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| Karen Armstrong |
Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralised at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, 'he' can encourage us to remain complacently within them; 'he' can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as 'he' seems to be. Instead of inspiring the compassion that should characterise all advanced religion, 'he' can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalise. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. The world religions all seem to have recognised this danger and have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality.
It is possible to read the Jewish scriptures as the story of the refinement and, later, of the abandonment of the tribal and personalised Yahweh who became YHWH. Christianity, arguably the most personalised religion of the three monotheistic faiths, tried to quality the cult of God incarnate by introducing the doctrine of the transpersonal Trinity. Muslims very soon had problems with those passages in the Koran which implied that God 'sees', 'hears' and 'judges' like human beings. All three of the monotheistic religions developed a mystical tradition, which made their God transcend the personal category and become more similar to the impersonal realities of nirvana and Brahman-Atman. Only a few people are capable of true mysticism, but in all three faiths (with the exception of Western Christianity) it was the God experienced by the mystics which eventually became normative among the faithful, until relatively recently.
Historical monotheism was not originally mystical. We have noted the difference between the experience of a contemplative such as the Buddha and the prophets. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all essentially active faiths, devoted to ensuring that God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven. The central motif of these prophetic religions is confrontation or a personal meeting between God and humanity. This God is experienced as an imperative to action; he calls us to himself; gives us the choice of rejecting or accepting his love and concern. This God relates to human beings by means of a dialogue rather than silent contemplation. He utters a Word, which becomes the chief focus of devotion and which has to be painfully incarnated in the flawed and tragic conditions of earthly life. In Christianity, the most personalised of the three, the relationship with God is characterised by love. But the point of love is that the ego has, in some sense, to be annihilated. In either dialogue or love, egotism is a perpetual possibility. Language itself can be a limiting faculty since it embeds us in the concepts of our mundane experience.
The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial, sacred time of myth. When monotheists turned to mysticism, however, mythology reasserted itself as the chief vehicle of religious experience. There is a linguistic connection between the three words 'myth', 'mysticism' and 'mystery'. All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence.' They are not popular words in the West today. The word 'myth', for example, is often used as a synonym for a lie: in popular parlance, a myth is something that is not true. A politician or a film star will dismiss scurrilous reports of their activities by saying that they are 'myths' and scholars will refer to mistaken views of the past as 'mythical'. Since the Enlightenment, a 'mystery' has been seen as something that needs to be cleared up. It is frequently associated with muddled thinking. In the United States, a detective story is called a 'mystery' and it is of the essence of this genre that the problem be solved satisfactorily. We shall see that even religious people came to regard 'mystery' as a bad word during the Enlightenment. Similarly 'mysticism' is frequently associated with cranks, charlatans or indulgent hippies. Since the West has never been very enthusiastic about mysticism, even during its heyday in other parts of the world, there is little understanding of the intelligence and discipline that is essential to this type of spirituality.
Yet there are signs that the tide may be turning. Since the 1960s Western people have been discovering the benefits of certain types of Yoga and religions such as Buddhism, which have the advantage of being uncontaminated by an inadequate theism, have enjoyed a great flowering in Europe and the United States. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell on mythology has enjoyed a recent vogue. The current enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the West can be seen as a desire for some kind of mysticism, for we shall find arresting similarities between the two disciplines. Mythology has often been an attempt to explain the inner world of the psyche and both Freud and Jung turned instinctively to ancient myths, such as the Greek story of Oedipus, to explain their new science. It may be that people in the West are feeling the need for an alternative to a purely scientific view of the world.
Mystical religion is more immediate and tends to be more help in time of trouble than a predominantly cerebral faith. The disciplines of mysticism help the adept to return to the One, the primordial beginning, and to cultivate a constant sense of presence. Yet the early Jewish mysticism that developed during the second and third centuries, which was very difficult for Jews, seemed to emphasise the gulf between God and man. Jews wanted to turn away from a world in which they were persecuted and marginalised to a more powerful divine realm. They imagined God as a mighty king who could only be approached in a perilous journey through the seven heavens. Instead of expressing themselves in the simple direct style of the Rabbis, the mystics used sonorous, grandiloquent language. The Rabbis hated this spirituality and the mystics were anxious not to antagonise them. Yet this 'Throne Mysticism', as it was called, must have fulfilled an important need since it continued to flourish alongside the great rabbinic academies until it was finally incorporated into Kabbalah, the new Jewish mysticism, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The classic texts of Throne Mysticism, which were edited in Babylon in the fifth and sixth centuries, suggest that the mystics, who were reticent about their experiences, felt a strong affinity with rabbinic tradition, since they make such great tannaim as Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Yohannan the heroes of this spirituality. They revealed a new extremity in the Jewish spirit, as they blazed a new trail to God on behalf of their people.
The Rabbis had had some remarkable religious experiences, as we have seen. On the occasion when the Holy Spirit descended upon Rabbi Yohannan and his disciples in the form of fire from heaven, they had apparently been discussing the meaning of Ezekiel's strange vision of God's chariot. The chariot and the mysterious figure that Ezekiel had glimpsed sitting upon its throne seem to have been the subject of early esoteric speculation. The Study of the Chariot (Ma'aseh Merkavah) was often linked to speculation about the meaning of the creation story (Ma'aseh Bereshit). The earliest account we have of the mystical ascent to God's throne in the highest heavens emphasised the immense perils of this spiritual journey:
"Our Rabbis taught: Four entered an orchard and these are they: Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aher and Rabbi Akiva. Rabbi Akiva said to them: 'When you reach the stones of pure marble, do not say "Water! water!" For it is said: "He that speaketh falsehood shall not be established before mine eyes" ' Ben Azzai gazed and died. Of him, Scripture says: 'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.' Ben Zoma gazed and was stricken. Of him Scripture says: 'Hast thou found honey? Eat as much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.' Aher cut the roots [that is, became a heretic]. Rabbi Akiva departed in peace." {2}
Only Rabbi Akiva was mature enough to survive the mystical way unscathed. A journey to the depths of the mind involves great personal risks because we may not be able to endure what we find there. That is why all religions have insisted that the mystical journey can only be undertaken under the guidance of an expert, who can monitor the experience, guide the novice past the perilous places and make sure that he is not exceeding his strength, like poor Ben Azzai who died and Ben Zoma, who went mad. All mystics stress the need for intelligence and mental stability. Zen masters say that it is useless for a neurotic person to seek a cure in meditation for that will only make him sicker. The strange and outlandish behaviour of some European Catholic saints who were revered as mystics must be regarded as aberrations. This cryptic story of the Talmudic sages shows that Jews had been aware of the dangers from the very beginning: later, they would not let young people become initiated into the disciplines of Kabbalah until they were fully mature. A mystic also had to be married, to ensure that he was in good sexual health.
The mystic had to journey to the Throne of God through the mythological realm of the seven heavens. Yet this was only an imaginary flight. It was never taken literally but always seen as a symbolic ascent through the mysterious regions of the mind. Rabbi Akiva's strange warning about the 'stones of pure marble' may refer to the password that the mystic had to utter at various crucial points in his imaginary journey. These images were visualised as part of an elaborate discipline. Today we know that the unconscious is a teeming mass of imagery that surfaces in dreams, in hallucinations and in aberrant psychic or neurological conditions such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. Jewish mystics did not imagine that they were 'really' flying through the sky or entering God's palace but were marshalling the religious images that filled their minds in a controlled and ordered way. This demanded great skill and a certain disposition and training. It required the same kind of concentration as the disciplines of Zen or Yoga, which also help the adept to find his way through the labyrinthine paths of the psyche. The Babylonian sage Hai Gaon (939-1038) explained the story of the four sages by means of contemporary mystical practice. The 'orchard' refers to the mystical ascent of the soul to the 'Heavenly Halls' (hekhalot) of God's palace. A man who wishes to make this imaginary, interior journey must be 'worthy' and 'blessed with certain qualities' if he wishes 'to gaze at the heavenly chariot and the halls of the angels on high'. It will not happen spontaneously. He has to perform certain exercises that are similar to those practised by Yogis and contemplatives all the world over:
"He must fast for a specified number of days, he must place his head between his knees whispering softly to himself the while certain praises of God with his face towards the ground. As a result he will gaze in the innermost recesses of his heart and it will seem as if he saw the seven halls with his own eyes, moving from hall to hall to observe that which is therein to be found." {3}
Although the earliest texts of this Throne Mysticism only date back to the second or third centuries, this kind of contemplation was probably older. Thus St Paul refers to a friend 'who belonged to the Messiah' who had been caught up to the third heaven some fourteen years earlier. Paul was not sure how to interpret this vision but believed that the man 'was caught up into paradise and heard things which must not and cannot be put into human language'. {4}
The visions are not ends in themselves but means to an ineffable religious experience that exceeds normal concepts. They will be conditioned by the particular religious tradition of the mystic. A Jewish visionary will see visions of the seven heavens because his religious imagination is stocked with these particular symbols. Buddhists see various images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas; Christians visualise the Virgin Mary. It is a mistake for the visionary to see these mental apparitions as objective or as anything more than a symbol of transcendence. Since hallucination is often a pathological state, considerable skill and mental balance is required to handle and interpret the symbols that emerge during the course of concentrated meditation and inner reflection.
One of the strangest and most controversial of these early Jewish visions is found in the Shiur Qomah (The Measurement of the Height), a fifth-century text which describes the figure that Ezekiel had seen on God's throne. The Shiur Qomah calls this being Yozrenu, the Creator. Its peculiar description of this vision of God is probably based on a passage from the Song of Songs, which was Rabbi Akiva's favourite biblical text. The Bride describes her Lover:
"My beloved is fresh and ruddy,
to be known among ten thousand.
His head is golden, purest gold,
his locks are palm fronds
and black as the raven.
His eyes are doves
at a pool of water,
bathed in milk,
at rest on a pool;
his cheeks are beds of spices,
banks sweetly scented.
His lips are lilies,
distilling pure myrrh,
His hands are golden, rounded,
set with jewels of Tarshish.
His belly a block of ivory
covered with sapphires.
His legs are alabaster columns." {5}
Some saw this as a description of God: to the consternation of generations of Jews, the Shiur Qomah proceeded to measure each one of God's limbs listed here. In this strange text, the measurements of God are baffling. The mind cannot cope. The 'parasang' - the basic unit - is equivalent to 180 billion 'fingers' and each 'finger' stretches from one end of the earth to the other. These massive dimensions boggle the mind, which gives up trying to follow them or even to conceive a figure of such size. That is the point. The Shiur is trying to tell us that it is impossible to measure God or contain him in human terms. The mere attempt to do so demonstrates the impossibility of the project and gives us a new experience of God's transcendence. Not surprisingly many Jews have found this odd attempt to measure the wholly spiritual God blasphemous. That is why an esoteric text such as the Shiur was kept hidden from the unwary. Seen in context, the Shiur Qomah would give to those adepts who were prepared to approach it in the right way, under the guidance of their spiritual director, a new insight into the transcendence of a God which exceeds all human categories. It is certainly not meant to be taken literally; it certainly conveys no secret information. It is a deliberate evocation of a mood that created a sense of wonder and awe.
