A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Author:Karen Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Christian Rituals & Practice - General, Judaism - Doctrines - History, Religion, God (Christianity), Biblical teaching, God (Islam) - History of doctrines, God - History of doctrines, god, Comparative studies, God (Judaism), Faith, God (Judaism) - History of doctrines, Judaism, God - Biblical teaching, Islam - Doctrines - History, Religion - Commentaries, History of doctrines, History, Reference, Christian Rituals & Practice, General, Comparative Religion, God (Islam), Islam
ISBN: 9780345384560
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 1994-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

The Tree of the Sefiroth

Some Kabbalists saw the

sefiroth as the limbs of primordial

man as originally intended by God.

This was what the Bible had meant

when it said that man had been

created in God's image: the

mundane

reality

here

below

corresponded to an archetypal

reality in the heavenly world. The

images of God as a tree or as a man

were imaginative depictions of a

reality

that

defied

rational

formulation. The Kabbalists were

not antagonistic towards Falsafah -

many of them revered figures like

Saadia Gaon and Maimonides - but

they

found

symbolism

and

mythology more satisfying than

metaphysics for penetrating the

mystery of God.

The

most

influential

Kabbalistic text was The Zohar,

which was probably written in

about 1275 by the Spanish mystic

Moses of Leon. As a young man, he

had studied Maimonides but had

gradually felt the attraction of

mysticism and the esoteric tradition

of Kabbalah. The Zohar (The Book

of Splendour) is a sort of mystical

novel, which depicts the third-

century Talmudist Simeon ben

Yohai wandering round Palestine

with his son Eliezar, talking to his

disciples about God, nature and

human life. There is no clear

structure

and

no

systematic

development of theme or ideas.

Such an approach would be alien to

the spirit of The Zohar, whose God

resists any neat system of thought.

Like Ibn al-Arabi, Moses of Leon

believed that God gives each mystic

a unique and personal revelation, so

there is no limit to the way the

Torah can be interpreted: as the

Kabbalist progresses, layer upon

layer of significance is revealed.

The Zohar shows the mysterious

emanation of the ten sefiroth as a

process whereby the impersonal En

Sof becomes a personality. In the

three highest sefiroth - Kether,

Hokhmah and Binah - when, as it

were, En Sof has only just 'decided'

to express himself, the divine

reality is called 'he'. As 'he'

descends

through

the

middle

sefiroth - Hesed, Din, Tifereth,

Netsah, Hod and Yesod - 'he'

becomes 'you'. Finally, when God

becomes present in the world in the

Shekinah, 'he' calls himself'!'. It is at

this point, where God has, as it

were, become an individual and his

self-expression is complete, that

man can begin his mystical journey.

Once the mystic has acquired an

understanding of his own deepest

self, he becomes aware of the

Presence of God within him and can

then ascend to the more impersonal

higher spheres, transcending the

limits of personality and egotism. It

is a return to the unimaginable

Source of our being and the hidden

world of uncreated reality. In this

mystical perspective, our world of

sense impression is simply the last

and outermost shell of the divine

reality.

In Kabbalah, as in Sufism, the

doctrine of the creation is not really

concerned with the physical origins

of the universe. The Zohar sees the

Genesis account as a symbolic

version of a crisis within En Sof,

which causes the Godhead to break

out

of

Its

unfathomable

introspection and reveal Itself. As

The Zohar says:

In the beginning, when

the will of the King began to

take effect, he engraved signs

into the divine aura. A dark

flame sprang forth from the

innermost recesses of En Sof,

like a fog which forms out of

the formless, enclosed in the

ring of this aura, neither

white nor black, red nor

green and of no colour

whatever. {55}

In Genesis, God's first creative

word had been: 'Let there be light!'

In The Zohar's commentary on

Genesis (called Bereshit in Hebrew

after its opening word: 'in the

beginning') this 'dark flame' is the

first sefirah: Kether Elyon, the

Supreme Crown of Divinity. It has

no colour or form: other Kabbalists

prefer to call it Nothing (ayin). The

highest form of divinity that the

human mind can

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