INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

ON SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

SATURDAY 1st OF DECEMBER 2008

KEIO PLAZA HOTEL, TOKYO

GOD IS LOVE
A PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH
Jean-Luc Berlet, PhD.

Love is the light of Amaterasu, goddess of the sun…

Editor’s note:

This is an abridged version of the full book published for the International
Symposium on Science and Philosophy, December 2008, by the “Unification
thought Institute”, Tokyo, Japan, under the title: “God is love: a
philosophical approach”.

Published by the Human Development and Spirituality Committee, Paris.

(upfps.online.fr)
These notes are given “as is”, they are rough translation of a French work…

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Table of Content
Table of Content..............................................................................4
GENESIS........................................................................................5
Chapter 1: The role of Eros in Plato’s philosophy..................................6
Philos and Eros in Plato’s philosophy................................................6
Greek’s and Plato’s cult of Beauty....................................................7
Chapter 2: The polarity of God in Oriental philosophy............................9
The originality of Chinese philosophy................................................9
Yin/Yang theory and Love of God ..................................................10
The sexual way to reach God in Tantrism........................................11
Chapter 3: The Love of God in Christianity.........................................12
The father’s love of God...............................................................12
The Christian quest for woman’s love ...........................................13
God’s love and Satan’s love .........................................................14
Chapter 4: The Love of God in Kierkegaard’s philosophy......................17
Kierkegaard’s biography, Regina and God.......................................17
Kierkegaard and Abraham story ....................................................18
God’s Love, freedom and anguish..................................................19
Chapter 5: The feminine God from past to nowadays...........................21
The Goddess of the old religions....................................................21
The meaning of the cult of Holy Virgin in Catholicism .......................23
The divine feminine in New Age spirituality......................................24
REVELATION.................................................................................26
GENESIS
“I loved you late, Beauty so old and so new, I loved you late. It’s because
you were inside me and I was out of myself”. Augustine

God is love! No doubt that this three words put together compose the most
beautiful sentence never heard. Unfortunately throughout history so much blood
was spread in the name of such a loving God! That’s why my purpose in this
short essay is to clarify as much as possible the meaning of this sentence: God is
love! Therefore I propose in this essay a philosophical approach of the idea of a
God of love. To prevent from a narrow vision, we have to explain about the
concept of God and the concept of love in different cultures in the world. That’s
why our essay will bring you in a travel starting with Plato and ending with
modern feminine spirituality going through oriental thought, Christianity and
Kierkegaard’s philosophy…Of course many other ways would have be possible
to evocate such a wide topic, but I had to select what is the more meaningful for
me in order not to be too long.

In fact, the idea of a God of love is a very logical idea even though it sounds
quite poetical. To show how much it’s logical to believe in a God of love we
have to consider the most important metaphysical question never asked! This
question is: “Why is there something weather than nothing?” This question was
asked for the first time by the German philosopher Leibniz in the 18th century!
Martin Heidegger, the most famous German philosopher of the 20th century was
surprised that we have to wait so long to ask such a fundamental question. Of
course, there is no evident answer to such a deep and difficult question.
Nevertheless, the more logical answer to such a question is to say that there is
something because a source of love exists. In fact the most logical definition of
love is the passage of nothingness to being. Without love there would never be
anything that exists. So, the fact that something is proves that something like a
God of love has to exist! Creation is in itself an action of love. Without love art
would not exist. By the way Augustine made an analogy between God and an
artist to explain about the creation of Universe. Somehow, God created the
world like an artist creates his master piece…Through such an analogy, we
understand that God is not just a big computer, but more deeply a Heart full of
love. The Big bang was probably such an explosion of God’s Love!

