rootseeker.org - ~~ Weekly Notes

Notes Lecture FOURTEEN

Heidegger - ‘Being” = ‘Wholly Other” , what makes all other existence possible - “Ex nihilo omne - qua ens” = from nothing came all, as ‘existence’ - Why are there ‘beings’, rather than nothing? - Describes the ‘thinking process’ as : a ‘waiting and ‘listening’ to Being.

Robinson - His Honest to God (1963) started an uproar!

Cupitt - Puts religious experience before theology.

Einstein - Had appreciation for mystical religion.

Hawking - Had no room for God in his cosmology - Asked: Did the universe need a creator? - The universe is governed by laws of nature, and created according to a blueprint we could someday learn to read - God and demons could not intervene in the running of the universe - And another question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

After-thought - Questions people ask from Religion : Is there a God? - How did the world/universe come into being? - Where answers can be found - The Socratic dialogue - No opposition between reason and the transcendent - Spiritual living is not an easy matter - The “Great” were quite at home in the backwoods between rationality and the transcendent - The ego-mind that seeks control can prevent the transcendent insight - What is needed! - It is often the recovery of practices and attitudes from way back - But the ‘ways’ are different! - ‘Revelation’ not an event that happened once in the distant past - It is an ongoing and creative process, without giving us infallable information - Our time is seeing a return to a god-perception that is less asserying, more open to ‘silence’ and ‘unknowing’ - it allows uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, without an irritable reaching after facts and reason - No dramatic ‘born-gain’ conversion, but a slow imperceptible transformation that finds expression in practice of compassion.

Overview - We looked at the god-conception from different perspectives during its development - From the beginning human beings repeatedly engaged in spiritual activity - It was not an activity connected with any sort of ‘religion’ - It was a ‘search’, a ‘want’ for god-connectedness : a way to enhance and fulfill their humanness - They wanted to transform themselves into a beautiful vessel filled with the sanctity that they were learning to see in life - They often failed - Buddha and Jesus simply revealed a ‘new potential in human nature’ : not something to ‘believe in’, but ‘to work at’ - As the Buddha ; ‘be awake’.

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Notes Lecture THIRTEEN

Atheism - Astute thinkers found the idea of God ‘wanting’.

Feuerbach - Published Essence of Chrisitanity , a theological statement and a revolutionary tract - ‘God an oppressive human construct’ - Humans revere and love in God nothing but their own being - He had no interest in saving an unnecessary God - Marx : Religion opium for the people - Dostoevsky protested God in the face of much innocent suffering - Freud pronounced God to be an illusion, so people could have a protective father - All signs of atheism.

Nietzsche - Story of the madman with the lighted lantern looking for God - “Where is God? - Where has God gone?” - “We have killed him : You and I” - Focus on the physical world made it impossible to take God seriously - The ‘Death of God’ - The Christian God becoming more and more incredible - All this cast a shadow over Europe.

Marx - Communist Manifesto - For him God did not exist - His aim was to alleviate human misery - We must not only interpret the world, we must change it.

Comte - presented an intellectual history of humanity - In the third, positivist phase there is no way back to theology - Only moving forward in the age of science.

Darwin - Origin of Species and The Descent of Man suggest the homo sapiens developed from the ape-family - Undermines the design-based theology, and repudiates central principles of the Enlightenment - Its impact.

G. The God of our time

The atheism of the Enlightenment rejected the man-made stuff of ‘icons’ and ‘idols’ - It is still leading to a new ‘faith’, to a new ‘knowingness’, an ‘awareness’ of God - Finds resistance in ‘tradition’ - But ‘change’ is needed - The development of the God-notion - A few opinions : Sartre, Camus, Freud, Rubenstein, Barth, Tillich.

Liberation theology - Can one believe and belong to a modern intellectual world? - Needed a new concept of God.

De Chardin - Saw the whole evolutionary struggle as a divine force propelling the universe from matter to spirit to God.

Williams/Whitehead - God’s unity with the world - God the ‘Great Companion”.

Rahner - God a supreme mystery, Jesus a decisive manifestation of what humanity can become.

Lonergan - Emphasizes the importance of ‘transcendence’ and ‘thought’, as opposed to ‘experience’ - We must transcendent ourselves ... indicating the presence of the ‘divine’ in the very nature of man’s inquiry.

