The Case for God
Page 18
But it was extremely difficult to think about God or even to work up any enthusiasm for contemplation. Anselm was acutely aware of the torpor that made prayer so difficult. In the opening verses of the Proslogion, which takes the form of a highly wrought poem, he laments his sense of alienation from the divine. The image of God within him was so obscured by his imperfections that, try as he would, he could not perform the task for which he had been created. He must, therefore, shake off this mental sloth, using his intellect, reason, imagination, and emotion to stir up and excite his mind; his newfound rational powers in particular were a God-given tool for rousing and kindling the spirit.
But he had no illusions about human reason, which he knew was incapable of understanding the unknowable God. “Lord, I am not trying to make my way to your height,” he prayed, “for my understanding is in no way equal to that.”6 He simply wanted to grasp
a little of your truth, to which my heart is already loyal and which it loves [quem credit et amat cor meum]. For I do not seek to understand in order that I may have faith [intellegere ut credam], but I commit myself in order that I may understand [credo ut intellgam]; and what is more, I am certain that unless I so commit myself I shall not understand.7
Anselm is still using the verb credere in its original sense: it is an affair of the “heart,” the center of the human being, rather than a purely notional act and, as for Augustine, inseparable from love. Because the word “belief” has changed its meaning since Anselm’s day, it is misleading to translate, as is often done, credo ut intellgam as: “I believe in order that I may understand.” This gives the impression that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one’s mind to accept blindly a host of incomprehensible doctrines. Anselm is saying something quite different: religious truth made no sense without practically expressed commitment. Perhaps a better translation is “I involve myself in order that I may understand.” Anselm was trying to shake off his lethargy in prayer by engaging all his faculties, and was certain that “unless I so involve myself, I shall not understand.” So to spark his reader’s interest, he invites him to consider what has been called the “ontological proof” for the existence of God.
In the second chapter of the Proslogion, he asks God to help him to understand “that you exist” in the way that he has been taught.8 Denys would not have approved of such a project, because God could not be said to “exist” in any way that human beings could understand. But Anselm was trying to express a similar insight in the new fashionably metaphysical terminology, in a way that would excite an eleventh-century reader. He defined God as “that thing than which nothing more perfect can be thought [aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit].”9 He was asking his readers to think of the greatest thing that they could imagine or conceive—but then go on to reflect that God was even greater and more perfect than that. God must transcend any “thing” that the human mind could envisage.
As a Platonist, it was natural for Anselm to think that the very nature (ontos) of God contains within it the necessity for God’s existence. “Lord my God,” he prays, “you so truly are, that it is not possible to think of you as not existing.”10 Since thought was something that happened to the thinker, an idea in the mind was an intimate encounter with the Known, so in an intellectual world still dominated by Platonism, this was a perfectly acceptable argument. Anselm had no doubt that God existed, so he was not trying to convince a skeptic. The only “atheist” he could imagine was the “fool” quoted in the Psalms who says that “there is no God.”11 Anselm believed that the idea of God was innate: even this atheist had an idea of God in his mind or he would not have been able to deny it. Even though we live in such an imperfect world, we have a notion of absolute perfection and completeness. But a perfect thing that existed only in the mind would be a contradiction in terms, since to exist in reality (in re) is both greater and more complete than to exist merely as a mental concept:
If that than which nothing greater [maius] can be thought exists in the understanding alone, then this thing than which nothing greater can be thought is something than which a greater can be thought. And this is clearly impossible.12
Therefore, Anselm concluded, “there can be no doubt at all” that this “something greater” exists “both in the understanding and in reality.”13 A modern person, who inhabits an entirely different intellectual universe, cannot assume that simply because he thinks he has a hundred dollars, the money will materialize in his pocket.14 But Anselm was not attempting a scientific or logical “proof;” rather, he was using his reasoning powers to stir up his sluggish mind so that it could “involve” itself with the immanent divine reality. And built into this “proof” was the apophatic conviction that any idea that human beings could conceive of God would inevitably fall short of the reality.
For the monks of medieval Europe, lectio (“reading”) was not conducted simply to acquire information but was a spiritual exercise that enabled them to enter their inner world and there confront the truths revealed in scripture to see how they measured up. Reading—in private or in the communal practice of the liturgy—was part of a process of personal transformation.15 Every day, a monk spent time in lectio divina, ruminating on the sacred page until it had become an interior reality. Lectio was a pleasant, leisurely exercise; a monk could proceed at his own pace until the words ignited and he “heard” their inner meaning. In his Prayers and Meditations, Anselm was taking this practice a stage further. Instead of communicating with the divine through the words of the Bible, he addressed God directly in his own words. He was also writing for men and women who wanted to practice lectio divina. In the preface, he explained that these prayers were “not to be read in a turmoil, but quietly, not skimmed or hurried through, but taken a little at a time with deep and thoughtful meditation.”16 Readers must feel free to dip into the book and leave off wherever they choose. Its purpose was not to inform but to “stir up the mind of the reader to the love and fear of God or to self-examination.”17 In this way, lectio would lead to a moment of reflection, awe, or insight. So in order to benefit, the reader must withdraw, mentally and physically, from the pressures of daily life and approach each meditation in a receptive frame of mind:
Come now, little man, turn aside for a while from your daily employment, escape for a moment from the tumult of thoughts. … Enter into the inner chamber of your soul, shut out everything except God and that which can help you in seeking him, and when you shut the door, seek him.18
You could not approach religious ideas in the same way as you conducted business or engaged in an argument in daily life. This logos-driven mentality had to be set to one side in order for these prayers and meditations to come to life in the mind.
