The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  Eckhart’s exuberant language, which swings so enthusiastically from the affirmative to the apophatic, demonstrates that precisely because this transformation is not an emotional “experience,” it cannot be described in words.

  Despite the new scholasticism, Denys’s dialectical method was still ingrained in European theology. We see it in two very different English writers of the fourteenth century. Julian of Norwich, who was not a trained theologian, has a perfect grasp of the apophatic, even at her most affirmative. When she speaks of Christ, for example, she alternates between male and female imagery to push the reader beyond these mundane categories. “In our Mother, Christ, we grow and develop; in his mercy he reforms and restores us; through his passion, death and resurrection he has united us to our being. So does our Mother work in mercy for all his children who respond to him and obey him.”94 And even though the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who translated Denys’ Mystical Theology into English, is taking the apophatic tradition in a new, fourteenth-century direction, he still sees it as fundamental to the religious life.95 If we want to know God, all thoughts about the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, the life of Christ, and the stories of the saints—which are perfectly good in themselves—must be cast under a thick “cloud of forgetting.”96

  At first, the author explains, a beginner would encounter only darkness “and, as it were, a cloud of unknowing.”97 If he asked: “How am I to think of God himself and what is he?” our author replied: “I cannot answer you, except to say ‘I do not know!’ For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be!”98 We can think about all kinds of things, but “of God himself can no man think.”99 This state of “unknowing” was not a defeat but an achievement; we arrived at this point by ruthlessly paring down all our God talk, until prayer was reduced to a single syllable: “God!” or “Love!” It was not easy. The mind rushed to fill the vacuum we were trying to create within ourselves with “wonderful thoughts of [God’s] kindness” and reminded us “of God’s sweetness and love, his grace and mercy.” But unless we turned a deaf ear to this pious clamor, we would be back where we started.100 In the meantime, the apprentice must continue with his prayers, liturgy, and lectio divina like everybody else. This was not what Eckhart would have called a special spiritual “way” but was a practice that should inform all the routine devotions and spiritual exercises of the Christian life.

  If we persevere, the intellect will eventually abdicate and allow love to take over. Here we see the new separation of knowledge from the affections: “Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that which I cannot think!” the author exclaims. “Why? Because [God] may well be loved but not thought. By love he may be caught and held but by thinking never.”101 But the apophatic habit is still so strong that the author immediately starts to deconstruct the notion of “love” and explain what it is not. There is no glow, no heavenly music, or interior sweetness in the Cloud. In fact the author seems to have Rolle in mind when he comes out strongly against the idea of an intense experience of God’s love. He warns beginners to be on their guard against the absurd literalism of this new spirituality. Novices hear talk of all kinds of special feelings— “how a man shall lift up his heart to God and continually long to feel his love. And immediately in their silly minds they understand these words not in the intended spiritual sense but in a physical and material, and they strain their natural hearts outrageously within their breasts!” Some even feel an “unnatural glow.”102 It is impossible to feel for God the love we feel for creatures; the “God” with whom these so-called mystics are infatuated is simply the product of their unhinged imagination.

  Clearly this “sham spirituality”103 was becoming a problem. When novices are told to stop all “exterior” mental activity, the author explains, they don’t know what “interior” work means, so “they do it wrong. For they turn their actual physical minds inwards to their bodies, which is an unnatural thing, and they strain as if to see spiritually with their physical eyes.”104 Their antics are painful to behold. They stare into space, looking quite deranged, squat “as if they were silly sheep,” and “hang their heads to one side as if they had a worm in their ear.”105 But “interiority” is achieved only by the discipline of “forgetting.” That is why the author is not going to tell his disciple to seek God within, and, he adds, “I don’t want you to be outside or above, behind, or beside yourself either!”106 When his disciple retorts in exasperation: “Where am I to be? Nowhere according to you!” our author replies that he is absolutely right: “Nowhere is where I want you! Why, when you are ‘nowhere’ physically, you are ‘everywhere’ spiritually.”107 There were no words to describe this kind of love. A person who has not put himself through the process of “forgetting” will see a dichotomy between “inner” and “outer,” “nowhere” and “everywhere.” But “nowhere” is not a “place” within the psyche; it is off the map of our secular experience.

  So let go this “everywhere” and “everything” for this “nowhere” and this “nothing.” Never mind if you cannot fathom this nothing, for I love it so much the better. It is so worthwhile in itself that no thinking about it will do it justice.108

  This “nothing” might seem like darkness, but it is actually “overwhelming spiritual light that blinds the soul that is experiencing it.”109 So the apprentice must be prepared to “wait in the darkness as long as is necessary,” aware only of “a simple, steadfast intention reaching out towards God.”110

