The Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God’s Inner Journey

By Michael Gellert. Prometheus Books, 2018. 286 pages. $26/hardcover; $11.99/eBook.

As a Conservative Jew—the muddled middle between Reform and Orthodox—I grew up on the Hebrew Bible. Now that I’m a Friend, I read the Gospels. But I’ve never touched a Qur’an. My experience mirrors the relative weight Michael Gellert gives to the Abrahamic religions in his “psychological thriller,” The Divine Mind.

Gellert’s book is the latest in a series of popular, idiosyncratic views of the monotheistic religions. Jack Miles focuses on the Hebrew Bible and the contradictions of the Five Books of Moses in God: A Biography, but ignores other scriptures. Karen Armstrong’s A History of God is more about the practices of the three religions than their conceptions of God; she seems to favor Islam. In God: A Human History, Reza Aslan examines the common denominators among all three, i.e., God is an image of the perfect human being.

Compared to the above books that run from 320 to nearly 500 pages, those of us who prefer a shorter read with a clear theme will find Gellert’s 220 pages (plus 40 of footnotes) to be written in an engaging and often provocative style. His dry wit is on display in such chapters as “God’s PTSD and Other Afflictions.”

A Jew turned Buddhist and Jungian analyst, Gellert uses a developmental approach to group the scriptures in a new way. First, there is the Pentateuch and other writings of the Hebrew Bible. Like Miles, he sees this God as stereotypically tribal and conflicted, but, in his interaction with Job, he has a wake-up call: “It’s time to get my act together as a caring Divine Being.”

Next are the Talmud, New Testament, Qur’an, and the Gnostic texts, which show us taking our sacred destinies into our own hands. The Talmud demonstrates how to act when God has abandoned you to exile—a form of self-love?—whereas the Incarnation is a step up in God’s love for his people. Gellert states, “In spite of Islam’s claim that it completes Judaism and Christianity . . . it is questionable whether the Qur’an genuinely advances God’s evolution.” Whoa!

And the author has a lot to say about Jewish and Christian Gnostics, but apparently there are no comparable Muslims until the Sufis come along (in part three). Oh well, even Buddhists can be human.

Then Gellert skips to the mysticism that he and Armstrong favor above all. We’re talking about the Hasidic Baal Shem Tov, Meister Eckhart and St. Teresa of Avila, and the Sufis.

Finally, as the son of Holocaust survivors, he bravely marshals “the [mystic] splendor of absolute nothingness” against the dark side of humanity. His conclusion: “It is important that we do not fall prey to a mystical quietism and dismiss evil simply because it is part and parcel of the structure of the universe. On a human level we must exercise our moral responsibility to deal with it. The mystics and sages of history have known this better than anyone.”

If Gellert gives in to sarcasm at times, it’s part of his strategy to provoke our thoughts, feelings, and actions. There’s much here for Friends to apply to our history and current leadings.

The first Quakers were keen on finding inspiration in the Scriptures. Rufus Jones brought our attention to how their right living was based on the guidance of that mystical Inner Light. And George Fox preached the Gospel at the end of a period when, according to Gellert, spiritual insiders believed “the Incarnation is happening all the time,” to quote him paraphrasing Meister Eckhart.

How many of us are wistful for those times when we made it to the mountain and reached out for the promised land on the other side? How long can Friends continue our good works when “that of God in everyone” and “continuing revelation” have become catchphrases?

These are tough questions and maybe we don’t like Michael Gellert bringing God down to our level and sometimes rubbing his face in our spiritual mud. But in the end he’s optimistic that, as Abraham Heschel suggested in God in Search of Man, redemption is a two-way street and God’s journey is a mirror of our own.

 

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2 thoughts on “The Divine Mind: Exploring the Psychological History of God’s Inner Journey

  1. Dear Carl Blumenthal,

    I happened to fall upon your review of my book (October 2018). Thank you for giving your attention to it and taking the time to compose your thoughts and write the review, which I found interesting and, overall, very favorable. It is always rewarding to a writer to learn that others have been moved or affected in some way by his or her labors.

    This said, a few things I’d like to point out include:

    Jack Miles has written three books, all provocative and excellent: the first on the Hebrew Bible, as you indicate, the second on the New Testament, and most recently, his third on the Qur’an.

    You write that I am a “Jew turned Buddhist and Jungian analyst.” I never converted to Buddhism and have always approached it as a psychological discipline revolving around meditation (“zazen”) and the nature of the unconscious mind. I remain and always will be an observant Jew. Leonard Cohen nicely summed up my own orientation when he said that Judaism is his religion and Zen his practice. The same or similar regarding my work as a Jungian analyst. It’s my profession, not my religion. One can be a Jew, Zen practitioner, and Jungian analyst all at the same time without violating the tenets of any one of them.

    You quote me and conclude with your sense of being surprised: “’In spite of Islam’s claim that it completes Judaism and Christianity … it is questionable whether the Qur’an genuinely advances God’s evolution.’ Whoa!” Why the surprise? I do not claim, as apparently some readers think I do, that the Qur’an is in any way inferior to Jewish and Christian sacred texts. Merely, it does not advance the dualist experience of the divine–of God as other than ourselves–beyond how this experience is articulated in the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, and New Testament. Why should it? Simply because it was written hundreds of years later than these other texts? It is Islam’s first encounter with the Abrahamic God, and like all these other scriptures that comprise the first and even secondary encounters with this God, it is dualistic, patriarchal, and anthropomorphic. That is what this passage and the book in general suggest. The next stage of religious or spiritual evolution came with the medieval mystics in all three Abrahamic religions. Until then, all of them were more or less on the same developmental level. “Of course!,” one should proclaim, not “Whoa!”

    You add, “And the author has a lot to say about Jewish and Christian Gnostics, but apparently there are no comparable Muslims until the Sufis come along (in part three). This is also a misrepresentation. In the chapter on the Sufis I acknowledge that early forms of mystical understanding were already germinating in the seventh century with figures like Uwaris al-Qarni and Hasan of Basra. They may be likened to Islam’s Gnostic phase. I chose not to write at length about them because they reflected Gnostic tendencies rather than an entire movement as in Judaism and Christianity. And frankly, to keep the book at 220 pages, as you observed, I had to take a few shortcuts.

    Lastly, if in any way I conveyed an impression of being sarcastic, I would wish to correct that. Ironic in the humanist tradition, perhaps, but hopefully not sarcastic.

    Again, thank you for your favorable review and your enthusiasm for this subject matter. “To be filled with God,” the etymological root meaning of the word “enthusiasm,” is something much needed in our world today.

    Sincerely,

    Michael Gellert

  2. Dear Mr. Blumenthal,

    In 2018 you generously reviewed my then newly published book, “The Divine Mind.” I have a new book that has just been published, “Legacy of Darkness and Light: Our Cultural Icons and Their God Complex.” I’m writing to ask if you might be interested in reviewing this book, too.

    Here is a brief synopsis of it:

    Whether or not we believe in the existence of Yahweh, the stormy God of the Hebrew Bible, we are all susceptible to the Yahweh complex that is modeled upon his attitudes, emotional style, and behaviors. Like the deity itself, the complex can be positive or dark, influencing our relationships, our social environment and culture, our public affairs and international relations, our treatment of the earth, and, of course, our religions. Drawing upon the experiences of famous individuals as well as the larger factors that shape history, “Legacy of Darkness and Light” explores both sides of this complex. The book aims to help us deal with this psychological force in a healthy, conscious, and self-empowered way.

    Naturally, I would be very grateful for your time and effort to write a review. Please let me know if I should send you a copy.

    Kind regards,

    Michael Gellert

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