Anselm did not arrive at his “proof” by means of a strictly rational, logical process. His monks had begged him for a meditation on the meaning of faith (fides), and for a long time he had struggled to find a single, self-evident argument for the reality of God. He was about to give up when an idea forced itself upon him with increasing urgency, until finally, “when I was tired out with resisting its importunity, that which I had despaired of finally came to me.”19 His biographer Eadmer said that the “proof” arrived in a moment of rapture involving both heart and head: “Suddenly one night during matins, the grace of God illumined his heart, the whole matter becoming clear in his mind, and a great joy and exultation filled his whole being.”20 Later writers would have dwelled in detail on this “experience,” but it does not seem to have interested either Anselm or Eadmer. Anselm was simply concerned with how best he could use it to help others. “It seemed to me that this thing which had given me such joy to discover would, if it were written down, give pleasure to any who might read it,” he explained. So he gave the Proslogion the subtitle fides quaerens intellectum, “Faith in Search of Understanding.”21
Anselm was not the first to attempt a “proof” of God’s existence. During the eighth and ninth centuries, t
he Muslims in the Abbasid Empire had enjoyed a cultural florescence, inspired by the encounter with ancient Greek, Syriac, and Sanskrit texts, which had recently been translated into Arabic. Many of these translators were local Christians. First they had tackled the more positive sciences, such as medicine and astronomy; then they had turned their attention to the metaphysical works of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, so that gradually the philosophical and scientific heritage of ancient Greece became available to the Arabic-speaking world—but with a scientific bias. Muslims began to study astronomy, alchemy, medicine, and mathematics with such success that they made impressive discoveries of their own and developed their own tradition of what they called falsafah (philosophy). Like the European philosophes of the eighteenth century, the faylasufs wanted to live in accordance with the rational laws that, they believed, governed the cosmos. They were scientists and mathematicians and wanted to apply what they had learned to their religion.
Following the example of the Greek philosophers, they began to devise their own proofs for God’s existence, based on Aristotle’s arguments for the Prime Mover and Plotinus’s doctrine of emanation.22 Like Anselm, none of the leading faylasufs—Yaqub ibn Ishaq alKindi (d. c. 870), Muhammad ibn Zakaria ar-Razi (d. c. 930), and Abu Nasr al-Farabi (d. 980)—had any doubts of God’s existence, but they wanted to integrate their scientific knowledge with Qur’anic teaching. Many practiced the spiritual exercises of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, finding that these yogic techniques of concentration and chanting of mantras added a new dimension to their studies. The more radical found the idea of creation ex nihilo unacceptable on philosophical grounds, but they believed that falsafah and scripture were both valid paths to God, because they served the needs of different individuals. At the same time, they were convinced that falsafah was a more developed form of religiosity because it was not rooted in a particular time and place but had universal appeal. The most distinguished faylasuf, Abu Ali ibn Sina (c. 980–1037), known in the West as Avicenna, argued that a prophet enjoyed a direct, intuitive knowledge of God that was similar to the Sufis’ and had therefore been able to bypass reason and logic, but falsafah could refine the idea of the divine, purge it of superstition and anthropomorphism, and prevent it from becoming idolatrous.
Falsafah was a valuable and instructive experiment. The Muslim philosophers were open to new ideas and had no qualms about learning from Greeks who had sacrificed to idols. “We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples,” al-Kindi had remarked.23 It is always dangerous to isolate religious ideas from contemporary thought. As one tenth-century faylasuf insisted, the seeker after truth must “shun no sciences, scorn no book, nor cling fanatically to a single creed.”24 Their stringent rationalism led some to develop a radically apophatic vision. Ibn Sina argued that God’s oneness meant that God was perfectly simple: Allah had no attributes that were distinct from his essential being, so there was absolutely nothing that reason could say about him, even though we could infer God’s goodness, life, and power from our own experience of these qualities. In the same vein, Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani (d. 971), who belonged to the Ismaili sect, developed a dialectical method similar to Denys’s, based on the affirmation and denial of the divine names.
But the God of the philosophers seemed dangerously close to the old Sky Gods, who had become so remote that they faded from the consciousness of their worshippers. Despite its desire to accommodate the faith of the masses, falsafah remained a minority pursuit and put down no roots in the Muslim world. Most Muslims found it impossible to engage with this distant God, who seemed a mere abstraction, was unaware that human beings existed, and could not possibly communicate with them. The faylasufs themselves may have found that the Sufi rituals helped to make this austere deity a more vibrant reality for them, and at the end of his life, Ibn Sina seems to have been evolving a philosophy based on intuitive insight as well as reason.
