“Some people,” says Meister Eckhart in one of his German sermons, “want to see God with their own eyes, just as they see a cow; and they want to love God just as they love a cow. You love a cow for the milk and the cheese and because of your advantage. This is how those people act who love God because of external riches or because of internal consolation.”1
Eckhart despises people who love God for their sake. He wants them to love Him for His sake. Very well. But who is He? Theologians offer definitions, but they rarely agree. More important, their definitions are hard to understand and even harder to “love.” That in itself is not necessarily a problem. Most people do not start from first principles nor do their emotions obey the laws of logic. We can fall in love with a person or a thing simply by coming into contact with the object of our love. We see, hear, touch, smell, or taste something, and behold, we’re in love. Explanations come later. That does not mean that sensory data are all there is to it. When we think of it, we tend to assume that beyond sensory data, there is some kind of “true” essence. The senses capture only glimpses, reflections of it. It is that essence that we love. We can, after all, “love” an idea.
But God is not easy to love even as an idea. True, we know things about God’s actions. He has created the world, for example, or sacrificed His only begotten son for us, or given us His Torah. But the passage from such knowledge (based, inescapably, on hearsay and sensory data) to the true essence of God is obstructed by the theological idea of the utter otherness of God. The god of the monotheists is the ultimate Other—that which is unlike anything we have ever experienced, sensually or intellectually. Those who claim to have experienced Him in some way usually claim (or the experts make the claim for them) that they have been in contact with a certain approximation of Him (a certain aspect of His power, or some lesser form of being suffused with the divine presence). In fact, the Lord Himself says that direct contact with His essence (“his face”) is impossible (or at least lethal) for humans:
And [Moses] said, “Please, show me your glory.” Then He said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim the name of Jehovah before you. I will be merciful to whom I will be merciful, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” And He said, “You cannot see my face; for no man shall see me, and live. (Ex 33:18–22)
Even contact with divine approximations, however, is extremely rare. Jews and Christians believe that God revealed Himself (that is, certain aspects of His self) to the entire Hebrew nation on Mount Sinai, but that type of collective revelation had not happened before or since, nor is it quite clear what was in fact revealed, besides the Ten Commandments. If God were to be loved only by those who claim some form of contact with Him, His love would have been a very marginal phenomenon indeed. Yet God is not marginal. For billions upon billions of people throughout history, God has been a central element of their existence. Nor is the love of God performed solely by “highly trained professionals.” On the contrary, throngs of people lacking “professional training” say they love God enough to die for Him (and quite as often to kill for Him). They dedicate their lives to and love something of which most of them have only secondhand experience (or more accurately they have secondhand experience of his approximations). They may think they love an idea, but in most cases it is not the professional idea of God that they love. If we asked theologians, they would say that the untrained understand God in a very partial and often incorrect fashion. What they love is never “really” God. They love cows. Or calves.
What do the untrained believe in? Most would acknowledge the concept of an ineffable god, but apart from this acknowledgment (the reasons of which we shall discuss), the theologians’ God plays a rather minor part in their religious lives. Humans do not love God for His sake. This has nothing to do with either greed or egotism, as Eckhart suggests. It has more to do with the kinds of stories that people are told about God. Since most humans have never had any direct experience with God, they rely on secondhand evidence. Are they allowed to “have faith” in firsthand information? Not without theological interpretation. Theologians (highly trained professionals) are willing to tell others what to make of the God of revelation. The problem is, however, that their descriptions of God are often meaningless for any but other theologians. The main source of information that most people rely on is stories, not definitions. Revelation tells us a little about who God is and a lot about what He did and does. In the overwhelming majority of these stories, the message, either explicit or implicit, is that there are great advantages to loving God, to fearing Him, and above all to believing in Him: “For thus says the Lord to the house of Israel: ‘Seek me and live’” (Am 5:4). And while belief is crucial, philosophical insight is not; while belief is for everyone, understanding is for the very few.