The Shiur introduces us to two essential ingredients in the mystical portrait of God, which are common in all three faiths. First, it is essentially imaginative; secondly, it is ineffable. The figure described in the Shiur is the image of God whom the mystics see sitting enthroned at the end of their ascent. There is absolutely nothing tender, loving or personal about this God; indeed his holiness seems alienating. When they see him, however, the mystical heroes burst into songs which give very little information about God but which leave an immense impression:
"A quality of holiness, a quality of power, a fearful quality, a dreaded quality, a quality of awe, a quality of dismay, a quality of terror -Such is the quality of the garment of the Creator, Adonai, God of Israel, who, crowned, comes to the thone of his glory; His garment is engraved inside and outside and entirely covered with YHWH, YHWH. No eyes are able to behold it, neither the eyes of flesh and blood, nor the eyes of his servants." {6}
If we cannot imagine what Yahweh's cloak is like, how can we think to behold God himself?
Perhaps the most famous of the early Jewish mystical texts is the fifth-century Sefer Yezirah (The Book of Creation). There is no attempt to describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as though he were writing a book. But language has been entirely transformed and the message of creation is no longer clear. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the mystic weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words. The purpose was to bypass the intellect and remind Jews that no words or concepts could represent the reality to which the Name pointed. Again, the experience of pushing language to its limits and making it yield a non-linguistic significance, created a sense of the otherness of God. Mystics did not want a straightforward dialogue with a God whom they experienced as an overwhelming holiness rather than a sympathetic friend and father.
Throne Mysticism was not unique. The Prophet Muhammad is said to have had a very similar experience when he made his Night Journey from Arabia to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He had been transported in sleep by Gabriel on a celestial horse. On arrival, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and a crowd of other prophets who confirmed Muhammad in his own prophetic mission. Then Gabriel and Muhammad began their perilous ascent up a ladder (miraj) through the seven heavens, each one of which was presided over by a prophet. Finally he reached the divine sphere. The early sources reverently keep silent about the final vision, to which these verses in the Koran are believed to refer.
"And indeed he saw him a second time by the lote-tree of the furthest limit, near unto the garden of promise, with the lote-tree veiled in a veil of nameless splendour ...
[And withal] the eye did not waver, nor yet did it stray: truly did he see some of the most profound of his Sustainer's symbols." {7}
Muhammad did not see God himself but only symbols that pointed to the divine reality: in Hinduism the lote-tree marks the limit of rational thought. There is no way in which the vision of God can appeal to the normal experiences of thought or language. The ascent to heaven is a symbol of the furthest reach of the human spirit, which marks the threshold of ultimate meaning.
The imagery of ascent is common. St Augustine had experienced an ascent to God with his mother at Ostia, which he described in the language of Plotinus:
"Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporate objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works and entered into our own minds." {8}
Augustine's mind was filled with the Greek imagery of the great chain of being instead of the Semitic images of the seven heavens. This was not a literal journey through outer space to a God 'out there' but a mental ascent to a reality within. This rapturous flight seems something given, from without, when he says 'our minds were lifted up' as though he and Monica were passive recipients of grace, but there is a deliberation in this steady climb towards 'eternal being'. Similar imagery of ascent has also been noted in the trance experiences of Shamans 'from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego', as Joseph Campbell puts it." {9}
The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly perceptions have been left far behind. The experience of God that is finally attained is utterly indescribable, since normal language no longer applies. The Jewish mystics describe anything but God! They tell us about his cloak, his palace, his heavenly court and the veil that shields him from human gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes. Muslims who speculated about Muhammad's flight to heaven stress the paradoxical nature of his final vision of God: he both saw and did not see the divine presence. {10} Once the mystic has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he reaches the point where neither concepts nor imagination can take him any further. Augustine and Monica were equally reticent about the climax of their flight, stressing its transcendence of space, time and ordinary knowledge. They 'talked and panted' for God, and 'touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of heart'. {11} Then they had to return to normal speech, where a sentence has a beginning, a middle and an end:
"Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are quiescent, if the heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about itself, if all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language and everything transitory is silent - for if anyone could hear then this is what all of diem would be saying, 'We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides for eternity' (Psalm 79:3,5) ... That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things." {12}
This was no naturalistic vision of a personal God: they had not, so to speak, 'heard his voice' through any of the normal methods of naturalistic communication: through ordinary speech, the voice of an angel, through nature or the symbolism of a dream. It seemed that they had 'touched' the Reality which lay beyond all these things.' {13}
Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of 'ascent' seems an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have had this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the climactic insight a 'vision of God'; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is that this is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind - often called the imagination - rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares.
Augustine seems to have imagined that privileged human beings were sometimes able to see God in this life: he cited Moses and St Paul as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604), who was an acknowledged master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He was not an intellectual and, as a typical Roman, had a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of the divine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced by such Greek Christians as Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. God was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that God was difficult of access. There was certainly no way we could talk about him familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing at all about God. We could make no predictions about his behaviour on the basis of our knowledge of people: 'Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot fully know anything about him.' {14} Frequently Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach to God. The joy and peace of contemplation could only be attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle. Before tasting God's sweetness, the soul has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element: It
"cannot fix its mind's eyes on that which it has with hasty glance seen within itself, because it is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards. It meanwhile pants and struggles and endeavours to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered with weariness, into its own familiar darkness.'" {15}
God could only be reached after 'a great effort of the mind', which had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, 'the soul could do nothing but weep'. 'Tortured' by its desire for God, it only 'found rest in tears, being wearied out'. {16} Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West continued to find God a strain."
In the East, the Christian experience of God was characterised by light rather than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism, which is also found world-wide. This did not depend on imagery and vision but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys the Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, 'every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest to those who search.' The aim of the contemplative was to go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction. Then he would acquire 'a certain sense of presence' that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human experiences of a relationship with another person. {17} This attitude was called hesychia, 'tranquillity' or 'interior silence'. Since words, ideas and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration, so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive.
How was it possible to know an incomprehensible God? The Greeks loved that kind of paradox and the hesychasts turned to the old distinction between God's essence (ousia) and his 'energies' (energeiai) or activities in the world, which enabled us to experience something of the divine. Since we could never know God as he is in himself, it was the 'energies' not the 'essence' that we experienced in prayer. They could be described as the 'rays' of divinity, which illuminated the world and were an outpouring of the divine, but as distinct from God himself as sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested a God who was utterly silent and unknowable. As St Basil had said: 'It is by his energies that we know our God; we do not assent that we come near to the essence itself, for his energies descend to us but his essence remains unapproachable." {18} In the Old Testament, this divine 'energy' had been called God's 'glory' (kavod). In the New Testament, it had shone forth in the person of Christ on Mount Tabor, when his humanity had been transfigured by the divine rays. Now they penetrated the whole created universe and deified those who had been saved. As the word 'energeiai' implied, this was an active and dynamic conception of God. Where the West would see God making himself known by means of his eternal attributes - his goodness, justice, love and omnipotence - the Greeks saw God making himself accessible in a ceaseless activity in which he was somehow present.
When we experienced the 'energies' in prayer, therefore, we were in some sense communing with God directly, even though the unknowable reality itself remained in obscurity. The leading hesychast Evagrius Pontus (d-599) insisted that the 'knowledge' that we had of God in prayer had nothing whatever to do with concepts or images but was an immediate experience of the divine which transcended these. It was important, therefore, for hesychasts to strip their souls naked: 'When you are praying,' he told his monks, 'do not shape within yourself any image of the deity and do not let your mind be shaped by the impress of any form.' Instead, they should 'approach the Immaterial in an immaterial manner'. {19} Evagrius was proposing a sort of Christian Yoga. This was not a process of reflection; indeed, 'prayer means the shedding of thought'. {20} It was rather an intuitive apprehension of God. It will result in a sense of the unity of all things, a freedom from distraction and multiplicity, and the loss of ego - an experience that is clearly akin to that produced by contemplatives in non-theistic religions like Buddhism. By systematically weaning their minds away from their 'passions' - such as pride, greed, sadness or anger which tied them to the ego - hesychasts would transcend themselves and become deified like Jesus on Mount Tabor, transfigured by the divine 'energies'.
Diodochus, the fifth-century bishop of Photice, insisted that this deification was not delayed until the next world but could be experienced consciously here below. He taught a method of concentration that involved breathing: as they inhaled, hesychasts should pray: 'Jesus Christ, Son of God'; they should exhale to the words: 'have mercy upon us'.
Later hesychasts refined this exercise: contemplates should sit with head and shoulders bowed, looking towards their heart or navel. They should breathe ever more slowly in order to direct their attention inwards, to certain psychological foci like the heart. It was a rigorous discipline that must be used carefully; it could only be safely practised under an expert director. Gradually, like a Buddhist monk, the hesychast would find that he or she could set rational thoughts gently to one side, the imagery that thronged the mind would fade away and they would feel totally one with their prayer.
Greek Christians had discovered for themselves techniques that had been practised for centuries in the oriental religions. They saw prayer as a psychosomatic activity, whereas Westerners like Augustine and Gregory thought that prayer should liberate the soul from the body. Maximus the Confessor had insisted: 'The whole man should become God, deified by the grace of the God become man, becoming whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body, by grace.' {21} The hesychast would experience this as an influx of energy and clarity that was so powerful and compelling that it could only be divine. As we have seen, the Greeks saw this 'deification' as an enlightenment that was natural to man. They found inspiration in the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, just as Buddhists were inspired by the image of the Buddha, who had attained the fullest realisation of humanity. The Feast of the Transfiguration is very important in the Eastern Orthodox Churches; it is called an 'epiphany', a manifestation of God. Unlike their Western brethren, the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and desolation were an inescapable prelude to the experience of God: these were simply disorders that must be cured. Greeks had no cult of a dark night of the soul. The dominant motif was Tabor rather than Gethsemane and Calvary.
Not everybody could achieve these higher states, however, but other Christians could glimpse something of this mystical experience in the icons. In the West, religious art was becoming predominantly representational: it depicted historical events in the lives of Jesus or the saints. In Byzantium, however, the icon was not meant to re-present anything in this world but was an attempt to portray the ineffable mystical experience of the hesychasts in a visual form to inspire the non-mystics. As the British historian Peter Brown explains, 'Throughout the Eastern Christian world, icon and vision validated one another. Some deep gathering into one focal point of the collective imagination.. . ensured that by the sixth century, the supernatural had taken on the precise lineaments, in dreams and in each person's imagination, in which it was commonly portrayed in art. The icon had the validity of a realised dream.' {22} Icons were not meant to instruct the faithful or to convey information, ideas or doctrines. They were a focus of contemplation (theoria) which provided the faithful with a sort of window on the divine world.
They became so central to the Byzantine experience of God, however, that by the eighth century they had become the centre of a passionate doctrinal dispute in the Greek Church. People were beginning to ask what exactly the artist was painting when he painted Christ. It was impossible to depict his divinity but if the artist claimed that he was only painting the humanity of Jesus, was he guilty of Nestorianism, the heretical belief that Jesus's human and divine natures were quite distinct? The iconoclasts wanted to ban icons altogether but icons were defended by two leading monks: John of Damascus (656-747) of the monastery of Mar Sabbas near Bethlehem, and Theodore (759-826), of the monastery of Studios near Constantinople. They argued that the iconoclasts were wrong to forbid the depiction of Christ. Since the Incarnation, the material world and the human body had both been given a divine dimension and an artist could paint this new type of deified humanity. He was also painting an image of God, since Christ the Logos was the icon of God par excellence. God could not be contained in words or summed up in human concepts but he could be 'described' by the pen of the artist or in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy.
