Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Mystical Perspectives on the Love of God

S. Hidden

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137443311
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137443328
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

A collection of essays in which the possibilities of a deeper dialogue, by means of the contemplative traditions of the Abrahamic Faiths is explored. The book expounds an ageless, profound means of overcoming religious hatred and violence and awakening the beauty of unity in diversity.

Chapter 1

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Between Task and Gift: Jews, Christians, Muslims, and a Spirituality of Dialogue

Michael Barnes

The last three popes have all published books that have touched upon interreligious, and more specifically Jewish-Christian, relations. In a series of interviews John Paul II speaks about his friendship with a young Jew from Wadowice.¹ In his lengthy meditation on the life and teaching of Jesus Benedict XVI writes appreciatively of his engagement with the work of Rabbi Jacob Neusner.² And in On Heaven and Earth, a book published soon after his election, Pope Francis talks with Rabbi Abraham Skorka about subjects as diverse as the nature of God, the Holocaust, and the future of religion. In all three books the personal dimension of their writing, especially on a topic that so often encourages polemic rather than openness, somehow manages to catch the public imagination.

On Heaven and Earth in particular is nothing if not a witness to what becomes possible when friendship and integrity are allowed to flourish. Pope Francis says that with Rabbi Skorka “I never had to leave my Catholic identity behind, just as he didn’t have to ignore his Jewish identity. Our challenge was to proceed with respect and affection, trying to be above reproach as we walked in the presence of God.”³ This theme of the God who becomes present to human beings by inviting them into the depths of a loving relationship runs through the book. In the first conversation, after quoting from the final words of Job—“By hearsay I had heard of you, but now my eye has seen you” (Job 42.5)—the pope comments: “What I tell people is not to know God only by hearing. The Living God is He that you may see with your eyes within your heart.”⁴

An exhortation to enter deep into the heart where God dwells serves as a suitable preface to the present book that is dedicated to the love of God in the three interrelated religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But that is not why I begin here. This is the Ignatian spirituality of a Jesuit pope in dialogue with the wisdom of Talmud. Throughout On Heaven and Earth the conversations move between different poles in unexpected ways. Both have in common a deep desire to know and to love the things that are of God—a learning that has its roots in liturgy and in learning. To that extent what the pope and the rabbi give us is typical of interreligious dialogue at its best—echoes and resonances reflected back as persons of faith respond to each other. In the first chapter it seems as if the conversation is about to take off into a discussion of the realms of interiority and mystical states. Very quickly, however, it mixes the theological and the intensely practical, an exchange about the interaction “between task and gift.” Rabbi Skorka says that “in Judaism God is honoured by our compliance with the precepts that he revealed.”⁵ Pope Francis agrees: creation is a gift from God, and human beings are called to work freely and generously for the sake of their world. The problem, he says, is that we so easily fall into the “Babel syndrome,” the arrogance that sees everything we achieve as the fruit of our own labor. This leads Skorka to introduce a Talmudic interpretation of the episode. The one who builds the tower is a tyrant who holds so tight a grip on power that the people may only speak one language—his. The tower is thus symbolic of human pretension—to presume that one’s own efforts bring one close to God. Language in these terms is despotic not universal: an alien imposition that punishes and oppresses, not a gift that overcomes violence and communicates without hindrance. The ensuing conversations are nothing if not a witness to the latter and to the responsibility that God’s own Word awakens in human hearts.

They are also a record of how far the dialogue between Catholic Christians and the Jewish people have moved since the dark days of the Shoah. As examples of interreligious dialogue the writings of recent popes are part of the common currency of formal and informal discussions that touch upon some fairly intractable historical and cultural currents, from the rise of the scientific intellectual paradigm to liberation movements of all kinds. I shall focus on one of these—the politically contentious issue of migration—in what follows. I begin, however, with dialogue as an exercise in learning together about what are arguably topics of the deepest concern—mysticism and interiority, the Word and the love of God, contemplation and action. All are developed in more detail in further chapters of this book, as authors focus on particular themes that arise from the encounter between the three “religions of the Book.” Here I am concerned with a question that is implicit in them all—a question that will always arise when virtues of openness and honesty meet the claims of truth. What can Christians and Jews and Muslims learn for their own faith from the experience of a dialogue that seeks, at its best, to face them with something new, strange, and unexpected?

Pope Francis and Rabbi Skorka share many of the deepest insights of the Judeo-Christian tradition—not least the prophetic sensibility that is concerned with justice. If human language is indeed the pure gift that brings true freedom, then there can be no end to the wisdom it opens up and the practical demands it makes. That ideal underpins any coherent spirituality of dialogue—understanding that slippery concept through Raimon Panikkar’s evocative description as a way of “handling the human condition . . . [which] represents man’s basic attitude vis-à-vis his ultimate end.”⁶ But dialogue, as much as any other expression of what it means to be human, needs to take note of the baneful reality of the “Babel syndrome.” However, we account for human religiousness and seek to describe its many forms as it does not exist in some historical and cultural vacuum. “The religions” are not abstract constructions; they have been formed by centuries of intermingling and sometimes violent upheavals that even the most high-minded of meetings often fail to recognize. Conceptual clarity in plotting a way forward is, of course, essential in any exercise of cross-cultural understanding. All too easily, however, the “problem” is identified as ignorance and misunderstanding when it often arises, more subtly, from the suppression of “the other,” both in the stranger who appears in so many forms and in ourselves. The rhetoric of liberal tolerance and well-meaning exhortations to practice global ethics only scratch the surface, and may turn out to be oppressive. Skorka’s point is that difference becomes universal only through God’s power, and in God’s good time. Talmudic commentary can be described as just such an exercise in allowing divine wisdom to percolate into the minutiae of human affairs. Or, putting it in more Ignatian terms, God is to be discerned in the ordinariness of the everyday. That applies above all to the interpersonal exchange that gives dialogue its energy and capacity to change. Whatever the level—whether in terms of theological exchange or common life—such a dialogue is more than a task to be done; it is first and foremost a moment of grace.

