A History Of God Part 8

Like many other Western people, Freud seemed unaware of this internalised, subjective G.o.d. Nevertheless he made a valid and perceptive point when he insisted that it would be dangerous to attempt to abolish religion. People must outgrow G.o.d in their own good time: to force them into atheism or secularism before they were ready could lead to an unhealthy denial and repression. We have seen that iconoclasm can spring from a buried anxiety and projection of our own fears on to the 'other'. Some of the atheists who wanted to abolish G.o.d certainly showed signs of strain. Thus despite his advocacy of a compa.s.sionate ethic, Schopenhauer could not cope with human beings and became a recluse, who communicated only with his poodle, Atman. Nietzsche was a tender-hearted, lonely man, plagued by ill-health, who was very different from his Superman. Eventually he went mad. He did not abandon G.o.d joyously, as the ecstasy of his prose might lead us to imagine. In a poem delivered 'after much trembling, quivering and self-contortion', he makes Zarathustra plead with G.o.d to return: No! come back, With all your torments!

Oh come back To the last of all solitaries!All the streams of my tears Run their course for you!

And the last flame of my heart - It burns up to you!

Oh come back My unknown G.o.d! My pain! my last - happiness. {20} {20} Like Hegel's, Nietzsche's theories were used by a later generation of Germans to justify the policies of National Socialism, a reminder that an atheistic ideology can lead to just as cruel a crusading ethic as the idea of 'G.o.d'.

G.o.d had always been a struggle in the West. His demise was also attended by strain, desolation and dismay. Thus in Memoriam, the great Victorian poem of doubt, Alfred Lord Tennyson recoiled in horror from the prospect of a purposeless, indifferent nature, red in tooth and claw. Published in 1850, nine years before the publication of The Origin of the Species, the poem shows that Tennyson had already felt his faith crumbling and himself reduced to An infant crying in the night; An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry. {21} {21} In 'Dover Beach', Matthew Arnold had lamented the inexorable withdrawal of the sea of faith, which left mankind wandering on a darkling plain. The doubt and dismay had spread to the Orthodox world, though the denial of G.o.d did not take on the precise lineaments of Western doubt but was more in the nature of a denial of ultimate meaning. Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) can be seen to describe the death of G.o.d, articulated his own conflict between faith and belief in a letter to a friend, written in March, 1854: I look upon myself as a child of the age, a child of unbelief and doubt; it is probable, nay, I know for certain, that I shall remain so to my dying day. I have been tortured with longing to believe - am so, indeed, even now; and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties that stand in the way. {22} {22} His novel is similarly ambivalent. Ivan, described as an atheist by the other characters (who attribute to him the now famous maxim: 'If G.o.d does not exist, all is permitted') says unequivocally that he does believe in G.o.d. Yet he does not find this G.o.d acceptable, since he fails to provide ultimate meaning for the tragedy of life. Ivan is not troubled by evolutionary theory but by the suffering of humanity in history: the death of a single child is too high a price to pay for the religious perspective that all will be well. We shall see later in this chapter that Jews would come to the same conclusion. On the other hand, it is the saintly Aloysha who admits that he does not believe in G.o.d - an admission that seems to burst from him unawares, escaping from some uncharted reach of his unconscious. Ambivalence and an obscure sense of dereliction has continued to haunt the literature of the twentieth century, with its imagery of wasteland and of humanity waiting for a G.o.dot which never comes.

There was a similar malaise and disquiet in the Muslim world, though it sprang from quite a different source. By the end of the nineteenth century, the mission civilisatrice of Europe was well under way. The French had colonised Algiers in 1830 and in 1839 the {} British colonised Aden. Between them they took over Tunisia (1881), Egypt (1882), the Sudan (1898) and Libya and Morocco (1912). In 1920, Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them into protectorates and mandates. This colonial project only made a more silent process of Westernisation official, since Europeans had been establishing a cultural and economic hegemony during the nineteenth century in the name of modernisation. Technicalised Europe had become the leading power and was taking over the world. Trading posts and consular missions had been established in Turkey and the Middle East which had undermined the traditional structure of these societies long before there was actual Western rule. This was an entirely new kind of colonisation. When the Moghuls had conquered India the Hindu population had absorbed many Muslim elements into their own culture but eventually the indigenous culture had made a comeback. The new colonial order transformed the lives of the subject people permanently, establishing a polity of dependence.

It was impossible for the colonised lands to catch up. Old inst.i.tutions had been fatally undermined and Muslim society was itself divided between those who had become 'Westernised' and the 'others'. Some Muslims came to accept the European a.s.sessment of them as 'Orientals', lumped indiscriminately with Hindus and Chinese. Some looked down on their more traditional countrymen. In Iran, Shah Nasiruddin (1848-96) insisted that he despised his subjects. What had been a living civilisation with its own ident.i.ty and integrity was gradually being transformed into a bloc of dependent states that were inadequate copies of an alien world. Innovation had been the essence of the modernising process in Europe and the United States: it could not be achieved by imitation. Today anthropologists who study modernised countries or cities in the Arab world such as Cairo point out that the architecture and plan of the city reflects domination rather than progress. {23} On their side Europeans had come to believe that their culture was not only superior at the present time but had always been in the van of progress. They often displayed a superb ignorance of world history. Indians, Egyptians and Syrians had to be Westernised for their own good. The colonial att.i.tude was expressed by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907: Sir Alfred Lyall once said to me: 'Accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind. Every Anglo-Indian should always remember that maxim.' Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental mind.The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry, his reasoning is of the most slipshod description. Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty. They are often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they may admit the truth. {24} {24} One of the 'problems' that had to be overcome was Islam. A negative image of the Prophet Muhammad and his religion had developed in Christendom at the time of the Crusades and had persisted alongside the anti-Semitism of Europe. During the colonial period, Islam was viewed as a fatalistic religion that was chronically opposed to progress. Lord Cromer, for example, decried the efforts of the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh, arguing that it was impossible for 'Islam' to reform itself.