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Chapter 1: The role of Eros in Plato’s philosophy
“When the soul of a man, since childhood, carries the seed of these virtues,
this divine man feels the desire, when comes the proper age, to produce and
give birth; he goes also, looking everywhere for the beauty to give birth…”
Plato

Plato is known as the greatest Greek philosopher who prepared the advent of
Christianity. Of course, as a spiritualist, Plato set down the philosophical basis
of Christianity. If we can’t deny such a link between Platonism and Christianity,
at the same time, we shouldn’t underestimate the differences. The conception of
love in Plato’s philosophy belongs precisely to these important differences. For
Plato, love is intimately connected with beauty, weather physical or spiritual.
According to Plato love has to be deserved and therefore cannot be
unconditional like in Jesus teaching. Love comes from the God Eros that is
represented like a cut baby with wings. Of course, Plato goes beyond of the
mythological representations. But in his dialogue about love The Banquet, Eros
constitutes a good point for starting his demonstration…

Philos and Eros in Plato’s philosophy

The word “philosophy” is very interesting in itself. This word has been created
by Pythagoras, the famous mathematician and mystic who influenced so much
Plato. Philosophy means the love for wisdom, in reference to the Goddess of
wisdom Sophia. Sophia is the rival Goddess of Venus, both of them being very
beautiful, but in a very different way. Sophia incarnate a noble and somehow
cold beauty weather Venus incarnate a seducing and rather “hot” beauty. Sophia
inspires the respect of men weather Venus inspires their strong desire. In Greek
language “Philos” means the intellectual love weather “Eros” incarnates the
sensual love. But there is nothing as sacrificial love in the Greek mind. “Agape”
that means the sacrificial love is a word invented by the first Greeks to convert
to Christianity…

As a spiritualist philosopher, Plato emphasises more Philos, the love for truth
than Eros, the love for body. Nevertheless, like it’s to often said, Plato is not
supporting the ascetic point of view rejecting fleshy desires as evil. The fact is
that Plato gives a higher value to spiritual love than to physical love, the second
one being a way to reach the first one. It is such a genial idea that Plato
developed in his famous dialogue about love The Banquet. This dialogue is
organised around a banquet offered in the name of the God of Love Eros.
According to Plato Eros is a very powerful God unifying all the opposite aspects
of reality through the power of love attraction. The sexual attraction between
man and woman is only one specific manifestation of the universal power of
Eros. Socrates, the word carrier of Plato, insists on the paradox of such a
powerful God that is represented as a baby…It’s a nice image of the paradox of
God’s love whose power lies on his humility. Christianity reminded the teaching
of Plato in the Nativity where God incarnated in a baby born in a very humble
place!

For Plato, Eros is leading to Philos through the love for Beauty. Through
loving the beautiful bodies we can bit by bit reach some higher levels of beauty
like the beauty of the souls, the beauty of intelligence and finally the beauty of
God himself. According to Plato like to the Greeks in general, Beauty is
connected to Truth and Good. The idea that Beauty could bring our soul far
away from salvation is a non sense for the old Greeks. Plato believes that the
erotic desire comes from God and is a wonderful way to reach the spiritual
desire for contemplating the Beauty, the Truth and the Good in the so called
world of Ideas. The so called “platonic” love that consist to love some body
without having sex with him or her can also be considered as a way to transform
the erotic love in “philosophical” love. Because God is love, there is no division
inside love but just some kind of hierarchy. That’s one reason why the Greek
society was quite tolerant with sexual freedom. Plato himself was supporting
homosexual love but we don’t know clearly if he was a homosexual even though
he didn’t marry. Nevertheless, at the end of the Banquet, it’s a wise woman
called Diotima who gives the most beautiful definition possible of love. For her,
love is to give birth to children in beauty…Maybe is it possible to see in this
statement Plato’s consciousness that homosexuality is not the best way of sexual
love?

Greek’s and Plato’s cult of Beauty

Old Greece is the country of the worship of Beauty. What is unique in Greek
mythology is that all the gods are beautiful even they are not always good…
Plato doesn’t like such a separation between Beauty and Good, source of
immorality…In Greek sculpture the main topic is the representation of the gods
through beautiful men and women. Compared to the Egyptian or Indian
mythology were the Gods are often represented as half animals, we can claim
that the Greek mythology shows an important progress of human consciousness.
If God created man and woman to his image, it’s quite logical to represent God
as the most beautiful man and woman possible…And the fact is that all founders
of religion are represented as handsome men! Plato agrees totally with such a
cult of Beauty even though he is very critical with art. According to Plato, art is

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just an illusory copy of the real Beauty that belongs to the world of Ideas. At
least, real man is a direct image of such a spiritual beauty and that’s why he
deserved to be loved. And for the Greeks it’s only the beauty that deserved to be
loved. May be if Socrates would have be more handsome he wouldn’t suffer
under such a persecution leading him to death in Athens?

