A History Of God Part 5

The imagery of ascent is common. St Augustine had experienced an ascent to G.o.d 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} {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 s.p.a.ce to a G.o.d '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 pa.s.sive 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 G.o.d that is finally attained is utterly indescribable, since normal language no longer applies. The Jewish mystics describe anything but G.o.d! 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 G.o.d: 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 s.p.a.ce, time and ordinary knowledge. They 'talked and panted' for G.o.d, 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 surpa.s.sing 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} {12} This was no naturalistic vision of a personal G.o.d: 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 G.o.d'; Plotinus had a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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. G.o.d was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d. The joy and peace of contemplation could only be attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle. Before tasting G.o.d'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} {15} G.o.d 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 G.o.d was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, 'the soul could do nothing but weep'. 'Tortured' by its desire for G.o.d, 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 G.o.d a strain.

In the East, the Christian experience of G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d? The Greeks loved that kind of paradox and the hesychasts turned to the old distinction between G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d himself as sunbeams were distinct from the sun. They manifested a G.o.d who was utterly silent and unknowable. As St Basil had said: 'It is by his energies that we know our G.o.d; we do not a.s.sent 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d. Where the West would see G.o.d making himself known by means of his eternal attributes - his goodness, justice, love and omnipotence - the Greeks saw G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 'pa.s.sions' - 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 G.o.d'; 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 G.o.d, deified by the grace of the G.o.d become man, becoming whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole G.o.d, 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 G.o.d. Unlike their Western brethren, the Greeks did not think that strain, dryness and desolation were an inescapable prelude to the experience of G.o.d: 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 G.o.d, however, that by the eighth century they had become the centre of a pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d, since Christ the Logos was the icon of G.o.d par excellence. G.o.d 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 a.s.sertion that G.o.d 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 G.o.d, exhibiting in themselves the ineffability of a mystery that transcends being. Without ceasing and without speech, they praise the goodness of G.o.d 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 bypa.s.ses words and concepts. In the nineteenth century, Walter Pater would a.s.sert 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. This, Symeon insisted, would be presumptuous; indeed, to speak about G.o.d in any way at all implied that 'that which is incomprehensible is comprehensible'. {24} Instead of arguing rationally about G.o.d's nature, the 'new' theology relied on direct, personal religious experience. It was impossible to know G.o.d in conceptual terms, as though he were just an-other being about which we could form ideas. G.o.d was a mystery. A true Christian was one who had a conscious experience of the G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d that everybody could experience here and now, without having to wait until the next life.

For Symeon, therefore, G.o.d 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 G.o.d had said to Symeon during one of his visions: 'Yes, I am G.o.d, the one who became man for your sake. And behold, I have created you, as you see, and I shall make you G.o.d.' {27} G.o.d was not an external, objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlightenment. Yet Symeon's refusal to speak about G.o.d 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 gra.s.s?

How, while continuing unchanged, altogether inaccessible, do you preserve the nature of the gra.s.s unconsumed? {28} {28} It was useless to define the G.o.d who affected this transformation, since he was beyond speech and description. Yet as an experience that fulfilled and transfigured humanity without violating its integrity, 'G.o.d' was an incontrovertible reality. The Greeks had developed ideas about G.o.d - 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 coa.r.s.e 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 Ma.s.signon, 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 G.o.d at any price. {29} {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 G.o.d but al-Lah and Jesus is his Messenger', which was technically correct but intentionally provocative. Where the Koran speaks of a G.o.d 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} {30} This is close to her famous prayer: 'O G.o.d! If I worship thee in fear of h.e.l.l, burn me in h.e.l.l; 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. As he approached the core of his ident.i.ty, he felt that nothing stood between G.o.d 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 G.o.d but I.' Then he changed me out of my ident.i.ty 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 G.o.d but Thou.' {32} {32} Yet again, this was no external deity 'out there', alien to mankind: G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 psychoa.n.a.lysts 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 G.o.d'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. G.o.d 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} {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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d that was so close that it felt like ident.i.ty. 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} {34} It was a daring expression of that annihilation of self and union with G.o.d 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} {35} Al-Hallaj's cry ana al-Haqq: 'I am the Truth!' shows that the G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sume that one man had contained the whole incarnation of the divine, Sufis would argue. A mystic who had regained his original vision of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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} {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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d-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 G.o.d'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, h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, while most of Islamdom opted, until relatively recently, for the imaginative G.o.d of the Mystics.

In 1201, while making the circ.u.mambulations 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d we see in his creatures: 'If you love a being for his beauty, you love none other than G.o.d, 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 G.o.d alone.' {40} The Shahadah reminded us that there was no G.o.d, no absolute reality but al-Lah. Consequently, there was no beauty apart from him. We cannot see G.o.d 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} {41} The creative imagination had transformed Nizam into an avatar of G.o.d.