Muslims had little time or energy to develop their understanding of G.o.d in the traditional way. They were engaged in a struggle to catch up with the West. Some saw Western secularism as the answer but what was positive and invigorating in Europe could only seem alien and foreign in the Islamic world, since it had not developed naturally from their own tradition in its own time. In the West, 'G.o.d' was seen as the voice of alienation, in the Muslim world it was the colonial process. Cut off from the roots of their culture, people felt disoriented and lost. Some Muslim reformers tried to hasten the cause of progress by forcibly relegating Islam to a minor role. The results were not at all as they had expected. In the new nation state of Turkey, which had emerged after the defeat of the Ottoman empire in 1917, Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938), later known as Kemal Ataturk, tried to transform his country into a Western nation: he disestablished Islam, making religion a purely private affair. Sufi orders were abolished and went underground; the madrasahs were closed and the state training of the ulema ceased. This secularising policy was symbolised by the banning of the fez, which reduced the visibility of the religious cla.s.ses and was also a psychological attempt to force the people into a Western uniform: 'to put on the hat' instead of the fez came to mean 'to Europeanise'. Reza Khan, Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941, admired Ataturk and attempted a similar policy: the veil was banned; mullahs were forced to shave and wear the kepi instead of the traditional turban; the traditional celebrations in honour of the Shii Imam and martyr Husayn were forbidden.

Freud had wisely seen that any enforced repression of religion could only be destructive. Like s.e.xuality, religion is a human need that affects life at every level. If suppressed, the results are likely to be as explosive and destructive as any severe s.e.xual repression. The Muslims regarded the new Turkey and Iran with suspicion and fascination. In Iran there was already an established tradition whereby the mullahs opposed the Shahs in the name of the people. They sometimes achieved extraordinary success. In 1872, when the Shah sold the monopoly for the production, sale and export of tobacco to the British, putting Iranian manufacturers out of business, the mullahs issued a fatwa forbidding Iranians to smoke. The Shah was forced to rescind the concessions. The holy city of Qom became an alternative to the despotic and increasingly draconian regime in Teheran. Repression of religion can breed fundamentalism, just as inadequate forms of theism can result in a rejection of G.o.d. In Turkey, the closure of the madrasahs led inevitably to the decline of the authority of the ulema. This meant that the more educated, sober and responsible element in Islam declined, while the more extravagant forms of underground Sufism were the only forms of religion left.

Other reformers were convinced that forcible repression was not the answer. Islam had always thrived on contact with other civilisations and they believed that religion was essential for any deep and long-lasting reform of their society. There was a great deal that needed to change; much had become backward-looking; there was superst.i.tion and ignorance. Yet Islam had also helped people to cultivate serious understanding: if it were allowed to become unhealthy, the spiritual well-being of Muslims all over the world would also suffer. The Muslim reformers were not hostile to the West. Most found Western ideals of equality, freedom and brotherhood congenial, since Islam shared the values of Judaeo-Christianity which had been such an important influence in Europe and the United States. The modernisation of Western society had - in some respects - created a new type of equality and the reformers told their people that these Christians seemed to live better Islamic lives than the Muslims. There was enormous enthusiasm and excitement at this new encounter with Europe. The wealthier Muslims were educated in Europe, absorbed its philosophy, literature and ideals and came back to their own countries eager to share what they had learned. At the beginning of the twentieth century, almost every single Muslim intellectual was also an ardent admirer of the West.

The reformers all had an intellectual bias and yet they were also nearly all a.s.sociated with some form of Islamic mysticism. The more imaginative and intelligent forms of Sufism and Ishraqi mysticism had helped Muslims in previous crises and they turned towards it again. The experience of G.o.d was not regarded as a clog but as a force for transformation at a deep level that would hasten the transition to modernity. Thus the Iranian reformer Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1839-89) was an adept of the Ishraqi mysticism of Suhrawardi at the same time as he was a pa.s.sionate advocate of modernisation. As he toured Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt and India, al-Afghani attempted to be all things to all men. He was capable of presenting himself as a Sunni to Sunnis, a Shii martyr to Shiis, a revolutionary, a religious philosopher and a parliamentarian.

The mystical disciplines of Ishraqi mysticism help Muslims to feel at one with the world around them and to experience a liberating loss of the boundaries that hedge in the self. It has been suggested that al- Afghani's recklessness and adoption of different roles had been influenced by the mystical discipline, with its enlarged concept of self. {25} Religion was essential, though reform was necessary. Al-Afghani was a convinced, even a pa.s.sionate theist, but there is little talk of G.o.d in The Refutation of the Materialists, his only book. Because he knew that the West valued reason and regarded Islam and Orientals as irrational, al-Afghani tried to describe Islam as a faith distinguished by its ruthless cult of reason. In fact, even such rationalists as the Mutazilis would have found this description of their religion strange. Al-Afghani was an activist rather than a philosopher. It is, therefore, important not to judge his career and convictions by this one literary attempt. Nevertheless, the depiction of Islam in a way calculated to fit what is perceived as a Western ideal shows a new lack of confidence in the Muslim world that would shortly become extremely destructive.

Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), al-Afghani's Egyptian disciple, had a different approach. He decided to concentrate his activities in Egypt alone and to focus on the intellectual education of its Muslims. He had had a traditional Islamic upbringing, which had brought him under the influence of the Sufi Sheikh Darwish, who had taught him that science and philosophy were the two most secure paths to the knowledge of G.o.d. Consequently when Abduh began to study at the prestigious al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, he was soon disillusioned by its antiquated syllabus. Instead he was attracted to al-Afghani, who coached him in logic, theology, astronomy, physics and mysticism. Some Christians in the West felt that science was the enemy of faith but Muslim mystics had often used mathematics and science as an aid to contemplation. Today Muslims in some of the more radical mystical sects of the Shiah, such as the Druzes or the Alawis, are particularly interested in modern science. In the Islamic world there are grave reservations about Western politics but few find it a problem to reconcile their faith in G.o.d with Western science.

Abduh was excited by his contact with Western culture and was especially influenced by Comte, Tolstoy and Herbert Spencer, who was a personal friend. He never adopted a wholly Western lifestyle but liked to visit Europe regularly to refresh himself intellectually. This did not mean that he abandoned Islam. Far from it; like any reformer, Abduh wanted to return to the roots of his faith. He therefore advocated a return to the spirit of the Prophet and the first four Rightly Guided Caliphs (rashidun). This did not entail a fundamentalist rejection of modernity, however. Abduh insisted that Muslims must study science, technology and secular philosophy in order to take their place in the modern world.