Azad - (Pakistan) His reflection on the Koran.

Frithjof Shuon - (Swiss Sufi) “Oneness of Being” - Nothing exists but the Divine, the world itself is properly ‘divine’. (Kathy!)

Buber - Saw Judaism as a spiritual process - Religon=encounter with a personal God - No time for Torah - God is not a law-giver - Found the ‘divine sparks’ trapped in the wolrd of crucial symbolic significance.

Heschel - Saw midzvot as an action that fulfills God’s needs, rather than our own - Faith in God from ‘immediate apprehension’, not from ‘concepts’.

Robinson - His Honest to God (1963) started an uproar!

Cupitt - Puts religious experience before theology.

After-thought -

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Notes Lecture TWELVE

Toward Enlightenment

Wesley - Developed a new type of piety and notion of God : Religion of the heart - Abandon external proofs and discover God within the heart - Is a capacity for everybody - A sign of true mysticism, but not without danger.

Quakers - Believed : all can approach God directly - Discovering of the ‘Inner Light’ can achieve ‘salvation’.

The Besht - Also believed in the ‘sparks’, the ‘presence of God’ in all creation - He gave a new, mystical interpretation to the Torah - Dov Baer, his successor, his view on the vision of Ezekiel of the ‘human being’ on the throne - His teaching made humans become aware of their own transcendent dimension.

French Revolution - Enlightenment - Age of Reason

Newton - Reduced God to his own mechanical system - Tried to rid ‘Christianity of mystery’ - The universe as proof of God’s existence - His conflict with the ‘divinity of Christ’, and his view on the Trinity - Blotting out ‘mystery’ became for him an obsession.

Voltaire - The “Embodiment of the Enlightenment movement” - “If God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him” - His problem was with the ‘doctrines about God’.

Diderot - Did not care if God existed or not - Monotheists about God and Diderot’s reaction : ‘there was nothing out there’ - Hence the triumphant cry of later philosophers : “God is dead”. [which God?]

Rousseau - Knowledge had become ‘intellectual’ - we should listen to the ‘heart’ = the ‘attitude of silent waiting’ - Learn to listen to hear the ‘timid voice of nature’, as a correction to the aggressive reasoning of the philosophers - Rousseau and Christianity - His God transcended the ‘old doctrines’ - He could be discovered by kenosis, compassion, humble contemplation of the majesty of nature.

Meslier - A priest - declared ‘Christianity a hoax’ - Religion is a ‘device to subdue the masses’ - Gospels and their internal contradiction - He believed : ‘even our most cherished beliefs must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny’ - “I believe in God, but I live very well with the atheist”.

Holbach - A ‘passionate anti-theist’ - Wanted to replace religion with science - His view on ‘religion’, and the ‘God of the believers’.

Deism - A trend in the philosophy of religion - Reason and observation of the natural world can (without reason) determine : the universe is a creation and has a creator - ‘Religion of reason’ had an ‘impersonal God’ to be discovered by man’s own effort - Benjamin Franklin & Thomas Jefferson - Where Voltaire fits in - Deism’s harmful reactions and positive aspects - Rejection of doctrines, belief in a Supreme Being.

Hume - The human can achieve objective knowledge and absolute certainty - But all knowledge is ‘subjective’ - Skeptic toward ‘proofs of God’ - Science could give no information about God - But, this invalidated the entire scientific enterprise - Different objections.

Reactions against Enlightenment - The trend was: away from God - Being an ‘atheist’ had become a term of ‘pride’ - Atheism associated with the hope for a more just and equal world.

Kant - Regarded ‘enlightenment’ as a liberating movement - He agreed : it is natural for a human being to have ideas that exceed the grasp of his mind.

Schleiermacher - Sought a ‘divine presence’ in the mind of man - God to be found in the depths of human nature - For him : the essence of religion : the ‘feeling of absolute dependence on the divine’ - Was not to be : an ‘abject servility’ to a distant, externalized God - The life we received : ‘was God’, as the source and ‘whence’ of our being.

Hegel - Was committed to ‘objective knowledge’ - Humans have thoughts and aspirations that exceed their rational grasp - His philosophical vision recalls the Jewish Kabbalah - Only when human beings deny the alienating idea of a separate, externalized God, would they discover the ‘divinity’ inherent in their very nature - Religion is a ‘phase’ human beings leave behind once they progressed toward their ultimate fulfillment - Hegal and his confusing stand on Judaism.