  Kenosis is at the heart of the Cloud’s spirituality. Instead of seeking special raptures, the author tells his disciple to seek God for himself and not “for what you can get out of him.”111 But the discipline of self-emptying was becoming a thing of the past. Theologians were becoming more self-important, and “mystics” more self-indulgent. The new polarity was resulting in thinking theologians and loving mystics. Denys the Carthusian, an extremely learned Flemish monk of the fifteenth century, was disturbed by this change. The old mystical theology, he recalled, had been accessible to all the faithful, no matter how uneducated they were; it had been grounded in the ordinary routines of liturgy, community life, and the practice of charity. But the theology of Scotus and Ockham was incomprehensible to all but a few experts. The theology of unknowing had encouraged humility; the new speculations of the schoolmen seemed to inflate their conceit and could be imparted to anybody who had the intelligence to follow it, regardless of his moral stature.112 Theology was not only becoming aridly theoretical; without the discipline of the apophatic, it was in danger of becoming idolatrous. Europe was on the brink of major social, cultural, political, and intellectual change. As it entered the modern world, spirituality was at a low ebb, and Europeans might find it difficult to respond creatively to the challenge.

  Science and Religion

  It is often said that the modern period began in the year 1492, when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in the hope of finding a new sea route to India and discovered the Americas instead. This voyage would have been impossible without such scientific discoveries as the magnetic compass and the latest insights in astronomy. The people of Western Europe were on the brink of a new world that would give them unprecedented control over their environment, and Christian Spain was in the vanguard of this change. Columbus’s patrons were the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had united the Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Spain was in the process of becoming a modern, centralized state. This was an age of transition. Columbus himself was certainly conversant with the new scientific ideas that were eagerly discussed in the Spanish universities, but he was still rooted in the older religious universe. A devout Christian, he had been born into a family of converted Jews and retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism. He also regarded himself as a latter-day Crusader: once he reached India, he intended to establish a military base for the recovery of Jerusale
m.1 The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but the traditional myths of religion still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations.

  On January 2, 1492, Columbus had been present at the conquest of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe, by the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella. On March 31, the monarchs signed the Edict of Expulsion that forced the Jews of al-Andalus to choose between baptism and deportation; in 1499, the Muslim inhabitants of Spain would be given the same choice. Many of the Spanish Jews were so attached to their homeland that they converted to Christianity, but about eighty thousand crossed the border into Portugal and another fifty thousand fled to the new Ottoman Empire.2 Modernity had its own intransigence. Some would find the modern age liberating and enthralling; but for others it would be experienced as coercive, invasive, and destructive. Ferdinand and Isabella were creating the kind of absolute government that was essential to the economy of early modern Europe. They could no longer tolerate such autonomous, self-governing institutions as the guild, the corporation, or the Jewish community, so the victory of Granada was followed by an act of ethnic cleansing.

  As part of their unification of kingdoms that had hitherto been independent and had their own unique ethos, Ferdinand and Isabella had established the Spanish Inquisition in 1483. Its aim was to enforce ideological conformity as a base for the new Spanish identity. In a pattern that would be repeated in later secular states, inquisitors sought out dissidents and forced them to abjure their “heresy,” a word deriving from the Greek airesis, “to go one’s own way.” The Spanish Inquisition was not an archaic attempt to preserve a bygone religious world; it was a modernizing institution devised by the monarchs to create national unity.3 Its chief victims were the Jewish and Muslim conversos, who had opted for baptism rather than deportation and were suspected of backsliding. Many conversos became committed Catholics, but there were rumors of an underground movement of dissidents who practiced their old faith in secret. The inquisitors were instructed to torture anybody who lit candles on Friday night or refused to eat pork, in order to force them to recant and to name other renegades. Not surprisingly, some of these “new Christians” were not only alienated from Catholicism but became skeptical about religion itself.

  The Jews who had fled to Portugal were tougher; they had preferred exile rather than abjuring their faith. Initially, they were welcomed by King João II, but when Manuel I succeeded to the throne in 1495, Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law, forced him to baptize all the Jews in Portugal. Manuel compromised by granting them immunity from the Inquisition for fifty years. Known as Marranos (“pigs”), a term of abuse that Portuguese Jews adopted as a badge of pride, they had time to organize a successful Jewish underground. For generations, closet Jews tried to practice their faith to the best of their ability, but they labored under huge difficulties. Cut off from the rest of the Jewish world, they had no access to Jewish literature and no synagogues and were able to perform only a few of the major rituals. Because they had received a Catholic education, their minds were filled with Christian symbols and doctrines, so inevitably, as the years passed, their faith was neither authentically Jewish nor truly Christian.4

  Others, as we shall see, would become the first atheists and freethinkers in modern Europe. Deprived of the observances that made the Torah a living reality, Marrano religion became distorted. In the Portuguese universities, the Marranos had studied logic, physics, medicine, and mathematics, but they had no expertise in the more intuitive disciplines of Jewish practice. Relying perforce on reason alone, their theology bore no relation to traditional Judaism.5 Their God was the First Cause of all being, who did not intervene directly in human affairs; there was no need for the Torah, because the laws of nature were accessible to everybody. This is the kind of God that, left to itself, human reason tends to create, but in the past Jews had found the rational God of the philosophers religiously empty. Like many modern people—and for many of the same reasons—some of the Marranos would find this God alien and incredible.

