The Sensual God

How the Senses Make the Almighty Senseless

Aviad Kleinberg

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231540247
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In the Old Testament, God wrestles with a man (and loses). In the Talmud, God wriggles his toes to make thunder and takes human form to shave the king of Assyria. In the New Testament, God is made flesh and dwells among humans. For religious thinkers trained in Greek philosophy and its deep distaste for matter, sacred scripture can be distressing. A philosophically respectable God should be untainted by sensuality, yet the God of sacred texts is often embarrassingly sensual.

Setting experts' minds at ease was neither easy nor simple, and often faith and logic were stretched to their limits. Focusing on examples from both Christian and Jewish sources, from the Bible to sources from the Late Middle Ages, Aviad Kleinberg examines the way Christian and Jewish philosophers, exegetes, and theologians attempted to reconcile God's supposed ineffability with numerous biblical and postbiblical accounts of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and even tasting the almighty. The conceptual entanglements ensnaring religious thinkers, and the strange, ingenious solutions they used to extricate themselves, tell us something profound about human needs and divine attributes, about faith, hope, and cognitive dissonance.

CHAPTER ONE

Instability and Its Discontents

Everything moves. I’m not sure when I first realized this. It probably happened when I was eight and got my first wristwatch, or at least that is how I remember it. My parents took me on a trip to Switzerland. When we stopped in Lucerne, they decided that I was responsible enough to get my own timepiece. Watches were fairly expensive at the time. Most of my buddies did not own one. I was rather pleased with it. It was an elegant little thing. I was even more pleased with myself. I had every intention of showing off my new prize when we returned home. But then it happened. As I was proudly gazing at my watch, it suddenly dawned on me: things move. As the second hand was making its rounds, time was passing. The circular movement of the thin strip of metal in my shiny new toy was part of a momentous linear movement that I was somehow part of. We were all part of it—my sister, my parents, the people in the bus, the whole town with its streets, with its parks and trees and monuments. Lake Lucerne was part of it too, as were Switzerland and Israel. All the things that looked stable and immobile to me a minute before were part of a huge movement. All things that moved in their own direction were at the same time being herded by some invisible hand along a single path, the path that my watch measured in seconds, minutes, and hours. It was a continuous, inescapable motion that I suddenly became aware of.

In book 11 (chapter 17) of his Confessions, Augustine claims that time is self-evident until we try to give it a formal definition. It is only when we start questioning the self-evident, that our naïve confidence is shattered. In my watch-less state, time did not bother me at all. It had a semantic existence that barley scratched the surface of my mind. Even when I became aware of the existence of time, I was not really concerned with definitions. The only thing that bothered me was the implications of time on me, on us. What, in other words, did it mean to live in a world governed by time? I assumed without question the objectivity, the ontological reality, of mechanical time. Not for a moment did I ask myself what exactly it was that clocks were measuring, nor did I pay much attention to the possibility that mechanical time was artificial (in contrast with the “natural” time of the movement of the earth and the planets). I took it for granted that time existed and that clocks were simply keeping record of it, just as cameras were recording things as they “truly” were. What I found absolutely devastating was the fact (I assumed it was a fact) that time moves in one direction only. And since we are all somehow implicated in its movement, each passing second signifies not just an external event, but also an intimate personal occurrence. These were my seconds, minutes, and hours that were passing as I was ogling my watch. Time was robbing me of my precious hours. At the age of eight, I was obviously not thinking about death or old age. It was simply the knowledge that whatever it was that I was doing (or not doing) was, from the moment the clock marked it, a fait accompli. What’s done is done. Too late now to do otherwise. The moment of open possibilities has passed. And even though I had no idea at the time who Auden was (“But all the clocks in the city / Began to whirr and chime: ‘O let not Time deceive you, / You cannot conquer Time.’”), I realized that the clocks were tolling all the time; they were tolling for me. Ah yes, I also had no idea who Donne was.

We are carved, thin layer after thin layer, by the butcher’s knife of time. In the end, we are gone and the carver alone is left, ever ready to perform his gruesome work on those next in line. The clock is a futile attempt to warn us—futile because nothing can be done but mourn, not the passing of time, but the passing of us.

But is the movement imposed on us from without? Is it time that assaults us with its carving knife, or are the clocks merely our metronomes, ticking the tempo of the inner motions of our self-destruction? We are constantly moving from within, I came to realize. It was not just the blood rushing through our veins, the complex chemical reactions in our digestive system, the storm of electric activity in our brains, and the pumping of air in and out of our lungs. In school, they showed us how under the microscope our bodies teem with life (bacteria, fungi, viruses), and that the food we eat and the water we drink are alive.

We are changing all the time. Our bodies are not the solid blocks of matter that I imagined them to be. And the movements within us, I realized, were not regular and circular, but erratic and linear. Time was not the perpetrator, but an innocent observer. Heraclitus was wrong. The river of time is constant and regular. Every second is exactly the same as every other second. The reason we cannot step into the same river twice is that we are never the same. With time, I became a follower of Parmenides without realizing it. The child never dies, just as the old man is never born. At any moment, we are exactly one moment old. We grow old by creating ourselves in our own image and likeness.