The piety of the Greeks was so dependent upon icons that by 820 the iconoclasts had been defeated by popular acclaim. This assertion that God was in some sense describable did not amount to an abandonment of Denys's apophatic theology, however. In his Greater Apology for the Holy Images, the monk Nicephoras claimed that icons were 'expressive of the silence of God, exhibiting in themselves the ineffability of a mystery that transcends being. Without ceasing and without speech, they praise the goodness of God in that venerable and thrice-illumined melody of theology'. {23} Instead of instructing the faithful in the dogmas of the Church and helping them to form lucid ideas about their faith, the icons held them in a sense of mystery. When describing the effect of these religious paintings, Nicephoras could only compare it to the effect of music, the most ineffable of the arts and possibly the most direct. Emotion and experience are conveyed by music in a way that bypasses words and concepts. In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater would assert that all art aspired to the condition of music; in ninth-century Byzantium, Greek Christians saw theology as aspiring to the condition of iconography. They found that God was better expressed in a work of art than in rationalistic discourse. After the intensely wordy Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, they were evolving a portrait of God that depended upon the imaginative experience of Christians.
This was definitively expressed by Symeon (949-1022), Abbot of the small monastery of St Macras in Constantinople, who became known as the 'New Theologian'. This new type of theology made no attempt to define God. This, Symeon insisted, would be presumptuous; indeed, to speak about God in any way at all implied that 'that which is incomprehensible is comprehensible'. {24} Instead of arguing rationally about God's nature, the 'new' theology relied on direct, personal religious experience. It was impossible to know God in conceptual terms, as though he were just an-other being about which we could form ideas. God was a mystery. A true Christian was one who had a conscious experience of the God who had revealed himself in the transfigured humanity of Christ. Symeon had himself been converted from a worldly life to contemplation by an experience that seemed to come to him out of the blue. At first he had had no idea what was happening, but gradually he became aware that he was being transformed and, as it were, absorbed into a light that was of God himself. This was not light as we know it, of course; it was beyond 'form, image or representation and could only be experienced intuitively, through prayer'. {25} But this was not an experience for the elite or for monks only; the kingdom announced by Christ in the Gospels was a union with God that everybody could experience here and now, without having to wait until the next life.
For Symeon, therefore, God was known and unknown, near and far. Instead of attempting the impossible task of describing 'ineffable matters by words alone', {26} he urged his monks to concentrate on what could be experienced as a transfiguring reality in their own souls. As God had said to Symeon during one of his visions: 'Yes, I am God, the one who became man for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you see, and I shall make you God.' {27} God was not an external, objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlightenment. Yet Symeon's refusal to speak about God did not lead him to break with the theological insights of the past. The 'new' theology was based firmly on the teachings of the Fathers of the Church. In his Hymns of Divine Love, Symeon expressed the old Greek doctrine of the deification of humanity, as described by Athanasius and Maximus:
"O Light that none can name, for it is altogether nameless.
O Light with many names, for it is at work in all things ...
How do you mingle yourself with grass?
How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible,
do you preserve the nature of the grass unconsumed?" {28}
It was useless to define the God who affected this transformation, since he was beyond speech and description. Yet as an experience that fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating its integrity, 'God' was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had developed ideas about God - such as the Trinity and the Incarnation - that separated them from other monotheists, yet the actual experience of their mystics had much in common with those of Muslims and Jews.
Even though the Prophet Muhammad had been primarily concerned with the establishment of a just society, he and some of his closest companions had been mystically inclined and the Muslims had quickly developed their own distinctive mystical tradition. During the eighth and ninth centuries, an ascetical form of Islam had developed alongside the other sects; the ascetics were as concerned as the Mutazilis and the Shiis about the wealth of the court and the apparent abandonment of the austerity of the early ummah. They attempted to return to the simpler life of the first Muslims in Medina, dressing in the coarse garments made of wool (Arabic SWF) that were supposed to have been favoured by the Prophet. Consequently, they were known as Sufis. Social justice remained crucial to their piety, as Louis Massignon, the late French scholar, has explained:
"The mystic call is as a rule the result of an inner rebellion of the conscience against social injustices, not only those of others but primarily and particularly against one's own faults with a desire intensified by inner purification to find God at any price." {29}
At first Sufis had much in common with the other sects. Thus the great Mutazili rationalist Wasil ibn Ala (d.748) had been a disciple of Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), the ascetic of Medina who was later revered as one of the fathers of Sufism.
The ulema were beginning to distinguish Islam sharply from other religions, seeing it as the one, true faith but Sufis by and large remained true to the Koranic vision of the unity of all rightly-guided religion. Jesus, for example, was revered by many Sufis as the prophet of the interior life. Some even amended the Shahadah, the profession of faith, to say: 'There is no god but al-Lah and Jesus is his Messenger', which was technically correct but intentionally provocative. Where the Koran speaks of a God of justice who inspires fear and awe, the early woman ascetic Rabiah (d. 801) spoke of love, in a way that Christians would have found familiar:
"Two ways I love Thee: selfishly,
And next, as worthy is of Thee.
'Tis selfish love that I do naught
Save think on Thee with every thought.
'Tis purest love when Thou dost raise
The veil to my adoring gaze.
Not mine the praise in that or this:
Thine is the praise in both, I wis." {30}
This is close to her famous prayer: 'O God! If I worship thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine Everlasting Beauty!' {31} The love of God became the hallmark of Sufism. Sufis may well have been influenced by the Christian ascetics of the Near East but Muhammad remained a crucial influence. They hoped to have an experience of God that was similar to that of Muhammad when he had received his revelations. Naturally, they were also inspired by his mystical ascent to heaven, which became the paradigm of their own experience of God.
They also evolved the techniques and disciplines that have helped mystics all over the world to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Sufis added the practices of fasting, night vigils and chanting the Divine Names as a mantra to the basic requirements of Muslim law. The effect of these practices sometimes resulted in behaviour which seemed bizarre and unrestrained and such mystics were known as 'drunken' Sufis. The first of these was Abu Yazid Bistami (d.874) who, like Rabiah, approached God as a lover. He believed that he should strive to please al-Lah as he would a woman in a human love affair, sacrificing his own needs and desires so as to become one with the Beloved. Yet the introspective disciplines he adopted to achieve this led him beyond this personalised conception of God. As he approached the core of his identity, he felt that nothing stood between God and himself; indeed, everything that he understood as 'self seemed to have melted away:
"I gazed upon [al-Lah] with the eye of truth and said to Him: 'Who is this?' He said, 'This is neither I nor other than I. There is no God but I.' Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood ... Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying: 'How fares it with me with Thee?' He said, 'I am through Thee; there is no god but Thou.'" {32}
Yet again, this was no external deity 'out there', alien to mankind: God was discovered to be mysteriously identified with the inmost self. The systematic destruction of the ego led to a sense of absorption in a larger, ineffable reality. This state of annihilation ('fana) became central to the Sufi ideal. Bistami had completely reinterpreted the Shahadah in a way that could have been construed as blasphemous, had it not been recognised by so many other Muslims as an authentic experience of that Islam commanded by the Koran.
Other mystics, known as the 'sober' Sufis, preferred a less extravagant spirituality. Al-Junayd of Baghdad (d. 910), who mapped out the ground plan of all future Islamic mysticism, believed that al-Bistami's extremism could be dangerous. He taught that 'fana (annihilation) must be succeeded by baqa (revival), a return to an enhanced self. Union with God should not destroy our natural capabilities but fulfil them: a Sufi who had ripped away obscuring egotism to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realisation and self-control. He would become more fully human. When they experienced 'fana and baqa, therefore, Sufis had achieved a state that a Greek Christian would call 'deification'. Al-Junayd saw the whole Sufi quest as a return to man's primordial state on the day of creation: he was returning to the ideal humanity that God had intended. He was also returning to the Source of his being. The experience of separation and alienation was as central to the Sufi as to the Platonic or Gnostic experience; it is, perhaps not dissimilar to the 'separation' of which Freudians and Kleinians speak today, although the psychoanalysts attribute this to a non-theistic source. By means of disciplined, careful work under the expert guidance of a Sufi master (pir) like himself, al-Junayd taught that a Muslim could be reunited with his Creator and achieve that original sense of God's immediate presence that he had experienced when, as the Koran says, he had been drawn from Adam's loins. It would be the end of separation and sadness, a reunion with a deeper self that was also the self he or she was meant to be. God was not a separate, external reality and judge but somehow one with the ground of each person's being:
"Now I have known, O Lord,
What lies within my heart;
In secret, from the world apart,
My tongue hath talked with my Adored.
So in a manner we
United are, and One;
Yet otherwise disunion
is our estate eternally.
Though from my gaze profound
Deep awe hath hid Thy Face,
In wondrous and ecstatic Grace
I feel Thee touch my inmost ground." {33}
The emphasis on unity harks back to the Koranic ideal of tawhid: by drawing together his dissipated self, the mystic would experience the divine presence in personal integration.
Al-Junayd was acutely aware of the dangers of mysticism. It would be easy for untrained people, who did not have the benefit of the advice of a pir and the rigorous Sufi training, to misunderstand the ecstasy of a mystic and get a very simplistic idea of what he meant when he said that he was one with God. Extravagant claims like those of al-Bistami would certainly arouse the ire of the establishment. At this early stage, Sufism was very much a minority movement and the ulema often regarded it as an inauthentic innovation. Junayd's famous pupil Husain ibn Mansur (usually known as al-Hallaj, the Wool-Carder) threw all caution to the winds, however, and became a martyr for his mystical faith. Roaming the Iraq, preaching the overthrow of the caliphate and the establishment of a new social order, he was imprisoned by the authorities and crucified like his hero, Jesus. In his ecstasy, al-Hallaj had cried aloud: 'I am the Truth!' According to the Gospels, Jesus had made the same claim, when he had said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Koran repeatedly condemned the Christian belief in God's incarnation in Christ as blasphemous, so it was not surprising that Muslims were horrified by al-Hallaj's ecstatic cry. Al-Haqq (the Truth) was one of the names of God and it was idolatry for any mere mortal to claim this tide for himself. Al-Hallaj had been expressing his sense of a union with God that was so close that it felt like identity. As he said in one of his poems:
"I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I:
We are two spirits dwelling in one body.
If thou seest me, thou seest Him,
And if thou seest Him, thou seest us both." {34}
It was a daring expression of that annihilation of self and union with God that his master al-Junayd had called 'fana. Al-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly death.
"When he was brought to be crucified and saw the cross and the nails, he turned to the people and uttered a prayer, ending with the words: 'And these Thy servants who are gathered to slay me, in zeal for Thy religion and in desire to win Thy favours, forgive them, O Lord, and have mercy upon them; for verily if Thou hadst revealed to them that which Thou hast revealed to me, they would not have done what they have done; and if Thou hadst hidden from me that which Thou hast hidden from them, I should not have suffered this tribulation. Glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou doest, and glory unto Thee in whatsoever Thou wiliest." {35}
Al-Hallaj's cry ana al-Haqq: 'I am the Truth!' shows that the God of the mystics is not an objective reality but profoundly subjective. Later al-Ghazzali argued that he had not been blasphemous but only unwise in proclaiming an esoteric truth that could be misleading to the uninitiated. Because there is no reality but al-Lah - as the Shahadah maintains - all men are essentially divine. The Koran taught that God had created Adam in his own image so that he could contemplate himself as in a mirror. {36} That is why he ordered the angels to bow down and worship the first man. The mistake of the Christians had been to assume that one man had contained the whole incarnation of the divine, Sufis would argue. A mystic who had regained his original vision of God had rediscovered the divine image within himself, as it had appeared on the day of creation. The Sacred Tradition (hadith qudsi) beloved by the Sufis shows God drawing a Muslim towards him so closely that he seems to have become incarnate in each one of his servants: 'When I love him, I become his Ear through which he hears, his Eye with which he sees, his Hand with which he grasps, and his Foot with which he walks.'