  The Jews who migrated to the Ottoman Empire had an entirely different experience. Their exile, a spiritual as well as a physical dislocation, had inflicted a deep psychic wound; everything seemed to be in the wrong place.6 Some Spanish Jews settled in Safed in Palestine, where they met Isaac Luria (1534–72), a frail northern European Jew who had developed a form of Kabbalah that spoke directly to their predicament. Kabbalists had always felt at liberty to interpret the first chapters of Genesis allegorically, transforming them into an esoteric account of the inner life of God. In this tradition, Luria had created an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the orderly cosmogony of Genesis and that began with an act of kenosis. Because God was omnipresent, there was no space for the world, no place where God was not. So En Sof, the inscrutable and unknowable Godhead, as it were, shrank into itself in a voluntary zimzum (“withdrawal”), a self-diminishment that made itself less. The creation continued in a series of cosmic accidents, primal explosions, and false starts, which seemed a more accurate depiction of the arbitrary world that Jews now inhabited. Sparks of divine light had fallen into the Godless abyss created by zimzum. Everything was exiled from its rightful place, and the Shekhinah wandered through the world, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead.7

  Nobody understood this strange story literally; like any creation myth, it was primarily therapeutic, speaking figuratively of a timeless rather than a historical reality. It became authoritative because it was such a telling description of the exiles’ experience, at the same time showing them that their tragedy was not unique but was in tune with fundamental laws of existence. Instead of being outcasts, Jews were central actors in the process that would redeem the universe, because their careful observance of Torah could end this universal displacement and effect the “restoration” (tikkun) of the Shekhinah to the Godhead, the Jews to the Promised Land, and the rest of the world to its rightful state.8 By 1650, Lurianic Kabbalah had become a mass movement in the Jewish world from Poland to Iran, the only Jewish theology at this time to win such wide acceptance.9

  Without the special rituals devised by Luria, this myth would have remained a senseless fiction. Weeping and rubbing their faces in the dust, Kabbalists made night vigils in order to confront their sorrow; they lay awake all night, calling out to God in their abandonment, and took long hikes in the Galilean countryside to act out their sense of homelessness. But there was no wallowing: Kabbalists were required to work through their pain in a disciplined, stylized manner until it gave way to a measure of joy. Vigils always finished at dawn with a meditation on the end of humanity’s estrangement from the divine. Kabbalists practiced disciplines of concentration (kawwanoth) that evoked from the farthest reaches of the psyche a wonder and delight that they had not known they possessed. Compassion was a crucial Lurianic virtue, and there were severe penances for faults that injured others: Jews who had suffered so much themselves must not increase the sum of grief in the world.10 After the disaster of 1492, many Jews had retreated from the falsafah that had been so popular in Spain and found that the new mythos and its rituals enabled them to make contact with the deeper roots of their grief and to discover a source of healing.11 But in the new world that was coming into being in Europe, this type of creative mythos would soon be a thing of the past.

  Other European countries were in the throes of the same transformation as Spain, even though at this early stage few were aware of its magnitude. By the sixteenth century, the people of the West had started to create an entirely new and unprecedented type of civilization that depended on a radical change in the economic base of society. Instead of relying, like every premodern economy, on a surplus of agricultural produce with which they could trade in order to fund their cultural achievements, the modern economy rested on the technological replication of resources and the constant reinvestment of capital, which provided a source of wealth that could be renewed indefinitely. This freed it from many of the constraints
of premodern societies, where the economy could not expand beyond a certain point and eventually outran its resources. Consequently, these agrarian societies tended to be conservative, because they simply could not afford the constant replication of the infrastructure that has come to characterize modernity. Original thought was not encouraged, because it could lead to frustration and social unrest, since fresh ideas could rarely be implemented and projects that required too large a financial outlay were usually shelved. It seemed preferable, therefore, to concentrate on preserving what had already been achieved.12 Now, however, Western people were gradually acquiring the confidence to look to the future instead of the past. Where the older cultures had taught men and women to remain within carefully defined limits, pioneers such as Columbus were encouraging them to venture beyond the confines of the known world, where they discovered that, thanks to their modern technology, they not only survived but prospered.

  By the sixteenth century, therefore, a complex process was at work in Europe that was slowly changing the way people thought and experienced the world. Inventions were occurring simultaneously in many different fields; none seemed particularly momentous at the time, but their cumulative effect would be decisive.13 Specialists in one discipline found that they benefited from discoveries made in others. Scientists and explorers, for example, both relied on the increased efficiency of instrument makers. By 1600, innovations were occurring on such a scale and in so many areas at once that progress seemed irreversible and set to continue indefinitely. But in the early sixteenth century, the Great Western Transformation was only in its infancy. Spain may have been the most advanced country in Europe, but it was not the sole model of a modern state. In the course of their struggle against Spanish hegemony, the Netherlands deliberately developed a more liberal ideology to counter Spanish autocracy. There were thus two rival versions of modernity: one open and tolerant, the other exclusive and coercive.