Abrahamism

I exalt the pagan personae of athlete and warrior, who belong to shame rather than guilt culture and whose ethic is candor, discipline, vigilance, and valor. (VT 1994)

— CamillePagliaQuotes (@PagliaQuotes) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Satyr wrote:

I exalt the pagan personae of athlete and warrior, who belong to shame rather than guilt culture and whose ethic is candor, discipline, vigilance, and valor. (VT 1994)

— CamillePagliaQuotes (@PagliaQuotes) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Even a lesbian understands the difference between "shame" and "guilt".
It requires minimal testosterone to dominate estrogen - a hormonal balance with profound consequences, such as an adjustment of world views.
[see Feminization of Man]

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— Αναχωρητής ΨΟΦΟΣ India - Free Tibet (@MakeMyDayPunk_) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

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You would like this I think [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Croatian Idiot (@croatiangrug) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Well, if Christianity were 'true' or 'the best' then other Xians in the world would have achieved what Xians in thee west achieved - and they didn't. So Christianity is helpful because it's better than Judaism or Islam, but it's not better than what made the West succeed: Law.

— Curt Doolittle (@curtdoolittle) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Now that I know how the entire belief system of the Abrahamists is just BS based on myths, traditions & symbols that they didn't understand, but simply stole from others & misused to create a new cult, I find it hard to take them seriously anymore.

Judeo-Christianity is a JOKE. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Thulêan Perspective (MYFAROG) (@WargarW) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

At the same time as Philo was expounding his Platonised Judaism in Alexandria and Hillel and Shammai were arguing in Jerusalem, a charismatic faith healer began his own career in the north of Palestine. We know very little about Jesus. The first full-length account of his life was St Mark's Gospel, which was not written until about the year 70, some twenty years after his death. 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. The first Christians saw him as a new Moses, a new Joshua, the founder of a new Israel. 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. During his lifetime, many Jews in Palestine had believed that he was the Messiah: he had ridden into Jerusalem and been hailed as the Son of David but, only a few days later, he was put to death by the agonising Roman punishment of crucifixion. 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. There were rumours that he had risen from the dead. 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 disciples believed that he would soon return to inaugurate the Messianic Kingdom of God and, since there was nothing heretical about such a belief, their sect was accepted as authentically Jewish by no less a Person than Rabbi Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel and one of the greatest of the tannaim. His followers worshipped in the Temple every day as fully observant Jews. Ultimately, however, the New Israel, inspired by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, would become a Gentile faith, which would evolve its own distinctive conception of God.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

There has been much speculation about the exact nature of Jesus's mission. Very few of his actual words seem to have been recorded in the Gospels and much of their material has been affected by later developments in the churches that were founded by St Paul after his death. Nevertheless there are clues that point to the essentially Jewish nature of his career. It has been pointed out that faith healers were familiar religious figures in Galilee: like Jesus, they were mendicants, who preached, healed the sick and exorcised demons. Like Jesus again, these Galilean holy men often had a large number of women disciples. Others argue that Jesus was probably a Pharisee of the same school as Hillel, just as Paul, who claimed to have been a Pharisee before his conversion to Christianity, was said to have sat at the feet of Rabbi Gamaliel. 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. Like the Pharisees, he was devoted to the Torah and was said to have preached a more stringent observance than many of his contemporaries. 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.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

After his death, the disciples could not abandon their faith that Jesus had somehow presented an image of God. From a very early date, they had begun to pray to him. 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. He was convinced that non-Jews could become members of the New Israel even though they did not observe the full Law of Moses. 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.
Most of Paul's converts were either diaspora Jews or Godfearers, however, so the New Israel remained deeply Jewish.
Paul never called Jesus 'God'. He called him 'the Son of God' in its Jewish sense: he certainly did not believe that Jesus had been the incarnation of God himself: he had simply possessed God's 'powers' and 'Spirit', which manifested God's activity on earth and were not to be identified with the inaccessible divine essence. 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. The doctrine of the Incarnation of God in Jesus has always scandalised Jews and, later, Muslims would also find it blasphemous. It is a difficult doctrine with certain dangers; Christians have often interpreted it crudely. Yet this type of incarnational devotion has been a fairly constant theme in the history of religion: we shall see that even Jews and Muslims developed some strikingly similar theologies of their own.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