The Shariah Law must be reformed to enable Muslims to get the intellectual freedom they required. Like al-Afghani, he also tried to present Islam as a rational faith, arguing that in the Koran reason and religion had marched hand in hand for the first time in human history. Before the career of the Prophet, revelation had been attended by miracles, legends and irrational rhetoric but the Koran had not resorted to these more primitive methods. It had 'advanced proof and demonstration, expounded the views of disbelievers and inveighed against them rationally'. {26} The attack against the Faylasufs mounted by al-Ghazzali had been immoderate. It had caused division between piety and rationalism, which had affected the intellectual standing of the ulema. This was apparent in the outdated curriculum of al-Azhar. Muslims should, therefore, return to the more receptive and rational spirit of the Koran. Yet Abduh pulled back from a totally reductionist rationalism. He quoted the hadith: 'Reflect upon G.o.d's creation but not upon his nature or else you will perish.' Reason cannot grasp the essential being of G.o.d which remains shrouded in mystery. All that we can establish is the fact that G.o.d does not resemble any other being. All the other questions that exercise theologians are simply frivolous and are dismissed by the Koran as zanna.

In India the leading reformer was Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938) who became for the Muslims of India what Gandhi was for the Hindus. He was essentially a contemplative - a Sufi and an Urdu poet - but he also had a Western education and a doctorate in philosophy. He was filled with enthusiasm for Bergson, Nietzsche and A. N. Whitehead and tried to reinvigorate Falsafah in the light of their insights, seeing himself as a bridge between East and West. He was dismayed by what he saw as the decadence of Islam in India. Ever since the decline of the Moghul empire in the eighteenth century, the Muslims of India had felt in a false position. They lacked the confidence of their brethren in the Middle East, where Islam was on home ground. Consequently they were even more defensive and insecure before the British. Iqbal attempted to heal the disturbance of his people by a creative reconstruction of Islamic principles through poetry and philosophy.

From such Western philosophers as Nietzsche, Iqbal had imbibed the importance of individualism. The whole universe re-presented an Absolute which was the highest form of individuation and which men had called 'G.o.d'. In order to realise their own unique nature, all human beings must become more like G.o.d. That meant that each must become more individual, more creative and must express this creativity in action. The pa.s.sivity and craven self-effacement (which Iqbal put down to Persian influence) of the Muslims of India must be laid aside. The Muslim principle of ijtihad (independent judgement) should encourage them to be receptive to new ideas: the Koran itself demanded constant revision and self-examination. Like al-Afghani and Abduh, Iqbal tried to show that the empirical att.i.tude, which was the key to progress, had originated in Islam and pa.s.sed to the West via Muslim science and mathematics during the Middle Ages. Before the arrival of the great confessional religions during the Axial Age, the progress of humanity had been haphazard, dependent as it was upon gifted and inspired individuals. Muhammad's prophecy was the culmination of these intuitive efforts and rendered any further revelation unnecessary. Henceforth people could rely on reason and science.

Unfortunately individualism had become a new form of idolatry in the West, since it was now an end in itself. People had forgotten that all true individuality derived from G.o.d. The genius of the individual could be used to dangerous effect if allowed absolutely free rein. A breed of Supermen who regarded themselves as G.o.ds, as envisaged by Nietzsche, was a frightening prospect: people needed the challenge of a norm that transcended the whims and notions of the moment. It was the mission of Islam to uphold the nature of true individualism against the Western corruption of the ideal. They had their Sufi ideal of the Perfect Man, the end of creation and the purpose of its existence. Unlike the Superman who saw himself as supreme and despised the rabble, the Perfect Man was characterised by his total receptivity to the Absolute and would carry the ma.s.ses along with him.

The present state of the world meant that progress depended on the gifts of an elite, who could see beyond the present and carry humanity forward into the future. Eventually everybody would achieve perfect individuality in G.o.d. Iqbals view of the role of Islam was partial but it was more sophisticated than many current Western attempts to vindicate Christianity at the expense of Islam. His misgivings about the superman ideal were amply justified by events in Germany during the last years of his life.

By this time, the Arab Muslims of the Middle East were no longer so confident about their ability to contain the Western threat. The year 1920 when Britain and France marched into the Middle East became known as the am-al-nakhbah, the Year of the Disaster, a word that has connotations of cosmic catastrophe. Arabs had hoped for independence after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and this new domination made it seem that they would never control their own destiny: there was even a rumour that the British were going to hand over Palestine to the Zionists, as though its Arab inhabitants did not exist. The sense of shame and humiliation was acute. The Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out that this was exacerbated by their memory of past greatness: 'In the gulf between [the modern Arab] and, for instance, the modern American, a matter of prime significance has been precisely the deep difference between a society with a memory of past greatness and a sense of present greatness.' {27} This had crucial religious implications. Christianity is supremely a religion of suffering and adversity and, in the West at least, has arguably been most authentic in times of trouble: it is not easy to square earthly glory with the image of Christ crucified. Islam, however, is a religion of success.

The Koran taught that a society which lived according to G.o.d's will (implementing justice, equality, and a fair distribution of wealth) could not fail. Muslim history had seemed to confirm this. Unlike Christ, Muhammad had not been an apparent failure but a dazzling success. His achievements had been compounded by the phenomenal advance of the Muslim empire during the seventh and eighth centuries. This had naturally seemed to endorse the Muslim faith in G.o.d: al-Lah had proved to be extremely effective and had made good his word in the arena of history. Muslim success had continued. Even such catastrophes as the Mongol invasions had been overcome. Over the centuries, the ummah had acquired an almost sacramental importance and had disclosed the presence of G.o.d. Now, however, something seemed to have gone radically wrong with Muslim history and this inevitably affected the perception of G.o.d. Henceforth many Muslims would concentrate on getting Islamic history back on to the rails and making the Koranic vision effective in the world.

The sense of shame was exacerbated when closer acquaintance with Europe revealed the depth of Western contempt for the Prophet and his religion. Muslim scholarship was increasingly devoted to apologetics or to dreaming of past triumph - a dangerous brew. G.o.d was no longer centre stage. Cantwell Smith traces this process in a close examination of the Egyptian Journal Al-Azhar from 1930-1948.