Plato made the clear statement that Beauty reveals Good. So, he believed that
we can be saved through loving the beauty. To understand this idea we have to
mention Plato’s theory of reminiscence. Plato believed that some kind of fall
introduced evil in the world. He refers to the famous Greek myth of the fall of
the souls into the matter. Originally man was only a spiritual being
contemplating Beauty, Truth and Good in the world of Ideas. But after the fall
the souls were “mudded” into matter and they lost the souvenir of the ideal
world. Nevertheless some souls were less “mudded” than the others and they
could remember partly the original perfection in the presence of the beauty. For
Plato the philosophers are the chosen souls able to recover the memory of their
former life in spiritual life. This is Plato’s theory of reminiscence. Among the
eternal essences of the World of Ideas, Beauty is the only one that allows the
process of reminiscence because of its incredible light. When the philosopher
meets the beauty, and usually it’s human beauty, he becomes like possessed with
strong fever and the feeling of the growth of his spiritual wings…But this
experience with beauty is just a first step before the rediscovery of original
Truth and Good. At this point we can say that in Plato’s philosophy there is
really a salvation through the love for Beauty…

Plato’s vision of salvation through love influenced very much the Western
thought across the ages. Without Plato, Paul or Augustine wouldn’t be able to
see in the beauty of the world the clear evidence of the existence of a loving
God. But Plato is also the inspirer of the romantic tradition. Romantic love is in
fact very close to Plato’s love, because in Romantism like in Platonism the
beauty of the body is considered as the necessary step to reach the beauty of the
soul. Nevertheless the difference is that in Platonism we love some body
because of his beauty weather in Romantism our love makes the one we love
beautiful…It’s probably the Russian writer Dostoyevsky who is the closest to
Plato’s point of view about the salvation through beauty. Dostoyevsky declared
that the beauty will save the world. And it’s obvious in his books that the beauty
is always bringing salvation at the end. In Dostoyevsky’s story the love of God
is usually expressed through beautiful women with loving heart. We can’t see
any evil beautiful women in the books of Dostoyevsky…As an orthodox
Christian, Dostoyevsky rejects absolutely the catholic idea of the beauty of the
devil!

Bibliography: Plato, The Banquet –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Plato

Chapter 2: The polarity of God in Oriental philosophy
“The sky is lasting, the earth is persisting

What makes them lasting and persisting?

They don’t leave for themselves

This is what makes them lasting and persisting”

Lao Tzu

In the oriental spirituality we don’t use the name of God but it doesn’t mean
that the idea of God is lacking. The oriental religions like Buddhism, Shinto or
Taoism are rather pantheistic, Divinity and Nature being integrated. All these
religions got the deep intuition of the essential polarity of the Divinity. It’s
interesting to notice that usually oriental spirituality is feminine weather the
social organisation is very masculine in Asia. For example in Japan, it seems
that the feminine beauty and smoothness of Shinto religion brought a nice
balance to the masculine fighting spirit of Samurai order…

The originality of Chinese philosophy

The Chinese cosmology developed the idea of Tao, an unknown principle of

Universe making life possible. The Tao is composed by two complementary
substances called Yin and Yang, each one representing one of the fundamental
aspects of Tao. Yin is emptiness weather Yang is fullness; Yin is darkness
weather Yang is lightness; Yin is cold weather Yang is hot; Yin is water weather
Yang is fire; Yin is concave weather Yang is convex and Yin is feminine
weather Yang is masculine. Of course they are so many others couples of duals
characteristics covered by Yin/Yang theory. Such a polarity is missing in the
Western Thinking that developed exclusively the duality between spirit and
matter. In his theory of eidos and hyle Aristotle set clearly a hierarchy erecting
the spiritual principle of eidos as the master over hyle. Consequently Aristotle
gave a very intellectual definition of God as Thinking of the Thinking. Christian
philosophy followed strictly Aristotle theory in Middle Age. But because
Christianity believed that Jesus was the incarnation of God, it concluded to
quickly that God was a male Being! The Christians theologians forgot also to
quickly that in the book of Genesis one it is said that God created man at his
image, male and female. This means obviously that God is a Being with both
masculine and feminine character! Nevertheless in the second writing about
man creation in Genesis two it is said that God created woman from the side

