Читать книгу Spiritual Envy - Michael Krasny - Страница 12

1. Thou shalt have no other God before thy God.

2. Thou shalt have no graven images from heaven above or earth below or water under the earth.

3. Thou shalt not take the name of thy Lord God in vain.

4. Thou shalt remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy.

5. Honor thy father and mother.

6. Thou shalt not kill.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery.

8. Thou shalt not steal.

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house nor wife nor male servant nor female servant nor his ox, donkey, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

To what extent, I began to wonder in my college years, was God’s existence at stake when one reckoned with the Ten Commandments? Even secular humanists and nonbelievers vouched that the commandments were the foundation of Western civilization and, as such, deserved our compliance even if there was no God poised to reward or punish us. The commandments were sensible rules, even nonbelievers reasoned, by which to live one’s life. They protected us from ourselves and others and ensured order over chaos, law over anarchy.

Tales in all the holy books that supposedly held God’s word could be dispelled as ancient myths and superstitions, dried-up beliefs and narratives. God parting the Red Sea? A fairy tale no more believable than Jesus walking across wide water. But the Ten Commandments, whether handed down to Moses by God on Sinai or not, were something else. Exodus and Deuteronomy might hold different lists of commandments, the New Testament might offer different translations and enumerations of them, and the Koran might make only minimal mention of them, but still people sanctified them as guideposts in life, law, and morality.

I recall a yeshiva-trained rabbi telling me, when I was in college, that the Ten Commandments had to be studied in their hierarchical, descending order of importance. By such logic the most important commandment is the one to worship no other God but the one God, the God the Hebrews worshipped as they moved from paganism and golden calves to strict monotheism.

The next two commandments — and, according to Talmudic scholars and many other theologians, the next two most important — also evoke God. One inveighs against idol worship and the other against the misuse of God’s name. Implicit in this trinity of commandments is a belief in God, a core belief in the supremacy of the one God the Hebrews believed would lead them out of Egypt and slavery to the promised land, who would protect them from their enemies by heavenly intervention. Is it any wonder that enslaved blacks in the United States would, many centuries later, identify with the exodus of those ancient Hebrews and the escape from Egyptian bondage? American slaves, too, praised God (and Jesus) and prayed fervently for deliverance and for ongoing protection from enslavement and further calamity or misfortune. Ingrained in them, as in the Hebrew flock led by Moses, was the need to exalt a higher power, one greater than what they believed they possessed. Both the Hebrew slaves in the time of Moses and the black slaves in the American South became slavishly bound to the one they saw as their creator, an almighty ruler to whom they believed they owed absolute filial piety and unceasing gratitude.

What the first commandment really discloses, above all, is mortal helplessness. One must believe in the one God absolutely, and in no other gods among the wild and abundant assortment that had long been available. All other commandments hinge on this first commandment: if people are expected to obey them, then the power behind them must be real and equipped to mete out reward and punishment. One’s inability to stand against baleful and enslaving forces dictates belief in God’s power. With the fear of that power comes the exalting.

As a boy I was acutely aware that many of the Hebrew prayers praised and adored God in order to express deepest gratitude to God for his blessings, out of the fear that comes with powerlessness against punishment and despair, or, perhaps above all, out of the fear of pissing off the überhegemon. The God of the Old Testament is an angry and vengeful God. Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the religious Jewish calendar, a day of profound dread and repentance, is also, more than anything else, a day to let the Almighty know how sorry we are for our mortal failures. It’s a day to plead for forgiveness but also to hope that, if we are penitent enough, he will keep us and those we love alive and free from harm or evil in the year to come.

When Christians testify and accept Jesus as their Lord and savior, and when they proselytize as a way to find the true path to the kingdom of heaven for themselves, and when, from their Sunday pews, they offer praise to the divine power, they act out of their belief in a singular and infinite power that grants no quarter in its demand that there be no other God. They exalt and humble themselves before that power and confirm their helplessness and mortal dependency. Even those who presume to speak in God’s name, or reckon that God’s will courses through them, acknowledge God’s almighty power and absolute sovereignty. God’s power, or that of his only begotten carpenter son, is seen as absolute. This form of supreme exaltation is also evident in the streams of Muslims answering the call emanating from the minaret or making their way in pilgrimage to Mecca to worship and submit to Allah.