During that time, the journal had two editors. From 1930 to 1933 it -as run by Al-Khidr Husain, a traditionist of the best sort, who saw his religion as a transcendent idea rather than a political and historical ent.i.ty Islam was an imperative, a summons to future action, rather than a reality which had been fully achieved. Because it is always difficult - even impossible - to incarnate the divine ideal in human life, Husain was not dismayed by past or present failures of the ummah. He was confident enough to criticise Muslim behaviour and the words 'ought' and 'should' run through all the issues of the journal during his time in office. Yet it is also clear that Husain could not imagine the predicament of a person who wanted to but found that he could not believe: the reality of al-Lah is taken for granted. In one early issue, an article by Yusuf al-Dijni had outlined the old ideological argument for the existence of G.o.d. Smith notes that the style was essentially reverential and expressed an intense and lively appreciation of the beauty and sublimity of nature which revealed the divine presence. Al-Dijni had no doubt that al-Lah existed. His article is a meditation rather than a logical demonstration of G.o.d's existence and he was quite unconcerned that Western scientists had long exploded this particular 'proof. Yet this att.i.tude was outdated. The circulation of the magazine slumped.

When Farid Wajdi took over in 1933, the readership doubled. Wajdi's prime consideration was to a.s.sure his readers that Islam was 'all right'. It would not have occurred to Husain that Islam, a transcendent idea in the mind of G.o.d, might require a helping hand from time to time but Wajdi saw Islam as a human inst.i.tution under threat. The prime need is to justify, admire and applaud. As Wilfred Smith points out, a profound irreligiousness pervades wajdi's work. Like his forebears, he constantly argued that the West was only teaching what Islam had discovered centuries earlier but, unlike them, he scarcely referred to G.o.d. The human reality of 'Islam' was his central concern: and this earthly value had in some sense replaced the transcendent G.o.d. Smith concludes: A true Muslim is not a man who believes in Islam - especially Islam in history; but one who believes in G.o.d and is committed to the revelation through his Prophet. The latter is there sufficiently admired. But commitment is missing. And G.o.d appears remarkably seldom throughout these pages. {28} {28} Instead, there is instability and lack of self-esteem: the opinion of the West has come to matter too desperately. People like Husain had understood religion and the centrality of G.o.d but had lost touch with the modern world. People who were in touch with modernity had lost the sense of G.o.d. From this instability would spring the political activism which characterises modern fundamentalism, which is also in retreat from G.o.d.

The Jews of Europe had also been affected by hostile criticism of their faith. In Germany, Jewish philosophers developed what they called 'the Science of Judaism', which rewrote Jewish history in Hegelian terms to counter the charge that Judaism was a servile, alienating faith. The first to attempt this reinterpretation of the history of Israel was Solomon Formstecher (1808-89). In The Religion of the Spirit (1841), he described G.o.d as a world Soul, immanent in all things. This Spirit did not depend upon the world, however, as Hegel had argued. Formstecher insisted that it lay beyond the reach of reason, reverting to the old distinction between G.o.d's essence and his activities. Where Hegel had decried the use of representational language, Formstecher argued that symbolism was the only appropriate vehicle for G.o.d-talk, since he lay beyond the reach of philosophical concepts. Nevertheless, Judaism had been the first religion to arrive at an advanced conception of the divine and would shortly show the whole world what a truly spiritual religion was like.

Primitive, pagan religion had identified G.o.d with nature, Formstecher argued. This spontaneous, unreflective period represented the infancy of the human race. When human beings had attained a greater degree of self-consciousness, they were ready to progress to a more sophisticated idea of divinity. They began to realise that this 'G.o.d' or 'Spirit' was not contained in nature but existed above and beyond it. The prophets who had arrived at this new conception of the divine preached an ethical religion. At first they had believed that their revelations had come from a force outside themselves but gradually they understood that they were not dependent upon a wholly external G.o.d but that they were inspired by their own Spirit-filled nature. The Jews had been the first people to attain this ethical conception of G.o.d. Their long years in exile and the loss of their Temple had weaned them from reliance upon external props and controls. They had thus advanced to a superior type of religious consciousness, which enabled them to approach G.o.d freely. They were not dependent upon mediating priests nor cowed by an alien Law, as Hegel and Kant had argued. Instead they had learned to find G.o.d through their minds and individuality. Christianity and Islam had tried to imitate Judaism but with less success. Christianity, for example, had retained many pagan elements in its depiction of G.o.d. Now that Jews had been emanc.i.p.ated, they would soon achieve complete liberation; they should prepare for this final stage in their development by casting aside the ceremonial laws that were a hangover from an earlier, less developed stage of their history.

Like the Muslim reformers, the exponents of the Science of Judaism were anxious to present their religion as a wholly rational faith. They were particularly eager to get rid of Kabbalah, which had become an embarra.s.sment since the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco and the rise of Hasidism. Consequently Samuel Hirsch, who published The Religious Philosophy of the Jews in 1842, wrote a history of Israel which ignored the mystical dimension of Judaism and presented an ethical, rational history of G.o.d, which focused on the idea of liberty. A human being was distinguished by the ability to say T. This self-consciousness represented an inalienable personal freedom. Pagan religion had not been able to cultivate this autonomy, since in the very early stages of human development, the gift of self-consciousness seemed to come from above. Pagans had located the source of their personal liberty with nature and believed that some of their vices were voidable. Abraham, however, had refused this pagan fatalism and dependence. He had stood alone in the presence of G.o.d in total command of himself. Such a man will find G.o.d in every aspect of life. G.o.d the Master of the Universe, has arranged the world to help us to this inner freedom and each individual is educated to this end by none other than G.o.d himself. Judaism was not the servile faith that gentiles imagined. It had always been a more advanced religion than Christianity, for example, which had turned its back on its Jewish roots and reverted to the irrationality and superst.i.tions of paganism.

Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), whose Guide for the Perplexed of our Time was published posthumously in 1841, did not recoil from mysticism like his colleagues. He liked to call 'G.o.d' or the 'Spirit' 'Nothing', like the Kabbalists, and to use the Kabbalistic metaphor of emanation to describe G.o.d's unfolding revelation of himself. He argued that the achievements of the Jews were not the result of an abject dependence upon G.o.d, but of the workings of the collective consciousness. Over the centuries, the Jews had gradually refined their conception of G.o.d. Thus at the time of the Exodus G.o.d had had to reveal his presence in miracles. By the time of the return from Babylon, however, the Jews had attained a more advanced perception of the divine and signs and wonders were no longer necessary. The Jewish conception of the worship of G.o.d was not the slavish dependence that the goyim imagined but corresponded almost exactly to the philosophic ideal. The only difference between religion and philosophy was that the latter expressed itself in concepts while religion used representational language, as Hegel had pointed out. Yet this type of symbolic language was appropriate, since G.o.d exceeds all our ideas about him. Indeed, we cannot even say that he exists, since our experience of existence is so partial and limited.

