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Friedman probes a chain of mysteries that concern the presence or absence of God, including the connection between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky who each independently developed the idea of the death of God.
- Sales Rank: #719548 in Books
- Published on: 1995-10-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.02" h x .94" w x 5.98" l, 1.50 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
- ISBN13: 9780316294348
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Library Journal
Arguing that "the disappearance or death of God is a substantial part of this century's philosophical and literary legacy," Friedman (Hebrew, comparative literature, Univ. of California, San Diego) probes what he calls three mysteries: the gradual disappearance of God in the Hebrew scriptures, a topic recently considered by Jack Miles in his God: A Biography (LJ 3/1/95), a book Friedman refers to approvingly; Nietzsche's dictum, "God is dead," relating it admirably to the works of Dostoyevsky and the problem of ethics without God; and the mysticism of the Kabbalah and the Big Bang theory. Avoiding the type of Zen and... approach that degrades both religion and science, Friedman offers a credible discussion of contemporary physics and the return of the divine, doing no disservice to either but actually enhancing the relationship between them. For general readers as well as specialists.?Augustine J. Curley, Newark Abbey,
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The Disappearance of God, at once scholarly and popularly accessible, is packed with wonderful insights into scriptural narrative, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and cabala. Friedman notes that the narrative structure of Hebrew Scripture is marked by a disappearance of God--God's hiding of God's face to see what our end will be--that corresponds to an increasingly important role for human beings, a "coming of age" in Bonhoeffer's apt and often cited phrase. Each of the three parts of the book addresses a mystery related to the title (the disappearance of God in Hebrew Scripture, the death of God and madness in Nietzsche, and the relationship of religion to science), but it is the one mystery of the title, the disappearance of God, that binds the whole together. The disappearance is akin to what Thomas Sheehan earlier referred to as "the absolute absence of God," and it points Friedman toward a concluding moral reflection in which he maintains (as does cabala) that the structure of morality inheres in the structure of the universe. God's absolute absence is a paradoxical revelation: "There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God." Steve Schroeder
Review
In his bold and illuminating new work, The Disappearance Of God: A Divine Mystery, Richard Friedman probes a chain of mysteries that concern the presence or absence of God. Why does the God who is known through miracles and direct interaction at the beginning of the Bible gradually become hidden, leaving humans on their own by the Bible's end/ Written over so many centuries, how is it possible that the Bible depicts this diminishing visible presence of God (and the growing-up of humankind) so consistently? Friedman brilliantly explores the place of this phenomenon in the formation of Judaism and of Christianity. In the Bible, the hiding of the face of God is a literary and theological development, yet in the twentieth century it is a spiritual crisis, and Friedman aims to supply solutions to this quandary. Moving through rich and provocative examinations of world literature, history, theology, mysticism, and physics, The Disappearance Of God is as readable and exciting as a good detective story, with a conclusion that offers real hope in a time of spiritual longing. -- Midwest Book Review
Most helpful customer reviews
20 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
An Outstanding Work
By Shawn P. Rife
I just finished this book and intend to read it again right away. I found it to be a very powerful work and am disappointed that it does not seem to have a stronger following; this is a real gem that has apparently been lost in the shuffle. Written for both believers and non-believers, Friedman proposes a very interesting framework for understanding man's relationship with God and our place in the universe. It's not a comprehensive theology by any means nor is it an attempt to convert atheists. By the end of the book, however, I found my faith strengthened ("renewed" is actually a better word) in a God that bridges the apparent gaps between modern science, the Bible, and the oft-misunderstood philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche (who gets soem very enlightening attention in this book, along with Dostoyevsky). Fundamentalists, on the other hand, may be disappointed (even though I think they shouldn't be). Highly recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A profoundly disturbing and thought-provoking work
By Yael Shahar
Many may know Richard Elliot Friedman for his books on Biblical textual research, but he has also written a very useful, and very wise commentary on the Torah. However, this latest book is both scholarly and mystical in scope.
The Disappearance of God details the gradual receding of the divine presence in the Biblical writings---from the unquestioned companion and teacher of the Patriarchs, to the distant but still-present redeemer in Exodus, to the absent deity of Esther. Each diminishment of the perceived Divine presence is another stage of human development. But how is it, asks Friedman, that the numerous biblical authors, in the complete absence of any coordination between them, managed to tell the same story of gradual Divine withdrawal from human history?
The answer, he posits, is that the Bible itself is a reflection of a universal story of human development, of the withdrawal from the Sacred--and frightening--origin of being into a realm that is safer, more human, and more understandable, but which draws its meaning from its Divine origin. We remember the closeness to the Holy. It's encoded in our very being. But we have had to leave it behind and embark on our own journey in order to be truly human.
"What the recurrence of the phrase [the hiding of the face] indicates is that the diminishing apparent presence of God was not only a literary-historical development in biblical narrative, but rather it was felt, consciously, acutely, by sensitive persons in the biblical world. In every occurrence the phrase reflects a condition in which the deity is understood to exist but not be available to humans, giving no visible signs of presence, leaving a human community to face their troubles on their own. The prophetic books do not so much add proof to the development; rather they make it deeper, more vivid. They convey the human, emotional response to the disappearance of God."