The story of al-Hallaj shows the deep antagonism that can exist between the mystic and the religious establishment who have different notions of God and revelation. For the mystic the revelation is an event that happens within his own soul, while for more conventional people like some of the ulema it is an event that is firmly fixed in the past. We have seen, however, that during the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina and al-Ghazzali himself had found that objective accounts of God were unsatisfactory and had turned towards mysticism. Al-Ghazzali had made Sufism acceptable to the establishment and had shown that it was the most authentic form of Muslim spirituality.
During the twelfth century the Iranian philosopher Yahya Suhrawardi and the Spanish-born Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi linked Islamic Falsafah indissolubly with mysticism and made the God experienced by the Sufis normative in many parts of the Islamic empire. Like al-Hallaj, however, Suhrawardi was also put to death by the ulema in Aleppo in 1191, for reasons that remain obscure. He had made it his life's work to link what he called the original 'Oriental' religion with Islam, thus completing the project that Ibn Sina had proposed. He claimed that all the sages of the ancient world had preached a single doctrine. Originally it had been revealed to Hermes (whom Suhrawardi identified with the prophet known as Idris in the Koran or Enoch in the Bible); in the Greek world it had been transmitted through Plato and Pythagoras and in the Middle East through the Zoroastrian Magi.
Since Aristotle, however, it had been obscured by a more narrowly intellectual and cerebral philosophy but it had been secretly passed from one sage to another until it had finally reached Suhrawardi himself via al-Bistami and al-Hallaj. This perennial philosophy was mystical and imaginative but did not involve the abandonment of reason. Suhrawardi was as intellectually rigorous as al-Farabi but he also insisted on the importance of intuition in the approach to truth. As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God and should be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found in paganism and Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheistic tradition. Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people. Sufism in particular would evolve an outstanding appreciation of the faith of others.
Suhrawardi is often called the Sheikh al-Ishraq or the Master of Illumination. Like the Greeks, he experienced God in terms of light. In Arabic, ishraq refers to the first light of dawn that issues from the East as well as to enlightenment: the Orient, therefore, is not the geographical location but the source of light and energy. In Suhrawardi's Oriental faith, therefore, human beings dimly remember their Origin, feeling uneasy in this world of shadow, and long to return to their first abode. Suhrawardi claimed that his philosophy would help Muslims to find their true orientation, to purify the eternal wisdom within them by means of the imagination.
Suhrawardi's immensely complex system was an attempt to link all the religious insights of the world into a spiritual religion. Truth must be sought wherever it could be found. Consequently his philosophy linked the pre-Islamic Iranian cosmology with the Ptolemaic planetary system and the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation. Yet no other Faylasuf had ever quoted so extensively from the Koran. When he discussed cosmology, Suhrawardi was not primarily interested in accounting for the physical origins of the universe. In his master work The Wisdom of Illumination (Hiqmat al-Ishraq), Suhrawardi began by considering problems of physics and natural science but this was only a prelude to the mystical part of his work. Like Ibn Sina, he had grown dissatisfied with the wholly rational and objective orientation of Falsafah, though he did believe that rational and metaphysical speculation had their place in the perception of total reality. The true sage, in his opinion, excelled in both philosophy and mysticism. There was always such a sage in the world. In a theory that was very close to Shii Imamology, Suhrawardi believed that this spiritual leader was the true pole (qutb) without whose presence the world could not continue to exist, even if he remained in obscurity. Suhrawardi's Ishraqi mysticism is still practised in Iran. It is an esoteric system not because it is exclusive but because it requires spiritual and imaginative training of the sort undergone by Ismailis and Sufis.
The Greeks, perhaps, would have said that Suhrawardi's system was dogmatic rather than kerygmatic. He was attempting to discover the imaginative core that lay at the heart of all religion and philosophy and, though he insisted that reason was not enough, he never denied its right to probe the deepest mysteries. Truth had to be sought in scientific rationalism as well as esoteric mysticism; sensibility must be educated and informed by the critical intelligence.
As its name suggests, the core of Ishraqi philosophy was the symbol of light, which was seen as the perfect synonym for God. It was (at least in the twelfth century!) immaterial and indefinable yet was also the most obvious fact of life in the world: totally self-evident, it required no definition but was perceived by everybody as the element that made life possible. It was all-pervasive: whatever luminosity belonged to material bodies came directly from light, a source outside themselves. In Suhrawardi's emanationist cosmology, the Light of Lights corresponded to the Necessary Being of the Faylasufs, which was utterly simple. It generated a succession of lesser lights in a descending hierarchy; each light, recognising its dependency on the Light of Lights, developed a shadow-self that was the source of a material realm, which corresponded to one of the Ptolemaic spheres. This was a metaphor of the human predicament. There was a similar combination of light and darkness within each one of us: the light or soul was conferred upon the embryo by the Holy Spirit (also known, as in Ibn Sina's scheme, as the Angel Gabriel, the light of our world). The soul longs to be united with the higher world of Lights and, if it is properly instructed by the qutb saint of the time or by one of his disciples, can even catch a glimpse of this here below.
Suhrawardi described his own enlightenment in the Hiqmat. He had been obsessed with the epistemological problem of knowledge but could make no headway: his book-learning had nothing to say to him. Then he had a vision of the Imam, the qutb, the healer of souls:
"Suddenly I was wrapped in gentleness; there was a blinding flash, then a diaphanous light in the likeness of a human being. I watched attentively and there he was ... He came towards me, greeting me so kindly that my bewilderment faded and my alarm gave way to a feeling of familiarity. And then I began to complain to him of the trouble I had with this problem of knowledge.
'Awaken to yourself,' he said to me, 'and your problem will be solved.'"{37}
The process of awakening or illumination was clearly very different from the wrenching, violent inspiration of prophecy. It had more in common with the tranquil enlightenment of the Buddha: mysticism was introducing a calmer spirituality into the religions of God. Instead of a collision with a Reality without, illumination would come from within the mystic himself. There was no imparting of facts. Instead, the exercise of the human imagination would enable people to return to God by introducing them to the alam al-mithal, the world of pure images.
Suhrawardi drew upon the ancient Iranian belief in an archetypal world by which every person and object in the getik (the mundane, physical world) had its exact counterpart in the menok (the heavenly realm). Mysticism would revive the old mythology that the God-religions had ostensibly abandoned. The menok, which in Suhra-wardi's scheme became the alam al-mithal, was now an intermediate realm that existed between our world and God's. This could not be perceived by means of reason nor by the senses. It was the faculty of the creative imagination which enabled us to discover the realm of hidden archetypes, just as the symbolic interpretation of the Koran revealed its true spiritual meaning. The alam al-mithal was close to the Ismaili perception of the spiritual history of Islam which was the real meaning of the earthly events or Ibn Sina's angelology, which we discussed in the last chapter. It would be crucial to all future mystics of Islam as a way of interpreting their experiences and visions. Suhrawardi was examining the visions that are so strikingly similar, whether they are seen by shamans, mystics or ecstatics, in many different cultures. There has recently been much interest in this phenomenon. Jung's conception of the collective unconscious is a more scientific attempt to examine this common imaginative experience of humanity. Other scholars, such as the Rumanian-American philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade, have attempted to show how the epics of ancient poets and certain kinds of fairy tales derive from ecstatic journeys and mystical flights. {38}
Suhrawardi insisted that the visions of mystics and the symbols of Scripture - such as Heaven, Hell, or the Last Judgement-were as real as the phenomena we experience in this world but not in the same way. They could not be empirically proven but could only be discerned by the trained imaginative faculty, which enabled visionaries to see the spiritual dimension of earthly phenomena. This experience was nonsensical to anybody who had not had the requisite training, just as the Buddhist enlightenment could only be experienced when the necessary moral and mental exercises had been undertaken. All our thoughts, ideas, desires, dreams and visions corresponded to realities in the alam al-mithal. The Prophet Muhammad, for example, had awakened to this intermediate world during the Night Vision, which had taken him to the threshold of the divine world. Suhrawardi would also have claimed that the visions of the Jewish Throne Mystics took place when they had learned to enter the alam al-mithal during their spiritual exercises of concentration. The path to God, therefore, did not lie solely through reason, as the Faylasufs had thought, but through the creative imagination, the realm of the mystic.
Today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not. {39} Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. The only way we can conceive of God, who remains imperceptible to the senses and to logical proof, is by means of symbols, which it is the chief function of the imaginative mind to interpret. Suhrawardi was attempting an imaginative explanation of those symbols that have had a crucial influence on human life, even though the realities to which they refer remain elusive.
A symbol can be defined as an object or a notion that we can perceive with our senses or grasp with our minds but in which we see something other than itself. Reason alone will not enable us to perceive the special, the universal or the eternal in a particular, temporal object. That is the task of the creative imagination, to which mystics, like artists, attribute their insights. As in art, the most effective religious symbols are those informed by an intelligent knowledge and understanding of the human condition. Suhrawardi, who wrote in extraordinarily beautiful Arabic and was a highly skilled metaphysician, was a creative artist as well as a mystic. Yoking apparently unrelated things together - science with mysticism, pagan philosophy with monotheistic religion - he was able to help Muslims create their own symbols and find new meaning and significance in life.
Even more influential than Suhrawardi was Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (i 165-1240), whose life we can, perhaps, see as a symbol of the parting of the ways between East and West. His father was a friend of Ibn Rushd, who was very impressed by the piety of the young boy on the one occasion that they met. During a severe illness, Ibn al-Arabi was converted to Sufism, however, and at the age of thirty he left Europe for the Middle East. He made the hajj and spent two years praying and meditating at the Kabah but eventually settled at Malatya on the Euphrates. Frequently called Sheikh al-Akbah, the Great Master, he profoundly affected the Muslim conception of God but his thought did not influence the West, which imagined that Islamic philosophy had ended with Ibn Rushd. Western Christendom would embrace Ibn Rushd's Aristotelian God, while most of Islamdom opted, until relatively recently, for the imaginative God of the Mystics.
In 1201, while making the circumambulations around the Kabah, Ibn al-Arabi had a vision which had a profound and lasting effect upon him: he had seen a young girl, named Nizam, surrounded by a heavenly aura and he realised that she was an incarnation of Sophia, the divine Wisdom. This epiphany made him realise that it would be impossible for us to love God if we relied only on the rational arguments of philosophy. Falsafah emphasised the utter transcendence of al-Lah and reminded us that nothing could resemble him. How could we love such an alien Being? Yet we can love the God we see in his creatures: 'If you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than God, for he is the Beautiful Being,' he explained in the Futuhat al-Makkiyah (The Meccan Revelations). 'Thus in all its aspects, the object of love is God alone.' {40} The Shahadah reminded us that there was no god, no absolute reality but al-Lah. Consequently, there was no beauty apart from him. We cannot see God himself but we can see him as he has chosen to reveal himself in such creatures as Nizam, who inspire love in our hearts. Indeed, the mystic had a duty to create his own epiphanies for himself in order to see a girl like Nizam as she really was. Love was essentially a yearning for something that remains absent; that is why so much of our human love remains disappointing. Nizam had become 'the object of my Quest and my hope, the Virgin Most Pure'. As he explained in the prelude to The Diwan, a collection of love poems:
"In the verses I have composed for the present book, I never cease to allude to the divine inspirations, the spiritual visitations, the correspondences [of our world] with the world of Angelic Intelligences. In this I conformed to my usual manner of thinking in symbols; this because the things of the invisible world attract me more than those of actual life and because this young girl knew exactly what I was referring to." {41}
The creative imagination had transformed Nizam into an avatar of God.
