrine and many rejected it
...
In any case, cosmology was not a scientific description of the origins of the world but was originally a symbolic
expression of a spiritual and psychological truth
...
In the west, however, a more literal
understanding of scripture has long prevailed When some Western Christians feel their faith in God undermined by the new science, they are
probably imagining God as Newton's great mechanick a Personalistic notion of God which should Perhaps, be rejected on religious as well as
on scientific grounds
...

The idea of a personal God seems increasingly unacceptable at the present time for all kinds of reasons: moral, intellectual, scientific and
spiritual
...
Yet to talk
about 'She' - other than in a dialectical way - can be just as limiting, since it confines the illimitable God to a purely human category
...
The God of the
philosophers is the product of a now outdated rationalism, so the traditional 'proofs' of his existence no longer work
...
Like the old
Sky God, this deity is so remote from humanity and the mundane world that he easily becomes Deus Otiosus and fades from our consciousness
...
The mystics have long insisted that God is not an-Other Being; they have
claimed that he does not really exist and that it is better to call him Nothing
...
Instead of seeing God as an objective Fact, which can be demonstrated by means of
scientific proof, mystics have claimed that he is a subjective experience, mysteriously experienced in the ground of being
...
Mystics have used music, dancing, poetry, fiction, stories, painting, sculpture and architecture to
express this Reality that goes beyond concepts
...
The God of the mystics could even satisfy the feminists, since both Sufis and
Kabbalists have long tried to introduce a female element into the divine
...
Mysticism has been regarded with some suspicion by many Jews and Muslims since the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco
and the decline of latter-day Sufism
...
The Protestant and Catholic
Reformers either outlawed or marginalised it and the scientific Age of Reason did not encourage this mode of perception
...
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easily consorts with our objective, empirical mentality
...
It requires long training with an expert
and a considerable investment of time
...
Mystics often insist that human beings must deliberately create this sense of God for themselves, with the same degree of
care and attention that others devote to artistic creation
...
The God of the mystics does not arrive ready-made and prepackaged
...

It is possible to acquire some of the mystical attitudes
...
The mystical agnosticism could help us to acquire a restraint that stops us rushing into these complex matters with dogmatic
assurance
...
Secondhand mysticism could prove to be as unsatisfactory as reading the explanation of a poem by a literary critic instead of the original
...
They mean something different when they are approached by this
particular route, which is not accessible to the logical, rationalist faculty
...
God has rarely been seen as a self-evident fact that can be encountered like any other objective existent
...
This need not be a catastrophe
...
Yet in the past people
have always created new symbols to act as a focus for spirituality
...
The aimlessness, alienation, anomie and violence that characterises so much of modern
life seems to indicate that now that they are not deliberately creating a faith in 'God' or anything else - it matters little what - many people are
falling into despair
...
The escalating crime rate, drug addiction and the
revival of the death penalty are not signs of a spiritually healthy society
...
One of the first people to express this dry desolation - quite different from the heroic atheism of Nietzsche - was Thomas
Hardy
...

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires
...

The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I
...
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Upon the growing gloom
...

Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning
...


Glossary
-AAlam al-mithal (Arabic) The world of pure images: the archetypal world of the imagination that leads the Muslim mystic and contemplative
philosopher to God
...

Apatheia (Greek) Impassibility, serenity and invulnerability
...

Apophatic (Greek)
...
Greek Christians came to believe that all theology should have an element of silence, paradox and restraint in order
to emphasise the ineffability and mystery of God
...
In the pagan world,
everything here below was seen as a replica or copy of a reality in the celestial world
...

Ashkenazim (Hebrew corruption of 'Allemagne')- The Jews of Germany and parts of eastern and western Europe
...
v
...

Avatar In Hindu myth, the descent of a god to earth in human form
...

Axial Age The term used by historians to denote the period 800-200 BCE, a time of transition during which the major world religions emerged
in the civilised world
...
In the Koran, the manifestations of God in the world
...

Baqa (Arabic) Survival
...
v
...
A batini is a Muslim who devotes himself to the esoteric, mystical understanding of the faith
...
v
...


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...
Those who have delayed their own private nirvana (q
...
) in order to guide and save suffering,
unenlightened humanity
...