Some Arabs seem to have attempted to discover a more neutral form of monotheism, which was not tainted by imperialistic associations. As early as the fifth century, the Palestinian Christian historian Sozomenus tells us that some of the Arabs in Syria had rediscovered what they called the authentic religion of Abraham, who had lived before God had sent either the Torah or the Gospel and who was, therefore, neither a Jew nor a Christian. Shortly before Muhammad received his own prophetic call, his first biographer Muhammad ibn Ishaq (d.767) tells us that four of the Quraysh of Mecca had decided to seek the hanifiyyah, the true religion of Abraham. 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. Three of the four hanifs were well-known to the first Muslims: Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was Muhammad's cousin, Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who eventually became a Christian, was one of his earliest spiritual advisers, and Zayd ibn Amr was the uncle of Umar ibn al-Khattab, one of Muhammad's closest companions and the second Caliph of the Islamic empire. 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.' Then he added sadly, 'O God, if I knew how you wish to be worshipped I would so worship you; but I do not know.'

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

But the greatest sign of all was the Koran itself: indeed its individual verses are called ayat. Western people find the Koran a difficult book and this is largely a problem of translation. 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. The early suras in particular give the impression of human language crushed and splintered under the divine impact. 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. As its name suggests, it is meant to be recited aloud and the sound of the language is an essential part of its effect. 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 not a book to be read simply to acquire information. It is meant to yield a sense of the divine, and must not be read in haste:

Koran wrote:

‘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.
[Know] then, [that] God is sublimely exalted, the Ultimate Sovereign (al-Malik), the Ultimate Truth
(al-Haqq): and [knowing this], do not approach the Koran in haste, ere it has been revealed unto thee in full, but [always] say: 'O my Sustainer, cause me to grow in knowledge!’

By approaching the Koran in the right way, Muslims claim that they do experience a sense of transcendence, of an ultimate reality and power that lies behind the transient and fleeting phenomena of the mundane world. 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. It is Jesus who is the Word of God and there is nothing holy about the New Testament Greek. Jews, however, have a similar attitude towards the Torah. When they study the first five books of the Bible, they do not simply run their eyes over the page. 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.
Sometimes they sway backwards and forwards, like a flame before the breath of the Spirit. 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.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

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. Western scholars have usually dated this rupture with the Quraysh to the possibly apocryphal incident of the Satanic Verses, which has become notorious since the tragic Salman Rushdie affair. 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. These deities were not fully personalised like Juno or Pallas Athene. They were often called the banat al-Lah, the Daughters of God, but this does not necessarily imply a fully-developed pantheon. The Arabs used such kinship terms to denote an abstract relationship: thus banat al-dahr (literally, 'daughters of fate') simply meant misfortunes or vicissitudes. The term banat al-Lah may simply have signified 'divine beings'.
These deities were not represented by realistic statues in their shrines but by large standing stones, similar to those in use among the ancient Canaanites, which the Arabs worshipped not in any crudely simplistic way but as a focus of divinity. Like Mecca with its Kabah, the shrines at Taif, Nakhlah and Qudayd had become essential spiritual landmarks in the emotional landscape of the Arabs. Their forefathers had worshipped there from time immemorial and this gave a healing sense of continuity.
The story of the Satanic Verses is not mentioned in either the Koran or in any of the early oral or written sources. It is not included in Ibn Ishaq's Sira, the most authoritative biography of the Prophet, but only in the work of the tenth-century historian Abu Jafar at-Tabari (d.923). He tells us that Muhammad was distressed by the rift that had developed between him and most of his tribe after he had forbidden the cult of the goddesses and so, inspired by 'Satan', he uttered some rogue verses which allowed the banat al-Lah to be venerated as intercessors, like the angels. 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. Later, however, Tabari says that Gabriel told the Prophet that these verses were of 'Satanic' origin and should be excised from the Koran to be replaced by these lines which declared that the banat al-Lah were mere projections and figments of the imagination:

Koran wrote:

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]? ....
These [allegedly divine beings] are nothing but empty names which you have invented - you and your forefathers - [and] for which God has bestowed no warrant from on high. 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.

