THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 11“IMMORTAL, INVISIBLE, GODonly wise/ In
light inaccessible hid from all eyes” — so
goes the hymn that neatly encapsulates
some of our modern problems with divinity
and its relation to humanity and the natural
world. In a long, detailed and scrupulously
researched book, “God: An Anatomy,”
Francesca Stavrakopoulou digs into this di-
lemma; as corporeal creatures, she argues,
we must somehow reincarnate this arcane
deity, see him as our ancestors did and
bring him down to earth. She then pro-
ceeds, in 21 chapters packed with knowl-
edge and insight, to “anatomize” the divin-
ity from head to toe, starting with the
“standing stones” that marked the foot-
steps of deities in the Late Bronze and
Early Iron Age and ending with images of
God that enabled people to imagine that
they were somehow communing with him
“face to face.”
This communing could be an over-
whelming physical experience. When in
the ninth century B.C. the king of Babylon
came into the presence of a cult statue of
Shamash, “his heart rejoiced, and shining
was his face.” Moses did not merely see
Yahweh, the God of Israel, he also talked
and communed with him on Mount Sinai
for 40 days — but it was the corporeal, visu-
al intensity of his bond with Yahweh that
transfigured Moses’ own face when he
came down from the mountain.
People yearned for this divine contact.
“My throat thirsts for you, my flesh faints
for you, as in a dry and weary land where
there is no water,” the psalmist cries. And
Yahweh himself longed to be seen: “Seek
my face!” he called to his worshipers.
“Come before his countenance!” cried the
ritual singers. Looking at the beauty of
God’s face was the very purpose of the tem-
ple, and it was his face that would continue
to entrance his worshipers.
Today we take it for granted that God has
no body. But the psalmists had other views.
“Praise Yahweh, for he is lovely looking!”
cries one psalmist; another longed to live in
the Jerusalem temple all the days of his life,
“to behold the beauty of Yahweh... your
face, Yahweh, do I seek.”
Yahweh certainly had feet; they were
thought to rest on a stool that placed him on
a higher, more commanding level in which
he embodied the order and hierarchy of the
universe. But he also enjoyed taking a soli-
tary evening walk in the Garden of Eden
and later spent time with the patriarchs
Enoch, Noah and Abraham. Yahweh was
an intensely physical being; it was his
“strong hand” and “outstretched arm” that
smashed the Egyptian army in the Sea of
Reeds. But his touch could also be gentle.
When the psalmist “lifted up his hands to
God,” Yahweh responded by holding out his
own hands “all day long,” like a lover or a
parent. Later the rabbis would claim that
when God prayed with them, he covered
his head with a prayer shawl as they did,
and dressed his arms in Torah texts.
But the gods’ bodies were of course supe-
rior to our own. In their ancient temples,
their radiant luminosity was manifest in
the polished gold, silver and bronze skin of
their statues, which were thought to have
been crafted in the celestial sphere and
filled pagan worshipers with fear and awe.
Yahweh too, the psalmist tells us, was
“clothed with glory and splendor.” When he
marched through the world of men, his
gleaming weapons eclipsed even the sun
and moon: “His splendor covers the heav-
ens, and the earth is full of his radiance.”
Rays come out “from his hands.”
The prophet Isaiah was instructed to “hide
in the dust” to protect himself from this terri-
fying radiance. Later Jesus’ disciples would
have the same experience when he was
transfigured before them: “His face shone
like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling
white.” But above all, it was God’s face that
entranced his worshipers. The Hebrew Bible
describes God as tob (“handsome”) and
na’im (“lovely looking”), which, with our
more spiritualized notion of divinity, are now
translated as “good” and “gracious.”
In 597 B.C., the armies of Nebuchadnez-zar, king of Babylon, descended upon the
little kingdom of Judah and subjugated the
region in three brutal military campaigns.
The young king was deported with 8,
exiles, including members of the royal fam-
ily, the aristocracy, the military and skilled
artisans. Ten years later, after another re-
bellion, the Babylonians destroyed Yah-
weh’s temple, razed the city of Jerusalem to
the ground and carried off 5,000 more de-
portees, leaving only the poorest people to
remain in the devastated land. When a
small group of Judahites were finally per-
mitted to return to their homeland in 539
B.C., they brought a very different religion
back with them and Yahweh never fully re-
covered his body. Without the temple rites
that had made him a living, breathing reali-
ty, he became the distant, spiritualized de-
ity that we know today.
This, Stavrakopoulou argues, was a trage-
dy. Yahweh, she complains, was transformed
by Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides
into a timeless, changeless, immaterial deity,
wholly unlike anything in the earthly realm,
while Christians developed the incompre-
hensible conundrum of the Trinity: “Three in
one and one in three!”
Instead, she believes, we should return
to the ancient Israelite mythology. But this
is not how religion works. At its best, it de-
mands that, as circumstances change, we
respond creatively and innovatively to the
present. After the Romans destroyed the
Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70, the rabbis re-discovered the divine presence in a highly
inventive study of Scripture. The medieval
mysticism of the kabbalah depicted the in-
scrutable divine essence emerging succes-
sively in 10 sephiroth(“stages”), each more
perceptible than the last, in, as it were, a di-
vine evolution. Later in the 18th century,
Polish Hasidim would develop techniques
of concentration that enabled them to be-
come vividly aware of the divine presence,
“as though it were flowing all around them
and they were sitting in the middle of light”
—an experience that made them dance
and sing.
This reminds us that religious belief be-
comes a reality to us only when accompa-
nied by the bodily gestures, intense mental
concentration and evocative ceremonial of
ritual. Because it imparts sacred knowl-
edge, a myth is recounted in an emotive set-
ting that sets it apart from mundane expe-
rience and brings it to life. Because they
could no longer perform the impassioned
rites of the Jerusalem temple, the tradition-
ally vivid experience of Yahweh became
opaque and distant to the Judean exiles in
Babylonia. And the complex doctrine of
Trinity devised by Greek theologians in the
fourth century was not something to be
“believed” but was the result of a mental
and physical discipline that, accompanied
by the rich music and ceremony of the lit-
urgy, enabled Eastern Christians to
glimpse the ineffable.
It is probably because most Western
Christians have not been instructed in this
exercise that the Trinity remains as ob-
scure to them as it does to Stavrakopoulou,
who longs for a divine face or hand to which
she can turn. 0The Divine Face
An exploration of Scripture that pieces together God’s body from head to toe.
By KAREN ARMSTRONG
GOD
An Anatomy
By Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Illustrated. 608 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
KAREN ARMSTRONGis the author, most recently,
of “The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the
Sacred Texts.”
Communing could be an
overwhelming physical experience.IMAGE FROM BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
God, as depicted by the painter Vittore Carpaccio in “Glorification of St. Ursula and Her Companions.”