She Hath Done What She Could Book Reviews
Nonfiction
Piecing Together God'southward Body, From Head to Toe
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GOD
An Anatomy
By Francesca Stavrakopoulou
"Immortal, invisible, God only wise / In low-cal inaccessible hid from all eyes" — so goes the hymn that neatly encapsulates some of our modern problems with divinity and its relation to humanity and the natural earth. In a long, detailed and scrupulously researched volume, "God: An Anatomy," Francesca Stavrakopoulou digs into this dilemma; every bit corporeal creatures, she argues, nosotros must somehow reincarnate this arcane deity, see him as our ancestors did and bring him down to world. She then gain, in 21 chapters packed with knowledge and insight, to "anatomize" the divinity from head to toe, starting with the "continuing stones" that marked the footsteps of deities in the Belatedly Bronze and Early Iron Age and ending with images of God that enabled people to imagine that they were somehow communing with him "face to face."
This communing could be an overwhelming concrete experience. When in the ninth century B.C. the king of Babylon came into the presence of a cult statue of Shamash, "his heart rejoiced, and shining was his face." Moses did not merely encounter Yahweh, the God of Israel, he too talked and communed with him on Mount Sinai for twoscore days — but it was the corporeal, visual intensity of his bond with Yahweh that transfigured Moses' ain face when he came downwards from the mountain.
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People yearned for this divine contact. "My throat thirsts for yous, my mankind faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water," the psalmist cries. And Yahweh himself longed to be seen: "Seek my confront!" he called to his worshipers. "Come before his countenance!" cried the ritual singers. Looking at the beauty of God's face was the very purpose of the temple, and it was his face that would proceed to archway his worshipers.
Today we take it for granted that God has no body. But the psalmists had other views. "Praise Yahweh, for he is lovely looking!" cries one psalmist; another longed to live in the Jerusalem temple all the days of his life, "to behold the dazzler of Yahweh … your face, Yahweh, practise I seek."
Yahweh certainly had feet; they were thought to rest on a stool that placed him on a higher, more commanding level in which he embodied the order and hierarchy of the universe. But he also enjoyed taking a solitary evening walk in the Garden of Eden and afterward spent fourth dimension with the patriarchs Enoch, Noah and Abraham. Yahweh was an intensely physical being; it was his "strong paw" and "outstretched arm" that smashed the Egyptian army in the Body of water of Reeds. But his touch could too be gentle. When the psalmist "lifted up his hands to God," Yahweh responded past property out his own hands "all twenty-four hours long," similar a lover or a parent. After the rabbis would claim that when God prayed with them, he covered his head with a prayer shawl as they did, and dressed his arms in Torah texts.
Only the gods' bodies were of course superior to our own. In their ancient temples, their radiant luminosity was manifest in the polished gold, silver and bronze skin of their statues, which were thought to take been crafted in the celestial sphere and filled infidel worshipers with fright and awe. Yahweh too, the psalmist tells us, was "clothed with glory and splendor." When he marched through the world of men, his gleaming weapons eclipsed fifty-fifty the sun and moon: "His splendor covers the heavens, and the earth is total of his radiance." Rays come out "from his easily."
The prophet Isaiah was instructed to "hibernate in the dust" to protect himself from this terrifying radiance. After Jesus' disciples would have the same experience when he was transfigured before them: "His face shone like the sunday, and his dress became dazzling white." Simply above all, it was God's face that entranced his worshipers. The Hebrew Bible describes God as tob ("handsome") and na'im ("lovely looking"), which, with our more spiritualized notion of divinity, are now translated as "expert" and "gracious."
In 597 B.C., the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, descended upon the little kingdom of Judah and subjugated the region in three barbarous military campaigns. The young rex was deported with 8,000 exiles, including members of the purple family, the aristocracy, the military and skilled artisans. Ten years later, after another rebellion, the Babylonians destroyed Yahweh's temple, razed the city of Jerusalem to the ground and carried off 5,000 more deportees, leaving only the poorest people to remain in the devastated land. When a modest group of Judahites were finally permitted to return to their homeland in 539 B.C., they brought a very different religion back with them and Yahweh never fully recovered his body. Without the temple rites that had made him a living, breathing reality, he became the afar, spiritualized deity that nosotros know today.
This, Stavrakopoulou argues, was a tragedy. Yahweh, she complains, was transformed by Jewish philosophers such equally Maimonides into a timeless, changeless, immaterial deity, wholly unlike anything in the earthly realm, while Christians adult the incomprehensible conundrum of the Trinity: "Three in one and one in three!"
Instead, she believes, we should return to the ancient Israelite mythology. But this is not how religion works. At its best, it demands that, equally circumstances modify, we respond creatively and innovatively to the present. After the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70, the rabbis rediscovered the divine presence in a highly inventive report of Scripture. The medieval mysticism of the kabbalah depicted the inscrutable divine essence emerging successively in ten sephiroth ("stages"), each more perceptible than the last, in, every bit it were, a divine development. Later in the 18th century, Polish Hasidim would develop techniques of concentration that enabled them to get vividly aware of the divine presence, "as though it were flowing all around them and they were sitting in the middle of light" — an experience that fabricated them trip the light fantastic toe and sing.
This reminds u.s.a. that religious belief becomes a reality to us only when accompanied by the bodily gestures, intense mental concentration and evocative formalism of ritual. Because it imparts sacred knowledge, a myth is recounted in an emotive setting that sets it apart from mundane experience and brings it to life. Because they could no longer perform the impassioned rites of the Jerusalem temple, the traditionally vivid feel of Yahweh became opaque and afar to the Judean exiles in Babylonia. And the complex doctrine of Trinity devised by Greek theologians in the fourth century was not something to exist "believed" only was the result of a mental and concrete subject area that, accompanied by the rich music and anniversary of the liturgy, enabled Eastern Christians to glimpse the ineffable.
It is probably because virtually Western Christians have non been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains as obscure to them as it does to Stavrakopoulou, who longs for a divine face or hand to which she tin turn.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/books/review/god-francesca-stavrakopoulou.html
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