Breaking of the Vessels A term in the Kabbalism of Isaac Luria that describes the primal catastrophe, when the sparks of divine light fell to the
earth and were trapped in matter
...
The tide applies to the numerous men and women who have attained nirvana (q
...
) but it is often used of
Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism
...
In Sufism dhikr takes the form of a recitation of the name of God as a
mantra
...
In the West, dogma has come to mean a body of opinion, categorically and authoritatively stated
...
A term used by Greeks to denote God's activity in the world, which is to be regarded as quite distinct
from his inaccessible essence
...
Applied to God, it indicates a kenosis (q
...
) of the hidden God who transcends his
introspection to make himself known to humanity
...
v
...

Emanation A process whereby the various grades of reality were imagined to flow from a single, primal source, which the monotheists
identified as God
...

En sof (Hebrew: 'without end')
...

v
...
Like dynameis (q
...
) the term is used
to distinguish the human conception of God from the ineffable and incomprehensible reality itself
...

Epiphany The appearance of a god or goddess on earth in human form
...
The attempt to interpret Islam in terms of ancient Greek rationalism
...
The ecstatic absorption in God of the Sufi mystic
...
Used of Muslims and Jews in the Islamic empire who were dedicated to the rational and scientific ideals of
Falsafah (q
...

-GGetik (Persian) The earthly world in which we live and which we can experience with our senses
...


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...

-HHadith (plural, ahadith) (Arabic) The traditions or collected maxims of the Prophet Muhammad
...

Hesychasm, hesychast From the Greek hesychia: interior silence, tranquillity
...

High God The supreme deity worshipped by many peoples as the sole God, creator of the world, who was eventually superseded by a pantheon
of more immediate and attractive gods and goddesses
...

Hijra (Arabic) The migration of the first Muslims from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, an event that marks the beginning of the Islamic era
...

Holy Spirit Term used by the Rabbis, often interchangeably with Shekinah (q
...
) to denote God's presence on earth
...
In Christianity the Spirit would become the
third 'person' of the Trinity
...
The controversial term used by Athanasius and his supporters to express
their conviction that Jesus was of the same nature (ousia) as God the Father and was, therefore, divine in the same way as he
...
v
...
An object or person viewed from the outside
...

-IIdolatry The worship or veneration of a human or man-made reality instead of the transcendent God
...

Ilm (Arabic) The secret 'knowledge' of God, which Shiite Muslims believe to have been the sole possession of the Imams (q
...

Imam (Arabic) In the Shiah (q
...
) the Imam is a descendent of Ali, Muhammad's son-in-law
...
v
...
Sunni Muslims, however, simply use the term to describe the person who leads the prayers in the mosque
...

Ishraq (Arabic) Illumination
...

Islam (Arabic) Surrender [to God]
...

-KKabah (Arabic) The cube-shaped granite shrine dedicated to al-Lah in Mecca
...
Muslim theology: the attempt to interpret the Koran in a rational way
...
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Kenosis (Greek) Self-emptying
...
v
...

-LLogos (Greek) Reason; definition; word
...
v
...

-MMadrasah (Arabic) College of Islamic studies
...

Menok (Persian) The heavenly, archetypal realm of being
...
See Throne Mysticism
...
v
...
v
...

Muslim (Arabic) One who surrenders him or herself to God
...

-NNirvana (Hindi) Literally 'cooling off or 'going out' like a flame; extinction
...
Like God, the end of the monotheistic quest, it is not capable of definition in rational terms but
belongs to a different order of experience
...
The sense of the sacred, of transcendence and holiness (q
...
) which has always inspired awe, wonder
and terror
...

Orthodox, Orthodoxy Literally, 'right teaching'
...
The term is also applied to the traditional Judaism which adheres to a
strict observance of the Law
...
That which makes a thing what it is
...
Applied to God, the term denotes that
divine essence which eludes human understanding and experience
...
Like the personae (q
...
) of the Trinity; some types of Kabbalah (q
...
) have imagined the
inscrutable God revealing himself to humanity in a number of different 'countenances', each of which has distinctive features
...

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...
The term preferred by the Western Christians to denote the three hypostases (q
...
) of the Trinity
...

Pir (Arabic) The spiritual director of Muslim mystics
...

-RRig-Veda The collection of odes, dating from 1500-900 BCE
...

-SSefirah (plural, sefiroth) (Hebrew) 'Numerations'
...
v
...
Kether Elyon: The Supreme Crown
...
Hokhmah: Wisdom
...
Binah: Intelligence
...
Hesed: Loving Kindness
...
Din;
...

6
...

7
...

8
...

9
...

10
...
Also called Shekinah (q
...