This was the most radical of all the Koranic condemnations of the ancestral pagan gods and after these verses had been included in the Koran there was no chance of a reconciliation with the Quraysh. From this point, Muhammad became a jealous monotheist and shirk (idolatry; literally, associating other beings with al-Lah) became the greatest sin of Islam.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

The perception of God's uniqueness was the basis of the morality of the Koran. To give allegiance to material goods or to put trust in lesser beings was shirk (idolatry), the greatest sin of Islam. The Koran pours scorn on the pagan deities in almost exactly the same way as the Jewish scriptures: they are totally ineffective. These gods cannot give food or sustenance; it is no good putting them at the centre of one's life because they are powerless. Instead the Muslim must realise that al-Lah is the ultimate and unique reality:

Quote :

Say: He is the One God; God, the Eternal, the Uncaused Cause of all being.
He begets not, and neither is he begotten and there is nothing that could be compared to him

Christians like Athanasius had also insisted that only the Creator, the Source of Being, had the power to redeem. They had expressed this insight in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Koran returns to a Semitic idea of the divine unity and refuses to imagine that God can 'beget' a son. 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. Only by acknowledging him as as-Samad, 'the Uncaused Cause of all being' will Muslims address a dimension of reality beyond time and history and which would take them beyond the tribal divisions that were tearing their society apart. 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.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

The assertion of the unity of God was not simply a denial that deities like the banat al-Lah were worthy of worship. To say that God was One was not a mere numerical definition: it was a call to make that unity the driving factor of one's life and society. The unity of God could be glimpsed in the truly integrated self. But the divine unity also required Muslims to recognise the religious aspirations of others. Because there was only one God, all rightly guided religions must derive from him alone. Belief in the supreme and sole Reality would be culturally conditioned and would be expressed by different societies in different ways but the focus of all true worship must have been inspired by and directed towards the being whom the Arabs had always called al-Lah. One of the divine names of the Koran is an-Nur, the Light. In these famous verses of the Koran, God is the source of all knowledge as well as the means whereby men catch a glimpse of transcendence:

Quote :

God is the light of the heavens and the earth. 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.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

A distinction between esoteric and exoteric truth will be extremely important in the history of God. It was not to be confined to Greek Christians but Jews and Muslims would also develop an esoteric tradition.The idea of a 'secret' doctrine was not to shut people out. Basil was not talking about an early form of Freemasonry. He was simply calling attention to the fact that not all religious truth was capable of being expressed and defined clearly and logically. 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. Since all religion was directed towards an ineffable reality that lay beyond normal concepts and categories, speech was limiting and confusing. 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. Besides their literal meaning, therefore, the scriptures also had a spiritual significance which it was not always possible to articulate.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

The difference between the Greek and the Western use of the word 'theory' is instructive. In Eastern Christianity, theoria would always mean contemplation. In the West, 'theory' has come to mean a rational hypothesis which must be logically demonstrated. Developing a 'theory' about God implied that 'he' could be contained in a human system of thought. There had only been three Latin theologians at Nicaea. 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. Perhaps it was not wholly translatable into another idiom. Every culture has to create its own idea of God. If Westerners found the Greek interpretation of the Trinity alien, they would have to come up with a version of their own.
The Latin theologian who defined the Trinity for the Latin Church was Augustine. He was also an ardent Platonist and devoted to Plotinus and was, therefore, more sympathetically disposed to this Greek doctrine than some of his Western colleagues. As he explained, misunderstanding was often simply due to terminology:

Augustine wrote:

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 (personæ).

Where the Greeks approached God by considering the three Hypostases, refusing to analyse his single, unrevealed essence, Augustine himself and Western Christians after him have begun with the divine unity and then proceeded to discuss its three manifestations. 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's approach was not metaphysical, like the Greeks', but psychological and highly personal.

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

Augustine can be called the founder of the Western spirit. No other theologian, apart from St Paul, has been more influential in the West. 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. From his earliest years, Augustine had sought a theistic religion.
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!' 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. He found the notion of the Incarnation offensive, a defilement of the idea of God, but while he was in Italy, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, was able to convince him that Christianity was not incompatible with Plato and Plotinus. Yet Augustine was reluctant to take the final step and accept baptism. He felt that for him Christianity entailed celibacy and he was loath to take that step: 'Lord, give me chastity,' he used to pray, 'but not yet.'

