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Another Indian culture, Hinduism, as well as other peoples and philosophies, consider God more frankly as the Soul of the universe, the common root of all particular souls. In Judaism and sister religions, God is projected as a conscious Presence overseeing (in a cognitive and volitional sense, and in the evaluative sense of lawgiver) the whole world, much as each of us has a soul reigning over his or her own little world.

Some suggest, as already mentioned, that our own soul is but a spark¹⁰² out of God’s.

Some consider God as transcendent, others as immanent. The latter end up equating God with Nature, in the way of pantheism (Baruch Spinoza comes to mind, here). The human belief in God may have historically developed out of animism, itself probably a generalization of the vague notion of a personal soul.

Peoples living close to Nature (the Indians of North America, for instance) tended to perceive an undifferentiated godliness in all life and indeed in all of nature. Everything had a soul—

a bubbling stream or a roaring ocean, a majestically immovable mountain, a pebble rolling downhill, the Sun, the Moon, the vast sky, one day blue, one day grey and rainy, rolling clouds and thunder in the sky, the wind brushing though the forest, a bud flowering, a soaring eagle, a roaming

102 The idea of a ‘spark’ is drawn from Lurianic kabbalistic philosophy.

cougar, field mice scattering, a fish jumping up. God was everywhere to be seen and encountered.

Such ideas may have in time become concretized, with the notion of discrete “spirits” residing in a stone or tree or river or mountain. Each thing was thought to have consciousness and volition, just as people intuited these powers within themselves (probably long before they named them). People might then seek to talk with bodies of inanimate matter as with animals; for instance, to respectfully ask permission to interact with them in some way. Or they might have to trick or fight them into doing what they wished them to.

Eventually, these small, scattered “gods” were taken home or at least represented in stone or wooden idols (as apparently in Africa).

Some gods, like perhaps those of Nordic peoples, may of course have evolved out of historical persons – kings or heroes who were remembered in stories and eventually became larger-than-life myths. Later, as in Greece and Rome, more abstract gods evolved, who represented broad domains of the world (like the heavens or the sea) or of human activity (like love or war).

Eventually, apparently thanks to the Hebrews, monotheism was born, i.e. belief in a single and sole universal spiritual God. Founded by the patriarch Abraham, Judaism became a more organized national religion a few centuries later¹⁰³.

103 A more concrete ‘monotheistic’ religion, consisting of worship of the Sun exclusively, appeared briefly in Egypt at about that time. But the question is, who inspired whom? It is certainly equally conceivable that a small foreign contingent (Hebrew slaves) culturally influenced the larger host (some of the Egyptians).

Eventually, through Christianity and Islam, both much later offshoots of Judaism, abstract monotheism gained ascendancy in large parts of the world. Christianity is closer to Judaism than Islam in some respects, further in others. The former is more explicitly rooted in Judaic textual details, whereas the latter uses them more as a tacit springboard.

Christianity retains some concrete ideas and images relative to its founder Jesus, while Islam like Judaism eschews all such deification or representation.

Still today, in India for instance, the pantheon of gods and the ubiquity of images of them is striking. Although Hinduism has also long ago reached the idea of abstract monotheism, it has not made it exclusive. Buddhism, for its part, attained a high level of abstraction, but without personalizing it as God (at least not originally, although many Buddhist offshoots have in practice identified the founder Buddha with God).

This is consistent with the Buddhist doctrine that even the human soul is ultimately “empty” of personality. However, Buddhists have remained influenced by ancient idolatry, in view of the statues of Buddha they worship (and thus mentally project ‘soul’ into, note)¹⁰⁴.

Jewish monotheism is not about God being the Soul of Nature. Nature (hateva) is sometimes said to be one of the

‘names’ of God – but this is taken to mean (e.g. by

104 To be fair, it may be that in the minds of some practitioners of meditation, statues and flat images are not objects of worship, but mere aids to achieving the depicted stillness, silence and concentration. One would have to ask individual practitioners what their real intentions are. All the same, it would seem likely that someone starting with imitation in mind, will develop an emotional attachment to the representative object and end up personifying it and bowing down to it. Which, to my mind, is silly, to say the least.