Sephardim The Jews of Spain
...
'
Shariah The Islamic Holy Law, based on the Koran and the hadith (q
...

Shekinah From the Hebrew shakan: to pitch one's tent
...
In Kabbalah it is identified with the last of the sefiroth (q
...

Shema The Jewish proclamation of faith: 'Listen (shema) Israel; Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is One!' (Deuteronomy 6:4)
...
Muslim Shiis believe that Ali ibn Abi Talib son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad) and the Imams (q
...
) his
descendants should lead the Islamic community
...
A controversial fifth-century mystical text describing the figure that Ezekiel saw
Droned on the heavenly chariot
...

Sufi Sufism The mystics and mystical spirituality of Islam
...

Sunnah (Arabic) Practice
...

Sunnah; Sunni The ahl al-sunnah: term used to denote the majority group of Muslims whose Islam is based upon the Koran, the hadith and the
sunnah (q
...
) and upon the Shana (q
...
) rather than upon the devotion to the Imams (q
...
) as expressed by the Shiah (q
...


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...
The classical rabbinic discussions of the ancient code of Jewish Law
...

Tannaim (Hebrew) The first generations of rabbinic scholars and legists who collated and edited the ancient code of oral Jewish Law, known as
the Mishnah (q
...

Taqwa (Arabic) God-consciousness
...
v
...
This refers to the divine unity of God and also to the integration required of each Muslim, who strives to surrender
wholly to God
...

Tfillin (Hebrew) The black boxes known as phylacteries, containing the text of the Shema, which Jewish men and boys who have attained
majority wear fastened to their foreheads and left arms near the heart during the morning service, as commanded by Deuteronomy 6:4-7
...

Theoria (Greek) Contemplation
...

Tikkun (Hebrew) Restoration
...
v
...

Torah (Hebrew) The Law of Moses as outlined in the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy,
which are also collectively known as the Torah
...
Those Muslims who interpreted the Koran and the hadith (q
...
) literally in order to
oppose the rationalistic tendencies of the Mutazilah (q
...

Tsimtsum (Hebrew) Shrinking, withdrawal
...
It is, therefore, an act of kenosis (q
...
) and self-limitation
...

Ummah (Arabic) The Muslim community
...
v
...

-VVeda (plural, Vedas) See Rig-Veda
...
The personification of God's divine plan in the scriptures
...

-Yfile:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Yahweh may originally have been the god of another people, adopted by Moses for the Israelites
...

Yoga A discipline early evolved by the people of India, which 'yokes' the powers of the mind
...

-ZZanna (Arabic) Guess work
...

Ziggurat Temple-tower built by the Sumerians in a form found in many other parts of the world
...


Notes
Quotations from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are taken from The Jerusalem Bible
...

1 - In the Beginning
...
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (trans
...
Trask), (Princeton, 1954)
...
From 'The Babylonian Creation' in N
...
Sandars (trans
...
(London, 1971) p
...

3
...
p-99
...
Pindar, Nemean VI, 1-4, The Odes of Pindar (trans
...
M
...
206
...
Anat-Baal Texts 49:11:5, quoted in E
...
James, The Ancient Gods (London, 1960), p
...

6
...

7
...

8
...

9
...

10
...
E
...
Rieu) (Harmondsworth, 1950), p-446
...
Acts of the Apostles 14:11-18
...
Genesis 28:15
...
Genesis 26:16-17
...

14
...

15
...
Mendenhall, 'The Hebrew Conquest of Palestine,' The Biblical Archeologist 25, 1962; M
...

16
...


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...
L
...
Bihu, 'Midianite Elements in Hebrew Religion', Jemsh Theological Studies, 31; Salo Wittmeyer Baron, A Social and Religious History
of the Jem, 10 vols, and edn
...
p
...

18
...

19
...

20
...

21
...

22
...

23
...

24
...
i52; Psalms 29, 89, 93
...

25
...

26
...

27
...
H
...
) Hindu Scriptures (London and New York, 1966), p
...

28
...
13, in Juan Mascaro (trans, and ed
...
m
...
Kena Upanishad I, in Mascaro (trans, and ed
...
5i
...
Ibid
...

31
...
Leon Peer) (London, 1888) p
...

32
...
40
...
Udana 8
...
81
...
The Symposium (trans
...
Hamilton), (Harmondsworth, 1951), pp
...

35
...

36
...

2 - One God
1
...

2
...

