I recently wrote a book review for the Dallas Morning News, looking broadly at the history of Western religions and their relationship with God, and primarily focused on Reza Aslan’s God: A Human History. It’s a compelling book, with a lot to recommend it, but I still had one big problem with the ending. Here’s what I wrote:
“[Aslan] touches upon Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, and its belief that “if God is truly indivisible, then God is all beings, and all beings are God*,” then briefly acknowledges other, non-Western religious traditions have a similar pantheistic point of view. After that, it’s just a skip and a jump to the idea that, if God is everything, and you and I are a part of everything, then you and I are God. Aslan doesn’t just present this conclusion abstractly — he embraces it, and invites us to embrace it as well.”
That’s all I had room to say within the confines of a book review for general audiences, but I wanted to take a moment to unpack this a bit more, because it’s a subject of some interest—as I went on to explain in the review, it’s not that I’m unsympathetic to pantheism, but I wanted to see a stronger case for it, particularly after all the persuasive material Aslan had written on the origins of religious consciousness and the evolution of monotheism.
(*Originally, I misquoted that as “If God is truly indivisible, then God is all beings, and all beings are one.” We got it straightened out for the online edition, and hopefully caught it in time for print, but I’m still sorry for getting that wrong.)
In his final chapter, Aslan describes how he arrived at pantheism through a spiritual journey that began with a lackluster Muslim childhood, veered into avid born-again Christianity, then veered back to a more passionate faith in Islam with led him to Sufi mysticism, and the idea that God didn’t make the world as something separate from God: “Rather, the world is God’s self-expression. It is God’s essence realized and experienced.” As a result, he now believes in “a God with no material form; a God who is pure existence, without name, essence or personality.” He also believes, more radically, that “I am, in my essential reality, God made manifest. We all are.”
Aslan even circles back to all the cognitive theories he’s explored over the course of the book to speculate on whether humanity has tended to think of God in human terms (“as a divine reflection of ourselves”) because, deep down, we already knew “God” was within us.
As I said in the review, Aslan touches very briefly on similar notions within various Eastern religions, the mystic traditions of Judaism and Christianity, and modern philosophy and science. But with no more than a sentence or two for each subcategory, that’s more of a suggestion of an argument than an actual argument. It wouldn’t have been impossible to tie all those threads together into a unified thesis—and we know from everything that precedes the conclusion that Aslan’s very good at tying threads together to reach convincing conclusions. And for me, at least, that fuller argument feels necessary when you’re issuing a provocative challenge like “Eat the forbidden fruit. Do not fear God. You are God.”
For starters, as I’ve implied, the case for pantheism ought to explore more fully the similar perspectives the world’s religious, philosophical, and scientific traditions have on the subject. From there, one could also acknowledge that, sure, Aslan’s identity-less divine energy does sound a lot like the Force, probably because George Lucas, like a lot of people in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was reading his fair share of Eastern philosophy explained for Western audiences.
Probing the details of pantheistic belief would also require pushing past the happy impression of “All is One, and One is All” and fully exploring the implications of believing “you are God.” Among other things, I’m thinking here of the twentieth-century occult traditions, specifically Aleister Crowley’s articulation of Thelema, which begins with the possibly divine revelation that “every man and woman is a star.” (I say “possibly” because there’s a range of opinions about what Crowley experienced in Cairo in 1904 that led to that statement and everything that followed from it in The Book of the Law.)
I don’t want to say anything for or against Thelema here; I know a little bit, but I’m no expert, and I’d hate to get it wrong. It just seems to me that, if you’re going to encourage people to believe that “God” or divine power resides within them, you could point to a modern religion tradition based on that principle and either say, yes, these folks are on the right track with the whole “do what thou wilt” thing, or, no, that’s definitely not what I’m thinking of, whatever you do, don’t end up like these guys.
(And that doesn’t even get us to the guys—and I’m guessing it’s mostly guys—who leap past “I am God” all the way to “I’m my own god,” because those guys are almost certainly nothing but trouble.)