Atheism - Astute thinkers found the idea of God ‘wanting’.

Marx - Communist Manifesto - For him God did not exist - His aim was to alleviate human misery - We must not only interpret the world, we must change it.

Comte -

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Notes Lecture ELEVEN

More notes on Christian God-concept - Duns Scotus Erigena - The schism of 1054 - Anselm - Abelard vs Bernard of Clervaux - Aquinas, some blending of philosophy and mysticism - Bonaventure - Both believed: ‘you don’t have to convince yourself that God exists, before you could have a mystical experience of God’ - Duns Scotus criticized Aquinas - Aquinas and the Church - An interesting note! - All this started a rift between theology and spirituality that persisted to present day - Reactions of New Spirituality - Richard Rolle - Late scholastic theologians and ‘new mysticism’ - The danger of ‘elevated feelings’ - Julian of Norwich and her grasp of the ‘divine unknowable’ - “Cloud of the Unknowing’ and its ‘cloud of forgetting’.

D The Modern God - Modern period started with Columbus’ discoveries - Complex process at work in the 16^th c. in Europe - Innovations led to : Renaissance, Reformation and Scientific revolution.

Erasmus - Set the scriptures in elegant Latin - Important for the Reformers - Humanists used them to return to the ‘sources’ - Rejection of recent past seemed essential.

Reformation in: religion and science -

Luther , a spokesman of the ‘current trend’ - Justification by ‘faith alone’ - More dependence of the ‘word’, than on theology.

Copernicus - Proposed a ‘sun-centered universe’ - Luther called him a ‘fool’.

Bruno - Was fascinated by the ancient ‘hermetic (gnostic) religion of Egypt - His thinking on access to the ‘divine life behind the veil of physical reality’.

Gallileo - Described the universe as a ‘cosmic mechanism ruled by mathematical laws’ - Conflict between science and religion - Modernity was overtaking the more open, liberal, and healthy skeptical spirit of the Renaissance.

Bacon - Declared : there could be no conflict between science and religion - Had as consequence : ‘dogmatism’ and ‘suspicion’ - In theology the ‘delight-in-unknowing’ was replaced by a strident lust for ‘certainty’ and a ‘harsh dogmatic intolerance’ - The spirituality of silence gave way to long-winded debate - refusal to define, a word that literally means ‘to set limits’, - was being superseded by ‘aggressive definitions’ of ‘ineffable dogma’. - Faith started to be identified with ‘belief-in-man-made-opinions’, and that would, eventually make faith itself difficult to maintain.

In Judaism - The first modern Western atheists were Jews.

Spinoza - Teacher of universal inter-dependence - Fighter for freedom of thought - Deeply critical of ‘pretension of Scripture’ and sectarian religion.

Uriel da Costa - Victim of oppressive, crucial Portuguese Christianity - In a treatise he attacked the Torah, because he believed only in human reason and laws of nature - Like Spinoza he was excommunicated by the Rabbis.

Toward Enlightenment - The role and nature of God would be affected by a different kind of society and ideal of mankind - The cult of secularism claimed ‘independence of God’, leading to an intellectual ‘enlightenment’, and political and social revolutions - An intellectual saw him/her self less as a conserver of tradition, but more as a ‘pioneer’ - Bringing traditional Christian explanations ‘up-to-date’.

Pascal - Turned from Catholicism to Jansenism - Made him see the world bleak and empty of the divine - Faith is ‘gamble’ - a leap in the dark and an experience that brings a moral enlightenment - Belief in God is a ‘personal choice’.

Descartes - Had confidence that the mind could discover God - ‘Reason alone’ can persuade to accept the truths of religion and morality - No time for ‘wonder’ = primitive state of mind - How he came to the statement : “I think, therefore I am” - Led to the ‘profound irreligious’ : God is a clear idea in the mind.

Reimarus - Wrote a critical ‘Life of Jesus’ - Set in motion the ‘quest’ for the historical Jesus - As a consequence he rejected Anselm’s atonement theory - As a man of his time ‘Reason’ was for him the answer.

Milton - Was disturbed by the Church’s intolerance - He made himself a ‘religious creed’.