John W
...
29-30
...
Isaiah 6:5
...
Exodus 4:11
...
Psalms 29, 89, 93
...
6
...

7
...


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...
Inscription on a cuneiform tablet quoted in Chaim Potok, Wanderings, History of the Jews (New York, 1978), p
...

9
...

10
...

11
...

12
...

13
...

14
...

15
...

16
...

17
...

18
...

19
...

20
...

21
...

22
...

23
...

24
...

25
...

26
...

27
...

28
...

29
...
73
...
See Genesis 14:20
...
2 Kings 32:3-10; 2 Chronicles 34:14
...
Deuteronomy 6:4-6
...
Deuteronomy 7:3
...
Deuteronomy 7:5-6
...
Deuteronomy 28:64-8
...
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36
...

37
...

38
...

39
...

40
...

41
...

42
...

43
...

44
...
Hinduism and Buddhism
are related and can both be seen as a reformed paganism
...
Jeremiah 2:31, 32; 12:7-11; 14:7-9; 6:11
...
Jeremiah 32:15
...
Jeremiah 44:15-19
...
Jeremiah 31:33
...
Ezekiel 1:4-25
...
Ezekiel 3:14-15
...
Ezekiel 8:12
...
Psalm 137
...
Isaiah 11:15,16
54
...
See Psalm 65:7; 74:13-14; 77:16; Job 3:8; 7:12
...
Isaiah 46:1
...
Isaiah 45:21
...
Isaiah 43:11, 12
...
Isaiah 55:8, 9
...
Isaiah 19:24, 25
...
Exodus 33:20
...
Exodus 33:18
...
Exodus 34:29-35
...
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...

64
...
Psalms 74 and 104
...
Exodus 25:8, 9
...
Exodus 25:3-5
...
Exodus 39:32, 43; 40:33; 40:2, 17; 31:3, 13
...
Deuteronomy 5:12-17
...
Deuteronomy 14:1-21
...
Proverbs 8:22, 23, 30, 31
...
Ben Sirah 24:3-6
...
The Wisdom of Solomon 7:25-6
...
De Sperialibus Legibus, 1:43
...
God is Immutable, 62; The Life of Moses, 1:75
...
Abraham 121-3
...
The Migration of Abraham, 34-5
...
Shabbat 31a
...
Aroth de Rabba Nathan, 6
...
Louis Jacobs, Faith (London, 1968), p
...

80
...

81
...

82
...

83
...

84 Commenting on Job 11:7; Mishna Psalm 25:6
...
Thus Rabbi Yohannan b
...
'
86
...

87
...
Berakoth 10a; Leviticus Rabba 4:8; Yalkut on Psalm 90:1; Exodus Rabba
...
B
...

89
...

90
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Mekhilta de Rabbi Simon on Exodus 19:6
...
Acts of the Apostles 4:32
...
Song of Songs Rabba 8:12
...
Yalkut on Song of Songs 1:2
...
Sifre on Deuteronomy 36
...
A
...
171-4
...
Niddah 3ib
...
Yalkut on 2 Samuel 22; B
...

98
...
Neusner, 'Varieties of Judaism in the Formative Age', in Arthur Green (ed
...
172-3
...
Sifre on Leviticus 19:8
...
Mekhilta on Exodus 20:13
...
Piske Aboth 6:6; Horayot 133
...
Sanhedrin 4:5
...
Baba Metziah 58b
...
Arakin 15b
...
Mark 1:18, 11
...
Mark 1:15
...

3
...

4
...

5
...

6
...

7
...
Sof
...

8
...

9
...

10
...

11
...
125
...
Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna's Counsel in War (New York, 1986), XI, 14, P
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Ibid XI:21, p
...

14
...
100
...
Galatians 1:11;14
...
See, for example, Romans 12:5; 1 Corinthians 4:15; 2 Corinthians 2:17
...

17
...

18 Quoted by Paul in the sermon put on his lips by the author of the Acts of the Apostles 17:28
...

19
...

20
...

21
...

22
...

23
...

24
...

25
...

26
...

27
...

28
...

29
...

30
...

31
...
D
...
207
...
AdBaptizandos, Homily 13:14 quoted in Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton, 1979), P-25933
...
1
...
Most of the writings of the early 'heretics' were destroyed and survive only in the polemic of their
orthodox opponents
...
Hippolytus, Heresies, 7
...
4
...
Irenaeus Heresies 1
...
3
...
Hippolytus Heresies 8
...
1-2
...
Luke 6:43
...
Irenaeus, Heresies 1
...
2
...
Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1
...
1
...
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...
9
...
Exhortation to the Greeks 59
...

