Karen Armstrong - The Battle for God - Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

But Luria was adamant that there was to be no wallowing; Kabbalists must work through their sorrow in a disciplined, stylized way until they achieved a measure of joy. The midnight rituals always ended at dawn with a meditation upon the final reunion of the Shekhinah with Ein Sof and, consequently, the end of the separation of humanity from the divine. The Kabbalist was instructed to imagine that every one of his limbs was an earthly shrine for the Divine Presence. 18 All the world religions insist that no spirituality is valid unless it results in practical compassion, and Lurianic Kabbalah was true to this insight. There were severe penances for faults that injured others: for sexual exploitation, for malicious gossip, for humiliating one’s fellows, and for dishonoring parents. 19

Finally the Kabbalists were taught the mystical practices that have evolved in most of the world faiths, which help the adept to access the deeper regions of the psyche and gain intuitive insight. In Safed, meditation centered on detailed, skilled reconfigurations of the letters composing God’s name. These “concentrations” (kawwanot) would help the Kabbalist to become aware of a trace of the divine within himself. He would become, leading Kabbalists believed, a prophet, able to utter a new mythos , bring to light a hitherto unknown religious truth, just as Luria had done. These kawwanot certainly brought Kabbalists great joy. Haim Vital (1542–1620), one of Luria’s disciples, said that in ecstasy he trembled and shook with elation and awe. Kabbalists saw visions and experienced a rapturous transcendence that transfigured the world at a time when it seemed cruel and alien. 20

Rational thought has achieved astonishing success in the practical sphere, but it cannot assuage our sorrow. After the Spanish disaster, Kabbalists found that the rational disciplines of philosophy, which had been popular among the Jews of al-Andalus, could not address their pain. 21 Life seemed drained of meaning, and without meaning in their lives, human beings can fall into despair. To make life bearable, the exiles turned to mythos and mysticism, which enabled them to make contact with the unconscious sources of their pain, loss, and desire, and anchored their lives in a vision that brought them comfort.

It is noticeable, however, that unlike Ignatius of Loyola, Luria and his disciples devised no practical plans for the political salvation of the Jews. Kabbalists had settled in the Land of Israel, but they were not Zionists; Luria did not urge Jews to end their exile by migrating to the Holy Land. He did not use his mythology or his mystical vision to create an ideology that would be a blueprint for action. This was not the job of mythos; all such practical planning and political activity were the domain of logos —rational, discursive thought. Luria knew that his mission as a mystic was to save Jews from existential and spiritual despair. When these myths were later applied to the practical world of politics, the results could be disastrous, as we shall see later in this chapter.

Without a cult, without prayer and ritual, myths and doctrines have no meaning. Without the special ceremonies and rites that made the myth accessible to the Kabbalists, Luria’s creation story would have remained a senseless fiction. It was only in a liturgical context that any religious belief became meaningful. Once people were deprived of that type of spiritual activity, they would lose their faith. This is what happened to some of the Jews who decided to convert to Christianity and remain in the Iberian Peninsula. This has also happened to many modern people who no longer meditate, perform rituals, or take part in any ceremonial liturgy, and then find that the myths of religion mean nothing to them. Many of the conversos were able to identify wholly with Catholicism. Some, indeed, such as the reformers Juan de Valdes (1500–41) and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), became important leaders of the Counter Reformation and thus made a significant contribution to early modern culture in rather the same way that secularized Jews such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound impact on later modernism after their assimilation into mainstream society.

One of the most illustrious of these influential conversos was Teresa of Avila (1515–82), the mentor and teacher of John of the Cross and the first woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church. She was a pioneer of the reform of spirituality in Spain and was especially concerned that women, who did not have the benefit of a good education and were frequently led into unhealthy mystical practices by inept spiritual directors, receive a proper grounding in religious matters. Hysterical trances, visions, and raptures had nothing to do with holiness, she insisted. Mysticism demanded extreme skill, disciplined concentration, a balanced personality, and a cheerful, sensible disposition, and must be integrated in a controlled and alert manner with normal life. Like John of the Cross, Teresa was a modernizer and a mystic of genius, yet had she remained within Judaism she would not have had the opportunity to develop this gift, since only men were allowed to practice the Kabbalah. Yet, interestingly, her spirituality remained Jewish. In The Interior Castle , she charts the soul’s journey through seven celestial halls until it reaches God, a scheme which bears a marked resemblance to the Throne Mysticism that flourished in the Jewish world from the first to the twelfth centuries CE. Teresa was a devout and loyal Catholic, but she still prayed like a Jew and taught her nuns to do the same.

In Teresa’s case, Judaism and Christianity were able to blend fruitfully, but other, less gifted conversos experienced conflict. A case in point: Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98), the first Grand Inquisitor. 22 The zeal with which he attempted to stamp out residual Judaism in Spain may perhaps have been an unconscious attempt to extirpate the old faith from his own heart. Most of the Marranos had accepted Christianity under duress, and many, it seems, had never fully made the transition to the new faith. This was hardly surprising, since, once they had been baptized, they were watched closely by the Inquisition, and lived in constant fear of arrest on the flimsiest of charges. Lighting candles on Friday evening or refusing to eat shellfish could mean imprisonment, torture, death, or, at the very least, the confiscation of one’s property. As a result, some became alienated from religion altogether. They could not fully identify with the Catholicism that made their lives a misery, and, over the years, Judaism became an unreal, distant memory. After the Great Expulsion of 1492, there were no practicing Jews left in Spain and, even if Marranos wished to practice their faith in secret, they had no means of learning about Jewish law or ritual practice. In consequence, they had no real allegiance to any faith. Long before secularism, atheism, and religious indifference became common in the rest of Europe, we find instances of these essentially modern attitudes among the Marrano Jews of the Iberian Peninsula.

According to the Israeli scholar Yirmiyahu Yovel, it was quite common for conversos to be skeptical about all religion. 23 Even before the Great Expulsion of 1492, some, such as Pedro and Fernando de la Caballeria, members of a great Spanish family, simply immersed themselves in politics, art, and literature, and appeared to have no interest in religion at all. Pedro, indeed, would scoff openly about being a fake Christian, which, he claimed, left him free to do as he wished without bothering about holy rules and regulations. 24 Shortly before 1492, one Alvaro de Montalban was brought before the Inquisition for eating cheese and meat during Lent; he had thereby, significantly, broken not only a Christian fast but also Jewish law, which forbids the consumption of meat and dairy products together. He obviously felt no commitment to either faith. On this occasion, Alvaro escaped with a fine. He was not likely to feel warmly disposed to Catholicism. His parents had been killed by the Inquisition for practicing Judaism secretly; their bodies had been exhumed, their bones burned, and their property confiscated. 25 Unable to retain even a tenuous link with Judaism, Alvaro was forced into a religious limbo. As an old man of seventy, he was finally imprisoned by the Inquisition for a repeated and deliberate denial of the doctrine of the afterlife. “Let me be well off down here,” he had said on more than one occasion, “since I don’t know if there is anything beyond.” 26