The new confidence brought by emanc.i.p.ation was dealt a harsh blow with the outbreak of a vicious anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe under Tsar Nicholas II in 1881. This spread to Western Europe. In France, the first country to emanc.i.p.ate the Jews, there was an hysterical surge of anti-Semitism when the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of treason in 1895. That same year, Karl Lueger, a notable anti-Semite, was elected Mayor of Vienna. Yet in Germany before Adolf Hitler came to power, Jews still imagined that they were safe. Thus Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) still seemed preoccupied with the metaphysical anti-Semitism of Kant and Hegel. Concerned above all with the accusation that Judaism was a servile faith, Cohen denied that G.o.d was an external reality that imposes obedience from on high. G.o.d was simply an idea formed by the human mind, a symbol of the ethical ideal. Discussing the biblical story of the burning bush, when G.o.d had defined himself to Moses as 'I am what I am' Cohen argued that this was a primitive expression of the fact that what we call 'G.o.d' is simply being itself. It is quite distinct from the mere beings that we experience, which can only partic.i.p.ate in this essential existence. In The Religion of Reason Drawn from the sources of Judaism (published posthumously in 1919), Cohen still insisted that G.o.d was simply a human idea. Yet he had also come to appreciate the emotional role of religion in human life. A mere ethical idea - such as 'G.o.d' - cannot console us. Religion teaches us to love our neighbour so it is possible to say that the G.o.d of religion - as opposed to the G.o.d of ethics and philosophy - was that affective love.

These ideas were developed out of all recognition by Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who evolved an entirely different conception of Judaism which set him apart from his contemporaries. Not only was he one of the first existentialists but he also formulated ideas that were close to the oriental religions. His independence can perhaps be explained by the fact that he had left Judaism as young man, become an agnostic and then considered converting to Christianity before finally returning to Orthodox Judaism. Rosenzweig pa.s.sionately denied that the observance of the Torah encouraged a slavish, abject dependence upon a tyrannical G.o.d. Religion was not simply about morality but was essentially a meeting with the divine. How was it possible for mere human beings to encounter the transcendent G.o.d? Rosenzweig never tells us what this meeting was like - this is a weakness in his philosophy. He distrusted Hegel's attempt to merge the Spirit with man and nature: if we simply see our human consciousness as an aspect of the World Soul, we are no longer truly individuals. A true existentialist, Rosenzweig emphasised the absolute isolation of every single human being. Each one of us is alone, lost and terrified in the crowd of humanity. It is only when G.o.d turns to us that we are redeemed from this anonymity and fear. G.o.d does not reduce our individuality, therefore, but enables us to attain full self-consciousness.

It is possible for us to meet G.o.d in any anthropomorphic way. G.o.d is the Ground of being, so bound up with our own existence that we cannot possibly talk to him, as though he were simply another person like ourselves. There are no words or ideas that describe G.o.d. Instead the gulf between him and human beings is bridged by the commandments of the Torah. These are not just proscriptive laws, as the goyim imagine. They are sacraments, symbolic actions that point beyond themselves and introduce Jews to the divine dimension that underlies the being of each one of us. Like the Rabbis, Rosenzweig argued that the commandments are so obviously symbolic - since they often have no meaning in themselves - that they drive us beyond our limited words and concepts to the ineffable Being itself. They help us to cultivate a listening, waiting att.i.tude so that we are poised and attentive to the Ground of our existence. The mitzvot do not work automatically, therefore. They have to be appropriated by the individual so that each mitzvah ceases to be an external command but expresses my interior att.i.tude, my inner 'must'. Yet although the Torah was a specifically Jewish religious practice, revelation was not confined to the people of Israel. He, Rosenzweig, would meet G.o.d in the symbolic gestures that were traditionally Jewish but a Christian would use different symbols.

The doctrines about G.o.d were not primarily confessional statements but they were symbols of interior att.i.tudes. The doctrines of creation and revelation, for example, were not literal accounts of actual events in the life of G.o.d and the world. The myths of revelation expressed our personal experience of G.o.d. Creation myths symbolised the absolute contingency of our human existence, the shattering knowledge of our utter dependence upon the Ground of being which made that existence possible. As Creator, G.o.d is not concerned with his creatures until he reveals himself to each one of them, but if he were not the Creator, that is, the Ground of all existence, the religious experience would have no meaning for humanity as a whole. It would remain a series of freak occurrences. Rosenzweig's universal vision of religion made him suspicious of the new political Judaism that was emerging as a response to the new anti-Semitism. Israel, he argued, had become a people in Egypt not in the Promised Land and would only fulfil its destiny as an eternal people if it severed its ties with the mundane world and did not get involved with politics.

But Jews who fell victim to the escalating anti-Semitism did not feel that they could afford this political disengagement. They could not sit back and wait for the Messiah or G.o.d to rescue them but must redeem their people themselves. In 1882, the year after the first pogroms in Russia, a band of Jews left Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine. They were convinced that Jews would remain incomplete, alienated human beings until they had a country of their own. The yearning for the return to Zion (the ancient name for Jerusalem) began as a defiantly secular movement, since the vicissitudes of history had convinced the Zionists that their religion and their G.o.d did not work. In Russia and Eastern Europe, Zionism was an offshoot of the revolutionary socialism that was putting the theories of Karl Marx into practice. The Jewish revolutionaries had become aware that their comrades were just as anti-Semitic as the Tsar and feared that their lot would not improve in a communist regime: events proved that they were correct. Accordingly ardent young socialists such as David Ben Gurion (1886-1973) simply packed their bags and sailed to Palestine, determined to create a model society that would be a light to the Gentiles and herald the socialist millenium. Others had no time for these Marxist dreams. The charismatic Austrian Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) saw the new Jewish venture as a colonial enterprise: under the wing of one of the European imperial powers, the Jewish state would be a vanguard of progress in the Islamic wilderness.