But the image and likeness of what exactly? As we move blindly toward the future, our past is constantly growing. In retrospect, we might detect patterns: we seem to do certain things in certain ways. But who exactly are “we”? Where is the point of reference, the Archimedean lever with which to move our world? We need to stand still for a moment, but we can’t. Only the present really exists, argues the Bishop of Hippo: the past is no longer, the future not yet. But the present is fiendishly slippery. Blink your eyes and it’s gone. We simply have not got a foothold on which to be “we.”

All the hours of night and day add up to twenty-four. The first of them has the others in the future, the last has them in the past. Any hour between these has past hours before it, future hours after it. One hour is itself constituted of fugitive moments. Whatever part of it has flown away is past. What remains of it is future. That flicker of time which cannot be divided into shorter moments, that alone is what we can call “present.” And this time becomes past so quickly that it has no duration.¹

In the geometry of the soul, like in Euclidean plane geometry, the basic point of reference occupies no space. “We” jump from one point that has no extension whatsoever to the next, similarly lacking extension. “We” try to draw unbroken lines out of these spaceless fragments. Like the humans cut in two by Zeus in Aristophanes’s myth in the Symposium, the split “I’s” crave to be whole, thirst for continuity, want psychological extension. These, argues Augustine, are achieved by turning our fragmented consciousness into a reflective “self.” We somehow manage to squeeze into our rapidly vanishing self-consciousness of the present (contuitus) the memory of things past (memoria) and an expectation of the future (expectatio). Memory (as a possibly imaginary record of “our” physical and mental reality) is in Augustine’s view what shapes our identity, an identity that is historical and accumulative. The entire project of the Confessions is based on the assumption that we are who we remember we are. The answer to the sphinx’s question—who are you? Augustine would say—is not a definition (“Man”), but a story (“I”). We are the result of specific historical processes that have made us radically different from others, while sharing the same abstract (and to a large extent useless) common definition. Instead of writing an essay on human nature, Augustine tells in the Confessions his own story. Now that story—the events, feelings, and thoughts that have shaped him—depends on memoria. In book 10 of the Confessions, Augustine offers a lengthy discussion of memory as the storehouse of the soul:

Memory’s huge cavern, with its mysterious, secret, and indescribable nooks and crannies, receives all these perceptions, to be recalled when needed and reconsidered. Every one of them enters into memory, each by its own gate, and is put on deposit there. …

These actions are inward, in the vast hall of my memory. There sky, land and sea are available to me together with all the sensations I have been able to experience in them, except for those which I have forgotten. There also I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it. There is everything that I remember, whether I experienced it directly or believed the word of others. Out of the same abundance in store, I combine with past events images of various things, whether experienced directly or believed on the basis of what I have experienced; and on this basis I reason about future actions and events, and hopes, and again think of all these things in the present. “I shall do this and that,” I say to myself within that vast recess of my mind, which is full of many rich images, and this act or that follows. “O that this or that were so” “May God avert this or that.” I say these words to myself, and, as I speak, there are present images of everything I am speaking of, drawn out of the same treasure-house of memory; I would never say anything like that if these images were not present.²

But then who is this expecting and remembering self ? The remembering and expecting self starts anew with every reemergence of the elusive, spaceless “present.” What gives it the right to claim continuity, to seize the moment, to master the past and the future? Augustine, like Descartes more than a millennium later, conjures up God to be the Archimedean lever. However variable and incomprehensible the world may be, however rootless and senseless the conscious self (the Cartesian thinker), there is always God, the solid rock upon which all the rest can rest. We shall return to this presently, but before we do, we might look at a bolder answer to the problem of the self ‘s instability. It is “hidden” in Plato’s Symposium, in a discussion of the nature of love. Love, it turns out, has important psychological side effects.

The participants in the Symposium present a variety of opinions concerning the nature of Eros. As he usually does, Socrates offers a position that contradicts the views of the other speakers. For Socrates, Eros is not the object of desire but the force that can catapult us from the concrete and material to the abstract and spiritual. Socrates’s position is presented from the mouth of the wise woman Diotima. Diotima argues that Eros is not a static “thing” but a process, the inclination to generate and beget “in beauty,” because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality. It is within this context that Diotima speaks about the problem of the fragmented self:

Even while each living thing is said to be alive and to be the same—as a person is said to be the same from childhood till he turns to be an old man—even then he never consists of the same things, though he is called the same, but he is always being renewed and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones and blood and his entire body. And it’s not just in his body, but in his soul too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires, pains or fears ever remains the same, but some are coming to be in him while others are passing away. And what is still far stranger than that is that not only does one branch of knowledge come to be in us while another passes away and that we are never the same even in respect of our knowledge, but that each single piece of knowledge has the same fate. For what we call studying exists because knowledge is leaving us, because forgetting is the departure of knowledge, while studying puts back fresh memory in place of what went away, thereby preserving a piece of knowledge, so that it seems to be the same. And in that way everything mortal is preserved, not like the divine, by always being the same in every way, but because what is departing and aging leaves behind something new, something such as it has been. By this device, Socrates, she said, what is mortal shares in immortality, whether it is a body or anything else, while the immortal has another way. So don’t be surprised if everything naturally values its own offspring, because it is for the sake of immortality that everything shows this zeal, which is love.³