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bone of man after making him felt asleep. That’s one of the reasons for the
justification of the man power in monotheism…

Even though we don’t speak about God in Chinese philosophy, the idea that
Tao is both male and female is really very important for the right understanding
of God. How could God really be a God of Love without such a dual character?
But this Chinese cosmology will finally lead to two controversial points of view
through Confucius and Lao Tzu in the fifth century before J-C. Confucius
developed the idea of Tao more in a social way weather Lao Tzu developed it
much more in a natural way. And because the social order in Old China was
ruled by male power, Confucius adapted the meaning of Tao to the situation. In
Confucianism the Yang principle is associated to Heaven and the Yin principle
to Earth including some hierarchy in advantage of Yang. In Taoism there is no
such kind of hierarchy inside the couple Yin/Yang that is put on a horizontal
level. Compare to Confucius Lao Tzu was a revolutionary thinker disturbing the
social order of his time. That’s the reason why Confucianism took over Taoism
in China. Of course, to identify man to Heaven and woman to Earth doesn’t
mean that the first should be consider as superior to the second. But on a
psychological point of view it’s rather clear that Heaven is more prestigious than
Earth. That’s why I think that the Taoist vision of Yin/Yang polarity is wiser
than the vision of Confucianism. True Love can only circulate on the basis of
strict equality. But equality doesn’t mean identity. Man and woman are different
from each other on the physical, psychological and even spiritual aspect.

Yin/Yang theory and Love of God

If we consider the beautiful symbol of Yin/Yang looking like a tennis ball or

two drops of water interfering in each other we can realise the full essence of
life! This symbol shows unity in diversity and resemblance in difference. There
is a part of Yang in Yin and a part of Yang in Yin. And the relation between Yin
and Yang is always in movement. The important fact is to find the right balance
between Yin and Yang. This is valuable for all aspects of life from the cosmic
level to the individual level passing by the sexual level. When the balance is
found between Yin and Yang harmony and happiness appear. What is important
is that the Yin and Yang energies are dwelling together in peace. The Yin-Yang
theory inspired so many human activities more and more appreciated today.
Among all of them, let us mention Chinese medicine, Chinese dietetics, martial
arts or Feng Shui.

When the Jesuits missionaries discovered the idea of Tao in China in the 17th
century, they identified this concept with their own Catholic concept of God. Of
course, such an assimilation of Tao and God was to quick and simple. The Tao
is an unknown, untouchable and non personal principle weather the Christian
God is a loving and powerful Being. Nevertheless, the “mistake” of the Jesuits is
a very interesting one from the point of view of their unconscious desire. As
intellectual Christians, the Jesuits could never feel so good with the
anthropomorphic Catholic vision of God. That’s why the admired the degree of
abstraction of the Chinese concept of Tao. The concept of Tao and Yin-Yang is
a very convenient way to express the dual characteristics of God on horizontal
aspect. If Tao is God, we can say that Yin is the female aspect of God and Yang
his male aspect. The movement of Yin and Yang inside Tao can be compared to
the movement of love inside God between his feminine and masculine aspect.

The sexual way to reach God in Tantrism

As a God of love, God created sexuality not only for reproduction but also for
human joy. Somehow, for the purpose of reproduction there are more simple
ways than sexuality existing in nature like the division of the cell for example.
Also, contrary to what happens in the animal kingdom, the human sexual desire
is not connected with the period of reproduction. This is the clear proof that God
offered the sexual pleasure like a beautiful love gift to mankind. But if we go
deeper in our analysis we will found out that sexual relation between man and
woman can also have a spiritual purpose. Spiritually, sexual love between man
and woman can be seen as a deep communion of the masculine and feminine
character of god. This is the point we want to show now through Tantrism.