Despite its avowed secularism, Zionism expressed itself instinctively in conventionally religious terminology and was essentially a religion without G.o.d. It was filled with ecstatic and mystical hopes for the future, drawing on the ancient themes of redemption, pilgrimage and rebirth. Zionists even adopted the practice of giving themselves new names as a sign of the redeemed self. Thus Asher Ginsberg, an early propagandist, called himself Ahad Ha'am (One of the People).

He was now his own man because he had identified himself with the lew national spirit, though he did not think that a Jewish state was feasible in Palestine. He simply wanted a 'spiritual centre' there to take the place of G.o.d as the single focus of the people of Israel. It would become 'a guide to all the affairs of life', reach 'to the depths of the heart' and 'connect with all one's feelings'. Zionists had reversed the old religious orientation. Instead of being directed towards a transcendent G.o.d, Jews sought fulfilment here below. The Hebrew term hagshamah (literally, to make concrete) had been a negative term in medieval Jewish philosophy, referring to the habit of attributing human or physical characteristics to G.o.d. In Zionism, hagshamah came to mean fulfilment, the embodiment of the hopes of Israel in the mundane world. Holiness no longer dwelt in heaven: Palestine was a 'holy' land in the fullest sense of the word.

Just how holy can be seen in the writings of the early pioneer Aaron B. Gordon (d.1922), who had been an Orthodox Jew and Kabbalist until the age of forty-seven when he was converted to Zionism. A weak and ailing man with white hair and beard, Gordon worked in the fields beside the younger settlers, leaping around with them at night in ecstasy, crying 'Joy! ... Joy!' In former times, he wrote, the experience of reunion with the land of Israel would have been called a revelation of the Shekinah. The Holy Land had become a sacred value; it had a spiritual power accessible to the Jews alone which had created the unique Jewish spirit. When he described this holiness, Gordon used Kabbalistic terms that had once been applied to the mysterious realm of G.o.d: The soul of the Jew is the offspring of the natural environment of the land of Israel. Clarity, the depth of an infinitely clear sky, a clear perspective, mists of purity. Even the divine unknown seems to disappear in this clarity, slipping from limited manifest light into infinite hidden light. The people of this world understand neither this clear perspective nor this luminous unknown in the Jewish soul. {29} {29} At first this Middle Eastern landscape had been so different from Russia, his natural fatherland, that Gordon had found it frightening and alien. But he realised that he could make it his own by means of labour (avodah, a word that also refers to religious ritual). By working the land, which Zionists claimed had been neglected by the Arabs, the Jews would conquer it for themselves and, at the same time, redeem themselves from the alienation of exile.

The socialist Zionists called their pioneering movement the Conquest of Labour: their kibbutzim became secular monasteries, where they lived in common and worked out their own salvation. Their cultivation of the land led to a mystical experience of rebirth and universal love. As Gordon explained: To the extent that my hands grew accustomed to labour, that my eyes and ears learned to see and hear and my heart to understand what is in it, my soul too learned to skip upon the hills, to rise, to soar - to spread out the expanses it had not known, to embrace all the land round about, the world and all that is in it, and to see itself embraced in the arms of the whole universe. {30} {30} Their work was a secular prayer. In about 1927, the younger pioneer and scholar, Avraham Schlonsky (1900-73), who worked as a road builder, wrote this poem to the land of Israel: Dress me, good mother, in a glorious robe of many colours, and at dawn lead me to my toil.

My land is wrapped in light as in a prayer shawl.

The houses stand forth like frontlets; and the rocks paved by hand, stream down like phylactery straps.

Here the lovely city says the morning prayer to its creator.

And among the creators is your son Avraham, a road-building bard in Israel. {31} {31} The Zionist no longer needs G.o.d; he himself is the creator.

Other Zionists retained a more conventional faith. The Kabbalist Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), who served as the Chief Rabbi for Palestinian Jewry, had had little contact with the Gentile world before his arrival in the Land of Israel. He insisted that as long as the concept of serving G.o.d was defined as the service of a particular Being, separate from the ideals and duties of religion, it would not be 'free from the immature outlook which is always focused in particular beings'. {32} G.o.d was not an-other Being: En Sof transcended all human concepts such as personality. To think of G.o.d as a particular being was idolatry and the sign of a primitive mentality. Kook was steeped in Jewish tradition but he was not dismayed by the Zionist ideology. true the Labourites believed that they had shaken off religion but this atheistic Zionism was only a phase. G.o.d was at work in the pioneers: divine 'sparks' were trapped in these 'husks' of darkness and were awaiting redemption. Whether they thought so or not, Jews were in their essence inseparable from G.o.d and were fulfilling G.o.d's plan without realising it. During the exile, the Holy Spirit had departed from his people. They had hidden the Shekinah away in synagogues and study halls but soon Israel would become the spiritual centre of the world and reveal the true conception of G.o.d to the Gentiles.

This type of spirituality could be dangerous. The devotion to the Holy Land would give birth to the idolatry of Jewish fundamentalism in our own day. Devotion to historical 'Islam' has contributed to a similar fundamentalism in the Muslim world. Both Jews and Muslims were struggling to find meaning in a dark world. The G.o.d of history seemed to have failed them. The Zionists had been right to fear the final elimination of their people. For many Jews, the traditional idea of G.o.d would become an impossibility after the Holocaust. The n.o.bel Prize winner Elie Weisel had lived only for G.o.d during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith for ever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the G.o.dless world imagined by Nietzsche. 'Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live', he wrote years later. 'Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my G.o.d and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.' {33} One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Weisel recalled, had the face of a 'sad-eyed angel', was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Weisel, one of the other prisoners asked: 'Where is G.o.d? Where is He?' It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: 'Where is G.o.d now?' And Weisel heard a voice within him make this answer: 'Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows.' {34} Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make G.o.d unacceptable but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circ.u.mstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of G.o.d. The remote G.o.d of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of G.o.d who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Weisel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal G.o.d, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this G.o.d is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.

Yet it is also true that even in Auschwitz some Jews continued to study the Talmud and observe the traditional festivals, not because they hoped that G.o.d would rescue them but because it made sense. There is a story that one day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put G.o.d on trial. They charged him with cruelty and betrayal. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problem of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for G.o.d, no extenuating circ.u.mstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi p.r.o.nounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over: it was time for the evening prayer.

