The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  Cyril’s lectures, therefore, were not metaphysical doctrinal explanations demanding credulous “belief” but mystagogy; this had been the technical term for the instruction that enabled mystai in the Greek Mysteries “to assimilate themselves with the holy symbols, leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.” When the ceremony began, baptismal candidates were lined up outside the church facing westward, in the direction of Egypt, the realm of sunset and death. As a first step in their reenactment of the Israelites’ liberation from slavery, they renounced Satan. They were then “turned around” in a “conversion” toward the east—to the dawn, new life, and the pristine innocence of Eden. Processing into the church, they discarded their clothes, symbolically shedding their old selves, so that they stood naked, like Adam and Eve before the fall. Each mystes was then plunged three times into the waters of the baptismal pool. This was their crossing of the Sea and their symbolic immersion in the death of Christ, whose tomb stood only a few yards away. Each time they were pulled underwater, the bishop asked them: Do you have pistis in the Father—in the Son—and in the Holy Spirit? And each time, the mystes cried, “Pisteuo!”: “I give him my heart, my loyalty and my commitment!” When they emerged from the pool, they had themselves become christoi (“anointed ones”).82 They were clothed in white garments, symbolizing their new identity, received the Eucharist for the first time, and, like Christ at his own baptism, were ritually adopted as “sons of God.” In the Latin-speaking West, neophytes would cry “Credo!” when they were immersed in the water. This was not an intellectual assent to obligatory doctrines; much of the dogma would not be imparted to them until the following week. The mystai were not simply stating their “belief” in a set of empirically unproven propositions. The cry “Pisteuo!” or “Credo!” was more like “I will!” in the marriage service.

  The carefully devised rituals had evoked an ekstasis, a “stepping out” of their accustomed modes of thought. As Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia from 392 to 428, explained to his catechumens:

  When you say “pisteuo” [“I engage myself”] before God, you show that you will remain steadfastly with him, that you will never separate yourself from him and that you will think it higher than anything else to be and to live with him and to conduct yourself in a way that is in harmony with his commandments.83

  “Belief” in our modern sense did not come into it. Even though Theodore was a leading proponent of the literal exegesis practiced in Antioch, he did not require his candidates to “believe” any “mysterious” doctrines. Faith was purely a matter of commitment and practical living.

  This would also be true of the third of the monotheisms, which would not emerge until the early years of the seventh century. In 610, Muhammad ibn Abdullah (c. 560–632), a merchant of the thriving commercial city of Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz, began to have revelations that he believed came from the God of the Jews and Christians. These divine messages were eventually brought together in the scripture known as the Qur’an, the “Recitation,” and its text was finalized a mere twenty years after the Prophet’s death. The religion of the Qur’an would eventually be known as islam, a word that means “surrender” to God, and was based on the same basic principles as the two other monotheistic traditions.

  The Qur’an has no interest in “belief;” indeed, this concept is quite alien to Islam.84 Theological speculation that results in the formulation of abstruse doctrines is dismissed as zannah, self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can prove one way or the other but that makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.85 Like any religion or philosophia, Islam was a way of life (din). The fundamental message of the Qur’an was not a doctrine but an ethical summons to practically expressed compassion: it is wrong to build a private fortune and good to share your wealth fairly and create a just society where poor and vulnerable people are treated with respect.86 The five “pillars” of Islam are a miqra, a summons to dedicated activity: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage. This is also true of the first “pillar,” the declaration of faith: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet.” This is not a “creed” in the modern Western sense; the Muslim who makes this shahadah “bears witness” in his life and in every single one of his actions that his chief priority is Allah and that no other “gods”—which include political, material, economic, and personal ambitions—can take precedence over his commitment to God alone. In the Qur’an, faith (iman) is something that people do: they share their wealth, perform the “works of justice” (salihat), and prostrate their bodies to the ground in the kenotic, ego-deflating act of prayer (salat).87

  In the Qur’an, the people who opposed Islam when Muhammad began to preach in Mecca are called the kafirun. The usual English translation is extremely misleading: it does not mean “unbeliever” or “infidel;” the root KFR means “blatant ingratitude,” a discourteous and arrogant refusal of something offered with great kindness.88 The theology of the kafirun was quite correct: they all took it for granted that God created the world, for example.89 They were not condemned for their “unbelief” but for their braying, offensive manner to others, their pride, self-importance, chauvinism, and inability to accept criticism.90 The kafirun never give serious consideration to an idea that is new to them, because they think they know everything already. Hence they sneer at the Qur’an, seizing every opportunity to display their own cleverness.91 Above all, they are jahili: chronically “irascible,” acutely sensitive about their honor and prestige, with a destructive tendency to violent retaliation.92 Muslims are commanded to respond to such abusive behavior with hilm (“forbearance”) and quiet courtesy, leaving revenge to Allah.93 They must “walk gently on the earth,” and whenever the jahilun insult them, they should simply reply, “Peace.”94