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

In 529 the emperor Justinian closed the ancient school of philosophy in Athens, the last bastion of intellectual paganism: its last great master had been Proclus (412-485), an ardent disciple of Plotinus. Pagan philosophy went underground and seemed defeated by the new religion of Christianity. Four years later, however, four mystical treatises appeared which were purportedly written by Denys the Areopagite, St Paul's first Athenian convert. They were, in fact, written by a sixth-century Greek Christian, who has preserved his anonymity. The pseudonym had a symbolic power, however, which was more important than the identity of the author: Pseudo-Denys managed to baptise the insights of Neoplatonism and wed the God of the Greeks to the Semitic God of the Bible.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

In fact, Denys did not like to use the word 'God' at all - probably because it had acquired such inadequate and anthropomorphic connotations. 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. Denys applied this to God-talk, which, properly understood, could also release the divine energeiai inherent in the revealed symbols. 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. Even the word 'God' itself was faulty, since God was 'above God', a 'mystery beyond being'. Christians must realise that God is not the Supreme Being, the highest being of all heading a hierarchy of lesser beings. Things and people do not stand over against God as a separate reality or an alternative being, which can be the object of knowledge. God is not one of the things that exist and is quite unlike anything else in our experience. In fact, it is more accurate to call God 'Nothing': we should not even call him a Trinity since he is 'neither a unity nor a trinity in the sense in which we know them'. 'He is above all names just as he is above all being’. Yet we can use our incapacity to speak about God as a method of achieving a union with him, which is nothing less than a 'deification' (theosis) of our own nature.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

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. Consequently, like Jews, they were scandalised when a prophet arose in Arabia during the seventh century who claimed to have received a direct revelation from their God and to have brought a new scripture to his people. Yet the new version of monotheism, which eventually became known as 'Islam', spread with astonishing rapidity throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Many of its enthusiastic converts in these lands (where Hellenism was not on home ground) turned with relief from Greek Trinitarianism, which expressed the mystery of God in an idiom that was alien to them, and adopted a more Semitic notion of the divine reality.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

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. After so many years of working in isolation he must have been looking forward to living with members of an older, more established tradition. 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. Muslims could marry Jewish women and should observe some of the dietary laws. Above all Muslims must now pray facing Jerusalem like the Jews and Christians. The Jews of Medina were at first prepared to give Muhammad a chance: life had become intolerable in the oasis and like many of the committed pagans of Medina they were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially since he seemed so positively inclined towards their faith. Eventually, however, they turned against Muhammad and joined those pagans who were hostile to the newcomers from Mecca.
The Jews had sound religious reasons for their rejection: they believed that the era of prophecy was over. They were expecting a Messiah but no Jew or Christian at this stage would have believed that they were prophets. Yet they were also motivated by political considerations: in the old days, they had gained power in the oasis by throwing in their lot with one or the other warring Arab tribes. 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. As they saw their position in Medina decline, the Jews became antagonistic. They used to assemble in the mosque 'to listen to the stories of the Muslims and laugh and scoff at their religion'. It was very easy for them, with their superior knowledge of scripture, to pick holes in the stories of the Koran - some of which differed markedly from the biblical version. 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.
Muhammad's rejection by the Jews was probably the greatest disappointment in his life and it called his whole religious position into question. But some of the Jews were friendly and seem to have joined the Muslims in an honorary capacity.
They discussed the Bible with him and showed him how to rebuff the criticisms of the Jews and this new knowledge of scripture also helped Muhammad to develop his own insights. For the first time Muhammad learned the exact chronology of the prophets, about which he had previously been somewhat hazy. He could now see that it was very important that Abraham had lived before either Moses or Jesus. 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. To outsiders like the Arabs there seemed little to choose between the two positions and it seemed logical to imagine that the followers of the Torah and the Gospel had introduced inauthentic elements into the hanifiyyah, the pure religion of Abraham, such as the Oral Law elaborated by the Rabbis and the blasphemous doctrine of the Trinity. 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. The polemic against the Jews in the Koran is well-developed and shows how threatened the Muslims must have felt by the Jewish rejection, even though the Koran still insists that not all 'the people of earlier revelation' have fallen into error and that essentially all religions are one.
From the friendly Jews of Medina, Muhammad also learned the story of Ishmael, Abraham's elder son. In the Bible, Abraham had had a son by his concubine Hagar but when Sarah had borne Isaac she had become jealous and demanded that he get rid of Hagar and Ishmael. To comfort Abraham, God promised that Ishmael would also be the father of a great nation.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam had emerged from a Semitic experience but had collided with the Greek rationalism in the Hellenic centres of the Middle East. Other Muslims were attempting an even more radical Hellenisation of the Islamic God and introduced a new philosophical element into the three monotheistic religions. The three faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam would come to different but highly significant conclusions about the validity of philosophy and its relevance to the mystery of God.