Some eighty years later, the young Dante Alighieri had a similar experience in Florence when he saw Beatrice Portinari. As soon as he caught sight of her, he felt his spirit tremble violently and seemed to hear it cry: 'Behold a god more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.' From that moment, Dante was ruled by his love of Beatrice, which acquired a mastery 'owing to the power which my imagination gave him'. {42} Beatrice remained the image of divine love for Dante and in The Divine Comedy, he shows how this brought him, through an imaginary journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, to a vision of God. Dante's poem had been inspired by Muslim accounts of Muhammad's ascent to heaven; certainly his view of the creative imagination was similar to that of Ibn al-Arabi. Dante argued that it was not true that imaginative simply combined images derived from perception of the mundane world, as Aristotle had maintained; it was in part an inspiration from God:
"O fantasy (imaginativa), that reav'st us oft away
So from ourselves that we remain distraught,
Deaf though a thousand trumpets round us bray.
What moves thee when the senses show thee naught?
Light moves thee, formed in Heaven, by will maybe
Of Him who sends it down, or else self-wrought." {43}
Throughout the poem, Dante gradually purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical descriptions of Hell give way to the difficult, emotional climb up Mount Purgatory to the earthly paradise, where Beatrice upbraids him for seeing her physical being as an end in itself: instead, he should have seen her as a symbol or an avatar that pointed him away from the world to God. There are scarcely any physical descriptions in Paradise; even the blessed souls are elusive, reminding us that no human personality can become the final object of human yearning. Finally, the cool intellectual imagery expresses the utter transcendence of God, who is beyond all imagination. Dante has been accused of painting a cold portrait of God in the Paradiso but the abstraction reminds us that ultimately we know nothing at all about him.
Ibn al-Arabi was also convinced that the imagination was a God-given faculty. When a mystic created an epiphany for himself, he was bringing to birth here below a reality that existed more perfectly in the realm of archetypes. When we saw the divine in other people, we were making an imaginative effort to uncover the true reality: 'God made the creatures like veils,' he explained, 'He who knows them as such is led back to Him, but he who takes them as real is barred from His presence.' {44} Thus - as seemed to be the way of Sufism - what started as a highly personalised spirituality, centering on a human being, led Ibn al-Arabi to a transpersonal conception of God. The image of the female remained important to him: he believed that women were the most potent incarnations of Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, because they inspired a love in men that was ultimately directed towards God. Admittedly, this is a very male view, but it was an attempt to bring a female dimension to the religion of a God who was often conceived as wholly masculine.
Ibn al-Arabi did not believe that the God he knew had an objective existence. Even though he was a skilled metaphysician, he did not believe that God's existence could be proved by logic. He liked to call himself a disciple of Khidr, a name given to the mysterious figure who appears in the Koran as the spiritual director of Moses, who brought the external Law to the Israelites. God had given Khidr a special knowledge of himself so Moses begs him for instruction, but Khidr tells him that he will not be able to put up with this, since it lies outside his own religious experience. {45} It was no good trying to understand religious 'information' that we had not experienced ourselves. The name Khidr seems to have meant 'the Green One', indicating that his wisdom was ever fresh and eternally renewable. Even a prophet of Moses's stature cannot necessarily comprehend esoteric forms of religion, for, in the Koran, he finds that indeed he cannot put up with Khidr's method of instruction. The meaning of this strange episode seems to suggest that the external trappings of a religion do not always correspond to its spiritual or mystical element. People, such as the ulema, might be unable to understand the Islam of a Sufi like Ibn al-Arabi. Muslim tradition makes Khidr the master of all who seek a mystic truth, which is inherently superior to and quite different from the literal, external forms. He does not lead his disciple to a perception of a God which is the same as everybody else's but to a God who is in the deepest sense of the word subjective.
Khidr was also important to the Ismailis. Despite the fact that Ibn al-Arabi was a Sunni, his teachings were very close to Ismailism and were subsequently incorporated into their theology - yet another instance of mystical religion being able to transcend sectarian divisions. Like the Ismailis, Ibn al-Arabi stressed the pathos of God, which was in sharp contrast to the apatheia of the God of the philosophers. The God of the mystics yearned to be known by his creatures. The Ismailis believed that the noun llah (god) sprang from the Arabic root WLH: to be sad, to sigh for. {46} As the Sacred Hadith had made God say: 'I was a hidden treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them.' There is no rational proof of God's sadness; we know it only by our own longing for something to fulfil our deepest desires and to explain the tragedy and pain of life. Since we are created in God's image, we must reflect God, the supreme archetype. Our yearning for the reality that we call 'God' must, therefore, mirror a sympathy with the pathos of God. Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary God sighing with longing but this sigh (nafas rahmani) was not an expression of maudlin self-pity. It had an active, creative force which brought the whole of our cosmos into existence; it also exhaled human beings, who became logoi, words that express God to himself. It follows that each human being is a unique epiphany of the Hidden God, manifesting him in a particular and unrepeatable manner.
Each one of these divine logoi are the names that God has called himself, making himself totally present in each one of his epiphanies. God cannot be summed up in one human expression since the divine reality is inexhaustible. It also follows that the revelation that God has made in each one of us is unique, different from the God known by the other innumerable men and women who are also his logoi. We will only know our own 'God' since we cannot experience him objectively; it is impossible to know him in the same way as other people. As Ibn al-Arabi says: 'Each being has as his god only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the whole.' He liked to quote the hadith: 'Meditate upon God's blessings, but not upon his essence (al-Dhat}.'* {1} The whole reality of God is unknowable; we must concentrate on the particular Word spoken in our own being. Ibn al-Arabi also liked to call God al-Ama, 'the Cloud' or 'The Blindness' {48} to emphasise his inaccessibility. But these human logoi also reveal the Hidden God to himself. It is a two-way process: God sighs to become known and is delivered from his solitude by the people in whom he reveals himself. The sorrow of the Unknown God is assuaged by the Revealed God in each human being who makes him known to himself; it is also true that the Revealed God in every individual yearns to return to its source with a divine nostalgia that inspires our own longing.
Divinity and humanity were thus two aspects of the divine life that animates the entire cosmos. This insight was not dissimilar to the Greek understanding of the incarnation of God in Jesus but Ibn al-Arabi could not accept the idea that one single human being, however holy, could express the infinite reality of God. Instead he believed that each human person was a unique avatar of the divine. Yet he did develop the symbol of the Perfect Man (insan i-kamil) who embodied the mystery of the Revealed God in each generation for the benefit of his contemporaries, though he did not, of course, incarnate the whole reality of God or his hidden essence. The Prophet Muhammad had been the Perfect Man of his generation and a particularly effective symbol of the divine.
This introspective, imaginative mysticism was a search for the ground of being in the depths of the self. It deprived the mystic of the certainties that characterise the more dogmatic forms of religion. Since each man and woman had had a unique experience of God, it followed that no one religion could express the whole of the divine mystery. There was no objective truth about God to which all must subscribe; since this God transcended the category of personality, predictions about his behaviour and inclinations were impossible. Any consequent chauvinism about one's own faith at the expense of other people's was obviously unacceptable, since no one religion had the whole truth about God. Ibn al-Arabi developed the positive attitude towards other religions which could be found in the Koran and took it to a new extreme of tolerance:
"My heart is capable of every form.
A cloister for the monk, a fane for idols,
A pasture for gazelles, the votary's Kabah
The tables of the Torah, the Koran.
Love is the faith I hold: wherever turn
His camels, still the one true faith is mine." {49}
The man of God was equally at home in synagogue, temple, church and mosque, since all provided a valid apprehension of God. He often used the phrase 'the God created by the faiths' (Khalq al-haqq fi'l-itiqad); it could be pejorative if it referred to the 'god' that men and women created in a particular religion and considered identical with God himself. This only bred intolerance and fanaticism. Instead of such idolatry, Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:
"Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognise the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for, he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of al-Lah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance." {50}
We never see any god but the personal Name that has been revealed and given concrete existence in each one of us; inevitably our understanding of our personal Lord is coloured by the religious tradition into which we were born. But the mystic (arif) knows that this 'God' of ours is simply an 'angel' or a particular symbol of the divine, which must never be confused with the Hidden Reality itself. Consequently he sees all the different religions as valid theophanies. Where the God of the more dogmatic religions divides humanity into warring camps, the God of the mystics is a unifying force.
It is true that Ibn al-Arabi's teachings were too abstruse for the vast majority of Muslims but they did percolate down to the more ordinary people. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Sufism ceased to be a minority movement and became the dominant Islamic mood in many parts of the Muslim empire. This was the period when the various Sufi orders or tariqas were founded, each with its particular interpretation of the mystical faith. The Sufi sheikh had a great influence on the populace and was often revered as a saint in rather the same way as the Shii Imams. It was a period of political upheaval: the Baghdad caliphate was disintegrating and the Mongol hordes were devastating one Muslim city after another. People wanted a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the Faylasufs and the legalistic God of the ulema. The Sufi practices of dhikr, the recitation of the Divine Names as a mantra to induce ecstasy, spread beyond the tariqas. The Sufi disciplines of concentration, with their carefully prescribed techniques of breathing and posture, helped people to experience a sense of transcendent presence within. Not everybody was capable of the higher mystical states, but these spiritual exercises did help people to abandon simplistic and anthropomorphic notions of God and to experience him as a presence within the self. Some orders used music and dancing to enhance concentration and their pirs became heroes to the people.
The most famous of the Sufi orders was the Mawlawiyyah, whose members are known in the West as the 'whirling dervishes'. Their stately and dignified dance was a method of concentration. As he spun round and round, the Sufi felt the boundaries of selfhood dissolve as he melted into his dance, giving him a foretaste of the annihilation of 'fana. The founder of the order was Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-73), known to his disciples as Mawlana, our Master. He had been born in Khurusan in Central Asia but had fled to Konya in modern Turkey before the advancing Mongol armies. His mysticism can be seen as a Muslim response to this scourge, which might have caused many to lose faith in al-Lah. Rumi's ideas are similar to those of his contemporary Ibn al-Arabi, but his poem - the Masnawi - known as the Sufi Bible, had a more popular appeal and helped to disseminate the God of the mystics among ordinary Muslims who were not Sufis. In 1244 Rumi had come under the spell of the wandering dervish Shams ad-Din, whom he saw as the Perfect Man of his generation. Indeed, Shams ad-Din believed that he was a reincarnation of the Prophet and insisted upon being addressed as 'Muhammad'. He had a dubious reputation and was known not to observe the Shariah, the Holy Law of Islam, thinking himself above such trivialities. Rumi's disciples were understandably worried by their Master's evident infatuation. When Shams was killed in a riot, Rumi was inconsolable and devoted still more time to mystical music and dancing. He was able to transform his grief imaginatively into a symbol of the love of God - of God's yearning for humanity and humanity's longing for al-Lah. Whether they realised it or not, everybody was searching for the absent God, obscurely aware that he or she was separated from the Source of being.