42
...
106
...

43
...
3
...

44
...
8
...

45
...
16
...

46
...
6
...
Ibid
...
3
...

48
...
7
...
2
...
Ibid
...
2
...

50
...
4
...
9
...
Ibid
...
3
...

52
...
6
...
37
...
Ibid
...
9
...

54
...
6
...
4
...
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 Vols, I
...
103
...
The source is Gregory of Nyssa
...
In a letter to Eusebius, his ally, and in the Thalia, quoted in Robert C
...
Groh, Early Arianism, A View of Salvation
(London, 1981), p
...

3
...

4
...
22
...
81-2
...
John 1
...

6
...
2
...
Philippians 2:6-11, quoted on p
...

8
...
2
...
Athanasius, Against the Heathen, 41
...
Anthanasius, On the Incarnation, 54
...
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11
...

12
...
1
...
Athanasius, Life of Antony, 67
...
Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 28
...

15
...

16
...

17
...

18
...
164
...
Basil, Epistle 234
...

20
...
8
...
Gregory of Nyssa, AW Three Gods
...
G
...
Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London, 1952), p
...

23
...

24
...

25
...

26
...

27
...
4
...

28
...
i
...
Henry Chadwick) (Oxford, 1991), p
...

29
...
VIII vii (17), p
...

30
...
VIII xii (28), p
...

31
...
VIII xii (29), pp
...
Passage from St Paul, Romans 13:13-14
...
Ibid
...
194
...
Ibid
...

34
...

35
...
ii
...

36
...

37
...
X
...
i4
...
Ibid
...
xi
...

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Ibid
...
Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (Oxford, 1983), p
...

41
...

42
...

43
...
27
...
On Female Dress, I, 1
...
Letter 243, 10
...
The Literal Meaning of Genesis, IX, V, 9
...
Letter XI
...
Ibid
...
The Celestial Hierarchy, I
...
The Divine Names, II, 7
...
Ibid
...

52
...
XIII, 3
...
Ibid
...

54
...
I
...
Mystical Theology, 3
...
The Divine Names, IV, 3
...
Ambigua, Migne, PG 91
...

5 - Unity: The God of Islam
1
...
Guillaume (trans
...
160
...
Koran 96:1
...

3
...
), A Life of Muhammad, p
...

4
...

5
...
Anne Carter) (London, 1971), p
...
Bukhari, Hadith 1
...
Quoted in Martin Lings, Muhammad, His Life Based On the Earliest Sources (London, 1983), pp
...

7
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Koran 75:17-19
...
Koran 42:7
...
Koran 88:21-2
...
Koran 29:61-3
...
Koran 96:6-8
...
Koran 80:24-32
...
Koran 92:18; 9:103; 63:9; 102:1
...
Koran 24:1, 45
...
Koran 2:158-9
...
Koran 20:114-15
...
Ibn Ishaq, Sira 227 in Guillaume (trans
...
159
...
Ibid
...
158
...
George Steiner, Real Presences, Is there anything in what we say? (London, 1989), pp
...

21
...

22
...
108-117
...
Koran 109
...
Koran 112
...
Quoted in Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 'God' in Islamic Spirituality: Foundation which he also edited, (London, 1987), p
...

26
...

27
...

28
...

29
...
21-44; 86-88
...
Koran 29:46
...
Ibn Ishaq, Sira 362 in Guillaume (trans
...
246
...
This is Muhammad Asad's translation of ahl al-kitab, usually rendered: 'the people of the Book'
...
Koran 2:135-6
...
Ali Shariati, Hajj (trans
...
54-6
...
Koran 33:35
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

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...
107-8
...
1 John 1
...

38
...
Montgomery Watt, Free Will and Predestination in Early Islam (London, 1948) p
...

39
...
197, quoted in A
...
Wensinck, The Muslim Creed, Its Genesis and Historical Development
(Cambridge, 1932), pp
...

6 - The God of the Philosophers
1
...
Walzer, 'Islamic Philosophy,' quoted in S
...
Nasr, 'Theology, Philosophy and Spirituality' in Islamic Spirituality:
Manifestations (London, 1991), which he also edited, p
...

2
...

3
...
H
...
195-6
...
See Henri Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, From Mazdean Iran to Shiite Iran (trans
...
51-72
...
Ibid
...