That idea is what holds the following reflections together. In sketching out the terms of a “spirituality of dialogue” I begin in the middle of praxis, with an astute political analysis of the fraught topic of multiculturalism from another rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. I will then bring his ideas about “the task” into dialogue with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, the great Jewish “philosopher of the other.” Levinas has some hard-hitting things to say about Christianity but for that very reason he points us in the direction of a “spirituality of dialogue” that can extend the inner logic of the Jewish-Christian relationship to a fruitful engagement with Islam, the third of the three “Abrahamic religions.”⁷ That term can be problematic, suggesting a monolithic continuity that elides difference and specificity; it raises serious questions not just about the identity of Abraham in the three traditions but, more awkwardly, about a history of interaction that is too complex to be dealt with here. Nevertheless, Islam cannot be understood without some reference back to the prophetic experience that is central to the identity of Israel. While care needs to be taken not to elide them into some generic “monotheism,” all three traditions take their rise to revert to Pope Francis’s words that form the title of this article, “between task and gift.”

The Task—Making Space for the Stranger

With the aid of Jonathan Sacks let us turn to one extremely topical task for interreligious relations. Sacks sketches out the patterns of engagement between the majority culture and the growing number of minority immigrant communities in terms of three little “parables.”⁸ A hundred strangers wander around the countryside looking for somewhere to stay. The first place they come to is a large country house where the lord of the manor invites them to use the empty rooms for which he has no occupants: “You are my guests; stay as long as you like.” The second place is a hotel in the middle of a big city. The travelers unpack, settle in, and enjoy the facilities the hotel has to offer—as long, of course, as they have the means to pay. The third place is a town where the mayor welcomes them with a gracious speech explaining that they have no houses or dwellings to spare—but they do have land. “Come and stay with us and we’ll build the houses you need together.”

Sacks calls these three parables—country house, hotel, and home—“three ways of thinking about society and identity.” The first and second have severe limitations while the third opens up new possibilities. In the first people are always guests with no sense of ownership and belonging. With the second, differences of identity are acknowledged; people are free to come and go but there are never the means to allow them any more than a temporary commitment. The third recognizes that while the differences between people are enormously significant, that in itself does not prevent them from working together. Indeed it may well motivate them to overcome their differences and make common cause.

The three parables tell the story of the British experience of a pluralist, globalized, and multicultural world. Multiculturalism was born, says Sacks, in the 1970s as fact; then it became value—and government policy. As society became more diverse, as old structures of class and religion broke down and immigrant communities changed the feel of our inner cities, multiple identities came to be honored and celebrated. That, says Sacks, is the good news. The bad is that we were left with “too little to bind us together as a society in pursuit of the common good.”⁹ You can live in a hotel but you cannot belong there; indeed when neutral space becomes the norm around which society organizes itself, the whole idea of belonging becomes problematic for the majority as much as for the minorities. The multicultural experiment, argues Sacks, has now come to an end. It is time for a new politics, to move away from an implicit social contract that undergirds the state and to place more weight on a covenantal “politics of empowerment” that will build up society. The Home We Build Together argues for a model of citizenship and national identity based not on individual rights or group identity that risks the fragmentation of civil society but on a concept of the common good that builds up society by generating a sense of shared interests. “What makes us different is what we are; what unites us is what we do.”¹⁰

The inspiration behind this proposal is, of course, the biblical story—and no one tells that story better than Sacks. He outlines the fraught history of exodus and exile, kings and prophets, tabernacle and temple, and links it all up with different models of politics that have characterized Western democracies for the last five hundred years. The issue—both a moral and a political question—applies as much to today’s society as it did to ancient Israel: How to create a nation out of many tribes?

Sacks’s argument turns on the difference between a static and a dynamic concept of society—not a set of social structures inherited from a distant past, but a moral community made up of free individuals, bound together in mutual respect for each other’s God-given dignity. The great merit of Sacks’s house model is that it puts human agency back in the frame; society, to repeat, is what we make. Just as the people of Israel are formed in solidarity, “side by side,” so can a disparate set of immigrants be forged into a community of communities by working together. This is not to say that he seeks to impose some Jewish template on the disparate peoples and communities that make up contemporary British society. Rather the particular Jewish experience is illustrative of how virtues of human living are generated by the memories people keep and the stories they tell. Experience moves the heart and motivates prophetic action. When Moses speaks to the people as they prepare to enter the Promised Land, he tells them to take care of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in their midst (Deut. 16.11). Those who are landless have a call on the generosity of the landed. The people’s origins in the land of slavery should remind t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   Between Task and Gift: Jews, Christians, Muslims, and a Spirituality of Dialogue
• 2   Maimonides Spirituality: Intellectual Mysticism and the Love of God
• 3   Exchange of Life: The Love of God in the Orthodox Christian Tradition
• 4   The Metaphysics of Oneness and Sanctifying Love in Islamic Mysticism
• 5   The Love of God in the Jewish Mystical Tradition: Mysticism of Freedom and Commemoration versus Mysticism of Hope and Redemption
• 6   The Uniting Wisdom of Love: The Story of a Late Medieval Controversy
• 7   Themes of Love in Islamic Mystical Theology
• List of Contributors
• Index