In Indian religions the Gods are always represented as couples. In Hindu

temples we can see beautiful sculptures of the God Shiva making love with his
spouse Shakhty. Among all religions born out of Indian mythology, it’s
Tantrism which developed especially the idea of a spiritual meaning of
sexuality. According to Tantrism, God who is both male and female created the
world through a cosmic sexual relation. As beings created to the image of God,
it’s only when man and woman join together through love that they become the
integral image of God. When man and woman come together through sexual
intercourse it is like if they were creating again the world to their own image.
That’s why according to Tantrism sexual relation is a very serious matter that
shouldn’t be taken too lightly. Man and woman have to purify themselves before
to be able to have the proper sexual relation leading them to God. Usually the
spiritual and physical conditions asked are so difficult that nobody can join such
a religion with lusty intentions! Historically the Hippie movement in the sixties
made a big mistake thinking that the young westerners will find a way to
conciliate their strong desire for drug and sex and their need for spirituality in
Nepal. Many young westerners went to Kathmandu hopping to get there easy
sexual freedom far away from the Christian guilt…In fact the Tantric sexual
way to reach the Divine implies a difficult ascetic preparation that is not easy to
overcome for the westerners…

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 Bibliography: Jean Granet, The Chinese Thought- C.G Jung, Psychology of
Kundalini – Julius Evola, Metaphysics of sex

Chapter 3: The Love of God in Christianity

“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one
another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law” Paul

God is Love! That’s the core of the Christian teaching. And Jesus incarnated
this love of God in each detail of his life. Jesus was conscious to be the Son of
God and gave to mankind the example of the sacrificial love of a father for his
children. In fact, the Love of God in Christianity is precisely the love of a father
for his children. This is at the same time the beauty and the limit of Christian
love. In Christianity like in Judaism God is clearly described as a male God
relating to his creation like his female counterpart.

The father’s love of God

The Jews were waiting a male messiah to bring them to the blessed country of
Canaan to set the Kingdom of God. And they worshiped God as a male Being
whose Love took sometimes very violent expression. Jesus brought a more
peaceful vision of God’s Love, but nevertheless sometimes he was also quite
violent. And Jesus acted really like a Father for his children, serving them with
deep dedication but also correcting them when necessary. Christian Love is a
vertical Love based on moral principles. Because this Love is the Love of a
Father, it can’t be the perfect expression of Love that should integrate the Love
of a Mother. Of course there was many tries to compensate this lack of feminine
love in Christianity. But without a real incarnation of such a love in a real
woman, Christianity could never incarnate properly such this mother love
belonging to God. Father’s Love is based on obedience to God’s Word and to
moral law. Such a love is absolutely needed for salvation, but it’s not sufficient
to fulfil the heart of man. Mankind needs both father’s and mother’s love to be
realized.

In fact, Christianity developed historically like a family without a real mother.

In my opinion that’s the main reason of all the deviations of the Catholic
Church. Christianity was based on the male culture of war values like courage,
sacrifice and even revenge. The “feminine” ideal of forgiveness was lost with
the time and the Christians started bit by bit to persecute the other religions like
they were persecuted under Roman Empire. Crusades, Inquisition or Witch Hunt
to mention only the worse crimes of the Church were consequences of such a
lack of mother’s love. Even the judges of Inquisition claimed that they killed the
heretics in the name of the Love of God! The limit of his Father’s Love of the
Christian God is obvious through Jesus expression of Love. In fact, Jesus
himself couldn’t express fully the love of God simply because he was a man and
not a woman! According to Genesis God created both man and woman to his
image. Even a perfect man alone cannot incarnate fully the Love of God. It is
not my intention here to deny the wonderful beauty of Jesus love. But something
sounds strange with the fact that love is always a question of order and will in
Gospel. Jesus gives an order to love God and the other. Of course he gave the
example of such a love. But there is something strange with such a love. This is
the problem with the love of man that seems to much connected with duty,
weather the woman’s love is more spontaneous and natural. Probably the Jews
were also chocked to receive such an order to love the others and particularly
their enemies.