So did Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali (1058–1111), an emblematic figure in the history of religious philosophy. A rising star in the intellectual establishment of Baghdad, he had made an intensive study of falsafah and could tackle the ideas of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina on their own terms. Finally, in The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazzali declared that the faylasufs had contravened their own principles. Our rational powers could investigate only observable data, so while falsafah was competent in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, it could tell us nothing about matters that lay beyond the reach of the senses. When the faylasufs spoke of God, therefore, they were guilty of zannah, fanciful guesswork. How could they prove the theory of divine emanation? What was their evidence for saying that God knew nothing of mundane affairs? In going beyond their brief, the philosophers had been unphilosophical.
Al-Ghazzali was looking for certainty, but he could not find it in any contemporary intellectual movement. His doubts became so severe that he suffered a breakdown and was forced to abandon his prestigious academic post. For ten years he lived in Jerusalem, engaged in the rituals and contemplative disciplines of the Sufis, and when he returned to his teaching duties, he insisted that only spiritual exercises of this kind could provide us with certainty (wujud) about the existence of God. It was a waste of time to try to prove the existence of Allah, as the faylasufs had done: because God was being itself, an all-encompassing reality, it could not be perceived in the same way as the mere beings that we see, hear, or touch. But that did not mean that the divine was wholly inaccessible. We could, as it were, catch a glimpse of God by cultivating a different mode of perception, as the Sufis did when they chanted the names of Allah like a mantra and performed the meditative exercises that induced an altered state of consciousness.
But those who did not have the time, talent, or inclination for this type of spirituality could make themselves conscious of God in the smallest details of daily life. Al-Ghazzali developed a spirituality that would enable every single Muslim to become aware of the interior dimension of Muslim law. They should deliberately call to mind the divine presence when they performed such ordinary actions as eating, washing, preparing for bed, praying, almsgiving, and greeting one another. They must guard their ears from slander and obscenity, their tongues from lies; they must refrain from cursing or sneering at others. Their hands must not harm another creature; their hearts must remain free of envy, anger, hypocrisy, and pride.25 This vigilance— similar to that practiced by Stoics, Epicureans, Buddhists, and Jains—would bridge the gap between outward observance and interior commitment; it would transform the smallest action of daily life into a ritual that made God present in the lives of ordinary men and women, even if they could not prove this rationally.
It has been said that al-Ghazzali was the most important Muslim since the Prophet Muhammad. After al-Ghazzali, one great philosopher after another—Yahya Suhrawardi (d. 1191), Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240), Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73), Mir Dimad (d. 1631), and his pupil Mulla Sadra (1571–1640)—insisted that theology must be fused with spirituality. The philosopher had a sacred duty to be as intellectually rigorous as Aristotle and as mystical as a Sufi; reason was indispensable for science, medicine, and mathematics, but a reality that transcended the senses could be approached only by more intuitive modes of thought. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufism ceased to be a fringe movement and remained the dominant Islamic mode until the nineteenth century. Ordinary laypeople practiced Sufi exercises, and these disciplines helped them to get beyond simplistically anthropomorphic ideas of God and experience the divine as a transcendent presence within.
The Jews in the Islamic empire, who were so excited by falsafah that they developed a philosophical movement of their own, had a similar experience. Writing for the most part in Arabic, they introduced a metaphysical dimension into Judaism. From the beginning, they were concerned about the contrast between the remote God of the philosophers and the highly personalized God
of the Bible. One of the first Jewish faylasufs, Saadia ibn Joseph (882–942), for example, found the idea of creation ex nihilo fraught with philosophical difficulties. In the main, however, Jewish philosophers tended to be less radical than the Muslims, did not concern themselves with science, confined their attention to religious matters, and concluded in the main that reason’s chief use was to help the philosopher give a more systematic explanation of religious truth. Maimonides (1134–1204), the greatest of the Jewish rationalists, believed that falsafah was unsuitable for the laity, but it could wean Jews from their more facile ideas of God. Maimonides developed an apophatic spirituality that denied any positive attributes to God, arguing that we could not even say that God was good or existed. A person who relied on this kind of affirmation would make God incredible, he warned in his Guide to the Perplexed, and “unconsciously loses his belief in God.”26
But again, for most Jews the God of the philosophers was too abstract, unable to offer any consolation in times of persecution and suffering. Increasingly they turned to the mystical spirituality of the Kabbalah, which was developed in Spain during the late thirteenth century. Some of the pioneers of this spirituality—Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Isaac de Latif, and Joseph Gikatilla—had been involved in falsafah but found its attenuated God empty of religious content.27 Yet they used philosophic motifs, such as divine emanation, to describe the process whereby the utterly unknowable Godhead, which they called En Sof (“Without End”), had emerged from its lonely inaccessibility and made itself known to humanity. Like Sufism, Kabbalah was an unashamedly mythical and imaginative spirituality. Until the modern period, it would inform the piety of many Jews and, as we shall see, would even become a mass movement.