Like Augustine, Diotima argues that it is memory that holds the ever-shifting self together. Yet Diotima describes a more complex, more dynamic process. Recollection, for her, is not a simple storage of sense and psychological data, but a re-creation. Knowledge, she says, “is leaving us, because forgetting is the departure of knowledge, while studying puts back fresh memory in place of what went away, thereby preserving a piece of knowledge, so that it seems to be the same.” Recollection is not a simple backup, knowledge recorded on a surface more durable than the mind, but the destruction of data and its replacement by new data produced by a mechanism that is not described. The new data only “[seem] to be the same.” In fact, it is clearly not the same, but a variation, just as our offspring are us only in the sense of being produced by us and from us, and not in the sense of being our faithful copies. What we call memory is thus a doppelganger, a distorted version of ourselves. Since we constantly forget the “real” sequence of external and internal events, the sequence that in theory (and only in theory) constitutes our true self, the only thing that allows us to think of ourselves as selves, as a continuum, is the mechanism that we call “memory.” But this mechanism is producing ersatz reality. All memory is by definition false.

In Christopher Nolan’s film Memento, the protagonist, played by Guy Pearce, suffers from short-term memory loss. He uses notes and tattoos to remind him who he is and who the man he is hunting is. Like Diotima’s man, the protagonist of Memento forgets every morning what he has learned the day before, and needs to reconstruct it so that it “appears to be the same.” The problem is that these aide memoirs are open to manipulation. Others can plant misleading information in the forgetful hero’s recollection. In the end, the hero (that is, one of the heroes bearing the same name, but an ever-changing identity) does this to himself (if it is really himself). He deliberately tattoos misleading information on his skin, information that he knows his avatars will misinterpret. The avatar for whom the new memory is not an external appendage, but part of his inner person—indeed, it is his inner person (for we are what we remember, and the reader of the messages has now acquired a radically different memory from the writer of them) will act in ways that are psychologically impossible for the producer of the new memory.

If we seek ontological certainty, then there is little comfort in memory. Augustine thinks that we can remember false things, but cannot remember falsely. Plato (at least in my reading) suggests that this might not be as simple as that. Contemporary studies of false memory agree—we can sense a powerful, Cartesian certainty that is flatly contradicted by recorded data and by others’ testimonies. I may be certain of my contuitus, my cogito, but all I can really say, as numerous critics of Descartes have insisted, is that a thought exists. We are not sure there is a thinker, for to give this term meaning, we need a whole array of assumptions that are in the end simply intuitive. Who is the first person speaking? Back to square one—the ever-changing unreliable Self that I have discovered as a child, when I got my first watch.

There is a response to this question that is even bolder than Plato’s. It is offered by the great ninth-century Indian philosopher Shankara:

It is a matter not requiring any proof that the object and the subject whose respective spheres are the notion of the non-ego and the ego, and which are opposed to each other as much as darkness and light, cannot be identified. All the less can their respective attributes be identified. Hence it follows that it is wrong to superimpose upon the subject—whose self is intelligence, and which has for its sphere the notion of the ego—the object whose sphere is the notion of the nonego and the attributes of the object and vice versa—to superimpose the subject and the attributes of the subject on the object. In spite of this, it is a natural procedure—which has its cause in wrong knowledge—for men not to distinguish between the two (subject and object) and their respective attributes, although they are absolutely distinct, but to superimpose upon each the characteristic nature and the attributes of the other, and thus mixing the real with the unreal to make use of expressions such as: “That am I” or “That is mine.”

… This superimposition learned men consider nescience (or non-knowledge), whereas the ascertainment of the true nature of that which is by distinguishing it from that which is superimposed upon it they call knowledge.

The mutual superimposition of the self and the non-self which is termed nescience is the foundation underlying all practical distinctions—those made in ordinary life as well as those laid down by the Veda: between means of knowledge, objects of knowledge and knowing persons, and all scriptural texts, whether they are concerned with injunctions and prohibitions (of meritorious and non meritorious actions), or with final release—moksha. But how can the means of right knowledge, such as perception, inference, and scriptural texts have for their object that which is dependent of nescience? Because, we reply, the means of right knowledge cannot operate unless there is a knowing personality and because the existence of the latter depends on the erroneous notion that the body, the senses and so on are identical with or belong to the self of the knowing person. For without the employment of the senses, perception and the other means of true knowledge cannot operate. And without a foundation the senses cannot act. Nor does anybody act...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Instability and Its Discontents
• 2. Loving God Like a Cow
• 3. Endless
• 4. Credo
• 5. Unimaginable: A Short Digression
• 6. Impossible
• 7. A Short Discourse on the Spiritual Senses
• 8. Invisible
• 9. Tasteless
• 10. Untouchable
• 11. Inaudible
• 12. Scentless
• Post Scriptum
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index