Our Hearts Fell to the Ground Book Review
Nonfiction
Piecing Together God's Body, From Head to Toe
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GOD
An Anatomy
Past Francesca Stavrakopoulou
"Immortal, invisible, God only wise / In light inaccessible hid from all optics" — 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 book, "God: An Anatomy," Francesca Stavrakopoulou digs into this dilemma; as corporeal creatures, she argues, nosotros must somehow reincarnate this arcane deity, see him as our ancestors did and bring him downward to earth. She then gain, in 21 chapters packed with knowledge and insight, to "anatomize" the divinity from caput to toe, starting with the "standing stones" that marked the footsteps of deities in the Late 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 up."
This communing could exist an overwhelming physical experience. When in the ninth century B.C. the rex of Babylon came into the presence of a cult statue of Shamash, "his centre rejoiced, and shining was his face." Moses did not only see Yahweh, the God of State of israel, he also talked and communed with him on Mount Sinai for 40 days — but it was the corporeal, visual intensity of his bond with Yahweh that transfigured Moses' own face up when he came downward from the mount.
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People yearned for this divine contact. "My throat thirsts for y'all, my flesh faints for yous, equally in a dry and weary land where there is no water," the psalmist cries. And Yahweh himself longed to be seen: "Seek my face up!" he called to his worshipers. "Come before his countenance!" cried the ritual singers. Looking at the dazzler of God's confront was the very purpose of the temple, and it was his face that would continue to entrance his worshipers.
Today we take it for granted that God has no trunk. Merely the psalmists had other views. "Praise Yahweh, for he is lovely looking!" cries ane psalmist; some other longed to live in the Jerusalem temple all the days of his life, "to behold the beauty of Yahweh … your face, Yahweh, exercise I seek."
Yahweh certainly had anxiety; they were thought to rest on a stool that placed him on a higher, more commanding level in which he embodied the guild and bureaucracy of the universe. Merely he also enjoyed taking a solitary evening walk in the Garden of Eden and later spent fourth dimension with the patriarchs Enoch, Noah and Abraham. Yahweh was an intensely physical beingness; information technology was his "strong mitt" and "outstretched arm" that smashed the Egyptian army in the Body of water of Reeds. But his touch could also be gentle. When the psalmist "lifted up his hands to God," Yahweh responded by holding out his own hands "all day long," like a lover or a parent. Later the rabbis would merits that when God prayed with them, he covered his head with a prayer shawl every bit they did, and dressed his artillery in Torah texts.
Just 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 pare of their statues, which were thought to have been crafted in the celestial sphere and filled pagan worshipers with fright and awe. Yahweh also, the psalmist tells the states, was "clothed with celebrity and splendor." When he marched through the world of men, his gleaming weapons eclipsed even the sun and moon: "His splendor covers the heavens, and the world is full of his radiance." Rays come up out "from his hands."
The prophet Isaiah was instructed to "hide in the dust" to protect himself from this terrifying radiance. Later Jesus' disciples would have the aforementioned experience when he was transfigured earlier them: "His confront shone similar the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white." But above all, it was God's face up that entranced his worshipers. The Hebrew Bible describes God as tob ("handsome") and na'im ("lovely looking"), which, with our more than spiritualized notion of divinity, are at present translated as "good" and "gracious."
In 597 B.C., the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, rex of Babylon, descended upon the piffling kingdom of Judah and subjugated the region in three vicious military campaigns. The young male monarch was deported with 8,000 exiles, including members of the royal family unit, the aristocracy, the war machine and skilled artisans. X years afterwards, afterwards another rebellion, the Babylonians destroyed Yahweh'south temple, razed the city of Jerusalem to the ground and carried off five,000 more deportees, leaving only the poorest people to remain in the devastated country. When a small-scale 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 fabricated him a living, animate reality, he became the distant, spiritualized deity that we know today.
This, Stavrakopoulou argues, was a tragedy. Yahweh, she complains, was transformed by Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides into a timeless, changeless, immaterial deity, wholly unlike anything in the earthly realm, while Christians adult the incomprehensible puzzler of the Trinity: "Three in ane and i in iii!"
Instead, she believes, we should render to the ancient Israelite mythology. But this is not how religion works. At its best, it demands that, as circumstances change, we respond creatively and innovatively to the nowadays. After the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70, the rabbis rediscovered the divine presence in a highly inventive study of Scripture. The medieval mysticism of the kabbalah depicted the inscrutable divine essence emerging successively in x sephiroth ("stages"), each more perceptible than the last, in, as information technology were, a divine evolution. Later in the 18th century, Shine Hasidim would develop techniques of concentration that enabled them to become vividly aware of the divine presence, "as though it were flowing all around them and they were sitting in the heart of calorie-free" — an experience that made them dance and sing.
This reminds usa that religious belief becomes a reality to us simply when accompanied by the bodily gestures, intense mental concentration and evocative formalism of ritual. Because it imparts sacred cognition, 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 experience of Yahweh became opaque and afar to the Judean exiles in Babylonia. And the circuitous doctrine of Trinity devised past Greek theologians in the fourth century was not something to be "believed" but was the outcome of a mental and concrete subject field that, accompanied by the rich music and anniversary of the liturgy, enabled Eastern Christians to glimpse the ineffable.
Information technology is probably because most Western Christians take not been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains as obscure to them every bit it does to Stavrakopoulou, who longs for a divine face up or hand to which she tin can plow.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/books/review/god-francesca-stavrakopoulou.html
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