  There was no question of a literal, simplistic reading of scripture. Every single image, statement, and verse in the Qur’an is called an ayah (“sign,” “symbol,” “parable”), because we can speak of God only analogically. The great ayat of the creation and the last judgment are not introduced to enforce “belief,” but they are a summons to action. Muslims must translate these doctrines into practical behavior. The ayah of the last day, when people will find that their wealth cannot save them, should make Muslims examine their conduct here and now: Are they behaving kindly and fairly to the needy? They must imitate the generosity of Allah, who created the wonders of this world so munificently and sustains it so benevolently. At first, the religion was known as tazakka (“refinement”). By looking after the poor compassionately, freeing their slaves, and performing small acts of kindness on a daily, hourly basis, Muslims would acquire a responsible, caring spirit, purging themselves of pride and selfishness. By modeling their behavior on that of the Creator, they would achieve spiritual refinement.95

  In these early days, Muslims did not see Islam as a new, exclusive religion but as a continuation of the primordial faith of the “People of the Book,” the Jews and Christians. In one remarkable passage, God insists that Muslims must accept indiscriminately the revelations of every single one of God’s messengers: Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and all the other prophets.96 The Qur’an is simply a “confirmation” of the previous scriptures.97 Nobody must be forced to accept Islam, because each of the revealed traditions had its own din; it was not God’s will that all human beings should belong to the same faith community.98 God was not the exclusive property of any one tradition; the divine light could not be confined to a single lamp, belonged neither to the East nor to the West, but enlightened all human beings.99 Muslims must speak courteously to the People of the Book, debate with them only in “the most kindly manner,” remember that they worshipped the same God, and not engage in pointless, aggressive disputes.100

  All this would require a ceaseless jihad (which did not mean “holy war” but “effort,” “struggle”), because it was extremely difficult to implement the will of God in a t
ragically flawed world. Muslims must make a determined endeavor on all fronts—intellectual, social, economic, moral, spiritual, and political. Sometimes they might have to fight, as Muhammad did when the Meccan kafirun vowed to exterminate the Muslim community. But aggressive warfare was outlawed, and the only justification for war was self-defense.101 Warfare was far from being the prime Muslim duty. An important and oft-quoted tradition (hadith) has Muhammad say on his way home after a battle: “We are returning from the Lesser Jihad [the battle] and going to the Greater Jihad,” the far more important and difficult struggle to reform one’s own society and one’s own heart. Eventually, when the war with Mecca was turning in his favor, Muhammad adopted a policy of nonviolence.102 When Mecca finally opened its gates voluntarily, nobody was forced to enter Islam and Muhammad made no attempt to implement an exclusively Islamic state there.

  Like any religious tradition, Islam would change and evolve. Muslims acquired a large empire, stretching from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but true to Qur’anic principles, nobody was forced to become Muslim. Indeed, for the first hundred years after the Prophet’s death, conversion to Islam was actually discouraged, because Islam was a din for the Arabs, the descendants of Abraham’s elder son, Ishmael, just as Judaism was for the sons of Isaac and Christianity for the followers of the gospel.

  • • •

  Faith, therefore, was a matter of practical insight and active commitment; it had little to do with abstract belief or theological conjecture. Judaism and Islam have remained religions of practice; they promote orthopraxy, right practice, rather than orthodoxy, right teaching. In the early fourth century, however, Christianity had begun to move in a slightly different direction and developed a preoccupation with doctrinal correctness that would become its Achilles’ heel. Yet even while some Christians stridently argued about abstruse dogmatic definitions, others—perhaps in reaction—developed a spirituality of silence and unknowing that would be just as important, characteristic, and influential.

  Silence

  In 312, Constantine defeated his rival for the imperial throne at the battle of Milvian Bridge and would always believe that he owed his victory to the God of the Christians. The following year, he declared Christianity religio licita, one of the permitted religions of the Roman Empire. This was a dramatic and fateful reversal. From being persecuted members of an outlawed sect, Christians could now own property, build churches, worship freely, and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Even though Constantine continued to preside over the official pagan cult as pontifex maximus and was baptized only on his deathbed, it was clear that he favored Christianity. He had hoped that, once legalized, the church would become a cohesive force in his far-flung empire. This state support proved a mixed blessing, however. Constantine had very little understanding of Christian theology, but that did not prevent him from meddling in doctrinal affairs when he discovered that the church that was supposed to unify his subjects was itself torn apart by a dogmatic dispute.

  Christians had to adapt to their changed circumstances. They had to find a way of instructing the flood of new converts presenting themselves for baptism, some, doubtless, with an eye on the main chance. They realized that their faith could be puzzling. Now that Christianity was a predominantly gentile religion, the Hebrew terminology of the first Jewish Christians needed to be translated into a Greco-Roman idiom. Christianity claimed to be a monotheistic religion, but what was the status of Jesus, the incarnate Logos? Was he a second God? What did Christians mean when they called him “Son of God”? Or was he a hybrid—half human and half divine—like Dionysus? And who was the Holy Spirit? The problem was exacerbated by a marked change in the intellectual and spiritual climate of late antiquity.

