God: A Human History is a profound look at the depiction of he Divine since humans evolved and began recording things. The author has a talent for taking complicated historical, archaeological and religious concepts and making them understandable to the non-academic. The other attractive feature of this book is that the author shares his own personal faith journey and how he arrived at his current personal view of the divine.
In the Introduction, Aslan states that it is NOT the purpose of the book to prove the existence of God. Belief in a divine being is faith, which the author elaborates is a personal choice for each of us. What he tries to do in this book is to show how we have always tried to humanize the divine. In fact, he states: “The entire history of human spirituality can be viewed as one long, interconnected, ever-evolving, and remarkably cohesive effort to make sense of the divine by giving it our emotions and our personalities…. In short, by making God us.”
The book is
divided into three parts: The Embodied Soul, The Humanized God, and What Is
God? In the first section, the author
analyzes cave drawings found in Europe and identifies the earliest image ever
found of God (the Sorcerer image from the Paleolithic Era found in
France). This and other drawings lead
researchers to conclude that our ancestors shared an animistic belief that all
living things are interconnected, that they all share in the same universal
spirit. This Sorcerer also represents
the “God of the Beasts”, a concept which arose in multiple primitive cultures
simultaneously. The scientific debate
regarding the origin of religion or religious thought began in earnest in the
nineteenth century. This coincided with
Darwin’s introduction of concepts such as “natural selection” and “survival of
the fittest.” Is the development of
religion an evolutionary adaptation? The
debate amongst anthropologists, social and other scientists continues
today. There is no doubt, however, that
a “religious impulse” is present across many cultures and societies and
developed in these different scenarios at similar paces. The concept of a “soul” was the first
religious belief which developed in humans.
The origin of our religious impulse, then is the result of “our
ingrained, intuitive, and wholly experiential belief that we are, whatever else
we are, embodied souls.” The universal
belief in the existence of the soul, then, “led to the concept of an active,
engaged, divine presence that underlies all of creation.” This concept of the divine presence was
gradually personalized and eventually gave way to the single divine personality
we know today as God.
The second
section of the book, “The Humanized God,” shows how different faith traditions
added layers of human characteristics to their concept of the Divine. Aslan concludes by saying “that what began as
an unconscious cognitive impulse to fashion the divine in our image – to give
it our soul – gradually became, over the next ten thousand years of spiritual
development a conscious effort to make the gods more and more human like –
until, at last, God became literally human.”
It is fascinating the way the author shows us cultures, such as the
Greeks, who developed “lofty persons” or high gods and lesser gods, each
representing some aspect of human nature.
He also introduces the concept of politicomorphism, or the divinization
of earthly politics. Aslan states: “In
each case, in every empire, and throughout all of Mesopotamia, as politics on
earth changed, the politics of heaven changed to match. Just as in the face of fear and terror, the free
citizens of Mesopotamia’s independent city states abandoned their primitive
democracy and voluntarily handed
absolute power to their kings, so, too, did the citizens of heaven make one or
another of the gods the unchallenged ruler over the rest. Theology shifted to conform to reality, and
the heavens became an amplified projection of the earth.”
The third section
of the book: “What is God?” consists of three chapters: “God is One”, “God is
Three” and “God is All”. In the first of
these chapters Aslan adroitly explains the development of the concept of
monotheism, tracing the Hebrew God back to Abraham and through Moses. In the second chapter we learn of the
conundrum of early Christianity: was Jesus fully human, fully divine, or
both? If He is divine, how does that
reconcile with the Jewish tradition of monotheism? The divinity of Jesus is broached in the
Gospel of John and reconciled by the Council of Nicea in 325 C.E. and, finally,
in the writings of Augustine of Hippo.
The concept of the Trinity was born: God is eternal and unchanging, but
nevertheless exists in three forms: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. All three share the same measure of divinity
and all three existed at the beginning of time.
As Aslan states: “And if this idea causes confusion, if it defies logic
and reason, if it seems to contradict the very definition of God, then it is
simply the task of the believer to accept it as a mystery and move on.” Aslan further opines that this humanization
of the divine in the concept of the Trinity put Christianity on a collision
course with the final monotheistic tradition which would come about 100 years
later: Islam. The third chapter, “God is
All” is a concise summary of the rise of Islam and Muhammad’s return to the
monotheism of the Jewish tradition. To
Muhammad, God is indivisible, and further, Muhammad attempted to dehumanize the
divine. Islam has no images or
caricatures of God. The Quran does not
proclaim that humans are made in God’s image and Muslims deny the concept of
the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus.
Aslan then goes on to describe the development of Sufism, a mystical
version of Islam. In Sufism, God is
recognized as inseparable with His creation, creating a form of pantheism (God
is everywhere). He goes on to state:
“These Sufis were claiming unity with the divine, Indeed, for most Sufis, the mistake of
Christianity lies not in violating the indivisible nature of God by
transforming God into a human being;
rather, it lies in believing that God is only one particular
human being and no other. According to
Sufism, if God is truly indivisible, then God is all beings, and beings are
God.” He concludes with “God is not the
creator of everything that exists. God is
everything that exists.
In his Conclusion,
Aslan makes the case for his pantheism, which he came to through Sufism. He reiterates the main themes of the book:
the universal primitive belief in a “soul” separate from our physical selves
which led to our belief in a divine being; the propensity to humanize this
divine being as evidenced by multiple independent cultures; the development of
the concept of monotheism which was reconciled with the divine/human Jesus of
Nazareth through the evolution of the concept of the Trinity; the return to
“true” monotheism and rejection of the Trinity and divinity of Jesus by
Muhammad; and finally, the idea of pantheism (God is present in all of His
Creation) exhibited by the pantheism of Sufism.
This long and winding road actually mirrors the author’s own spiritual
journey as he notes in the conclusion.
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