The Case for God (19 page)

The carefully devised rituals had evoked an
ekstasis
, a “stepping out” of their accustomed modes of thought. As Theodore, bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia from 392 to 428, explained to his catechumens:

“Belief” in our modern sense did not come into it. Even though Theodore was a leading proponent of the literal exegesis practiced in Antioch, he did not require his candidates to “believe” any “mysterious”
doctrines. Faith was purely a matter of commitment and practical living.

This would also be true of the third of the monotheisms, which would not emerge until the early years of the seventh century. In 610, Muhammad ibn Abdullah (c. 560–632), a merchant of the thriving commercial city of Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz, began to have revelations that he believed came from the God of the Jews and Christians. These divine messages were eventually brought together in the scripture known as the
Qur’an
, the “Recitation,” and its text was finalized a mere twenty years after the Prophet’s death. The religion of the Qur’an would eventually be known as
islam
, a word that means “surrender” to God, and was based on the same basic principles as the two other monotheistic traditions.

The Qur’an has no interest in “belief;” indeed, this concept is quite alien to Islam.
⁸⁴
Theological speculation that results in the formulation of abstruse doctrines is dismissed as
zannah
, self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can prove one way or the other but that makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian.
⁸⁵
Like any religion or
philosophia
, Islam was a way of life (din). The fundamental message of the Qur’an was not a doctrine but an ethical summons to practically expressed compassion: it is wrong to build a private fortune and good to share your wealth fairly and create a just society where poor and vulnerable people are treated with respect.
⁸⁶
The five “pillars” of Islam are a
miqra
, a summons to dedicated activity: prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and pilgrimage. This is also true of the first “pillar,” the declaration of faith: “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet.” This is not a “creed” in the modern Western sense; the Muslim who makes this
shahadah
“bears witness” in his life and in every single one of his actions that his chief priority is Allah and that no other “gods”—which include political, material, economic, and personal ambitions—can take precedence over his commitment to God alone. In the Qur’an, faith
(iman
) is something that people do: they share their wealth, perform the “works of justice”
(salihat)
, and prostrate their bodies to the ground in the kenotic, ego-deflating act of prayer (salat).
⁸⁷

In the Qur’an, the people who opposed Islam when Muhammad
began to preach in Mecca are called the
kafirun
. The usual English translation is extremely misleading: it does not mean “unbeliever” or “infidel;” the root
KFR
means “blatant ingratitude,” a discourteous and arrogant refusal of something offered with great kindness.
⁸⁸
The theology of the
kafirun
was quite correct: they all took it for granted that God created the world, for example.
⁸⁹
They were not condemned for their “unbelief” but for their braying, offensive manner to others, their pride, self-importance, chauvinism, and inability to accept criticism.
⁹⁰
The
kafirun
never give serious consideration to an idea that is new to them, because they think they know everything already. Hence they sneer at the Qur’an, seizing every opportunity to display their own cleverness.
⁹¹
Above all, they are
jahili:
chronically “irascible,” acutely sensitive about their honor and prestige, with a destructive tendency to violent retaliation.
⁹²
Muslims are commanded to respond to such abusive behavior with
hilm
(“forbearance”) and quiet courtesy, leaving revenge to Allah.
⁹³
They must “walk gently on the earth,” and whenever the
jahilun
insult them, they should simply reply, “Peace.”
⁹⁴

There was no question of a literal, simplistic reading of scripture. Every single image, statement, and verse in the Qur’an is called an
ayah
(“sign,” “symbol,” “parable”), because we can speak of God only analogically. The great
ayat
of the creation and the last judgment are not introduced to enforce “belief,” but they are a summons to action. Muslims must translate these doctrines into practical behavior. The
ayah
of the last day, when people will find that their wealth cannot save them, should make Muslims examine their conduct here and now: Are they behaving kindly and fairly to the needy? They must imitate the generosity of Allah, who created the wonders of this world so munificently and sustains it so benevolently. At first, the religion was known as
tazakka
(“refinement”). By looking after the poor compassionately, freeing their slaves, and performing small acts of kindness on a daily, hourly basis, Muslims would acquire a responsible, caring spirit, purging themselves of pride and selfishness. By modeling their behavior on that of the Creator, they would achieve spiritual refinement.
⁹⁵

In these early days, Muslims did not see Islam as a new, exclusive religion but as a continuation of the primordial faith of the “People of the Book,” the Jews and Christians. In one remarkable passage, God
insists that Muslims must accept indiscriminately the revelations of every single one of God’s messengers: Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and all the other prophets.
⁹⁶
The Qur’an is simply a “confirmation” of the previous scriptures.
⁹⁷
Nobody must be forced to accept Islam, because each of the revealed traditions had its own
din;
it was not God’s will that all human beings should belong to the same faith community.
⁹⁸
God was not the exclusive property of any one tradition; the divine light could not be confined to a single lamp, belonged neither to the East nor to the West, but enlightened all human beings.
⁹⁹
Muslims must speak courteously to the People of the Book, debate with them only in “the most kindly manner,” remember that they worshipped the same God, and not engage in pointless, aggressive disputes.
¹⁰⁰