The Christian quest for woman’s love

Many Christians felt such a lack of the feminine love of God in their official
religion. That’s the reason why in Middle Age the popular culture of the
Christians countries created so many legends. Among all this legends, the most
popular is the story of The Knights of the Round Table. This story created in
Britain in connexion with the legend of King Arthur gives really to woman her
divine role. It would be too long here to remain the whole story. Let us just
mention the way this story introduce the divine feminine. King Arthur asked to
his best knights to bring him the Holy Grail, supposed to be the cup where Jesus
drank at his last supper…For many interpreters that I join the Holy Grail is in
fact the symbol of the perfect woman incarnating the Love of God. In fact, the
Holy Grail is a very romantic symbol to design ideal woman because a cup is
somehow like a woman womb…By the way, women play an important role in
this quest for the Holy Grail. Lancelot, the most powerful knight failed in the
quest because he fells in love with the queen, the wife of Arthur and commits
adultery with her. Finally it’s Galahad, the purest knight who reaches the Holy
Grail with the help of divine women!

We can mention also the famous Celtic legend of the Middle Age Tristan et
Iseult. Tristan is a knight attending the King of Cornwell Marc. The King is
looking for his ideal spouse, waiting for a sign of God to show him the right
person. One day, a bird brought him a lady’s blond hair and Marc knew
immediately that the owner of this hair was the chosen woman. He asked Tristan
to find this mysterious woman to bring her safely to him. Tristan could find the
beautiful owner of the blond hair, Iseult after overcoming so many obstacles.
But Iseult belonged to the enemy country of Cornwell in South West of Britain,
the Kingdom of Ireland. Therefore, Iseult refused to follow Tristan to be offered
to Marc the enemy’s king. To help Tristan in his mission, a witch prepared a
love drink in order that Iseult falls in love with Marc. But unfortunately, by
accident it’s Tristan who drunk the love drink and who felt desperately in love

13
with the beautiful Iseult! And because Tristan saved the life of Iseult she felt
also in deep love with him after a kiss as a symbol of forgiveness…Marc was
quickly informed of the betrayal of Tristan and swore to take revenge of it by
killing him. Tristan and Iseult escaped to French Britain where they finally
committed suicide together to consecrate their absolute love…

These two British legends have a link with the Troubadour’s tradition in South
of France at the XIIIth century. This is a tradition of courtesy of men toward
women based on pure love. The noble man should fell in love with the beautiful
woman but shouldn’t have any sexual intercourse with her. In such a tradition,
beautiful woman is considered as the feminine image of God that has to be
worshipped by noble man. Somehow, this tradition has influenced Christianity
in a positive way, particularly concerning the respect for women. If we go
deeper in our analysis, it’s obvious that such a tradition is connected with the
restoration of the Fall evocated in Genesis III. The Fall of man was in fact a
betrayal of God’s love. The Archangel Lucifer represented by the serpent
seduced Eve and initiated her to some kind of erotic love. But Eve was destined
to become the spouse of Adam and together they would become the ideal
ancestors of humankind. Somehow the noble man falling in love with the
beautiful woman but refusing to have sex with her is restoring the mission of
Archangel who was supposed to serve Adam. Such a tradition was obviously
missing at the time of Jesus! We can reasonably suppose that Jesus himself as
the second Adam should have meet a perfect woman as the second Eve. And
probably, it was up to John the Baptist as an Archangel figure to find the proper
Spouse for the Messiah…But I can’t go further with such a hypothesis because
of the lack of elements!

God’s love and Satan’s love

Under the strong influence of Augustine, Christianity makes a very clear

difference between God’s love and Satan’s love. Augustine himself was very
much involved in sexual love with women before to convert to Catholicism. On
a psychological point of view the Augustinian rejection of sexual love as evil
can be explained by Augustine’s strong denial of his past life. Even Augustine
himself recognised that he loved God through all the women he loved. His
famous sentence “I loved to love” became the key word of the romantic
tradition. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church adopted more Augustine’s austerity
toward sexuality with all the consequences of such a choice…