Kant - Enlightenment was for him : man’s exodus from self-imposed reliance upon external authority - ‘Practical reason’ was the solution - Not opposed to the idea of God - Humanity had the natural tendency to transgress ‘limits’, and seek a principle of unity - God as a ‘convenience’ - Kant denied he was an atheist.

Quakers

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Notes Lecture TEN

Plato on Socrates - Plato’s teaching - His doctrine of the “Forms’ - The allegory of ‘the cave’, pointing to the un-enlightened condition of man - The meaning of ‘the Good’ - Aristotle’s ‘down to earth’ philosophy - His meaning of ‘Theoria’ - Connection with the ‘divine’ - God as the ‘Unmoved Mover’ - Though ‘down to earth’, his philosophy involved a spiritual transformation - After-thought.

Impact of Hellenism on Jewish God-concept - Some Jews were hostile to Hellenism, others were inspired by it - Books of Proverbs and Wisdom with their traces of Hellenism.

Philo - a Jewish Platonist - His view on ‘God’ : ousia, essence and energeiai , energies.

Muslim Falsafah philosophy - 9^th c. - Proposed: a rational life according to the laws of the cosmos - For the followers of this philosophy: rationalism was the most advanced form of religion - They had a higher ‘God-notion’ than the God revealed in Scripture - Some positive aspects of this philosophy.

Sufism - Its knowledge of God not rational or metaphysical, but an intuitive experience - Traces of this in the Koran and the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.

Impact on Judaism - Rabbi Maimonides saw Falsafah as the most advanced form of religious knowledge - His creed of 13 Articles - an innovation in Judaism, not entirely accepted - Creed can lead to ‘dogmatism’.

Christian God of the Crusaders - Soldiers saints of more importance than God - God of the Crusaders had a lot in common with the primitive tribal deity of early Jewish history - Slaughter of Jews and Muslims while conquering Jerusalem - ‘Compassion’ was lost.

D The Modern God -

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Notes Lecture NINE

General observations - From an ‘experienced’ God to a ‘God in action’ - God relates from then on rather ‘in dialogue’, rather than in ‘silent contemplation’ - Not easy for Eastern mentality - Note! : Christianity came from the East - Surge of mysticism in Judaism - Found later expression in the Kabbalah.

Kabbalah - Attempted to penetrate the inner life of God and human consciousness - Book of Zohar: a mystical novel.

Mysticism in Islam - It had its own distinctive mystical tradition in the Sufis (swf=wool) - For the Sufis Jesus was the prophet of interior life - Sufis identified God mysteriously with the inmost self - Systematic control of the ego led to the Ineffable Reality - Rumi and his teachings.

Western mysticism - Christian doctrine slowed down the development of mysticism - 14^th c. brought and explosion: Eckhart, Gertrude, Cloud of the Unknown, Julian of Norwich - They experienced what the Greeks, Sufis and Kabbalists had: God can only be know by mystical experience - Naming ‘God’ - ‘Ground of being’ - Opposition of the Church to mysticism.

E. God of the Philosophers and Scientist - New view on the cosmos by some Greek philosophers, the Naturalists - They accepted an ‘underlying order’ that governed the universe by ‘intelligible laws’ - Physical elements evolved according to inherent natural principles - Philosophy rooted in a search for transcendence - Led to ‘mystery cults’: ‘no life without death’ - Aristotle’s view on this.

Socrates - Sought not merely to ‘inform’, but to ‘form the minds’ - Wisdom was about ‘insight’ - The concentration on the physical of the naturalists left so much out - Meditation of Socrates not a kind of yoga, but a form of conversation with oneself - Only possible if the ‘self’ was authentic - Socrates’ mission: to awaken genuine self-knowledge - ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’! - Socrates a ‘midwife’ helping questioners to experience the ‘new self’ -

Impact of Hellenism on Jewish God-concept -

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Notes Lecture EIGHT

God of Islam - Heschel compares God of Islam with the God of Israel - Some details about the origin of Islam - How Islam sees God - The ‘al-Lah’ of the Koran - Names of God in Koran - An ‘immanent presence’ - Each Muslim responsible before God for his/her own fate - “Silence’ appropriate form for ‘talking about God’.