If God demands we have no other God before him, how can we not give our faith to him alone and repeatedly demonstrate to him its fullness? If salvation comes through acceptance of and obeisance to Jesus Christ, how can we not put him above all other Gods? We transgress when we do not. The annunciation heralding the birth of Christ eclipsed other annunciative moments, such as the story of Leda and the swan. The one God became a God with a better brand name in the ancient marketplace of deities.

Nietzsche’s decision about God, the proclamation about the death of God by Time magazine’s editors, and similar announcements by other mortals were all heresy, idiocy. God ruled! Jesus ruled! We of mortal flesh had to humble ourselves before immortal power. And what of those billions of Chinese commies and godless Russians and all the others who did not embrace a code tied to God and his Ten Commandments? Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism are not rooted in the Abrahamic theism of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The Ten Commandments do not form the spine of their ethical traditions, even though much in their religious texts reflects on the same topics that are the staples of the Ten Commandments.

An agnostic is not sure about the Ten Commandments as an ethical base, because an agnostic, by definition, is a doubter. But, as the fiction writer Tobias Wolff once told me, doubt is part of faith. I considered myself a doubter, and, as the years progressed, I also saw myself as a seeker who did not want to give up believing in God. But if God existed, I wanted to know him — if not in some empirical and extrinsic way, then in a spiritual or mystical way, which is to say, an irrational or nonempirical intrinsic way. I longed for the God I had known as a boy. I longed for a certainty that, even if it lacked scientific verification, assured me of God’s existence and the power behind his commandments. Couldn’t I feel the presence of God without the proverbial foxhole mentality, and without the deep abiding fear that accompanies feelings of helplessness? Couldn’t I peek in, even if only for a second, on the eternal, the infinite, the transcendent, the mysterious prime mover? Couldn’t I do this despite my intellect, which fiercely assured me that I could not possibly know what I could not, with epistemological certainty, perceive, touch, render, or grasp? Was there a spiritual presence unrelated to the personal, concrete God of my fathers and mothers, the God of the commandments?

In my freshman year in college, when we seemed at the brink of nuclear war with the soviet Union because of missiles Khrushchev was shipping to Cuba, I prayed to God to keep us from nuclear incineration. While my intellect deeply doubted the efficacy of my prayer, I still wanted God to be an active and involved participant. in fear, I got down on my knees in my dormitory room while my two college roommates solemnly observed. I said aloud words I wanted to believe were heard by God, who, if he existed, surely had it within his power to keep us safe.

Back when I was still in elementary school, I had come to fear nuclear attack. My class had done duck-and-cover exercises and listened to scary talk of massive destruction and mushroom clouds and radiation from Russian MiG payloads. I knew the world was a perilous place, and that we could all, suddenly and randomly, go off in a bang, just as I knew I could meet my own end in some unforeseen, unpredictable way. God was not watching over me, my family, or my nation. Only wishful thinking and involuntary visceral responses and vestigial hope told me otherwise. Yet there I was on my knees with my two frightened college roommates, pleading with God to keep us safe. How could I be certain my prayer or the prayers of others were not being heard by a higher power? Could I depend more on what my intellect told me or what my heart longed for? A world without God seemed comfortless. Was it possible to have it both ways — to doubt God and simultaneously believe he existed?

And what of agnosticism? To even inwardly admit not knowing whether God existed directly opposed the first three commandments. Could agnosticism be a middle way between faith and disbelief, or was it simply vacillation? Could agnosticism embrace the moral views set forth in God’s commandments?

I was still unwilling to call myself an agnostic. It seemed too charged a word for a young man who fell on his knees in prayer. I could not relinquish the first three, and possibly the most vital, of the Ten Commandments. Years later I would interview atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, whose observations would not dissuade me from recognizing that I could not, with certainty, know of God’s existence or nonexistence, especially not with the kind of certainty that marked both deep faith and the cocksure atheism that negated faith. If God existed, how could I possibly know what he was capable of?

The problem with the atheists I encountered was that they all seemed so certain that God did not and could not exist. Paradoxically, they resembled fundamentalists in their atheism — even though Dawkins spoke almost glowingly of the beauty of nature and Hitchens of his attraction to the idea of the numinous, telling me how his friend, the British novelist Ian McEwan, had given him a greater conceptual understanding of it. A self-proclaimed lifetime contrarian, Hitchens had taken on God. His book title said it all — God Is Not Great. But how could he, or anyone, know? He and many other atheists, it seemed to me, were thinking of the traditional, anthropomorphic God tied to religion’s dark history, the celestial big daddy whom religious zealots killed for and over, the God who would punish boys if they masturbated and girls if they lost their maidenheads.