6
...
193
...
Rasai'l IV, 42, in ibid
...
187
...
Metaphysics XII,ioj4b, 32
...
Al-Mundiqh al-Dalal, trans, in W
...
20
...
Quoted in John Bowker, The Religious Imagination and the Sense of God (Oxford, 1978), p
...

11
...

12
...
5913
...
222-6
...
Koran 24:35, quoted on p
...

15
...
278
...
Kuzari, Book II, quoted inj
...
257
17
...

18
...

19
...

David W
...
179
...
Quoted in Abelson, The Immanence of God in Rabbinic Literature, P
...

21
...
49-75
...
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22
...
1
...
Periphsean, Migne, PL, 426C-D
...
Ibid
...

25
...
680 D-681-A
...
Ibid
...
Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London, 1957), pp
...

28
...

29
...

30
...
Commenting on Isaiah 7:9
...
John Macquarrie, In Search of Deity; An Essay in Dialectical Theism (London, 1984), pp
...

32
...
1
...
Quoted in Henry Adams, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (London, 1986), p
...

34
...
199-234
...
Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia, q
...
5
...
14
...
Summa Theologiae ia, 13, 11
...
The Journey of the Mind to God, 6
...

38
...
3
...

39
...
1
...

7 - The God of the Mystics
1
...
34
...
Hagigah 14b, quoting Psalms 101:7; 116:15; 25:16
...
Quoted in Louis Jacobs (ed
...
23
...
2 Corinthians 2:2-4
...
The Song of Songs, 5:10-15
...
Translated in T
...
and trans
...
199
...
Koran 53:13-17
...
Confessions IX, 24 (trans
...
171
...
Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers), The Power of Myth (New York, 1988), p
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill and London, 1985)
...

11
...
Chadwick), p
...

12
...
171-2
...
Ibid
...
Morals on Job v
...

15
...
ii
...
Homilies on Ezekiel II, ii, i
...
Commentary on the Song of Songs, 6
...
Epistle 234
...

19
...

20
...
71
...
Ambigua, PG
...
Peter Brown with Sabine MacCormack, 'Artifices of Eternity', in Brown, society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London, 1992), p
...

23
...

24
...

25
...
3
...
Orations 26
...
Ethical Orations 5
...
Hymns of Divine Love 28
...

29
...
Leiden 1913), entry under 'Tasawwuf
...
Trans
...
A
...
J
...
Quoted in R
...
Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (London, 1963 edn
...
115
...
Narrative, quoted in Marshall G
...
Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization 3 Vols, (Chicago,
1974), I
...
404
...
Quoted in Arberry, Sufism, p
...

34
...
151
...
Quoted in Arberry, Sufism, p
...
36
...

37
...
Nancy Pearson),

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
168-9
...
Mircea Eliade, Shamamism, p
...

39
...
P
...

40
...
Ralph Manheim), (London,
1970), p
...

41
...
p
...

42
...
Barbara Reynolds), (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp
...

43
...
Barbara Reynolds), (Harmondsworth, 1969), p
...

44
...
) Islamic Spirituality: Manifestations (New York and London,
1991), p
...

45
...

46
...
m
...
Chittick, 'Ibn Arabi and His School' in Nasr (ed
...

48
...
282
...
R
...
Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, p
...

50
...
A
...
) Eastern Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, 1922), p
...

51
...
250
...
Quoted in This Longing, Teaching Stories and Selected Letters of Rumi (trans, and ed
...
20
...
'Song of Unity' quoted in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 2nd edn
...
108
...
Ibid, p
...

55
...
and trans
...
27
...
Ibid
...
Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p
...

58
...
p
...

59
...
C
...
28
...
Simon Tugwell, 'Dominican Spirituality' in Louis Dupre and Don
...
Saliers (eds
...
28
...
Quoted in Clark, Meister Eckhart, p-40
...
Sermon, 'Qui Audit Me Non Confundetur' in R
...
Blakeney (trans
...
2O4
...
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...
288
...
'On Detachment' in Edmund Coledge and Bernard McGinn (eds
...
) Meister Eckhart, the Essential Sermons, Commentaries,
Treatises and Defence (London, 1981), p
...

65
...
9320
...
)
66
...

67
...
3
...

8 - A God for Reformers
1
...
351
...
Marshall G
...
Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 Vols, (Chicago, 1974), II, pp-334-360
...
Kitab al hikmat al-arshiya, quoted in Henri Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, From Mazdean Iran to Shiite Iran (trans
...
166
...
Quoted in M
...
Raschid, Iqbal's Concept of God (London, 1981), pp
...