I realize this threatens to veer into “Hey, Reza Aslan, why didn’t you write the book I would have written?” And, the more I think about it, the more I realize I’m basically asking Aslan to provide a comprehensive rational argument for an article of faith… one that, as I mentioned in my review, I’m already willing to give serious consideration.
So let’s change gears and look at the matter from another book, one I didn’t discover until well after I’d turned the review in to my editor at Dallas. Tim Crane is a philosopher who takes a look at, as the subtitle of The Meaning of Belief frames it, “religion from an atheist’s point of view.” If Aslan’s asking why humans believe in the type of god in which we believe, Crane’s taking a step back, asking why humans have a religious impulse of any kind. One of the first things Crane points out is that religion isn’t simply about identifying a transcendent quality to existence, but about ascribing the meaning of existence to that transcendent quality in some way.
That search for meaning, the assurance that “there is more to the world than what we see around us every day,” something beyond our immediate experience of the world, is a key part of the religious impulse, but it’s not all there is to it. Crane also talks about how religious people identify themselves in relation to the transcendent. I was somewhat vague before, when I talked about “ascribing the meaning of existence to that transcendent quality in some way,” because there’s different ways of doing that. You could call the transcendent God, give God a distinct identity, and say God created you and the universe around you, and that somehow imposes certain moral obligations upon you to keep God satisfied.
Or you could say that the transcendent permeates the entire universe, including you, and then the next question is: What kind of obligations would that impose? It’s not enough to say everything is holy—if everything is holy, well, how do you deal with everything? God addresses this in very general terms: “Respond to everyone and everything as though they were God—because they are.” But what does that mean in the real world?
Aslan immediately follows that with a slightly more practical bit of advice from a Muslim hadith, “He who knows his soul knows his Lord,” which is not quite the same thing as the Delphic counsel to “know thyself,” though it’s in the same ballpark. Again, though, the question emerges: What do you do with the knowledge that comes from self-reflection and self-awareness?
That, I think, is where a religious argument distinguishes itself from a spiritual declaration, which is how I’m starting to view Aslan’s last chapter. Based on my understanding of Crane, I’d also imagine a religious argument for pantheism to invoke a community of pantheists—and, after all, if you believe God is in everyone and everything, then you’d certainly want to form a community with like-minded people, right?
So how would a community of people who believed that God dwelled within them, nay, within everyone, conduct themselves? It’s a fascinating question, and one I know just enough about to know that I don’t know enough to say anything about it yet.
(Which is one reason I’m grateful to Aslan for the material he does provide on the Sufis, because up until this point what I knew about them was pretty much confined to a couple of books I found when I was sixteen collecting koan-like stories about Nasrudin that all run along the semi-jocular lines of “Have you ever seen me before?” “No, sir!” “So how do you know it’s me?”)
(Although, funnily enough, even before I read God, I’d been spurred to learn more about Sufism by, of all things, a video game called The Witness. Those of you who’ve played it extensively will know why, and I wouldn’t want to give any more potential spoilers to those who haven’t. Anyway, long story short, William Chittick seems like he knows what he’s talking about as far as the Sufis are concerned, so I’m starting there.)
In the initial draft of my book review, I described myself as an “agnostic materialist.” Science does an awfully good job of describing how the world around me works, but it doesn’t explain everything, so I suppose there could be something beyond what we can observe, but I’m not fully convinced, and I wouldn’t entirely know how to live my life if I were fully convinced. Maybe that’s why I felt frustrated by the final chapter of God—if you’re going to belong to something bigger than yourself, after all, all of creation is a heck of a thing to belong to, but you still need (or, to be precise, I might still need) someone who can say “believe with me” utterly convincingly, and as appealing as Aslan’s introduction to pantheism is, it wasn’t that.
That certainly doesn’t mean I’m dismissing the notion of pantheism entirely. I’ll tuck it away and keep poking around, maybe bring Aslan’s description back out for another look at some point. Or, perhaps, his next book might follow through on the implications of inviting the reader to embrace Godness in a way that could convince even an agnostic materialist like me.