All this would require a ceaseless
jihad
(which did not mean “holy war” but “effort,” “struggle”), because it was extremely difficult to implement the will of God in a tragically flawed world. Muslims must make a determined endeavor on all fronts—intellectual, social, economic, moral, spiritual, and political. Sometimes they might have to fight, as Muhammad did when the Meccan
kafirun
vowed to exterminate the Muslim community. But aggressive warfare was outlawed, and the only justification for war was self-defense.
¹⁰¹
Warfare was far from being the prime Muslim duty. An important and oft-quoted tradition
(hadith
) has Muhammad say on his way home after a battle: “We are returning from the Lesser Jihad [the battle] and going to the Greater Jihad,” the far more important and difficult struggle to reform one’s own society and one’s own heart. Eventually, when the war with Mecca was turning in his favor, Muhammad adopted a policy of nonviolence.
¹⁰²
When Mecca finally opened its gates voluntarily, nobody was forced to enter Islam and Muhammad made no attempt to implement an exclusively Islamic state there.

Like any religious tradition, Islam would change and evolve. Muslims acquired a large empire, stretching from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but true to Qur’anic principles, nobody was forced to become Muslim. Indeed, for the first hundred years after the Prophet’s death, conversion to Islam was actually discouraged, because Islam was a
din
for the Arabs, the descendants of Abraham’s elder son, Ishmael, just as Judaism was for the sons of Isaac and Christianity for the followers of the gospel.

• • •

Faith, therefore, was a matter of practical insight and active commitment; it had little to do with abstract belief or theological conjecture. Judaism and Islam have remained religions of practice; they promote orthopraxy, right practice, rather than orthodoxy, right teaching. In the early fourth century, however, Christianity had begun to move in a slightly different direction and developed a preoccupation with doctrinal correctness that would become its Achilles’ heel. Yet even while some Christians stridently argued about abstruse dogmatic definitions, others—perhaps in reaction—developed a spirituality of silence and unknowing that would be just as important, characteristic, and influential.

Silence

I
n 312, Constantine defeated his rival for the imperial throne at the battle of Milvian Bridge and would always believe that he owed his victory to the God of the Christians. The following year, he declared Christianity
religio licita
, one of the permitted religions of the Roman Empire. This was a dramatic and fateful reversal. From being persecuted members of an outlawed sect, Christians could now own property, build churches, worship freely, and make a distinctive contribution to public life. Even though Constantine continued to preside over the official pagan cult as
pontifex maximus
and was baptized only on his deathbed, it was clear that he favored Christianity. He had hoped that, once legalized, the church would become a cohesive force in his far-flung empire. This state support proved a mixed blessing, however. Constantine had very little understanding of Christian theology, but that did not prevent him from meddling in doctrinal affairs when he discovered that the church that was supposed to unify his subjects was itself torn apart by a dogmatic dispute.

Christians had to adapt to their changed circumstances. They had to find a way of instructing the flood of new converts presenting themselves for baptism, some, doubtless, with an eye on the main chance. They realized that their faith could be puzzling. Now that Christianity was a predominantly gentile religion, the Hebrew terminology of the first Jewish Christians needed to be translated into a Greco-Roman idiom. Christianity claimed to be a monotheistic religion, but what was the status of Jesus, the incarnate Logos? Was he a second God? What did Christians mean when they called him “Son
of God”? Or was he a hybrid—half human and half divine—like Dionysus? And who was the Holy Spirit? The problem was exacerbated by a marked change in the intellectual and spiritual climate of late antiquity.

There seems to have been a profound loss of confidence in both the physical world and human nature. Hitherto Greeks, like most other peoples, had seen no impassable gulf between God and humanity. Their philosophers had agreed that as rational animals, human beings contained a spark of the divine within themselves; a sage like Socrates, who incarnated the transcendent ideal of wisdom, was a son of God and an avatar of the divine. People had no doubt that they could ascend to the Good by their own natural powers. Origen, a Platonist, believed that he could get to know God by contemplating the universe and had seen the Christian life as a Platonic ascent that would continue after death until the soul was fully assimilated to the divine. The Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (c. 205–70) believed that the universe emanated from God eternally, like rays from the sun, so that the material world was a kind of overflowing of God’s very being; when you meditated on the universe, you were, therefore, meditating upon God. But by the early fourth century, people felt that the cosmos was separated from God by a vast, almost unbridgeable chasm. The universe was now experienced as so fragile, moribund, and contingent that it could have nothing in common with the God that was being itself. A terrifying void lay ready to engulf all living things. The primordial question (Why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?) no longer inspired awe, wonder, and delight but had been replaced by a sickening vertigo. The possibility of nothingness lurked threateningly at both the beginning and the end of human existence.

Some Christians had already started to promote the new doctrine, entirely unknown in antiquity, of creation ex nihilo. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) believed that the philosophical idea of an eternal cosmos was idolatrous, because it presented nature as a second coeternal god. Nothing could come from nothing, so the universe could only have been summoned out of the primal void by the God that was Life itself. Instead of “deifying the universe,” people needed to know that “the sheer volition of God is the making of the universe.”
¹
The idea that God had deliberately created all things posed
huge problems: Did it not imply that God was responsible for evil? Yet the belief that matter was eternal seemed to compromise God’s omnipotence and sovereign freedom. Monotheism implied that there was only one omnipotent power, so God’s decisions could surely not be influenced by the independent requirements of matter, which, like Plato’s craftsman, he was merely permitted to arrange and finish off.
²