5
...
(London, 1955), p
...

6
...
p
...
43-48; R
...
Zwi Weblosky, 'The Safed Revival and its Aftermath' in Arthur Green (ed
...
(London, 1986,
1988), II; Jacob Katz, 'Halakah and Kabbalah as Competing Disciplines of Study' in ibid
...

7
...

8
...
Leo Sherley Poole), (Harmondsworth, 1953), I, i, p
...

9
...
) Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation
(New York and London, 1989), p
...

10
...
Clifton Wolters) (London, 1981), 15, pp
...

11
...
Bouwsme, The Spirituality of Renaissance Humanism' in Raitt, Christian
Spirituality, p
...

12
...
), Petrarch, a Humanist among Princes: An Anthology of
Petrarch's Letters and Translations from His Works (New York, 1971), P
...

13
...
87
...
Of Learned Ignorance, 1
...

15
...
5
...
Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (London, 1976)
...
Quoted in Alister E
...
73
...
Commentary on Psalm 90
...


file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/History%20of%20God%20-%20Karen%20Armstrong/histgod
...
Commentary on Galatians 3
...

20
...
74
...
I Corinthians 1
...

22
...

23
...
19-20
...
Ibid
...
Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, A History of the Development of Dogma 5 Vols, IV, Reformation of Church and
Dogma (Chicago and London, 1984), p
...

26
...
16
...
Ethical Orations 5
28
...
4
...
i6i
...
)
29
...
McGrath, A Life of John Calvin, A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture (Oxford, 1990) p
...

30
...
251
...
Institutes of the Christians Religion, I, xiii, 2
...
Quoted in Pelikan, Reformation of Church, p-327
...
Zinzendorf quoted in ibid, p
...

34
...
87
...
McGrath, A Life of Calvin, p
...

36
...
Martine E
...
127-85
...
John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400-1700 (Oxford and New York, 1985), p
...

38
...
209-245
...
R
...
Lovelace, 'Puritan Spirituality: the Search for a Rightly Reformed Church' in Louis Dupre and Don E
...
) Christian
Spirituality: Post Reformation and Modern (New York and London, 1989) p
...

40
...

41
...
Michael Barry) (London, 1968), p
...

42
...
Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, the Religion of Rabelais (trans
...
,
and London, 1982) p
...

44
...

45
...
C
...
114
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

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...
131
...
Quoted in Robert S
...
Lindberg and Ronald E
...
), God and Nature;
Historical Essays in the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1986), p
...

48
...

49
...
Shea, 'Galileo and the Church' in Lindberg and Numbers (eds
...
125
...
Text taken from Blaise Pascal, Pensees (trans, and ed
...
J
...
Pensees, 919
...
Ibid
...

4
...
418
...
Ibid
...

6
...
418
...
Romans 1
...

8
...
J
...
6
...

9
...
Paul J
...
263
...
Ibid
...
36i
...
Quoted in A
...
Hall and L
...
) The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3 Vols (Cambridge, 1959-77), December 10, 1692, III,
PP
...

12
...
p
...

13
...
Andrew Motte, ed
...
344-6
...
'Corruptions of Scripture' quoted in Richard S
...
A Study of Kepler,
Descartes and Newton' in David C
...
Numbers (eds
...
231
...
Ibid
...
231-2
...
Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, A History of the Development of Doctrine 5 Vols, V Christian Doctrine and Modern
Culture (Since 1700) (Chicago and London, 1989), p
...

17
...
p
...

18
...
101
...
Ibid
...
103
...
Paradise Lost, Book III, Lines 113-119, 124-128
...
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A History of God By Karen Armstrong

21
...
Theodore Besterman) (London, 1972), p
...

22
...
p
...

23
...
290
...
Baruch Spinoza, A Theologica-Political Treatise (trans
...
H
...
Elwes) (New York, 1951), p
...

25
...
6o
...
Ibid
...
11 o
...
Quoted in Sherwood Eliot Wirt (ed
...
9
...
Albert C
...
), John Wesley: Writings, 2 Vols
...
194-6
...
Pelikan, Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture, p
...

30
...
p
...

31
...
2s8
...
Ibid
...
221
...
Samuel Shaw, Communion with God, quoted in Albert C
...
Saliers (eds
...
245
...
Ibid, p
...