But it is not only the poor in spirit who love God for the sake of the kingdom of heaven or for His blessings on earth. The rich in spirit also love Him as we love a cow. The few may seek different advantages, but like the many they ask in the hope of receiving. A mind beset by doubt can be as hard to bear as an empty stomach. If nothing else, believing in God is better than admitting that the world is meaningless. When all else fails, there is always God. Who created heaven and earth? God did. Who made the rough rude sea? God. Who changes the seasons and imposes order on the ominous chaos out there? God does. Who is our insurance policy against epistemological and existential angst? God is. Whether horrible or wonderful, merciful or cruel, He substitutes question marks with exclamation points, fragmentation with continuity. In the chaotic big picture that we face, He brightens up the dark spots, fills the places that we cannot otherwise explain. He is the light that chases out darkness, not by means of human arguments and syllogisms, but by the very mention of His name. We may not really understand the answer, but if we have faith, we shall no longer be troubled by the questions. He was there at the beginning and He will be there at the end. He is alpha and omega. “God” names the unnameable. He is the ultimate guarantee that our existence is not a sequence of passing moments of fleeting awareness without extension. That has nothing to do with “popular” religion. The elite is as troubled by the chaotic nature of human experience as the people, indeed more so. The territory the philosophically inclined find troubling is much broader than what their down-to-earth brethren are upset by. Craving intellectual peace of mind is in no way less result-oriented than the pursuit of earthly happiness. From the outsider’s point of view, the intellectuals’ obsession with abstractions often requires greater philosophical sacrifices than the “simple folks’” alleged materialism. Of course, there are many other things God can do besides serving as the ultima ratio philosophorum.2 He offers hope to the hopeless, consolation to the downtrodden, justice to the weak, security to the uncertain. He is said to do many amazing things. We love Him for them.
But the real issue, as I said in the beginning, is not the lovers—whatever their motives—but the unusual object of their love. Psychologically speaking, there was nothing wrong with the old gods. They provided excellent answers to the hardest existential questions. They ruled the universe and meddled in human affairs. Everything could be explained with their help. In some cultures it still is. Making God a philosophical construct that satisfies one particular set of intellectual obsessions (the tendency of equating matter with existential inferiority) comes with a huge price tag in terms of human emotional needs. Not willing to give up either intellectual or emotional benefits, the monotheists created a hybrid. God may indeed be the rock upon which churches and epistemological towers of Babel are built, but that should not mislead us. God is just as fragmented and incoherent as His creatures/creators. Since He is the answer to radically different questions, He is of necessity full of impossible contradictions. He is distant and close, immanent and transcendent, just and merciful, visible and invisible, and so on.
Theologians do not like contradictions. They are trained to weed out the very logical fallacies that life is made of. God suffers particularly from the theologians’ lust for consistency. Revelation does not make life easy for seekers of conceptual consistency. The Sacred Scriptures of the Abrahamic religions were not written by professional theologians and are therefore full of very problematic, at times embarrassing material. Theologians try to save God from the many inaccuracies that people use in talking about Him. The result is a God that doesn’t quite fit—you simply cannot squeeze all His attributes, stories, traditions into one working system. And so, like Ptolemy’s universe, God has given birth, sprouted cycles and epicycles, retrograde movements and temporary anomalies.
Perhaps instead of saving God for the theologians, we need to save Him from the theologians. We need to start with the assumption that God is not one thing, but rather a certain category of explanation, that He is not subject to any logical or metaphysical commitment, and that His contradictions are part of His advantage as a universal key to problems ranging from providing luck to bounty hunters and mates for lonely men and women to providing metaphysical certainty for intellectuals. In other words, the theological God is just one avatar (and not a very popular one) among many. Sometimes the avatars interact with each other, in strong or weak ways (the incarnation may explain God’s lapses into materiality), but sometimes they do not. They exist side by side, like precedents in common law. Each is there to solve a particular problem, and they can live happily together, as long as we do not try too hard to make them abide by one set of logical rules.