God of the mystics - Development of the notion : ‘creation out of nothing’ - The ‘Chain of being’ presupposed some ‘emanation from the divine’.

Mysticism in antiquity - Started with: ‘Various gods, manifestation of one divine Absolute’ - Switch from ‘external rituals’ to ‘inward realization of divine awareness’ - Hinduism, Buddhism.

In the Hebrew Bible - Best presentation of God was: ‘Presence’ - Ezekiel during the Exile : God would ‘tent’ with his People - Jeremiah’s message.

Personal God in monotheism - Personal God represents: ‘religion at its best’ - Sometimes it made God ‘too human’ - In Christianity - In the mystical tradition: God transcends the ‘personal category’ - Historical monotheism was originally ‘not mystical’.

Early Christianity - turmoil + unity - In its beginnings : not organized - Freedom of expression ‘one of the gifts of the Spirit’ - Became a form of mysticism - Constantine and his desire for unity in ‘empire and church’ - Nicea Council : God Creator, Trinity - ‘Unity’ superficial for quite a while - Freedom of thinking made acceptance of a decree difficult.

Knowledge an awareness - Early influence of Hellenism on Christianity - ‘Spark’ of the divine - Transcendent ideal of wisdom - One could ascend to the ‘Good’, on one’s own power - Plotinus : Universe an ‘overflowing of God’s very being’ - Ideas that found expression in ‘Gnosticism’ - Further details - For the Greek Fathers : ‘knowing God was experiencing him’ .

Kabbalah - Attempted to penetrate the inner life of God and human consciousness - Book of Zohar: a mystical novel.

Western mysticism -

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Notes Lecture SEVEN

Cappadoceans - Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazian - famous Eastern theologians who were deeply spiritual - Only religous experience could provide the key to the problem of God - For Basil ‘dogma’ meant: opinion, belief (what seems good: dokein ) - Christians of the West ‘talk’ about God - In the East ‘good theology’ was ‘silent’ - Gregory of Nyssa: We cannot see God ‘intellectually’, but if we let ourselves be enveloped ‘in the cloud’ we feel his ‘presence’.

Trinity - From a notion about God to: the Trinity - Understanding the terms: ousia = essence, and hypostates = expressions, manifestations - The use of those terms for: Father, Son, & Spirit - How the Cappadoceans understood those terms and their application - Trinity for them not to be seen as a ‘literal fact’, but as a paradigm that corresponds to real facts in the hidden life of God - Less dogmatic, and more spiritual than the doctrine declared by the Council.

Augustine - 354-430 - Defined the Trinity for the Western Church - Some details about his life - God for Augustine not an ‘objective reality’, but a ‘spiritual presence’ - His teachings were tainted by a strong awareness of his sinfulness: original sin - Church of Rome under the influence of fear for the barbaric tribes’

Ps-Denys - around 600 - Who was he? - His ‘insights into the Divine’ of profound influence on nearly all Western theologians - He saw ‘creation’ as an ‘ecstacy’, an eruption of goodness - Importance of ‘silence’ for ‘knowing’ God - How Denys looked at God - His spiritual exercise in three phases leads to: a ‘breakdown in speech’, making people strangers to their former way of thinking and speaking.

God a strain in the West - Gregory the Great versus Augustine - God a strain in the West in comparison with the Eastern experiences: God is accessible - In the West it is ‘doctrine’, in the East it is ‘awareness’.

God of Islam - Heschel compares God of Islam with the God of Israel - Some details about the origin of Islam - How Islam sees God - The ‘al-Lah’ of the Koran -

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Notes Lecture SIX

Plotinus - Having absorbed the main currents of Greek speculation, he transmitted it in a form that continues its influence till or days - ‘Understanding the self’ was important to him - Withdraw to the ‘within’, to re-fashion the ‘self’ ! - For that ‘purification, ‘letting go’, would be required - Result: not an ascend to a ‘reality outside’, but a descend to the deepest recesses of the ‘self’ - Plotinus called the ‘ultimate Reality’ the ‘One’ - No description possible - It simply “was” - How one gets perception of the ‘divine’.