35
...
), p
...

36
...
p
...

37
...
p
...

38
...
p
...

39
...
303
...
Ibid
...
3O4
...
Ibid
...
305
...
Quoted in Wirt (ed
...
110
...
Quoted in ibid, p
...

44
...
From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass
...
43
...
'An Essay on the Trinity' quoted in ibid, pp
...

46
...
101
...
Remarks of Alexander Gordon and Samuel Quincey quoted in ibid
...
167
...
htm (195 of 198)6/29/2005 11:31:15 PM

A History of God By Karen Armstrong

48
...

49
...
124
...
Ibid
...
130
...
Ibid
...
Ibid
...
Ibid
...
136
...
Quoted in Scholem, 'Neutralisation of Messianism in Early Hasidism' in ibid
...
190
...
Scholem, 'Devekut or Communion with God' in ibid
...
2O756
...
) Jewish Spirituality 2 Vols, (London, 1986, 1988), II, pp
...

57
...
p
...

58
...
226-7
...
Arthur Green, 'Typologies of leadership and the Hasidic Zaddick' in Jewish Spirituality II, p
...

60
...
R
...
Za
...
) The Jewish Mystics (Jerusalem, 1976 and London, 1990), p
...

61
...
p
...

62
...
Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 Vols (Oxford 1934-61), X, p
...

63
...
) Modern Religious Thought (Boston, 1990), p
...

64
...
) Jewish Spirituality II, p
...

65
...
p
...

66
...
Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven and London, 1987), p
...

67
...
) Diderot's Early Philosophical Works (Chicago, 1966),
PP
...

68
...
H
...
Robinson) 2 Vols
(New York, 1835), I, p
...

69
...
II, p
...

70
...
I, p
...

71
...
II, p
...

10 - The Death of God?
1
...
H
...
66
...
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2
...
H
...
Rollins) 2 Vols (Cambridge, Mass
...
184-5
...
To George and Thomas Keats, December 21 (27?), 1817 in ibid, p
...

4
...

5
...

6
...

7
...

8
...

9
...

10
...

11
...
96:23-8
...
F
...
E
...
H
...
Mackintosh and J
...
Steward) (Edinburgh, 1928)
...
Ibid
...
12
...
Albert Ritschl, Theology and Metaphysics (2nd edn
...
2915
...
i62
...
'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of the Right" {!} in jaroslav Pelikan (ed
...
80
...
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York, 1974), No
...

18
...
R
...
Hollingdale), (London, 1968), p
...

19
...
56
...
Friedrich Neitzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, A Book for Every One and No One (trans
...
J
...
217
...
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam liv, 18-20
...
Quoted by William Hamilton in 'The New Optimism - From Prufrock to Ringo' in Thomas J
...
Altizer and William Hamilton (eds
...

23
...
), p-38
...
Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt 2 Vols (New York, 1908), II, p
...

25
...
183-4
...
Risalat al-Tawhid, quoted in Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York and London, 1971), p-378
...
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton and London, 1957), p-9528
...
p
...
123-160 for the analysis of Al-Azhar
...
htm (197 of 198)6/29/2005 11:31:15 PM

A History of God By Karen Armstrong

29
...
Deborah Greniman) (New York, 1985), p
...

Kabbalistic terms in italics
...
Ibid
...
143
...
'Avodah', 1-8, trans, by T
...
and trans
...
'The Service of God', quoted in Ben Zion Bokser (ed
...
) TheEssential Writings of Abraham Isaac Kook (Warwick N
...
, 1988),
p
...

33
...
Stella Rodway) (Harmondsworth, 1981), P
...

34
...
76-7
...
Peter Berger, A Rumour of Angels (London, 1970), p
...

2
...
J
...
152
...
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Belief and History (Charlottesville, 1985), p
...

4
...
J
...
136
...
Paul Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (London, 1963), P
...

6
...
Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, 1966), passim
...
Paul Tillich, Theology and Culture (New York and Oxford,) 1964, P
...

8
...
191-2
...
Process and Reality (Cambridge, 1929), p
...

10
...
Laleh Bakhtiar), (Teheran, 1988), p
...

11
...
p
...

12
...
Edward Quinn), (London, 1978), p
...

13
...
43
...
Personal responsibility is also important in Christianity, of course, but Judaism and Islam have stressed it by their lack of a mediating
priesthood, a perspective that was recovered by the Protestant reformers
...
Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times (New York, 1947), pp
...


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