The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  Even though the Greeks found his interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve far too literal, Augustine was no die-hard biblical literalist. He took science very seriously, and his “principle of accommodation” would dominate biblical interpretation in the West until well into the early modern period. God had, as it were, adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it.62 One of the psalms, for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine’s time, that there was a body of water above the earth that caused rainfall.63 It would be absurd to interpret this text literally. God had simply accommodated the truths of revelation to the science of the day so that the people of Israel could understand it; today a text like this must be interpreted differently. Whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.64 And there must be no unseemly quarreling about the Bible. People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbor.65 The exegete must not leave a text until he could make it “establish the reign of charity,” and if a literal understanding of any biblical passage seemed to teach hatred, the text must be interpreted allegorically and forced to preach love.66

  Augustine had absorbed the underlying spirit of Greek apophatic theology, but the West did not develop a fully fledged spirituality of silence until the ninth century, when the writings of an unknown Greek author were translated into Latin and achieved near-canonical status in Europe. He used the pseudonym Denys the Areopagite, Saint Paul’s first Athenian convert,67 but he was almost certainly writing toward the end of the fifth and the beginning of the sixth centuries. During the medieval period, Denys had a profound influence on nearly every major Western theologian. The fact that very few people have even heard of him today is, perhaps, a symptom of our current religious malaise.68

  Denys saw no conflict between the Neoplatonic philosophia and Christianity, even though he was almost certainly writing in 529, when Emperor Justinian had closed down the Academy, driven its philosophers underground, and abolished the Eleusinian Mysteries. Plotinus had seen all beings radiating from the One, an outward movement that was balanced by the yearning of all beings to return to the primal Unity. In rather the same way, Denys imagined the creation as an ekstatic, almost erotic eruption of divine goodness, when God was, as it were, “carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything.” Creation was not something that had happened once in the distant past but was a mythos, a continuous, timeless process in which, paradoxically, God was eternally “enticed away from his transcendent dwelling-place and comes to abide within all things,” and yet had the “capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.”69

  But, of course, this was impossible to understand rationally, because our minds cannot think outside a universe of beings that are unable to do two irreconcilable things at once. Religious people are always talking about God, and it is important that they do so. But they also need to know when to fall silent. Denys’s theological method was a deliberate attempt to bring all the Christians he taught—lay folk, monks, and clergy alike—to that point by making them conscious of the limits of language. We can do that only by talking about God and listening carefully to what we say. As Denys pointed out, in the Bible God is given fifty-two names.70 God is called a rock and is likened to the sky, the sea, and a warrior. All that is fine, as far as it goes. Because God is always pouring itself into creatures, any one of them—even a rock—can tell us something about the divine. A rock is a very good symbol of God’s permanence and stability. But because a rock is not alive, it is obviously worlds apart from the God that is life itself, so we will never be tempted to say that God is a rock. But the more sophisticated attributes of God—Ineffability, Unity, Goodness, and the like—are more dangerous, because they give us the false impression that we know exactly what God is like. “He” is Good, Wise, and Intelligent; “He” is One; “He” is Trinity.

  In his treatise The Divine Names, Denys symbolically reproduced God’s descent from his exalted solitude into the material world, so he began by discussing the more elevated and lofty divine attributes. At first, each one sounds perfectly appropriate, but closer examination reveals it to be inherently unsatisfactory. It is true that God is One—but this term properly applies only to beings defined by numerical quantities. God is Trinity but that does not mean that the three personae add up to any kind of triad that is familiar to us. God is Nameless—yet he has a multiplicity of names. God must be Intelligible—and yet God is Unknowable; God is certainly not “good” like a “good” human being or a “good” meal. Gradually, we become aware that even the most exalted things we say about God are bound to be misleading.71

  Then, following God’s descent into the depths of the material world, we consider the physical and obviously inadequate images of God in the Bible. These texts cannot, of course, be read literally, because they are full of “so many incredible or fictitious fairy tales.” From the very first chapter of Genesis, the Bible calls God a creator “as if he was a mere artisan” but goes on to say even more ludicrous things. Scripture supplies God

  with horses and chariots and thrones and provides delicately prepared banquets and depicts Him drinking and drunk, and drowsy and suffering from a hangover. And what about God’s fits of anger, His griefs, His various oaths, His moments of repentance, His curses, His wraths, the manifold and crooked reasons given for His failure to fulfil promises?72

  But crass as this seems, it is valuable, because this gross theologia shocks us into an appreciation of the limitations of all theological language.73 We have to remember this when we speak about God, listen critically to ourselves, realize that we are babbling incoherently, and fall into an embarrassed silence.