Plotinus’ ‘triad’ of divinity - Triad: ‘One’, ‘Mind’, ‘Soul’ - This ‘trinity of One’ not a ‘god-out-there’ - The ‘divine’ was seen as the ‘whole of existence’ - We exist as an ‘emanation’ of the ‘One’ - What prevents the ‘return’ to the One - Plotinus’ philosophy not a ‘logical process’, but a ‘spiritual quest’ - For him his god not an ‘alien object’, but ‘our best self’ - For several centuries Christian thinkers, in trying to explain their own religious experiences, turned to philosophies around - When humans contemplate the ‘absolute’, they have very similar ideas and experiences.

Tertullian - Leading theologian of the Latin/Roman Church - He reacted against Marcion

Celsus - His reactions were against weaknesses in Christian thinking - Why Christian belief was seen by the Romans as ‘atheism’ - The Christians were failing to give the Roman traditional gods their due.

Shaping of the Christian God - The confusion caused by Arius from Alexandria, Egypt - Claimed: Jesus not ‘divine by nature’ - His view not seen simply as a ‘theological variant’ - It was a vital question about God - Reaction of emperor Constantine - Arius was a ‘heretic’, a person who made the ‘choice’ to think for himself - Arius stood (with others) also for creation ex nihilo, out of nothing - Entirely a new idea - Consequence: there was no longer a ‘great chain of being’ emanating from God - Humans could not ‘ascend the chain of being’ to God - Only God could ensure ‘eternal salvation’ - Christ had enabled humans to cross ‘the gulf’ that separated God from humanity - On ‘which side of the great divide’ was Christ? - It led to the doctrine of ‘salvation by Christ’ death on the cross”.

Athanasius - Saw humanity as ‘inherently fragile’ - Humans came from ‘nothing’ and had fallen back to nothing when they sinned - Jesus as a vulnerable creature, not able to save mankind - But Jesus was the Logos, made ‘flesh’ to give us life - Jesus as Logos must be of the same nature as the Father - Athanasius: The Word/Logos became man, so we could become divine - He managed to impose his theology on the delegates of the council of Nicea - Creation ‘ex nihilo’ also became a doctrine.

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Notes Lecture FIVE

‘P’ - re-interpretation - ‘P’ would show them ‘how’ - Before: the ‘Exodus’ was ‘the gift of Torah’ - now: ‘the divine Presence in the Tent of Meeting’ - God a ‘tent dweller’ - Exile would offer special insight in the nature of their God - Holiness ethics - Purity vs impurity (Jesus) - Ezra’s influence - Nehemiah made Judaism ‘a religion of the Book’.

Hebrew prophets and the notion of God - God often experienced in some form of extremity - Prophets experienced a more authentic vision of God - Pathos notion - ‘God needs man’ (Heschel) - Prophetic message often began with ‘doom’, but eneded with ‘hope’ - For the prophets, history was the playing out of power ‘placed by God in human hands’.

OT - God - NT - ‘God of anger’ concept moved from OT into NT - Marcion and his ‘good God’ - ‘Anger of God’ in the Bble not to be taken literally - God’s anger had a’corrective purpose’ - Harnack on Marcion.

D The Christian God - From the Jewish biblical concept to the ‘trinitary doctrine’ of Christendom - Influence of Greek thinking.

Followers of Jesus prayed like Jews - Change came when they were rejected from the synagogue - To the Romans Christians were a branch of Judaism - When they no longer were members of the synagogue Romans considered them a ‘religion of fanatics’ - They became a ‘threat’ when they claimed ‘their to be the only God - Signs of Greek philosophy in Christian thinking.

Justin - was restless, in search for meaning - in need for more than pagan ritual - He found his solution in the ‘blossoming Christianity’ - Following Plato he maintained there was only one God - By the end of the 2^nd c. cultivated pagans began to be converted to Christianity.

Clement - was one of them - He had no doubt the Yahweh and the God of the Greek philosophers were ‘one and the same’ - Clement’s God was characterized by apatheia, being not able to ‘suffer’ or ‘change’ - Christians should imitate the ‘serenity of God ,,, becoming so aware of the ‘vast quietness within’, t.i., image of God inscribed in each being - Yet, Clement also believed Jesus was God.

Origen - developed a form of Christian Platonism, including a continuity of God with the world - His view on the divinity of Jesus did not conform to later doctrine - We are not saved by the death of Christ, but ascend to God ‘under our own steam’ - In those days people could think for themselves without being bound by doctrine.