  There seems to have been a profound loss of confidence in both the physical world and human nature. Hitherto Greeks, like most other peoples, had seen no impassable gulf between God and humanity. Their philosophers had agreed that as rational animals, human beings contained a spark of the divine within themselves; a sage like Socrates, who incarnated the transcendent ideal of wisdom, was a son of God and an avatar of the divine. People had no doubt that they could ascend to the Good by their own natural powers. Origen, a Platonist, believed that he could get to know God by contemplating the universe and had seen the Christian life as a Platonic ascent that would continue after death until the soul was fully assimilated to the divine. The Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (c. 205–70) believed that the universe emanated from God eternally, like rays from the sun, so that the material world was a kind of overflowing of God’s very being; when you meditated on the universe, you were, therefore, meditating upon God. But by the early fourth century, people felt that the cosmos was separated from God by a vast, almost unbridgeable chasm. The universe was now experienced as so fragile, moribund, and contingent that it could have nothing in common with the God that was being itself. A terrifying void lay ready to engulf all living things. The primordial question (Why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?) no longer inspired awe, wonder, and delight but had been replaced by a sickening vertigo. The possibility of nothingness lurked threateningly at both the beginning and the end of human existence.

  Some Christians had already started to promote the new doctrine, entirely unknown in antiquity, of creation ex nihilo. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) believed that the philosophical idea of an eternal cosmos was idolatrous, because it presented nature as a second coeternal god. Nothing could come from nothing, so the universe could only have been summoned out of the primal void by the God that was Life itself. Instead of “deifying the universe,” people needed to know that “the sheer volition of God is the making of the universe.”1 The idea that God had deliberately created all things posed huge problems: Did it not imply that God was responsible for evil? Yet the belief that matter was eternal seemed to compromise God’s omnipotence and sovereign freedom. Monotheism implied that there was only one omnipotent power, so God’s decisions could surely not be influenced by the independent requirements of matter, which, like Plato’s craftsman, he was merely permitted to arrange and finish off.2

  Today the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is regarded as the linchpin of Christianity, the truth on which theism stands or falls. So it is interesting to note how slowly and uncertainly this idea emerged. It was entirely alien to Greek philosophy. It would have seemed absurd to Aristotle to imagine the timeless God who was wholly absorbed in ceaseless contemplation of itself suddenly deciding to create the cosmos. Creation out of nothing represented a fundamental change in the Christian understanding of both God and the world. There was no longer a chain of being emanating eternally from God to the material universe, no longer an intermediate realm of spiritual beings that transmitted the divine energy to the nether regions. Instead, God had called every single creature from an abysmal and unimaginable nothingness and could at any moment withdraw his sustaining hand. Creation ex nihilo tore the universe away from God. The physical world could not tell us anything about the divine, because it had not emanated naturally from God, as the philosophers had imagined, but was made out of nothing. It was, therefore, of an entirely different nature (ontos) from the substance of the living God. A “natural theology” that argued from our rational observation of the world to God was no longer possible, because the new doctrine made it clear that, left to ourselves, we could know nothing at all about God.

  Yet Christians did not feel that God was entirely unknowable. The man Jesus had been an image (eikon) of the divine and had given them an inkling of what the utterly transcendent God was like. They were also convinced that, in spite of everything, they had entered a hitherto-unexplored dimension of their humanity that in some sense enabled them to participate in the divine life. They called this Christian experience theosis (“deification”): like the incarnate Logos, they too had become the sons of God, as Paul had explained. But because this chasm had opened up between the material and divine worlds, they now realized that they could
not have achieved this by their own efforts. It had happened only because of a divine initiative. The God who had called all things into being had somehow bridged the immense gulf when “the Word was made flesh and lived among us.”3 But who was Jesus? On which side of the abyss was the Logos “through whom all things came to be”? 4 Some Christians argued that because, as Saint John said, the Word had been “with God” from the beginning and, indeed “was God,”5 Jesus, the incarnate Word, belonged in the divine sphere. But others pointed out that because he had become a man and died an agonizing death, he shared the fragility and contingency of matter. Did that mean that the Word had been created from nothing like everything else?

  In 320, a heated debate about these issues erupted in Alexandria. It seems to have started with an argument about the meaning of Wisdom’s words in the book of Proverbs, which Christians had always applied to Christ—”Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded, before the oldest of his works”6—and went on to say that Wisdom had been God’s “master craftsman,” his agent of creation. Arius, a handsome and charismatic young presbyter of Alexandria, argued that this text made it clear that the Word and Wisdom of the Father was the first and most privileged of God’s creatures. It followed that the Word must also have been created ex nihilo. Arius did not deny that Jesus was God, but suggested that he had merely been promoted to divine status. God had foreseen that when the Logos became a man, he would behave with perfect obedience, and as a reward had raised him to divine status in advance of his mission. The Logos thus became the prototype of the perfected human being; if Christians imitated his wholehearted kenosis, they too could become “sons of God;” they too could become divine.7 Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that Arius had put his finger on an ambiguity in the Alexandrian view of Christ that needed to be cleared up.8