The human awareness of the absence of divinity brings with it a crisis of faith. Friedman cites the writings of Nietzche and Dostoevsky as examples of the crisis as it unfolded in modern times. Both authors connect the disappearance of God (or the absence of God) with madness.
"It is understandable that these two men who were so deeply concerned with God and with madness should have perceived these two realms to overlap. God represents order, especially in Western religious tradition. God gives shape, gives laws. Recall that in the Bible, creation is the divine imposition of order over chaos. In Genesis, initially there is only water, in a shapeless, undifferentiated abyss, described as “unformed and void” (Hebrew tohu vavohu). Creation is a process of distinctions, or divisions, which turn this unformed material into a universe of things and beings: distinctions between light and dark, between dry areas and waters, between the waters above the firmament and those below, between sky and earth, between sun, moon, and stars, et cetera."
As Friedman notes, the opposite of order is not disorder, but madness. Chaos, translated into human perception, is the absence of distinctions, where all values have equal value.
"In each case, creation involves the deity's separating a substance and then giving it a name. With time as with space, the deity makes distinctions, marking days, months, years, seasons. That is creation. With God, things have distinguishable existence in time and space. Without God, “all is permitted.” Somehow madness involves, in some degree, a return to chaos. Distinctions break down, all is permitted."
Interestingly, Friedman never makes the connection to the Four who entered the Pardes, a story of mystical revelation and madness set out in the Talmud (Chagiga 14b). There two, madness corresponded to a lack of clear distinctions.
One of the more ominous implications of the "madness" accompanying the declining perception of the divine was how it set the stage for the Shoah. Friedman writes that our voluntary acceptance of God’s law provides a measure of security. But more than that, it anchors our moral being in something greater than ourselves, and thus serves as a bulwark against moral relativism.
"[The absence of the Divine] leaves an arbitrariness, an ambiguity, concerning which even Nietzsche himself forewarned. When he said that the greatest danger lurking is madness, the full context oft that remark was one of madness as the opposite of faith: 'The greatest danger that always hovered over humanity and still hovers over it is the eruption of madness—which means the eruption of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing, the enjoyment of the mind’s lack of discipline, the joy in human unreason. Not truth and certainty are the opposites of the world of the madman, but the universality and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the non-arbitrary character of judgments.' "
Nietzsche warning against arbitrariness and lack of discipline carries an implicit warning against hubris---the elevation of human reason to a position of infallibility. The moral relativism that Nietzsche foresaw was to bear fruit in the greatest cataclysm that mankind had yet seen:
"Nearly a hundred years later, while some of the death-of-God theologians concentrated on the liberating aspect of the doctrine, others were intensely aware of the psychologically troubling side of what they were pronouncing. Altizer wrote of '… a new chaos, a new meaninglessness brought on by the disappearance of an absolute or transcendent ground, the very nihilism foreseen by Nietzsche as the next stage of history.' And he added, 'No honest contemporary seeker can ever lose sight of the very real possibility that the willing of the death of God is the way to madness [and] dehumanization…'"
It would appear that the "death of God" was an all-or-nothing proposition. The continued existence of people for whom God was not dead presented a problem for those who were certain that God was dead. Their answer was to exterminate all ambassadors of God in their midst. They would do their part to bring all back to chaos, to erase the distinctions between light and dark, good and evil. They would, in short, do what they could to bring about the death of God. Dehumanization, indeed.
And so Nietzsche's Death of God comes full circle to what Jewish tradition calls Hester Panim--the Hiding of the Face (of God). The hallmark of Hester Panim is the breakdown of God’s justice. The "Destroyer" is unleashed, taking the good along with the wicked. When Avraham asked, “Shall not the Judge of all the world do justice?” he had in mind that the good not perish along with the wicked. “Far be it for You to do this! To kill the good along with the wicked!” But that is exactly what is foretold for the days of Hester Panim. And if God himself does not act morally, can we expect humanity to act any better? The answer of course is: Yes, we can and we should!
If the Disappearance of God is a stage of our growth as a species, it is to be hoped that we will outgrow it, and soon!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A mystery that captures the evolution of philosophy over a millenia as much as it establishes a change in religious belief.
By kikeo58
Unlike the arguments about historical veracity that dominate bookshelves today, this book examines a remarkable theme that stretches between multiple Biblical authors across centuries. The Bible presents a theology that evolved from a simple mythology to a very complex relationship between man and what he understood to be holy at the end of the Babylonian exile. The premise does not require any particular belief other than philosophy so there is no argument about existence. It is a record of philosophical growth as much as a change in religious belief.
The mystery is how that growth was coordinated between so many authors over such a long time. We know the authors did not always agree with each other and thus the common growth theme becomes very mysterious indeed. I would recommend this book not only to people of religion but also to those who wish to understand the evolution of thought in man's culture.
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