Plotinus - Having absorbed the main currents of Greek speculation, he transmitted it in a form that continues its influence till or days - ‘Understanding the self’ was important to him - Withdraw to the ‘within’, to re-fashion the ‘self’ ! - For that ‘purification, ‘letting go’, would be required - Result: not an ascend to a ‘reality outside’, but a descend to the deepest recesses of the ‘self’ -

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Notes Lecture FOUR

Aristotle - ‘Initiates’ in various mystery religions not required to ‘learn’, but to ‘experience’ - A symbolic, mythical, ritual presentation of the unbearable events of daily life can be redeemed and transformed - God the ‘unmoved Mover’ - The new ideas of the Axial Age contained a ‘transcendent element’ crucial to the development of all into ‘full human beings’.

Their ‘religion’ not a ‘belief ’ - Becoming aware of the Divine not a ‘form of belief’, nor an abstract conceptual activity - It was a ‘practice’ - About ‘spiritual beings’ - Being spiritual, seeking connection with the deity/ies, not what they ‘thought about’, but what they ‘did’ - A practical discipline that teaches new capacities of mind and heart - Seen as a ‘knack’ by constant practicing - It will discover a transcendent dimension of life, not ‘out there’, but identical with the ‘deepest level of our own being’ - The ‘delight of the Unknown’.

B God concept in monotheisms

Hebrew religion as basis - creation story - Eden the land of delight - Creation of Adam and Eve - The fruit from the ‘tree of knowledge’ - Purpose of ‘myth’ to help us contemplate the human predicament.

Enuman Elish - From Babylon - It’s impact on Jewish monotheism - Temple - It’s rites -

J /E epics - No single orthodox message about God in Hebrew writings - J + E traditions not ‘sacred’ - Some more details how they looked at ‘their God’ - For Abraham God was like the local high-god, El - Israel and pagan gods - God in creation story and following : ‘benign creator’ & ‘crucial destroyer’ - Offering of Isaac - Idolatry in Israel - Reformation coming

‘D’ - ‘Deuteronomistic twist’ - Assyria terrorized N.Kingdom for 200 yrs - Deportation - Young king Josiah 649 brought change - Exclusive worship of Yahweh (D) - Made God in their own image: National God - Blinded them for the practical realities: the Babylonians - Exile to Babylon 597 - Destruction of the Temple 586 - But their God had chosen to leave Jerusalem and take up residence with the exiles.

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Lecture THREE Notes

Note on J E D P traditions - J and E found in Gn and Ex - J: God called ‘Jaweh’ - E: God called ‘Elohim’ - In the 7^th c. D, author of Deuteronomy, used the old Exodus myth for the fearful theology of ‘election’ - Divine election of the Chosen People has often inspired a narrow tribal theology in Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism - P: priestly interpretation started during the Babylonian Exile - Having lost temple and worship cult, how could Israel worship their God? - Prophets told them: Yahweh would ‘tent’ with them.

Parallel development in Indian religion - In 8^th c. changes showed the old Vedic religion no longer relevant - Primitive ideas surfaced - Growing interest in karma : one’s destiny is determined by one’s actions - Don’t blame the gods! - Gods were seen more as symbols of a single ‘transcendent Reality’ - Instead of Vedic ‘’religion of rites‘

the old Indian practice of yoga took over - Helped to find the inner meaning of the external rites - People were seeking an inward realization of ‘divine awareness’ - It is the “great religious insight of the Indian philosophy”.

Upanishads - It’s concept of the ‘divine’ : “The inner meaning of all existence” - the hidden ground of all being - This ‘Divine’, Brahman, was mostly ‘impersonal - Does not speak to mankind - The purpose of yoga - Leading to the experience of ‘the holy power’ as a ‘dimension of self’ - Brahman pervades the world, and as Atman is found eternally within each one of us - Only when we go beyond the self, the ‘divine’ can be known beyond thought - One cannot imagine that it can be attained ‘by thought’ - It cannot be explained rationally any more than a piece of music or a poem - All this is a ‘constant theme’ in the history of God.

C The God of the early philosophers - The Greeks marveled how ‘everything could come from nothing’ - Natural philosophers believed there had to be a ‘certain basic substance’ - as a ‘hidden cause of all changes - They wanted to understand the process, making themselves free from religion and mythic thinking - They became the forerunners of later ‘science’.

