How Man Created God

Who is God? what can we know about God? And if knowing God is possible, how do we comprehend him: by reason or only through an ecstatic epiphany of faith? These questions have tormented theologians and mystics in the 4,000-year history of monotheism. Their wildly varied answers are explored in an absorbing new book from Britain with a catchy title, a lode of learning and a challenging thesis. Whether or not one accepts the biblical teaching that men and women are made in God’s image, argues the author of A History of God (Knopf; $27.50), it is clear the deity is a product of humankind’s creative imagination.

God may well be our most interesting idea. Down the ages, humans have posited a deity, or deities, in order to fulfill a pragmatic need: primarily, to find meaning and value in life. Man is the only animal that worships; religion underlies conflicts and economics even in the secular 20th century, the only age in history that has not regarded some form of faith as natural and normative.

Karen Armstrong, 48, who wrote A History of God, has impressively wide scholarship and strong ecumenical credentials. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, part of the time studying literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. It was there that she began to question the teachings of the church and decided, after considerable agony, to leave her order. She lives alone in north London and teaches at the Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism. Armstrong has written 10 books, including an account of her convent years, Through the Narrow Gate, and a well-regarded biography of Muhammad that earned her an honorary membership in the Association of Muslim Social Scientists.

A request by British television’s Channel 4 to write and present a six-part documentary series on St. Paul revived her interest in religion. “What I really am is a historian of ideas,” she says, “rather than a theologian, which sounds a bit narrow.” She considers herself an unaffiliated monotheist who appreciates many aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy but finds it easier to pray with Jews and Muslims. “Only Western Christianity makes a song and dance about creeds and beliefs,” she says. “The authentic test of a religion is not what you believe. It’s what you do, and unless your religion expresses itself in compassion for all living things, it is not authentic.”

Whether Jew, Christian or Muslim, believers today tend to regard their faith as a received whole — that is, as a belief system with most of the major theoretical issues long since resolved, in so far as they can be. No 20th century Christian, for example, would bother to start an argument about the divinity of Jesus, a subject that obsessed 4th century bishops. But as Armstrong reminds us, the world’s three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — did not arrive where they are without impassioned debates and conflicts. She contends that Yahweh was originally a savage, partisan god of war and one of several deities worshipped by the & Israelites. It took seven centuries or more for this unpleasant being to evolve into the almighty Yahweh proclaimed by the prophets as the one and only God.

Armstrong sees nothing amiss or unusual in this evolutionary process. New ideas about God have always emerged in response to new psychological needs. Had the great faiths lacked this capacity to change, they might well have withered away. “All religions change and develop,” the author writes. “If they do not, they will become obsolete.” Consequently, “each generation has to create its own imaginative conception of God.”

Some eras have been particularly critical for God’s history. During the so- called Axial Age (800 B.C. to 200 B.C.), political and economic changes led to new religious ideologies throughout the known civilized world: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, the rational philosophy of Plato and Aristotle in Greece, differing concepts of monotheism in Israel and in Iran (Zoroastrianism). Common to all these ideologies was what Armstrong calls “the duty of compassion,” meaning authentic religious experiences must be integrated into everyday life. The Axial Age was a time of prosperity, when power was passing from kings and priests to the merchant class. “Strange as it may seem,” Armstrong writes, “the idea of ‘God’ developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.”

In different ways, all three monotheisms generated the idea of a personal God who sees and hears, rewards and punishes. The concept, among other virtues, helped establish the dignity of the individual and led ultimately to liberal humanism. There was, however, a liability: a personal God could easily become no more than a projection of humankind’s limited hopes and fears; in short, an idol. Seeking to escape this dilemma, mystical traditions, which emerged in all three religions, taught that God was to be experienced — albeit by a dedicated elite — rather than defined. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the mystical Sufi movement was the dominant force within Islam. In the 15th century, facing persecution and exile, European Jews found solace in the mystical writings known as the Cabala. Even Western Christianity, which has been strongly suspicious of ineffability, had its mystical tradition, exemplified by such figures as the German Dominican Meister Eckehart and the Spanish saint, Teresa of Avila.

Armstrong considers herself a feminist. But she argues that while it might not be right to call God exclusively “he,” it is equally mistaken to regard God as “she.” This makes God into a being. She notes, however, that much of the gender politics of God may come from the inflexibility of English. Other languages allow God to transcend sex. In Arabic, for example, the supreme name for God, al-Lah, is masculine, but his other names, “the Compassionate” (al- Rahmat) and “the Merciful” (al-Rahim), are feminine.

One of the delights of Armstrong’s book is her exploration of some relatively unfamiliar pathways to God. She is much taken with a Muslim movement devoted to Falsafah (roughly, philosophy) that emerged in the 9th and 10th centuries. Its advocates, known as Faylasufs, believed that the God of Greek philosophy was identical to Islam’s. “Instead of seeing God as a mystery,” Armstrong writes, “the Faylasufs believed he was reason itself.” But they also acknowledged the chaos and disorder of the universe and recognized that their quest for ultimate meaning was a difficult one. Indirectly, the Faylasufs influenced such medieval thinkers as the Jewish sage Maimonides and the greatest Catholic theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Modern monotheism, as Armstrong sees it, has had two main flaws. One is a tendency toward “belligerent righteousness,” which has led to pogroms, inquisitions and other shameful manifestations of intolerance that defile the image of God as a benevolent creator. The other — most apparent in Western Christianity — is a tendency to define God in terms compatible with secular thinking. Thus the Jesuit theologian Leonard Lessius (1554-1623) argued that the existence of God could be demonstrated scientifically, like any other fact. Similarly, the 19th century German exponents of the Science of Judaism argued that their religion was a wholly rational faith. Alas, the end result of treating the deity as just another provable fact was to marginalize God, thereby making it easier for unbelievers to proclaim that he did not exist.

What of the present and the future? Armstrong notes the ever-growing strength of secularism, which makes it possible for more and more people to think of God as an idea that belongs to the past. She also notes in all three faiths a surging counterrevolutionary fundamentalism that to her represents a problem rather than a solution: its proponents “use ‘God’ to prop up their own loves and hates.” In short, this kind of religiosity is simply a new idolatry and thus represents a retreat from God.

Armstrong acknowledges that the anthropomorphic personal God of monotheism is obsolete (hence dead), as is the remote Supreme Being posited by religious philosophers. A more plausible alternative is the God of mysticism, experienced as a reality that lies beyond human concepts, much the way that great art is felt. Not that this will be easy in an age of anomie, symbolized by handgun violence, hip-hop quality and an MTV attention span. Human kind cannot bear very much reality, T.S. Eliot wrote, but it also cannot endure too much emptiness and desolation. In her book’s dying fall, Armstrong suggests that the ancient quest for life’s meaning will go on.