11 - Has G.o.d a Future?

As we approach the end of the second millennium, it seems likely that the world that we know is pa.s.sing away. For decades we have lived with the knowledge that we have created weapons that could wipe out human life on the planet. The Cold War may have ended but the new world order seems no less frightening than the old. We are facing the possibility of ecological disaster. The AIDS virus threatens to become a plague of unmanageable proportions. Within two or three generations, the population will become too great for the planet to support. Thousands are dying of famine and drought. Generations before our own have felt that the end of the world is nigh, yet it does seem that we are facing a future that is unimaginable. How will the idea of G.o.d survive in the years to come? For 4000 years it has constantly adapted to meet the demands of the present but, in our own century, more and more people have found that it no longer works for them and when religious ideas cease to be effective they fade away. Maybe G.o.d really is an idea of the past. The American scholar Peter Berger notes that we often have a double standard when we compare the past with our own time. Where the past is a.n.a.lysed and made relative, the present is rendered immune to this process and our current position becomes an absolute: thus 'the New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the a.n.a.lyst takes the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing'. {1} Secularists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw atheism as the irreversible condition of humanity in the scientific age.

There is much to support this view. In Europe, the churches are emptying; atheism is no longer the painfully acquired ideology of a few intellectual pioneers but a prevailing mood. In the past it was always reduced by a particular idea of G.o.d but now it seems to have lost its inbuilt relationship to theism and become an automatic response to the experience of living in a secularised society. Like the crowd of amused people surrounding Nietzsche's madman, many are unmoved by the prospect of life without G.o.d. Others find his absence a positive relief. Those of us who have had a difficult time with religion in the past find it liberating to be rid of the G.o.d who terrorised our childhood. It is wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity, who threatens us with eternal d.a.m.nation if we do not abide by his rules. We have a new intellectual freedom and can boldly follow up our own ideas without p.u.s.s.y-footing gingerly round difficult articles of faith, feeling all the while a sinking loss of integrity. We imagine that the hideous deity we have experienced is the authentic G.o.d of Jews, Christians and Muslims and do not always realise that it is merely an unfortunate aberration.

There is also desolation. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) spoke of the G.o.d-shaped hole in the human consciousness, where G.o.d had always been. Nevertheless, he insisted that even if G.o.d existed, it was still necessary to reject him since the idea of G.o.d negates our freedom. Traditional religion tells us that we must conform to G.o.d's idea of humanity to become fully human. Instead, we must see human beings as liberty incarnate. Sartre's atheism was not a consoling creed but other existentialists saw the absence of G.o.d as a positive liberation. Maurice Merleau Ponty (1908-61) argued that instead of increasing our sense of wonder, G.o.d actually negates it. Because G.o.d represents absolute perfection, there is nothing left for us to do or achieve. Albert Camus (1913-60) preached an heroic atheism. People should reject G.o.d defiantly in order to pour out all their loving solicitude upon mankind. As always, the atheists have a point. G.o.d had indeed been used in the past to stunt creativity; if he is made a blanket answer to every possible problem and contingency, he can indeed stifle our sense of wonder or achievement. A pa.s.sionate and committed atheism can ore religious than a weary or inadequate theism.

During the 1950s, Logical Positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910-91) asked whether it made sense to believe in G.o.d. The natural sciences provided the only reliable source of knowledge because it could be tested empirically. Ayer was not asking whether or not G.o.d existed but whether the idea of G.o.d had any meaning. He argued that a statement is meaningless if we cannot see how it can be verified or shown to be false. To say: 'There is intelligent life on Mars' is not meaningless since we can see how we could verify this once we had the necessary technology. Similarly a simple believer in the traditional Old Man in the Sky is not making a meaningless statement when he says: 'I believe in G.o.d', since after death we should be able to find out whether or not this is true. It is the more sophisticated believer who has problems, when he says: 'G.o.d does not exist in any sense that we can understand' or 'G.o.d is not good in the human sense of the word.' These statements are too vague; it is impossible to see how they can be tested; therefore, they are meaningless. As Ayer said: 'Theism is so confused and the sentences in which "G.o.d" appears so incoherent and so incapable of Verifiability or falsifiability that to speak of belief or unbelief, faith or unfaith, is logically impossible.' {2} Atheism is as unintelligible and meaningless as theism. There is nothing in the concept of 'G.o.d' to deny or be sceptical about.

Like Freud, the Positivists believed that religious belief represented an immaturity which science would overcome. Since the 19505, linguistic philosophers have criticised Logical Positivism, pointing out that what Ayer called the Verification Principle could not itself be verified. Today we are less likely to be as optimistic about science, which can only explain the world of physical nature. Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out that the Logical Positivists set themselves up as scientists during a period when, for the first time in history, science saw the natural world in explicit disjunction from humanity. {3} The kind of statements to which Ayer referred work very well for the objective facts of science but are not suitable for less clear-cut human experiences. Like poetry or music, religion is not amenable to this kind of discourse and verification. More recently linguistic philosophers such as Antony Flew have argued that it is more rational to find a natural explanation than a religious one. The old 'proofs' do network: the argument from design falls down because we would need to get outside the system to see whether natural phenomena are motivated by their own laws or by Something outside. The argument that we are 'contingent' or 'defective' beings proves nothing, since there could always be an explanation that is ultimate but not supernatural. Flew is less of an optimist than Feuerbach, Marx or the Existentialists. There is no agonising, no heroic defiance but simply a matter-of-fact commitment to reason and science as the only way forward.

We have seen, however, that not all religious people have looked to 'G.o.d' to provide them with an explanation for the universe. Many have seen the proofs as a red herring. Science has been felt to be threatening only by those Western Christians who got into the habit of reading the scriptures literally and interpreting doctrines as though they were matters of objective fact. Scientists and philosophers who find no room for G.o.d in their systems are usually referring to the idea of G.o.d as First Cause, a notion eventually abandoned by Jews, Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians during the Middle Ages. The more subjective 'G.o.d' that they were looking for could not be proven as though it were an objective fact that was the same for everybody. It could not be located within a physical system of the universe, any more than the Buddhist nirvana.