"Listen to the reed, how it tells a tale, complaining of separateness. Ever since I was parted from the reed-bed, my lament has caused men and women to moan. I want a bosom torn by severance, that I may unfold [to such a person] the power of love-desire: everyone who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united to it." {51}
The Perfect Man was believed to inspire more ordinary mortals to seek God: Shams ad-Din had unlocked in Rumi the poetry of the Masnawi, which recounted the agonies of this separation.
Like other Sufis, Rumi saw the universe as a theophany of God's myriad Names. Some of these revealed God's wrath or severity, while others expressed those qualities of mercy which were intrinsic to the divine nature. The mystic was engaged in a ceaseless struggle (jihad) to distinguish the compassion, love and beauty of God in all things and to strip away everything else. The Masnawi challenged the Muslim to find the transcendent dimension in human life and to see through appearances to the hidden reality within. It is the ego which blinds us to the inner mystery of all things but once we have got beyond that we are not isolated, separate beings but one with the Ground of all existence. Again, Rumi emphasised that God could only be a subjective experience. He tells the humorous tale of Moses and the Shepherd to illustrate the respect we must show to other people's conception of the divine. One day Moses overheard a shepherd talking familiarly to God: he wanted to help God, wherever he was - to wash his clothes, pick the lice off, kiss his hands and feet at bedtime. 'All I can say, remembering You', the prayer concluded, 'is ayyyy and ahhhhhhhh.' Moses was horrified. Who on earth did the shepherd imagine he was talking to? The Creator of heaven and earth? It sounded as though he were talking to his uncle! The shepherd repented and wandered disconsolately off into the desert but God rebuked Moses. He did not want orthodox words but burning love and humility. There were no correct ways of talking about God:
"What seems wrong to you is right for him
What is poison to one is honey to someone else.
Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
These mean nothing to Me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another.
Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It's all praise, and it's all right.
It's not Me that's glorified in acts of worship.
It's the worshippers! I don't hear the words
they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the language! Forget phraseology.
I want burning, burning.
Be Friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression!" {52}
Any speech about God was as absurd as the shepherd's but when a believer looked through the veils to how things really were, he would find that it belied all his human preconceptions.
By this time tragedy had also helped the Jews of Europe to form a new conception of God. The crusading anti-Semitism of the West was making life intolerable for the Jewish communities and many wanted a more immediate, personal God than the remote deity experienced by the Throne Mystics. During the ninth century, the Kalonymos family had emigrated from southern Italy to Germany and had brought some mystical literature with them. But by the twelfth century, persecution had introduced a new pessimism into Ashkenazi piety and this was expressed in the writings of three members of the Kalonymos clan: Rabbi Samuel the Elder, who wrote the short treatise Sefer ha-Yirah (The Book of the Fear of God) in about 1150; Rabbi Judah the Pietist, author of Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pietists), and his cousin Rabbi Eliezar ben Judah of Worms (d.i23o) who edited a number of treatises and mystical texts. They were not philosophers or systematic thinkers and their work shows that they had borrowed their ideas from a number of sources that might seem to have been incompatible. They had been greatly impressed by the dry Faylasuf Saadia ibn Joseph, whose books had been translated into Hebrew, and by such Christian mystics as Francis of Assisi. From this strange amalgam of sources, they managed to create a spirituality which remained important to the Jews of France and Germany until the seventeenth century.
The Rabbis, it will be recalled, had declared it sinful to deny oneself pleasure created by God. But the German Pietists preached a renunciation that resembled Christian asceticism. A Jew would only see the Shekinah in the next world if he turned his back on pleasure and gave up such pastimes as keeping pets or playing with children.
Jews should cultivate an apatheia like God's, remaining impervious to scorn and insults. But God could be addressed as Friend. No Throne Mystic would have dreamt of calling God 'Thou', as Eliezar did. This familiarity crept into the liturgy, depicting a God who was immanent and intimately present at the same time as he was transcendent:
"Everything is in Thee and Thou art in everything; Thou fillest everything and dost encompass it; when everything was created, Thou was in everything; before everything was created, Thou wast everything." {53}
They qualified this immanence by showing that nobody could approach God himself but only God as he manifested himself to mankind in his 'glory' (kavod) or in 'the great radiance called Shekinah'. The Pietists were not worried by the apparent inconsistency. They concentrated on practical matters rather than theological niceties, teaching their fellow-Jews methods of concentration (kawwanah} and gestures that would enhance their sense of God's presence. Silence was essential; a Pietist should close his eyes tightly, cover his head with a prayer shawl to avoid distraction, pull in his stomach and grind his teeth. They devised special ways of 'drawing out prayer' which was found to encourage this sense of Presence. Instead of simply repeating the words of the liturgy, the Pietist should count the letters of each word, calculating their numerical value and getting beyond the literal meaning of the language. He must direct his attention upwards, to encourage his sense of a higher reality.
The situation of the Jews in the Islamic empire, where there was no anti-Semitic persecution, was far happier and they had no need of this Ashkenazi pietism. They were evolving a new type of Judaism, however, as a response to Muslim developments. Just as the Jewish Faylasufs had attempted to explain the God of the Bible philosophically, other Jews tried to give their God a mystical, symbolic interpretation. At first these mystics constituted only a tiny minority. Theirs was an esoteric discipline, handed on from master to disciple: they called it Kabbalah or inherited tradition. Eventually, however, the God of Kabbalah would appeal to the majority and take hold of the Jewish imagination in a way that the God of the philosophers never did.
Philosophy threatened to turn God into a remote abstraction but the God of the mystics was able to touch those fears and anxieties that lie deeper than the rational. Where the Throne Mystics had been content to gaze upon the glory of God from without, the Kabbalists attempted to penetrate the inner life of God and the human consciousness. Instead of speculating rationally about the nature of God and the metaphysical problems of his relationship with the world, the Kabbalists turned to the imagination.
Like the Sufis, the Kabbalists made use of the Gnostic and Neoplatonic distinction between the essence of God and the God whom we glimpse in revelation and creation. God himself is essentially unknowable, inconceivable and impersonal. They called the hidden God En Sof, (literally, 'without end'). We know nothing whatever about En Sof: he is not even mentioned in either the Bible or the Talmud. An anonymous thirteenth-century author wrote that En Sof is incapable of becoming the subject of a revelation to humanity. {54} Unlike YHWH, En Sof had no documented name; 'he' is not a person. Indeed it is more accurate to refer to the Godhead as 'It'. This was a radical departure from the highly personal God of the Bible and the Talmud. The Kabbalists evolved their own mythology to help them to explore a new realm of the religious consciousness. To explain the relationship between En Sof and YHWH, without yielding to the Gnostic heresy that they were two different beings, the Kabbalists developed a symbolic method of reading scripture. Like the Sufis, they imagined a process whereby the hidden God made himself known to humanity. En Sof had manifested himself to the Jewish mystics under ten different aspects or sefiroth ('numerations') of the divine reality which had emanated from the inscrutable depths of the unknowable Godhead. Each sefirah represented a stage in En Sof s unfolding revelation and had its own symbolic name, but each of these divine spheres contained the whole mystery of God considered under a particular heading. The Kabbalistic exegesis made every single word of the Bible refer to one or other of the ten sefiroth: each verse described an event or phenomenon that had its counterpart in the inner life of God himself.
Ibn al-Arabi had seen God's sigh of compassion, which had revealed him to mankind, as the Word which had created the world. In rather the same way, the sefiroth were both the names that God had given to himself and the means whereby he had created the world. Together these ten names formed his one great Name, which was not known to men. They represented the stages whereby En Sof had descended from his lonely inaccessibility to the mundane world. They are usually listed as follows:
1. Kether Elyon: the 'Supreme Crown'.
2. Hokhmah: 'Wisdom'.
3. Binah: 'Intelligence'.
4. Hesed: 'Love' or 'Mercy'.
5. Din: 'Power' (usually manifested in stern judgement).
6. Rahamin: 'Compassion'; sometimes called 'Tifereth': 'Beauty'.
7. Netsah: 'Lasting Endurance'.
8. Hod: 'Majesty'.
9. Yesod: 'Foundation'.
10. Malkuth: 'Kingdom'; also called 'Shekinah'.
Sometimes the sefiroth are depicted as a tree, growing upside down with its roots in the incomprehensible depths of En Sof, [see diagram] and its summit in the Shekinah, in the world. The organic image expresses the unity of this Kabbalistic symbol. En Sof is the sap that runs through the branches of the tree and gives them life, unifying them in a mysterious and complex reality. Although there is a distinction between En Sof and the world of his names, the two are one in rather the same way as a coal and a flame. The sefiroth represent the worlds of light that manifest the darkness of En Sof which remains in impenetrable obscurity. It is yet another way of showing that our notions of ‘God' cannot fully express the reality to which they point. The world of the sefiroth is not an alternative reality 'out there' between the Godhead and the world, however. They are not the rungs of a ladder between heaven and earth but underlie the world experienced by the senses. Because God is all in all, the sefiroth are present and active in everything that exists. They also represent the stages of human consciousness by which the mystic ascends to God by descending into his own mind. Yet again, God and man are depicted as inseparable.
Some Kabbalists saw the sefiroth as the limbs of primordial man as originally intended by God. This was what the Bible had meant when it said that man had been created in God's image: the mundane reality here below corresponded to an archetypal reality in the heavenly world. The images of God as a tree or as a man were imaginative depictions of a reality that defied rational formulation. The Kabbalists were not antagonistic towards Falsafah - many of them revered figures like Saadia Gaon and Maimonides - but they found symbolism and mythology more satisfying than metaphysics for penetrating the mystery of God.
The most influential Kabbalistic text was The Zohar, which was probably written in about 1275 by the Spanish mystic Moses of Leon. As a young man, he had studied Maimonides but had gradually felt the attraction of mysticism and the esoteric tradition of Kabbalah. The Zohar (The Book of Splendour) is a sort of mystical novel, which depicts the third-century Talmudist Simeon ben Yohai wandering round Palestine with his son Eliezar, talking to his disciples about God, nature and human life. There is no clear structure and no systematic development of theme or ideas. Such an approach would be alien to the spirit of The Zohar, whose God resists any neat system of thought. Like Ibn al-Arabi, Moses of Leon believed that God gives each mystic a unique and personal revelation, so there is no limit to the way the Torah can be interpreted: as the Kabbalist progresses, layer upon layer of significance is revealed. The Zohar shows the mysterious emanation of the ten sefiroth as a process whereby the impersonal En Sof becomes a personality. In the three highest sefiroth - Kether, Hokhmah and Binah - when, as it were, En Sof has only just 'decided' to express himself, the divine reality is called 'he'. As 'he' descends through the middle sefiroth - Hesed, Din, Tifereth, Netsah, Hod and Yesod - 'he' becomes 'you'. Finally, when God becomes present in the world in the Shekinah, 'he' calls himself'!'. It is at this point, where God has, as it were, become an individual and his self-expression is complete, that man can begin his mystical journey. Once the mystic has acquired an understanding of his own deepest self, he becomes aware of the Presence of God within him and can then ascend to the more impersonal higher spheres, transcending the limits of personality and egotism. It is a return to the unimaginable Source of our being and the hidden world of uncreated reality.
In this mystical perspective, our world of sense impression is simply the last and outermost shell of the divine reality.
