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Abstract
The following consists of the final chapter of my book, The Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God’s Inner Journey, published by Prometheus Books in 2018. The book tells the story of God’s evolution as depicted in the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Needless to say, this parallels the evolution of human consciousness, as each reflects the other. This chapter picks up where an earlier one left off, namely, on the nature of Ein Sof (literally, “infinity” or “without end”). This is the name that the Kabbalists have assigned to the mystical Godhead or absolute nothingness that is beyond anthropomorphic projections and all other gods, including the biblical one. The book won a Nautilus Book Award in the category of “Religion/Spirituality of Western Thought.”
Notes
1 The quotation in the story, “a rabbinic court of law to indict the Almighty,” is taken from Abrahamson (Citation1985, pp. 112–113). I am grateful to J. Marvin Spiegelman for introducing me to this story.
2 On the Kabbalistic idea of creation, see Scholem (Citation1972, p. 217).
3 On the Kabbalistic theory of evil, see Scholem (Citation1991, pp. 56–87).
4 I inserted a comma after “angry,” capitalized “Mount,” and deitalicized “Sinai.” See also Boehme’s (1656/2012) references to severity: chap. 8, v. 164; chap. 10, v. 93; chap. 13, v. 67; and chap. 24, v. 78.
5 The term “original face” (sometimes translated as “true face”) appears most famously in “Think Neither Good Nor Evil,” case 23 of the koan collection Mumonkan, or “Gateless Gate.” This koan or riddle is used as a meditation exercise in Zen training: the student focuses on the question, “What was your original face before your parents were born?” (Yamada, 1979, p. 115).
6 I am grateful to Wendy Goldman Rohm for sharing this quote with me.
7 On whether such voices are God’s or paranormal manifestations of the psyche, or both, see my book, Modern Mysticism: Jung, Zen and the Still Good Hand of God (Gellert, Citation1994). (With Cordovero we observed a similar conviction in the value of direct knowledge versus belief.) In Answer to Job, Jung (Citation1973) explains the reason why the question of God’s existence is difficult to answer: “It is only through the psyche that we can establish that God acts upon us, but we are unable to distinguish whether these actions emanate from God or from the unconscious. We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are borderline concepts for transcendental contents” (para. 757).
8 On God’s intervention in worldly affairs: there are similar explanations for why he did not or could not prevent the Holocaust. Philosopher Hans Jonas (Citation1987), for example, also posits a God whose ability to intervene in history is limited due to factors shaped by his mystical or core nature. However, he does not address why God intervened in history in biblical times but no longer does (pp. 1–13).
9 On Kirsch hearing the voice “again”: he was 13 when he first heard it. It told him he would follow in the steps of Abraham and Moses, which he evidently did in helping to establish a number of Jungian training institutes (Kirsch, Citation1986, p. 149).
10 On revelation becoming dogma or law in the founding of all religions, see Maslow (Citation1994, pp. 30–35).
11 On Dostoevsky: I am referring to his famous comment, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted,” in The Brothers Karamazov, specifically, in part 4, bk. 11, chap. 4 (“A Hymn and a Secret”). There are various translations of this. Constance Garnett translates this as, “without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then” (Dostoevsky, Citation1957, p. 534).
12 On Nietzsche as an “anti-anti-Semite”: I say he was “arguably” this because his attitude toward Jews and Judaism was complex. See Holub (Citation2016) and Safranski (Citation2002, pp. 338–340). Also noteworthy, Nietzsche, in his opposition to what he considered to be the slavish morality of Judaism and Christianity, in fact called himself an immoralist. For an interesting treatment of this, see Berkowitz (Citation1996).
13 On Akiva as a Talmudic Father and Merkabah mystic: although known more for the former than the latter, he did, indeed, frequently engage in Merkabah practices (see Ariel, 2006, pp. 26–27).
14 On Saadi Shirazi’s enslavement by Christian Crusaders, the Encyclopaedia Britannica states, “this story, like many of his other ‘autobiographical’ anecdotes, is considered highly suspect” (Encyclopaedia Britannica Editors, Citation2022, para. 2). I am grateful to Sherri Mahdavi (Citation2015) for introducing me to these verses by Saadi.
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Michael Gellert
Michael Gellert, MA, LCSW, is a Jungian analyst practicing in Los Angeles. He was formerly Director of Training at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles and a humanities professor at Vanier College, Montreal. His books include Modern Mysticism, The Way of the Small, The Divine Mind, America’s Identity Crisis (the latter two each winning a Nautilus Book Award), Far From This Land, and, most recently, Legacy of Darkness and Light: Our Cultural Icons and Their God Complex. His website is www.michaelgellert.com.