More dramatic than the linguistic philosophers were the radical theologians of the 19605 who enthusiastically followed Nietzsche and proclaimed the death of G.o.d. In The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966), Thomas J. Altizer claimed that the 'good news' of G.o.d's death had freed us from slavery to a tyrannical transcendent deity: 'Only by accepting and even willing the death of G.o.d in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by G.o.d's self-alienation in Christ.' {4} Altizer spoke in mystical terms of the dark night of the soul and the un of abandonment. The death of G.o.d represented the silence that necessary before G.o.d could become meaningful again. All our old conceptions of divinity had to die, before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a style in which G.o.d could once more become a possibility. Altizer's theology was a pa.s.sionate dialectic which attacked the dark G.o.d-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret. Paul Van Buren was more precise and logical. In The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (1963), he claimed that it was no longer possible to speak of G.o.d acting in the world. Science and technology had made the old mythology invalid. Simple faith in the Old Man in the Sky was clearly impossible but so was the more sophisticated belief of the theologians. We must do without G.o.d and hold on to Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospel was 'the good news of a free man who has set other men free'. Jesus of Nazareth was the liberator, 'the man who defines what it means to be a man'. {5} In Radical Theology and the Death of G.o.d (1966), William Hamilton noted that this kind of theology had its roots in the United States, which had always had a Utopian bent and had no great theological tradition of its own. The imagery of the death of G.o.d represented the anomie and barbarism of the technical age which made it impossible to believe in the biblical G.o.d in the old way. Hamilton himself saw this theological mood as a way of being Protestant in the twentieth century. Luther had left his cloister and gone out into the world. In the same way, he and the other Christian radicals were avowedly secular men. They had walked away from the sacred place where G.o.d used to be to find the man Jesus in their neighbour out in the world of technology, power, s.e.x, money and the city. Modern secular man did not need G.o.d. There was no G.o.d-shaped hole within Hamilton: he would find his own solution in the world.

There is something rather poignant about this buoyant sixties' optimism. Certainly, the radicals were right that the old ways of speaking about G.o.d had become impossible for many people but in the 19903 it is sadly difficult to feel that liberation and a new dawn are at hand. Even at the time, the Death of G.o.d theologians were criticised, since their perspective was that of the affluent, middle-cla.s.s, white American. Black theologians such as James H. Cone asked how white people felt they had the right to affirm freedom through the death of G.o.d when they had actually enslaved people in G.o.d's name. The Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein found it impossible to understand how they could feel so positive about G.o.dless humanity so soon after the n.a.z.i Holocaust. He himself was convinced that the deity conceived as a G.o.d of History had died for ever in Auschwitz. Yet Rubenstein did not feel that Jews could jettison religion. After the near-extinction of European Jewry, they must not cut themselves off from their past. The nice, moral G.o.d of liberal Judaism was no good, however. It was too antiseptic; it ignored the tragedy of life and a.s.sumed that the world would improve. Rubenstein himself preferred the G.o.d of the Jewish mystics. He was moved by Isaac Luria's doctrine of tsimtsum, G.o.d's voluntary act of self-estrangement which brought the created world into being. All mystics had seen G.o.d as a Nothingness from which we came and to which we will return. Rubenstein agreed with Sartre that life is empty; he saw the G.o.d of the mystics as an imaginative way of entering this human experience of nothingness. {6} Other Jewish theologians have also found comfort in Lurianic Kabbalah. Hans Jonas believes that after Auschwitz we can no longer believe in the omnipotence of G.o.d. When G.o.d created the world, he voluntarily limited himself and shared the weakness of human beings. He could do no more now and human beings must restore wholeness to the G.o.dhead and the world by prayer and Torah. The British theologian Louis Jacobs, however, dislikes this idea, finding the image of tsimtsum coa.r.s.e and anthropomorphic: it encourages us to ask how G.o.d created the world in too literal a manner. G.o.d does not limit himself, holding his breath, as it were, before exhaling. An impotent G.o.d is useless and cannot be the meaning of human existence. It is better to return to the cla.s.sic explanation that G.o.d is greater than human beings and his thought and ways are not ours. G.o.d may be incomprehensible but people have the option of trusting this ineffable G.o.d and affirming a meaning, even in the midst of meaninglessness. The Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung agrees with Jacobs, preferring a more reasonable explanation for tragedy than the fanciful myth of tsimtsum. He notes that human beings cannot have faith in a weak G.o.d but in the living G.o.d who made people strong enough to Pray in Auschwitz.

Some people still find it possible to find meaning in the idea of G.o.d. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) set his face against the Liberal Protestantism of Schliermacher with its emphasis on religious experience. But he was also a leading opponent of natural theology. It was, he thought, a radical error to seek to explain G.o.d in rational terms not simply because of the limitations of the human mind but also because humanity has been corrupted by the Fall. Any natural idea we form about G.o.d is bound to be flawed, therefore, and to worship such a G.o.d was idolatry. The only valid source of G.o.d-knowledge was the Bible. This seems to have the worst of all worlds: experience is out; natural reason is out; the human mind is corrupt and untrustworthy; and there is no possibility of learning from other faiths, since the Bible is the only valid revelation. It seems unhealthy to combine such radical scepticism in the powers of the intellect with such an uncritical acceptance of the truths of scripture.

Paul Tillich (1868-1965) was convinced that the personal G.o.d of traditional Western theism must go but he also believed that religion was necessary for humankind. A deep-rooted anxiety is part of the human condition: this is not neurotic, because it is ineradicable and no therapy can take it away. We constantly fear loss and the terror of extinction, as we watch our bodies gradually but inexorably decay. Tillich agreed with Nietzsche that the personal G.o.d was a harmful idea and deserved to die: The concept of a 'Personal G.o.d' interfering with natural events, or being 'an independent cause of natural events', makes G.o.d a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of G.o.d. {7} {7} A G.o.d who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a G.o.d who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If G.o.d is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thou, a cause separate from its effect, 'he' becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who made everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a G.o.d is amply justified.

Instead we should seek to find a 'G.o.d' above this personal G.o.d. There is nothing new about this. Ever since biblical times, theists had been aware of the paradoxical nature of the G.o.d to which they prayed, aware that the personalised G.o.d was balanced by the essentially transpersonal divinity. Each prayer was a contradiction, since it attempted to speak to somebody to whom speech was