In Kabbalah, as in Sufism, the doctrine of the creation is not really concerned with the physical origins of the universe. The Zohar sees the Genesis account as a symbolic version of a crisis within En Sof, which causes the Godhead to break out of Its unfathomable introspection and reveal Itself. As The Zohar says:
"In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recesses of En Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, red nor green and of no colour whatever." {55}
In Genesis, God's first creative word had been: 'Let there be light!' In The Zohar's commentary on Genesis (called Bereshit in Hebrew after its opening word: 'in the beginning') this 'dark flame' is the first sefirah: Kether Elyon, the Supreme Crown of Divinity. It has no colour or form: other Kabbalists prefer to call it Nothing (ayin). The highest form of divinity that the human mind can conceive is equated with nothingness because it bears no comparison with any of the other things in existence. All the other sefiroth, therefore, emerge from the womb of Nothingness. This is a mystical interpretation of the traditional doctrine of the creation ex nihilo. The process of the Godhead's self-expression continues as the welling of light, which spreads in ever wider spheres. The Zohar continues:
"But when this flame began to assume size and extension, it produced radiant colours. For in the inmost centre a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En Sof. The well broke through, and yet did not entirely break through, the eternal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely recognisable until under the impact of its breakthrough, i hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and it is called Bereshit, the Beginning; the first word of creation."{56}
This 'point' is Hokhmah (Wisdom), the second sefirah which contains the ideal form of all created things. The point develops into a palace or a building, which becomes Binah (Intelligence), the third sefirah. These three highest sefiroth represent the limit of human comprehension. Kabbalists say that God exists in Binah as the great 'Who?' (Mi) which stands at the beginning of every question. But it is not possible to get an answer. Even though En Sof is gradually adapting Itself to human limitations, we have no way of knowing 'Who' he is: the higher we ascend, the more 'he' remains shrouded in darkness and mystery.
The next seven sefiroth are said to correspond to the seven days of creation in Genesis. During the biblical period, YHWH had eventually triumphed over the ancient goddesses of Canaan and their erotic cults. But as Kabbalists struggled to express the mystery of God, the old mythologies reasserted themselves, albeit in a disguised form. The Zohar describes Binah as the Supernal Mother, whose womb is penetrated by the 'dark flame' to give birth to the seven lower sefiroth. Again Yesod, the ninth sefirah inspires some phallic speculation: it is depicted as the channel through which the divine life pours into the universe in an act of mystical procreation. It is in the Shekinah, the tenth sefirah, however, that the ancient sexual symbolism of creation and theogony appears most clearly. In the Talmud, the Shekinah was a neutral figure: it had neither sex nor gender. In Kabbalah, however, the Shekinah becomes the female aspect of God. The Bahir (c.1200), one of the earliest Kabbalistic texts, had identified the Shekinah with the Gnostic figure of Sophia, the last of the divine emanations which had fallen from the Pleroma and now wandered, lost and alienated from the Godhead, through the world.
The Zohar links this 'exile of the Shekinah' with the fall of Adam as recounted in Genesis. It says that Adam was shown the 'middle sefiroth' in the Tree of Life and the Shekinah in the Tree of Knowledge. Instead of worshipping the seven sefiroth together, he chose to venerate the Shekinah alone, sundering life from knowledge and rupturing the unity of the sefiroth. The divine life could no longer flow uninterruptedly into the world, which was isolated from its divine Source. But by observing the Torah, the community of Israel could heal the exile of the Shekinah and reunite the world to the Godhead. Not surprisingly, many strict Talmudists found this an abhorrent idea but the exile of the Shekinah, which echoed the ancient myths of the goddess who wandered far from the divine world, became one of the most popular elements of Kabbalah. The female Shekinah brought some sexual balance into the notion of God which tended to be too heavily weighted towards the masculine and clearly fulfilled an important religious need.
The notion of the divine exile also addressed that sense of separation which is the cause of so much human anxiety. The Zohar constantly defines evil as something which has become separated or which has entered into a relationship for which it is unsuited. One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves. It can then be pushed away and made monstrous and inhuman. The terrifying image of Satan in Western Christendom was such a distorted projection. The Zohar finds the root of evil in God himself: in Din or Stern Judgement, the fifth sefirah. Din is depicted as God's left hand, Hesed (Mercy) as his right. As long as Din operates harmoniously with the divine Mercy, it is positive and beneficial. But if it breaks away and becomes separate from the other sefiroth, it becomes evil and destructive. The Zohar does not tell us how this separation came about. In the next chapter, we shall see that later Kabbalists reflected on the problem of evil, which they saw as the result of a kind of primordial 'accident' that occurred in the very early stages of God's self-revelation. Kabbalah makes little sense if interpreted literally, but its mythology proved psychologically satisfying. When disaster and tragedy engulfed Spanish Jewry during the fifteenth century, it was the Kabbalistic God which helped them to make sense of their suffering.
We can see the psychological acuity of Kabbalah in the work of the Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia (i 24O-after 1291). The bulk of his work was composed at about the same time as The Zohar but Abulafia concentrated on the practical method of achieving a sense of God rather than with the nature of God itself. These methods are similar to those employed today by psychoanalysts in their secular quest for enlightenment. As the Sufis had wanted to experience God like Muhammad, Abulafia claimed to have found a way of achieving prophetic inspiration. He evolved a Jewish form of Yoga, using the usual disciplines of concentration such as breathing, the recitation of a mantra and the adoption of a special posture to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Abulafia was an unusual Kabbalist. He was a highly erudite man, who had studied Torah, Talmud and Falsafah before being converted to mysticism by an overwhelming religious experience at the age of thirty-one. He seems to have believed that he was the Messiah, not only to Jews but also to Christians. Accordingly, he travelled extensively throughout Spain making disciples and even ventured as far as the Near East. In 1280 he visited the Pope as a Jewish ambassador. Although Abulafia was often very outspoken in his criticism of Christianity, he seems to have appreciated the similarity between the Kabbalistic God and the theology of the Trinity. The three highest sefiroth are reminiscent of the Logos and Spirit, the Intellect and Wisdom of God, which proceed from the Father, the Nothingness lost in inaccessible light. Abulafia himself liked to speak about God in a trinitarian manner.
To find this God, Abulafia taught that it was necessary 'to unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it'. The phrase 'untying the knots' is also found in Tibetan Buddhism, another indication of the fundamental agreement of mystics worldwide. The process described can perhaps be compared to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock those complexes that impede the mental health of the patient. As a Kabbalist, Abulafia was more concerned with the divine energy that animates the whole of creation but which the soul cannot perceive. As long as we clog our minds with ideas based on sense perception, it is difficult to discern the transcendent element of life. By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia taught his disciples to go beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world. One of his methods was the Hokmah ha-Tseruf (The Science of the Combination of the Letters) which took the form of a meditation on the Name of God. The Kabbalist was to combine the letters of the divine name in different combinations with a view to divorcing his mind from the concrete to a more abstract mode of perception. The effects of this discipline -which sound remarkably unpromising to an outsider - appear to have been remarkable. Abulafia himself compared it to the sensation of listening to musical harmonies, the letters of the alphabet taking the place of notes in a scale. He also used a method of associating ideas, which he called dillug (jumping) and ketifsah (skipping), which is clearly similar to the modern analytic practice of free association. Again, this is said to have achieved astonishing results. As Abulafia explained, it brings to light hidden mental processes and liberated the Kabbalist from 'the prison of the natural spheres and leads [him] to the boundaries of the divine sphere'. {57} In this way, the 'seals' of the soul were unlocked and the initiate discovered resources of psychic power that enlightened his mind and assuaged the pain of his heart.
In rather the same way as a psychoanalytic patient needs the guidance of his therapist, Abulafia insisted that the mystical journey into the mind could only be undertaken under the supervision of a master of Kabbalah. He was well aware of the dangers because he himself had suffered from a devastating religious experience in his youth which had almost caused him to despair. Today patients will often internalise the person of their analyst in order to appropriate the strength and health that he or she represents. Similarly Abulafia wrote that the Kabbalist would often 'see' and 'hear' the person of his spiritual director, who becomes 'the mover from inside, who opens the closed doors within him'. He feels a new surge of power and an inner transformation that was so overwhelming that it seemed to issue from a divine source. A disciple of Abulafia gave another interpretation of the ecstasy: the mystic, he said, became his own Messiah. In ecstasy he was confronted with a vision of his own liberated and enlightened self:
"Know that the complete spirit of prophecy consists for the prophet in that he suddenly sees the shape of his self standing before him and he forgets his self and it is disengaged from him ... and of this secret our teachers said [in the Talmud]: 'Great is the strength of the prophets, who compare the form of Him who formed it' [that is, 'who compare men to God']." {58}
Jewish mystics were always reluctant to claim union with God. Abulafia and his disciples would only say that by experiencing union with a spiritual director or by realising a personal liberation the Kabbalist had been touched by God indirectly. There are obvious differences between medieval mysticism and modern psychotherapy but both disciplines have evolved similar techniques to achieve healing and personal integration.
In the West Christians were slower to develop a mystical tradition. They had fallen behind the monotheists in the Byzantine and Islamic empires and were perhaps not ready for this new development. During the fourteenth century, however, there was a veritable explosion of mystical religion, especially in Northern Europe. Germany in particular produced a flock of mystics: Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), John Tauler (1300-61), Gertrude the Great (1256-1302), and Henry Suso (1295-1306). England also made a significant contribution to this Western development and produced four great mystics who quickly attracted a following on the continent as well as in their own country: Richard Rolle of Hampole (1290-1349), the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton (d.1346) and Dame Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1416). Some of these mystics were more advanced than others. Richard Rolle, for example, seems to have got trapped in the cultivation of exotic sensations and his spirituality was sometimes characterised by a certain egotism. But the greatest of them discovered for themselves many of the insights already achieved by the Greeks, Sufis and Kabbalists.
Meister Eckhart, for example, who greatly influenced Tauler and Suso, was himself influenced by Denys the Areopagite and Maimonides. A Dominican friar, he was a brilliant intellectual and lectured on Aristotelian philosophy at the University of Paris. In 1325, however, his mystical teaching brought him into conflict with his bishop, the Archbishop of Cologne, who arraigned him for heresy: he was charged with denying the goodness of God, with claiming that God himself was born in the soul and of preaching the eternity of the world. Yet even some of Eckhart's severest critics believed that he was orthodox: the mistake lay in interpreting some of his remarks literally instead of symbolically, as intended. Eckhart was a poet, who thoroughly enjoyed paradox and metaphor. While he believed that it was rational to believe in God, he denied that reason alone could form any adequate conception of the divine nature: 'The proof of a knowable thing is made either to the senses or the intellect,' he argued, 'but as regards the knowledge of God there can be neither a demonstration from sensory perception, since He is incorporeal, nor from the intellect, since He lacks any form known to us.' {59} God was not another being whose existence could be proved like any normal object of thought.
God, Eckhart declared, was Nothing. {60} This did not mean that he was an illusion but that God enjoyed a richer, fuller type of existence than that known to us. He also called God 'darkness', not to denote the absence of light but to indicate the presence of something brighter. Eckhart also distinguished between the 'Godhead', which was best described in negative terms, such as 'desert', 'wilderness', 'darkness' and 'nothing', and the God who is known to us as Father, Son and Spirit. {61} As a Westerner, Eckhart liked to use Augustine's analogy of the Trinity in the human mind and implied that even though the doctrine of the Trinity could not be known by reason, it was only the intellect which perceived God as Three persons: once the mystic had achieved union with God, he or she saw him as One. The Greeks would not have liked this idea but Eckhart would have agreed with them that the Trinity was essentially a mystical doctrine. He liked to talk about the Father engendering the Son in the soul, rather as Mary had conceived Christ in the womb. Rumi had also seen the Virgin Birth of the Prophet Jesus as a symbol for the birth of the soul in the heart of the mystic. It was, Eckhart insisted, an allegory of the cooperation of the soul with God.
