The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

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People who engaged in acrimonious discussion of religious truth were simply in love with their own opinions and had forgotten the cardinal teaching of the Bible, which was the love of God and neighbor.65 The exegete must not leave a text until he could make it “establish the reign of charity,” and if a literal understanding of any biblical passage seemed to teach hatred, the text must be interpreted allegorically and forced to preach love.66

Religious people are always talking about God, and it is important that they do so.

But they also need to know when to fall silent.

Gradually, we become aware that even the most exalted things we say about God are bound to be misleading.71

what we call God falls “neither within the predicate of existence or non-existence.”

This new understanding is not an emotional experience. If we cannot know God, we certainly can neither feel nor have any sensation of unity with God.

these truths simply by studying the doctrines of the church, but by allowing the beauty and symbolism of the liturgy to act upon him, he “experienced” or “suffered (pathein) divine things.”

By the medieval period, the apophatic habit had become ingrained in Western Christian consciousness.

Instead of being educated in the niceties of doctrine, Western Christians were introduced to their faith as a practical way of life.

instead he saw his writings “advancing through faith to understanding, rather than proceeding through understanding to faith.”

religious truth made no sense without practically expressed commitment.

“I involve myself in order that I may understand.”

God as “that thing than which nothing more perfect can be thought [aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit].”9 He was asking his readers to think of the greatest thing that they could imagine or conceive—but then go on to reflect that God was even greater and more perfect than that. God must transcend any “thing”

that the human mind could envisage.

Anselm believed that the idea of God was innate: even this atheist had an idea of God in his mind or he would not have been able to deny it.

But Anselm was not attempting a scientific or logical “proof;” rather, he was using his reasoning powers to stir up his sluggish mind so that it could “involve” itself with the immanent divine reality.

“Faith in Search of Understanding.”

Al-Ghazzali was looking for certainty, but he could not find it in any contemporary intellectual movement.

theology must be fused with spirituality.

Maimonides developed an apophatic spirituality that denied any positive attributes to God, arguing that we could not even say that God was good or existed. A person who relied on this kind of affirmation would make God incredible, he warned in his Guide to the Perplexed, and “unconsciously loses his belief in God.”

The Crusaders’ God was an idol; they had foisted their own fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto a deity they had created in their own likeness and thus given themselves a sacred seal of absolute approval. Crusading made anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe and would indelibly scar relations between Islam and the West.

Francis had no time for theology of any kind and were far more literal-minded than the apophatic Anselm.

And yet this gentle saint seems to have approved of the Crusades and accompanied the Fifth Crusade to Egypt, though he did not take part in the fighting but preached to the sultan.

When reason was applied to faith, it must show that what we call “God” was beyond the grasp of the human mind. If it failed to do this, its statements about the divine would be idolatrous.

“God’s effects then are enough to prove that God exists.”

Thomas was not trying to convince a skeptic of God’s existence. He was simply trying to find a rational answer to the primordial question: Why does something exist rather than nothing?

We cannot ask whether there is a God, as if God were simply one example of a species. God is not and cannot be a “sort of thing.”38

We have simply demonstrated the existence of a mystery.

Faith was the ability to appreciate and take delight in the nonempirical realities that we glimpse in the world.

“it is well to remember this so that one does not try to prove what cannot be proved and give non-believers grounds for mockery, and for thinking the reasons we give are our reasons for believing (credens).”

Christ is not the Terminus of the religious quest, but only the “Way” that leads us to the unknowable Father.

Ockham no longer saw doctrines as symbolic; they were literally true and should be subjected to exact analysis and inquiry.

By the time some students arrived in divinity school, they were so well versed in scientific thinking that they tried to solve theological problems mathematically.72 They measured free will, sin, and merit according to the laws of proportion and tried to calculate the exact degree of difference between God and creatures, the odds on the possibility of God’s creating successively better worlds ad infinitum, and how many angels could sit on the tip of a needle.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in a complete reversal of former practice, we find people cultivating a privatized type of prayer that was devoted almost exclusively to the achievement of intense emotional states, which they imagined were an “experience” of God.

This was a spirituality of “urgent longing,” “interior sweetness” that set the heart “aglow,” “infusion of comfort,” and “perfervid love.”

This emphasis on sensation was strangely parallel to the tendency of the late scholastic theologians, who were increasingly skeptical about the mind’s ability to transcend sense data.

But in his writings Rolle alternates between excitable, almost manic exultation and crushing depression.

Elevated feelings were never supposed to be the end of the spiritual quest: Buddhists insist that after achieving enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and there practice compassion for all living beings.

For Eckhart, the intellect was still the “place” in the mind where the divine touches the human; in intellectus, the “I” ends and “God” begins.

Detachment was the disciplined kenosis that would bring us to the “silence” and “desert” of the intellect.

A devout Christian, he had been born into a family of converted Jews and retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism.

so the victory of Granada was followed by an act of ethnic cleansing.

Spanish Inquisition was not an archaic attempt to preserve a bygone religious world; it was a modernizing institution devised by the monarchs to create national unity.

Others, as we shall see, would become the first atheists and freethinkers in modern Europe.

Relying perforce on reason alone, their theology bore no relation to traditional Judaism.

Sparks of divine light had fallen into the Godless abyss created by zimzum.

Everything was exiled from its rightful place, and the Shekhinah wandered through the world, yearning to be reunited with the Godhead.7

because their careful observance of Torah could end this universal displacement and effect the “restoration” (tikkun) of the Shekhinah to the Godhead, the Jews to the Promised Land, and the rest of the world to its rightful state.

Jews who had suffered so much themselves must not increase the sum of grief in the world.