  When we listen to the sacred text read aloud during Mass and apply this method to the readings, we start to understand that even though God has revealed these names to us, we have no idea what they can mean. So we have to deny them, one after the other, and in the process make a symbolic ascent from earthly modes of perception to the divine. It is easy to deny the physical names: God is plainly not a rock, a gentle breeze, a warrior, or a creator. But when we come to the more conceptual descriptions of God, we find that we have to deny these too. God is not Mind in any sense that we can understand; God is not Greatness, Power, Light, Life, Truth, Imagination, Conviction, Understanding, Goodness—or even Divinity.74 We cannot even say that God “exists” because our experience of existence is based solely on individual, finite beings whose mode of being bears no relation to being itself:

  Therefore … God is known by knowledge and by unknowing; of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name and many other things, but he is not understood, nothing can be said of him, he cannot be named. He is not one of the things that are, nor is he known in any of the things that are; he is all things in everything and nothing in anything.75

  This was not simply an arid logical conundrum that left people in a baffled, thwarted state. It was a spiritual exercise that, if properly performed, would bring participants to the same kind of stunned insight as did the Brahmodya competition.

  Denys’s spiritual exercise took the form of a dialectical process, consisting of three phases. First we must affirm what God is: God is a rock; God is One; God is good; God exists. But when we listen carefully to ourselves, we fall silent, felled by the weight of absurdity in such God talk. In the second phase, we deny each one of these attributes. But the “way of denial” is just as inaccurate as the “way of affirmation.” Because we do not know what God is, we cannot know what God is not, so we must then deny the denials: God is therefore not placeless, mindless, lifeless, or nonexistent. In the course of this exercise, we learn that God transcends the capability of human speech and �
��is beyond every assertion” and “beyond every denial.”76 It is as inaccurate to say that God is “darkness” as to say that God is “light;” to say that God “exists” as to say that God does “not exist,” because what we call God falls “neither within the predicate of existence or non-existence.”77 But what can this mean? The exercise leads us to apophasis, the breakdown of speech, which cracks and disintegrates before the absolute unknowability of what we call God.

  As our language fails, we experience an intellectual ekstasis. We no longer pay mere lip service to God’s ineffability; the fact that “there is no kind of thing that God is”78 has become an insight that we have made our own, a kenosis that “drives us out of ourselves.”79 Like the mystai of Eleusis, we have become strangers to our former ways of thinking and speaking. This new understanding is not an emotional experience. If we cannot know God, we certainly can neither feel nor have any sensation of unity with God. Denys’s dialectical method leads to an intellectual rapture that takes us beyond everyday perceptions and introduces us to another mode of seeing. Like Moses at the top of the mountain, we embrace the darkness and experience no clarity, but know that, once we have rinsed our minds of inadequate ideas that block our understanding, we are somehow in the place where God is.

  Renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible and the invisible, [Moses] belongs completely to him who is beyond everything. Here, being neither oneself nor someone else, one is supremely united to the completely unknown by an inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.80

  Once we have left the idols of thought behind, we are no longer worshipping a simulacrum, a projection of our own ideas and desires. There are no longer any false ideas obstructing our access to the inexpressible truth, and, like Moses, forgetful of self, we can remain silently in the presence of the unknown God.

  But this would, of course, be incomprehensible unless you had personally put yourself through this spiritual exercise again and again. Denys did not regard this ekstasis as an exotic “peak” experience. Everybody, priests and lay folk alike, should apply this threefold dialectical method to the scriptures as they listened to them read aloud during the liturgy. When they heard God called “Rock,” “Creator,” “Wise,” or “Good,” they must affirm, deny, and then deny the denial, becoming in the process ever more conscious of the inadequacy of all theological language—even the inspired words of scripture. At key moments they would be able to “hear” the silence of the ineffable other that lay beyond the limits of speech. In his Mystical Theology, Denys applied his method to the ceremonies of the liturgy, to bring to light the deeper meaning of these ritualized symbolic gestures.81 This was a communal rather than a solitary ekstasis. Priests and congregants should plunge together “into that darkness which is beyond intellect.” Eventually, Denys concluded, “We shall find ourselves not simply running short of words but actually speechless and unknowing.”82

  Denys’s theology was based on the liturgy of Alexandria, which instead of simply regarding the Eucharist as a reenactment of Jesus’s last supper also saw it as an allegory of the soul’s ascent to God.83 His method was not for an elite group of contemplatives but seems to have been part of the public instruction of all the baptized faithful, who would have found it easy to follow his imagery of descent and ascent because it was familiar to them in the liturgy. When the celebrant left the sanctuary and walked among the congregation, sprinkling them with holy water, the people should see this as a symbolic reenactment of the ekstasis in which God perpetually abandoned its lonely solitude and merged with creation. When the celebrant turned his back on the congregation, entered the inner sanctum, and disappeared from view to consecrate the bread and wine, Denys compared him to Moses, when he left the people and, “accompanied by certain priests,” entered the “mysterious darkness of unknowing” on the summit of Mount Sinai.84