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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l, purgatory and heaven, to a vision of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d: 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} {43} Throughout the poem, Dante gradually purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical descriptions of h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, who is beyond all imagination. Dante has been accused of painting a cold portrait of G.o.d 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 G.o.d-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: 'G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d. Admittedly, this is a very male view, but it was an attempt to bring a female dimension to the religion of a G.o.d who was often conceived as wholly masculine.

Ibn al-Arabi did not believe that the G.o.d he knew had an objective existence. Even though he was a skilled metaphysician, he did not believe that G.o.d'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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d which is the same as everybody else's but to a G.o.d 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 G.o.d, which was in sharp contrast to the apatheia of the G.o.d of the philosophers. The G.o.d of the mystics yearned to be known by his creatures. The Ismailis believed that the noun llah (G.o.d) sprang from the Arabic root WLH: to be sad, to sigh for. {46} As the Sacred Hadith had made G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d's image, we must reflect G.o.d, the supreme archetype. Our yearning for the reality that we call 'G.o.d' must, therefore, mirror a sympathy with the pathos of G.o.d. Ibn al-Arabi imagined the solitary G.o.d 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 G.o.d to himself. It follows that each human being is a unique epiphany of the Hidden G.o.d, manifesting him in a particular and unrepeatable manner.

Each one of these divine logoi are the names that G.o.d has called himself, making himself totally present in each one of his epiphanies. G.o.d cannot be summed up in one human expression since the divine reality is inexhaustible. It also follows that the revelation that G.o.d has made in each one of us is unique, different from the G.o.d known by the other innumerable men and women who are also his logoi. We will only know our own 'G.o.d' 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 G.o.d only his particular Lord; he cannot possibly have the whole.' He liked to quote the hadith: 'Meditate upon G.o.d's blessings, but not upon his essence (al-Dhat}.'* {1} The whole reality of G.o.d is unknowable; we must concentrate on the particular Word spoken in our own being. Ibn al-Arabi also liked to call G.o.d al-Ama, 'the Cloud' or 'The Blindness' {48} to emphasise his inaccessibility. But these human logoi also reveal the Hidden G.o.d to himself. It is a two-way process: G.o.d sighs to become known and is delivered from his solitude by the people in whom he reveals himself. The sorrow of the Unknown G.o.d is a.s.suaged by the Revealed G.o.d in each human being who makes him known to himself; it is also true that the Revealed G.o.d 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 G.o.d in Jesus but Ibn al-Arabi could not accept the idea that one single human being, however holy, could express the infinite reality of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d in each generation for the benefit of his contemporaries, though he did not, of course, incarnate the whole reality of G.o.d 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 G.o.d, it followed that no one religion could express the whole of the divine mystery. There was no objective truth about G.o.d to which all must subscribe; since this G.o.d 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 G.o.d. Ibn al-Arabi developed the positive att.i.tude 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} {49} The man of G.o.d was equally at home in synagogue, temple, church and mosque, since all provided a valid apprehension of G.o.d. He often used the phrase 'the G.o.d created by the faiths' (Khalq al-haqq fi'l-itiqad); it could be pejorative if it referred to the 'G.o.d' that men and women created in a particular religion and considered identical with G.o.d 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. G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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} {50} We never see any G.o.d 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 'G.o.d' 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 G.o.d of the more dogmatic religions divides humanity into warring camps, the G.o.d 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 G.o.d who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote G.o.d of the Faylasufs and the legalistic G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d - of G.o.d's yearning for humanity and humanity's longing for al-Lah. Whether they realised it or not, everybody was searching for the absent G.o.d, 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} {51} The Perfect Man was believed to inspire more ordinary mortals to seek G.o.d: 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 G.o.d's myriad Names. Some of these revealed G.o.d'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 compa.s.sion, love and beauty of G.o.d 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 G.o.d could only be a subjective experience. He tells the humorous tale of Moses and the Shepherd to ill.u.s.trate the respect we must show to other people's conception of the divine. One day Moses overheard a shepherd talking familiarly to G.o.d: he wanted to help G.o.d, 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 G.o.d rebuked Moses. He did not want orthodox words but burning love and humility. There were no correct ways of talking about G.o.d: 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} {52} Any speech about G.o.d 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 G.o.d. The crusading anti-Semitism of the West was making life intolerable for the Jewish communities and many wanted a more immediate, personal G.o.d 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 Ashken.a.z.i 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 G.o.d) 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 a.s.sisi. 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 G.o.d. But the German Pietists preached a renunciation that resembled Christian