Intellectuals seek to harmonize discordant voices. Legal systems, they believe, should be consistent, human beings should be consistent, and surely God should at least try to make sense—one sense, that is. Like continuity, consistency, making one sense, is all but self-evident. Groups and even whole cultures can get along quite well without it. In the twelfth century, Pierre Abelard tried to prove to his contemporaries that their faith is full of inconsistencies. In his revolutionary book Sic et non (Yes and No), he proved that the holy fathers of the Church were in disagreement—at least prima facie—about very significant theological and philosophical questions. This could not go on, he argued. Abelard offered to rectify this unfortunate state of affairs, and while his particular synthesis was not accepted, his project has become the dominant project of Western culture to this very day. The so-called scholastic revolution made the creation of syntheses its central objective. Gratian’s textbook of canon law, published a few years after Sic et non, was called Concordia discordantium canonum (the Concord of Discordant Canons). Soon a general persecution of discordant canons began, followed by a persecution of discordant human beings.
It is hard for us to imagine the ability to live with inner contradictions as anything but a symptom of personal or cultural dysfunction. We offer Concordiae as an act of cultural charity. But such charitable activity can sometimes prove too costly. It creates a dangerous hermeneutical myopia, a tendency not to see what does not fit. We become so dedicated to our synthetic creations that we forget that cultural reality is only possible by taking huge liberties with the rules of logical consistency. By this, I mean not simply that no society can live up to its conceptual ideals, but that it is those very flaws that make it possible. Sociocultural entities are never smooth. They are wrinkled and messy. Instead of starting with a seamless definition of God from which all else must follow, we should start from an impartial look at God’s actions and more specifically at the seams that keep the idea of “God” loosely hanging together.
Historians have an inborn predilection for the “actual”—not what should have happened but what actually happened. They were reproached by Aristotle for being less philosophical than even poets. All historians care about, he scoffed, is what Alcibiades did and what others did to him. Perhaps that is not all historians care about, but they are indeed convinced that what Alcibiades did and what others did to him is not merely a specific case in some grand point but the unfolding of mental as well as practical possibilities. For humans again and again prove that there are things that should not work in theory that work perfectly well in practice. Indeed, the only way they could work is by being “unphilosophical.”
If we wish to understand the idea of God in practice, as we think of Alcibiades, it might be useful to stop thinking of Him as a single person or idea (this approach wipes out both history and sociology for the sake of philosophy and sees Him instead as a group of persons, persons that unlike the three persons of the Trinity do not converge into a common substance, each perfectly suitable for specific tasks and useful for answering a particular set of questions). It is as if the old gods were grouped together under a single name, without thereby losing their conflicting and contradictory attributes. This does not mean that the One God is a camouflaged pagan god. He is not. The grouping together of needs and obsessions has created tensions that were lacking in the old system and answers that were not available in it. The fact that theologians (rather than mythmakers, storytellers, or lawyers) were made the bouncers in the religious club had a huge impact on the nature of concepts allowed to enter “orthodoxy.” But we must not forget that the selection process was, and is, distorted because of the heterogeneous nature of the selection principles, and by the fact not only that the selectors were a heterogeneous group, as Abelard pointed out, but also that they were not operating in a pure environment. They were not playing solely with ideas, but with human needs—social, cultural, and political needs. Once they were allowed into “orthodoxy,” ideas about God had to obey the dress code and assume the suitable garb. But the gowns provided by reinterpreters never quite fit. You may declare that the cabbalistic idea of the Sephirot does not contradict the idea of God’s oneness, but when one has a closer look at the sephirotic god, one can, and should, have doubts. Certainly, His modus operandi has changed radically. What Alcibiades does and what others do to him is not without interest.
If we want to understand how God “works,” we need to watch Him in action, not in the classroom, but in specific situations where people report His presence. But where should we look for Him? He is, after all, everywhere. “There is no place free of Him,” as the Zohar declares.3 But if we want to catch Him in the process of transforming Himself from one set of preoccupations to another, in the process of avatar-incarnation, then certain places are better than others as observation points. Cultural phantoms reveal themselves at crossroads, where spheres meet, where complicated and poorly understood abstract principles of high theology meet half-pronounced concrete needs. We can get glimpses of Him in the moments when theoretical premises run into difficulties. We might want to look at the relationship of the theologians’ God to the senses—those dangerous “windows” that convey into the unsullied soul the false information of the material world. God, as we know, should be above sensory data. But of course He isn’t. He is visible and audible. He has taste, touch, and smell. How is this possible? Surely God has a lot of explaining to do.
And so do we.