Maimonides) that Nature is in God’s power. In Judaism, God is absolutely abstract and without any concrete manifestation whatsoever – no incarnation in human or any other form, and nothing that can be represented by an image. Or more precisely, God is purely spiritual and never material. He is nevertheless the Creator of the world of nature, and remains all-knowing and all-powerful in it. Omniscient – not merely in the sense of knowing generalities (as Aristotle suggested), but also in the sense of knowing every particular; and thus able to exercise providence down to the last detail – as befits omnipotence.

This is analogous to the human soul, which has no phenomenal aspects¹⁰⁵ of its own, although it is capable of knowing and interacting with the phenomenal world.

However, the analogy is not total, since Judaism teaches that the world is not God’s body, and moreover that humans did not create their own bodies but God created both their bodies and their souls (Genesis 2:7):

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

So, it is conceivable to Jews that whereas God is eternal, humans are not; and it is also conceivable that God’s

‘breathing life’ into us was animating our bodies with a bit of His eternal Soul.

105 In this respect, Judaism has similarities to Buddhism;

although unlike the latter, the former recognizes a non-phenomenal ‘spiritual’ substance for soul. Another possible analogy is that between the “Ayin” (non-existence, nothingness) of Jewish kabbalah and the “Shunyata” (emptiness) of Buddhism.

As these reflections show, the histories of the notion of soul and of that of God are closely intertwined. One of the functions of religion and/or metaphysics is to propose origins for soul and God, and explain how they are known.

Catholic Christians, to varying degrees, use material representations of Jesus in their homes, churches and processions. This may historically be an inheritance from the representation and worship of Roman emperors, which was widespread and seemed normal in the world Christianity took over. Protestants, later on and for various (political as well as spiritual) reasons, have for the most part eschewed three-dimensional sculptures and dolls, but they still resort to mental representations as well as to two-dimensional pictures. Hinduism and some forms of Buddhism similarly resort to incarnations of numerous divinities, giving them bodily form or thinking of them concretely.

These are perceptual ideas about divinity. Judaism, and later on Islam, on the basis of the narratives in their scriptures (the Torah and the Koran, respectively) ascribe perceptible behavior to God, in the way of manifest miracles (if only the sending of an angel or a prophetic vision, or the decree of a legal system), but they exclude any physical or mental representation of God, which they reprove as “idolatrous”.

The idea(s) of God transmitted by their holy books, and later reinforced by interpretative commentaries, are essentially conceptual.

As philosophers we might ask: what is the rationale for the worship of statues or other representations? Does the worshipper consider that material (or mental) object itself to be what he or she is worshipping (fetishism), or to contain the divinity aimed at or be an emanation of it or a channel to it –

or does the concrete object at hand merely serve as a mnemonic or as an expedient means to focus personal attention on a divinity far beyond it?

One would have to enter people’s minds to find out for sure (for their own introspections and oral reports are not necessarily reliable). I would suspect that there is a wide range of attitudes in different people, some imagining a more literal interpretation, others being more conscious of the possible distinctions. The spiritual issue is: does this practice

‘weigh down’ the soul, preventing it from ‘rising’ to the formless?¹⁰⁶

I should add that I personally suspect that people who believe in some incarnation(s) of God, or in narrow gods or idols, and even atheists or agnostics, often or at least occasionally lift their eyes and prayers to the heavens, effectively intending to appeal to or thank God. That is to say, adherence in principle to some non- or not-quite monotheistic doctrine does not exclude the occasional intuition and practice of monotheism. The issue here is not the culturally specific name given to the Deity, or the theoretical constructions usually associated with that name, but the actual intention of the praying soul at the moment

106 The essential purpose of idolatry, I would say, is to imprint people’s minds with alleged representations of gods or God. It is a powerful form of advertising, which produces psychic dependence on the idol, so that it is voluntarily or involuntarily recalled and appealed to in various circumstances. This incidentally benefits the clerical class tending and serving the idol; although, to be fair, the members of that class are rarely hypocritical, but themselves true (indeed, usually truer) believers.

concerned. I think all or most humans have that understanding and reaction in common.