God could only be known by mystical experience. It was better to speak of him in negative terminology, as Maimonides had suggested. Indeed, we had to purify our conception of God, getting rid of our ridiculous preconceptions and anthropomorphic imagery. We should even avoid using the term 'God' itself. This is what he meant when he said: 'Man's last and highest parting is when, for God's sake, he takes leave of God.' {62} It would be a painful process. Since God was Nothing, we had to be prepared to be no-thing too in order to become one with him. In a process similar to that 'fana described by the Sufis, Eckhart spoke of 'detachment' or, rather, 'separateness' (Abgeschieden) {63} In much the same way as a Muslim considers the veneration of anything other than God himself as idolatry (shirk), Eckhart taught that the mystic must refuse to be enslaved by any finite ideas about the divine. Only thus would he achieve identity with God, whereby 'God's existence must be my existence and God's Is-ness (Istigkeit) is my is-ness'. {64} Since God was the ground of being, there was no need to seek him 'out there' or envisage an ascent to something beyond the world we knew.
Al-Hallaj had antagonised the ulema by crying: 'I am the Truth' and Eckhart's mystical doctrine shocked the bishops of Germany: what did it mean to say that a mere man or woman could become one with God? During the fourteenth century, Greek theologians debated this question furiously. Since God was essentially inaccessible, how could he communicate himself to mankind? If there was a distinction between God's essence and his 'activities' or 'energies', as the Fathers had taught, surely it was blasphemous to compare the 'God' that a Christian encountered in prayer with God himself? Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Saloniki, taught that, paradoxical as it might seem, any Christian could enjoy such a direct knowledge of God himself. True, God's essence is always beyond our comprehension, but his 'energies' were not distinct from God and should not be considered as a mere divine afterglow. A Jewish mystic would have agreed: God En Sof would always remain shrouded in impenetrable darkness but his sefiroth (which corresponded to the Greeks' 'energies') were themselves divine, flowing eternally from the heart of the Godhead. Sometimes men and women could see or experience these 'energies' directly, as when the Bible said that God's 'glory' had appeared. Nobody had ever seen God's essence, but that did not mean that a direct experience of God himself was impossible. The fact that this assertion was paradoxical did not distress Palamas in the least. It had long been agreed by the Greeks that any statement about God had to be a paradox. Only thus could people retain a sense of his mystery and ineffability. Palamas put it this way:
"We attain to participation in the divine nature, and yet at the same time it remains totally inaccessible. We need to affirm both at the same time and to preserve the antimony as a criterion for right doctrine."{65}
There was nothing new in Palamas's doctrine: it had been outlined during the eleventh century by Symeon the New Theologian. But Palamas was challenged by Barlaam the Calabrian, who had studied in Italy and been strongly influenced by the rationalistic Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas. He opposed the traditional Greek distinction between God's 'essence' and his 'energies', accusing Palamas of splitting God into two separate parts. Barlaam proposed a definition of God that went back to the ancient Greek rationalists and emphasised his absolute simplicity. Greek philosophers like Aristotle who, Barlaam claimed, had been specially enlightened by God, taught that God was unknowable and remote from the world. It was not possible, therefore, for men and women to 'see' God: human beings could only sense his influence indirectly in scripture or the wonders of creation. Barlaam was condemned by a Council of the Orthodox Church in 1341 but was supported by other monks who had also been influenced by Aquinas. Basically this had become a conflict between the God of the mystics and the God of the philosophers. Barlaam and his supporters Gregory Akindynos (who liked to quote the Greek version of the Summa Theologiae), Nicephoras Gregoras and the Thomist Prochoros Cydones had all become alienated from the apophatic theology of Byzantium with its stress on silence, paradox and mystery. They preferred the more positive theology of Western Europe, which defined God as Being rather than as Nothing. Against the mysterious deity of Denys, Symeon and Palamas, they set up a God about which it was possible to make statements.
The Greeks had always distrusted this tendency in Western thought and, in the face of this infiltration of rationalistic Latin ideas, Palamas reasserted the paradoxical theology of Eastern Orthodoxy. God must not be reduced to a concept that could be expressed by a human word. He agreed with Barlaam that God was unknowable but insisted that he had nonetheless been experienced by men and women. The light that had transfigured the humanity of Jesus on Mount Tabor was not God's essence, which no Tian had seen, but was in some mysterious way God himself. The liturgy which, according to Greek theology, enshrined orthodox opinion, proclaimed that on Tabor: 'We have seen the Father as light and the Spirit as light.' It had been a revelation of 'what we once were and what we are to be' when, like Christ, we become deified. {66} Again, what we 'saw' when we contemplated God in this life was not a substitute for God but was somehow God himself. Of course this was a contradiction but the Christian God was a paradox: antimony and silence represented the only correct posture before the mystery that we called 'God' - not a philosophical hubris which tried to iron out the difficulties.
Barlaam had tried to make the concept of God too consistent: in his view, either God was to be identified with his essence or he was not. He had tried, as it were, to confine God to his essence and say that it was impossible for him to be present outside it in his 'energies'. But that was to think about God as though he were any other phenomenon and was based on purely human notions of what was or was not possible. Palamas insisted that the vision of God was a mutual ecstasy: men and women transcend themselves but God also underwent the ecstasy of transcendence by going beyond 'himself in order to make himself known to his creatures: 'God also comes out of himself and becomes united with our minds by condescension.' {67} The victory of Palamas, whose theology remained normative in Orthodox Christianity, over the Greek rationalists of the fourteenth century represents a wider triumph for mysticism in all three monotheistic religions. Since the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers had come to the conclusion that reason - which was indispensable for such studies as medicine or science - was quite inadequate when it came to the study of God. To rely on reason alone was like attempting to eat soup with a fork.
The God of the Sufis had gained ascendancy over the God of the philosophers in most parts of the Islamic empire. Mysticism was able to penetrate the mind more deeply than the more cerebral or legalistic types of religion. Its God could address more primitive hopes, fears and anxieties before which the remote God of the philosophers was impotent. By the fourteenth century the West had launched its own mystical religion and made a very promising start. But mysticism in the West would never become as widespread as in the other traditions. In England, Germany and the Lowlands, which had produced such distinguished mystics, the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century decried this unbiblical spirituality. In the Roman Catholic Church, leading mystics like St Teresa of Avila were often threatened by the Inquisition of the Counter-Reformation. As a result of the Reformation, Europe began to see God in still more rationalistic terms.
Notes
1. John Macquarrie, Thinking About God (London, 1957) p.34.
2. Hagigah 14b, quoting Psalms 101:7; 116:15; 25:16.
3. Quoted in Louis Jacobs (ed.) The Jewish Mystics (Jerusalem, 1976, London, 1990), p.23.
4. 2 Corinthians 2:2-4.
5. The Song of Songs, 5:10-15.
6. Translated in T. Carmi (ed. and trans.) The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse (London, 1981) p.199.
7. Koran 53:13-17.
8. Confessions IX, 24 (trans. Henry Chadwick) (Oxford, 1991) p.171.
9. Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers), The Power of Myth (New York, 1988), p.85.
10. Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill and London, 1985). PP-161-75.
11. Confessions IX:24, (trans. Chadwick), p.171.
12. Confessions IX,25, pp.171-2.
13. Ibid.
14. Morals on Job v.66.
15. Ibid xxiv.ii.
16. Homilies on Ezekiel II, ii, i.
17. Commentary on the Song of Songs, 6.
18. Epistle 234.1.
19. On Prayer, 67.
20. Ibid. 71.
21. Ambigua, PG.91 1088c
22. Peter Brown with Sabine MacCormack, 'Artifices of Eternity', in Brown, society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London, 1992), p.2i2.
23. Nicephoras, Greater Apology for the Holy Images, 70.
24. Theological Orations I.
25. Ethical Orations 1.3.
26. Orations 26.
27. Ethical Orations 5.
28. Hymns of Divine Love 28.114-15, 160-2.
29. Encyclopaedia of Islam (1st edn. Leiden 1913), entry under 'Tasawwuf.
30. Trans. R. A. Nicholson, quoted in A. J. Arberry, Sufism, An Account of the Mystics of Islam (London, 1950), p-43-
31. Quoted in R. A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam (London, 1963 edn.), p.115.
32. Narrative, quoted in Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization 3 Vols, (Chicago, 1974), I., p.404.
33. Quoted in Arberry, Sufism, p.59.
34. Quoted in Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, p.151.
35. Quoted in Arberry, Sufism, p.6o. 36. Koran 2:32.
37. Hiqmat al-Ishraq, quoted in Henri Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, From Mazdean Iran to Shiite Iran (trans. Nancy Pearson), (London, 1990), pp. 168-9.
38. Mircea Eliade, Shamamism, p.9 508.
39. J.P. Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (London, 1972), passim.
40. Futuhat alMakkiyah II, 326, quoted in Henri Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of lbm Arabi (trans. Ralph Manheim), (London, 1970), p.330.
41. The Diwan, Interpretation of Ardent Desires, in ibid. p.138.
42. La Vita Nuova (trans. Barbara Reynolds), (Harmondsworth, 1969), pp.29-30.
43. Purgatory xvii, 13-18 (trans. Barbara Reynolds), (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 196.
44. William Chittick, 'Ibn al-Arabi and His School' in Sayyed Hossein Nasr (ed.) Islamic Spirituality: Manifestations (New York and London, 1991), p.6i.
45. Koran 18:69.
46. Quoted in Henri Corbin, Creative Imagination in Ibn al-Arabi, p.m.
47. Chittick, 'Ibn Arabi and His School' in Nasr (ed.) Islamic Spirituality, p-58.
48. Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York and London, 1970), p.282.
49. R. A. Nicholson, The Mystics of Islam, p. 105.
50. R. A. Nicholson, (ed.) Eastern Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, 1922), p.i48.
51. Masnawi, I, i, quoted in Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, II, p.250.
52. Quoted in This Longing, Teaching Stories and Selected Letters of Rumi (trans, and ed. Coleman Banks and John Moyne), (Putney, 1988), p.20.
53. 'Song of Unity' quoted in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 2nd edn., (London, 1955), p.108.
54. Ibid, p.11.
55. In Gershom Scholem (ed. and trans.) The Zohar, The Book of Splendour (New York, 1949), p.27.
56. Ibid.
57. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p.i36.
58. Ibid. p. 142.
59. Quoted in J.C. Clark, Meister Eckhart, An Introduction to the Study of his Works with an Anthology of his Sermons (London, 1957), p.28.
60. Simon Tugwell, 'Dominican Spirituality' in Louis Dupre and Don. E. Saliers (eds.) Christian Spirituality III (New York and London, 1989), p.28.
61. Quoted in Clark, Meister Eckhart, p-40.
62. Sermon, 'Qui Audit Me Non Confundetur' in R.B. Blakeney (trans.) Meister Eckhart, A New Translation (New York, 1957), p.2O4.
63. Ibid, p.288.
64. 'On Detachment' in Edmund Coledge and Bernard McGinn (eds. and trans.) Meister Eckhart, the Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defence (London, 1981), p.87.
65. Theophanes, PG. 9320. (My italics.)
66. Homily, 16.
67. Triads 1.3.47.
By Karen Armstrong in "A History of Good", Ballantines Books, USA, 1993, excerpts chapter 7. Digitized,adapted and illustrated to be post by Leopoldo Costa.
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