A History of God

Christianity is "Early Bolshevism". Bolshevism is "Christianity for Atheists".

Same thing, different wrapping. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Thulêan Perspective (MYFAROG) (@WargarW) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

When he applied this method to the statement 'God exists', Erigena arrived, as usual, at the synthesis: 'God is more than existence.' God does not exist like the things he has created and is not just an-other being existing alongside them, as Denys had pointed out. Again, this was an incomprehensible statement, because, Erigena comments, 'what that is which is more than "being" it does not reveal. For it says that God is not one of the things that are, but that he is more than the things that are, but what that "is" is, it in no way defines'. In fact, God is 'Nothing'.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

It is possible to read the Jewish scriptures as the story of the refinement and, later, of the abandonment of the tribal and personalised Yahweh who became YHWH. 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. Muslims very soon had problems with those passages in the Koran which implied that God 'sees', 'hears' and 'judges' like human beings. 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. Only a few people are capable of true mysticism, but in all three faiths (with the exception of Western Christianity) it was the God experienced by the mystics which eventually became normative among the faithful, until relatively recently.

A History of God

Armstrong, Karen wrote:

The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial, sacred time of myth. When monotheists turned to mysticism, however, mythology reasserted itself as the chief vehicle of religious experience. There is a linguistic connection between the three words 'myth', 'mysticism' and 'mystery'. All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence.' They are not popular words in the West today. The word 'myth', for example, is often used as a synonym for a lie: in popular parlance, a myth is something that is not true. 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'. Since the Enlightenment, a 'mystery' has been seen as something that needs to be cleared up. It is frequently associated with muddled thinking. 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. We shall see that even religious people came to regard 'mystery' as a bad word during the Enlightenment. Similarly 'mysticism' is frequently associated with cranks, charlatans or indulgent hippies. Since the West has never been very enthusiastic about mysticism, even during its heyday in other parts of the world, there is little understanding of the intelligence and discipline that is essential to this type of spirituality…
Mystical religion is more immediate and tends to be more help in time of trouble than a predominantly cerebral faith. The disciplines of mysticism help the adept to return to the One, the primordial beginning, and to cultivate a constant sense of presence. 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. Jews wanted to turn away from a world in which they were persecuted and marginalised to a more powerful divine realm. They imagined God as a mighty king who could only be approached in a perilous journey through the seven heavens. Instead of expressing themselves in the simple direct style of the Rabbis, the mystics used sonorous, grandiloquent language. The Rabbis hated this spirituality and the mystics were anxious not to antagonise them. Yet this 'Throne Mysticism', as it was called, must have fulfilled an important need since it continued to flourish alongside the great rabbinic academies until it was finally incorporated into Kabbalah, the new Jewish mysticism, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 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. They revealed a new extremity in the Jewish spirit, as they blazed a new trail to God on behalf of their people.

A History of God

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Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily concerned with the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest companions had been mystically inclined and the Muslims had quickly developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment of the austerity of the early ummah. They attempted to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF) that were supposed to have been favoured by the Prophet. Consequently, they were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained: ‘The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one's own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price.’
At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ala (d.748) had been a disciple of Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one of the fathers of Sufism.

A History of God

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Other mystics, known as the 'sober' Sufis, preferred a less extravagant spirituality. Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910), who mapped out the ground plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al-Bistami's extremism could be dangerous. He taught that 'fana (annihilation) must be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self. 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. He would become more fully human. When they experienced 'fana and baqa, therefore, Sufis had achieved a state that a Greek Christian would call 'deification'. Al-Junayd saw the whole Sufi quest as a return to man's primordial state on the day of creation: he was returning to the ideal humanity that God had intended. He was also returning to the Source of his being. The experience of separation and alienation was as central to the Sufi as to the Platonic or Gnostic experience; it is, perhaps not dissimilar to the 'separation' of which Freudians and Kleinians speak today, although the psychoanalysts attribute this to a non-theistic source. 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. It would be the end of separation and sadness, a reunion with a deeper self that was also the self he or she was meant to be.