Plato - The humans soul is a ‘fallen, polluted deity’, incarcerated in the body - He accepted a ‘divine, unchanging reality’ - The soul could regain its divine status - Doctrine of eternal ‘forms’ - Highest is ‘the Good’ - Plato encased the ancient myth of the archetypes into a philosophical form - The divine world is static, changeless : ‘what has true identity remains the same - Had an immense influence on Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Plato’s mystical aspect - Divine forms not realities, could be discovered ‘within the self’ - We see ‘thinking’ as something we ‘do’ - Plato sow it as something that happens to the mind - An apprehension of something we had always known, but forgotten - An intuitive grasp of the eternal reality within us - It is a notion that greatly influenced the mystics of the monotheistic religions.

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Lecture TWO Notes

God notion in the Axial Age - The sages were convinced that there was an absolute reality that transcended the confusions of this world: God, Nibbana, the Tao, brahman - and they sought to integrate it within the conditions of daily life - Change was in the air from 800-200 bce - It was crucial and formative for the god-conception - Change was based on altering of economic and social conditions - The different applications: China, India, Greece - Further gradual change to seeing the ‘gods’ and manifestations of ‘one divine Absolute’.

Babylon’s impact on Israel - The Babylonian “Enuma Elish” story of victory of the gods over chaos - Leading to ‘creator concept’ - The story - ‘Emanation’ notion - How the story saw the ‘creation of man’ of the substance of a god - Further details of the story and its traces in the Bible.

God of Israel - Three waves of settlement in Canaan : Abraham, Jacob, Hebrews returning from Egypt - The ‘God of Moses’ - Who is this Yahweh? - ‘El’ - God of Mnt. Moriah: offering of Isaac - The history of the ‘violent God’ - ‘Election’ - ‘God of our Fathers’ - ‘El Shaddai’ - Moses: What is your name? - Meaning of ‘Ehyeh asher ehyeh’.

Monotheism in Israel - In the beginning in a polytheistic setting - cf 10 comandments: ‘no strange gods before me’ - Yahweh was Israel’s choice, its ‘elohim’ - god of gods - The ‘Yahweh cult’ still an expression of pagan cult - f.ex. Solomon’s temple - Former Canaanite shrines - Ahab and Jezabel - Eight c. start of the J and E traditions.

Upanishads -

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L 1 Notes - ‘Even God'

Preamble - Course is about the ‘human struggle of finding and understanding the Divine’ - It is found in the developing structure of god-notion - Human experience of transcendence was somewhere a fact of life - So: history of God is reflected in the history of man’s concept of God.

Introduction - Background of the course - ‘First Axial Age’ course - as did others - has touched on the beginning of religion - a constant tendency of the human to be aware of the Life Force - It became crystallized in monotheistic religions - and critically viewed by philosophies.

A Time period of the Unknown God - Started with the “homo sapiens” - From the start the awareness of the divine was vague

The Caves - Paintings and engravings (17,000 yrs old) express an intensely appreciation of the ‘nature world’ - Giving a hint of experiences of the divine behind it - Description of the findings in the caves - Hunters feeling deep sympathy for their prey - These ancient forms of religion see in every single person/object a replica of a reality in a sacred world - Divine power seen in ancient world as a ‘basic energy’ that supports and animates everything (‘Being’-Heidegger) - It shows its power in endless renewal - This mysterious essence of life bounds all things together on earth and in the cosmos.

Homo religiosus - t.i., that ‘searching spiritual being’ - Creating gods or a god is something human beings have been doing - But ‘concepts’ came and went - In general ancient world people believed that only by participating in the ‘divine life’ they would be truly human - It was not just an ‘idea’, but rather a ‘prototype of human existence’ - The sense of the ‘numinous’, the divine, was basic to their spiritual experience - How the ‘sense’ was expressed - Symbolic stories, cave paintings and carvings, were all attempts to express their ‘wonder’, and to link the ‘omnipresent mystery’ to their own lives.

God notion in the Axial Age - The sages were convinced that there was an absolute reality that transcended the confusions of this world: God, Nibbana, the Tao, brahman - and they sought to integrate it within the conditions of daily life - Change was in the air from 800-200 bce - It was crucial and formative for the god-conception -