  Like all doctrinal instruction in the Greek Orthodox world, Denys’s method was practiced in the heightened atmosphere of the liturgy. The evocative music, stylized drama, clouds of fragrant incense, and numinous solemnity all ensured that the dialectical process was not a dry, cerebral exercise but was performed in a context that, like any great aesthetic performance, touched people and stirred them at a deeper level of their being. As they heard the words of scripture read aloud in a special chant that separated it from normal discourse, and attended critically, as Denys had taught them, to the words of the prayers and hymns, clergy and congregants would in effect be saying to themselves, “Neti… neti”: the reality we call God was not this, not that, but immeasurably other. The liturgy had always been a musterion, a ritual that initiated all the participants into a different mode of seeing. When Denys spoke of his mentor Bishop Hierotheus, he used terms associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries that Emperor Justinian had just abolished. Hierotheus did not “learn” (mathein) these truths simply by studying the doctrines of the church, but by allowing the beauty and symbolism of the liturgy to act upon him, he “experienced” or “suffered (pathein) divine things.” Denys implies that Hierotheus imparted the knowledge he had intuited to the people not by speaking about it but in the way he performed the liturgy, which made it obvious that he had achieved an empathetic sympatheia with the rites.85

  In the East, Denys was merely regarded as a disciple of the Cappadocians and Maximus, the major luminaries of Greek Orthodoxy, but in the West he enjoyed enormous prestige and became a leading authority. His writings were translated into Latin by the Irish theologian John Scotus Erigena (810–877), who worked in the court of Charles the Bald, king of the West Franks. In his writings, like Denys, Erigena insisted that God is “Nothing” because he does not possess “being” in any sense that we could understand. But God is also “Everything,” because every single creature that God informs becomes a theophany, a manifestation of God. Erigena also translated the works of Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, and other Greek fathers, making Orthodox wisdom available to the traumatized West, which was beginning to crawl out of the long period of barbarism that had succeeded the fall of Rome and rejoin the outside world. In the West, people took Denys’s pseudonym seriously, and his supposed connection with Saint Paul gave him near-apostolic status. Western theologians tended not to apply his method liturgically, since their Mass was different from the Alexandrian ritual. But the apophatic method was central to the way leading European theologians understood religious truth and to the way they instructed the laity to think about God. By the medieval period, the apophatic habit had become ingrained in Western Christian consciousness.

  Faith and Reason

  By the end of the eleventh century, philosophers and theologians in the West had embarked on a project that, they believed, was entirely new. They had begun to apply their reasoning powers systematically to the truths of faith. By now Europe was beginning to recover from the dark age that had descended after the fall of Rome. The Benedictine monks of Cluny in Burgundy had initiated a campaign to educate the clergy and laity, many of whom were woefully ignorant of the rudiments of Christianity. Hundreds of churches were built throughout Christendom, even in quite small villages and settlements, where people could attend Mass and hear the biblical readings. This instruction was reinforced by the cult of pilgrimage. During the long, difficult trek to a holy place— Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Conques, or Glastonbury—lay folk experienced a “conversion” of life, turning away from their secular affairs and toward the centers of holiness. They traveled in a community of pilgrims, dedicated for the duration to the monastic ideals of austerity, charity, celibacy, and nonviolence. The rich had to share the hardships of the poor, who, in turn, realized that their poverty had spiritual value.1 Instead of being educated in the niceties of doctrine, Western Christians were introduced to their faith as a practical way of life. By the end of the century, there was a marked rise in commitment among the laity, and Europeans had begun to forge a new and distinctively Western Christian identity.

&
nbsp; Meanwhile, as they became reacquainted with the intellectual heritage of their more sophisticated neighbors in the Greek Byzantine and Islamic worlds, European monks had started to think and pray in a more “rational” way. One of the leading exponents of this new spirituality was Anselm of Laon, abbot of the prestigious monastery and school at Bec in Normandy, who was appointed archbishop of Canterbury by William Rufus in 1093.2 Excited by the new vogue for reasoning, he wanted to make traditional Christian teaching rationally coherent. There was no question of making his loyalty to God dependent upon rational proof; instead he saw his writings “advancing through faith to understanding, rather than proceeding through understanding to faith.”3 Men and women had to use all their faculties when they approached God, and Anselm wanted to make truths grasped intuitively intelligible, so that every part of his mind was involved in the contemplation of God. Augustine had taught the Christians of the West that all their mental activities reflected the divine, and this was particularly true of their reasoning powers. “I confess, Lord, with thanksgiving,” Anselm prayed in his Proslogion (“Colloquy”) with God, “that you have made me in your image, so that I can remember you, think of you and love you.”4 This was the raison d’etre of every “rational creature,” so people must spare no effort in “remembering, understanding and loving the Supreme Good.”5