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The story of al-Hallaj shows the deep antagonism that can exist between the mystic and the religious establishment who have different notions of God and revelation. 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. We have seen, however, that during the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina and al-Ghazzali himself had found that objective accounts of God were unsatisfactory and had turned towards mysticism. Al-Ghazzali had made Sufism acceptable to the establishment and had shown that it was the most authentic form of Muslim spirituality.

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Since Aristotle, however, it had been obscured by a more narrowly intellectual and cerebral philosophy but it had been secretly passed from one sage to another until it had finally reached Suhrawardi himself via al-Bistami and al-Hallaj. This perennial philosophy was mystical and imaginative but did not involve the abandonment of reason. Suhrawardi was as intellectually rigorous as al-Farabi but he also insisted on the importance of intuition in the approach to truth. As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God and should be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found in paganism and Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheistic tradition. Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people. Sufism in particular would evolve an outstanding appreciation of the faith of others.

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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. They were evolving a new type of Judaism, however, as a response to Muslim developments. 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. At first these mystics constituted only a tiny minority. Theirs was an esoteric discipline, handed on from master to disciple: they called it Kabbalah or inherited tradition. Eventually, however, the God of Kabbalah would appeal to the majority and take hold of the Jewish imagination in a way that the God of the philosophers never did.

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. Where the Throne Mystics had been content to gaze upon the glory of God from without, the Kabbalists attempted to penetrate the inner life of God and the human consciousness. 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.
Like the Sufis, the Kabbalists made use of the Gnostic and Neoplatonic distinction between the essence of God and the God whom we glimpse in revelation and creation. God himself is essentially unknowable, inconceivable and impersonal.
They called the hidden God En Sof, (literally, 'without end'). We know nothing whatever about En Sof: he is not even mentioned in either the Bible or the Talmud. An anonymous thirteenth-century author wrote that En Sof is incapable of becoming the subject of a revelation to humanity.
Unlike YHWH, En Sof had no documented name; 'he' is not a person. Indeed it is more accurate to refer to the Godhead as 'It'. This was a radical departure from the highly personal God of the Bible and the Talmud. The Kabbalists evolved their own mythology to help them to explore a new realm of the religious consciousness. To explain the relationship between En Sof and YHWH, without yielding to the Gnostic heresy that they were two different beings, the Kabbalists developed a symbolic method of reading scripture. Like the Sufis, they imagined a process whereby the hidden God made himself known to humanity. En Sof had manifested himself to the Jewish mystics under ten different aspects or sefiroth ('numerations') of the divine reality which had emanated from the inscrutable depths of the unknowable Godhead. 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.
The Kabbalistic exegesis made every single word of the Bible refer to one or other of the ten sefiroth: each verse described an event or phenomenon that had its counterpart in the inner life of God himself.

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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. He had tried, as it were, to confine God to his essence and say that it was impossible for him to be presentoutside it in his 'energies'. 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. Palamas insisted that the vision of God was a mutual ecstasy: men and women transcend themselves but God also underwent the ecstasy of transcendence by going beyond 'himself in order to make himself known to his creatures: 'God also comes out of himself and becomes united with our minds by condescension.' 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. Since the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers had come to the conclusion that reason - which was indispensable for such studies as medicine or science - was quite inadequate when it came to the study of God. To rely on reason alone was like attempting to eat soup with a fork.
The God of the Sufis had gained ascendancy over the God of the philosophers in most parts of the Islamic empire. In the next chapter we shall see that the God of the Kabbalists became dominant in Jewish spirituality during the sixteenth century.
Mysticism was able to penetrate the mind more deeply than the more cerebral or legalistic types of religion. Its God could address more primitive hopes, fears and anxieties before which the remote God of the philosophers was impotent. By the fourteenth century the West had launched its own mystical religion and made a very promising start. But mysticism in the West would never become as widespread as in the other traditions. In England, Germany and the Lowlands, which had produced such distinguished mystics, the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century decried this unbiblical spirituality. In the Roman Catholic Church, leading mystics like St Teresa of Avila were often threatened by the Inquisition of the Counter-Reformation. As a result of the Reformation, Europe began to see God in still more rationalistic terms.

A History of God