The idea of a “satanic love” is in fact very paradoxical because God is

supposed to be the unique source of love. In fact, the Christian idea of such a
thing as satanic love or beauty of devil can only have a meaning if we take
seriously the story of the fall of man in Genesis III. According to the book of
Genesis, Adam and Eve were created as innocent beings in a delightful place
called the Garden of Eden. God allowed them to eat the fruits from all the trees
except the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God even said to
man and woman that they will dye if they eat the fruits of this tree. But the
serpent, described as the wiser animal of the Garden, said to Eve that she won’t
dye if she eats the forbidden fruit. He convinced her that God told such a lie to
prevent human beings to become gods like him. Seduced by the words of the
serpent Eve ate the forbidden fruit that seems delicious to her and than she went
to Adam to chair the fruit with. But later on their eyes opened and they realised
there were naked hiding their sexual parts with wine leaves. Adam felt ashamed
and tried to hide from the eyes of God. But God knew that Adam and Eve
disobeyed to him and he chased them away from Paradise cursing them…

If we take this story in a literal sense like many Christians are doing we have
to accept a very strange idea of God that has nothing to do with Love. Could a
loving God give such a temptation to his immature children? And what about
the serpent speaking and betraying the confidence of Eve? In fact the story of
fall is a symbolic one but the meaning is not very difficult to guess. Let’s take
one after the other the elements of the story to find out their real meaning. The
fruit of the tree of knowledge is obviously the symbol of sexual love. On one
hand, for vegetal the fruit is the way of reproduction and on the other hand, why
should we hide our sexual organs if we ate a forbidden apple? The identity of
the serpent is revealed by the Book of Revelation 12:9 that mention about the
fall of the dragon, the old serpent that is in other words the devil! In fact the
serpent is the incarnation of Lucifer the Archangel of Knowledge who became
Satan after his fall. And the serpent is at the same time a symbol of wisdom and
male sexuality! Finally we have to admit that the fall of man was some kind of
spiritual adultery between Lucifer and eve followed by an immature sexual
intercourse between Adam and Eve…

But how was it possible for such a being as the Archangel to betray God, his
creator? Once again the only possible answer to such a question lies on the love
deception. God created the angels under the leadership of Lucifer before to
create man as his child. Comparing the new situation with the former one,
Lucifer had the wrong feeling of a lack of love from God. Than he started to
hate God trying to destroy his ideal by all means possible. Because Lucifer was
not evil but just upset, the way to revenge against God was to steal the love of
his children and especially the love of Eve. In fact, it’s not absurd to believe that
somehow Lucifer felt in love with Eve whose natural beauty was incredibly
lighted with the grace of God’s love…That’s probably the reason why the
Catholic Church always suspected women to be close to the devil…with all the
terrible consequences of such an accusation! The main accusation of Holy
Inquisition against the witches was their sexual intercourse with the devil…

15
 Bibliography: The Holy Bible- Saint Augustine, Confessions- J. Weston, The
quest of the Holy Grail.
Chapter 4: The Love of God in Kierkegaard’s philosophy
“God is love…You can’t even imagine how much He is suffering, because He
knows perfectly how much the suffering is harming you. But He can’t
change, because in this case He would have to become something else than
love.” Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

The Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard is the very first one to speak clearly
about the suffering of God. He understood that if you believe in a God of love
you have also to believe in a God who suffers because of the misery of mankind.
In fact, the official statement of Christian belief is to deny the idea that God can
be suffering. According to Christian theology, God is almighty and an almighty
being can’t be suffering. Therefore the Christian idea of a God of love remains
very abstract. And Kierkegaard is the enemy of abstraction in philosophy. As the
so called “father of existentialism”, Kierkegaard believe that a thinker is a man
before any thing else and that he should live before to think. By the way,
Kierkegaard is the first philosopher to base consciously his thinking on his own
biography that is revolutionary in the whole history of thought. The Danish
philosopher bases his thinking especially on his love story in connexion with
God, what makes sense for our own study about God’s love…

Kierkegaard’s biography, Regina and God

The life of Sören Kierkegaard is intimately connected with Love and God. Two
big chocks led him to become a philosopher. The first chock for Kierkegaard
was to learn about the denial of God by his father, a very strong Christian. Later
on his father felt that he was cursed by God because of the quick death of his
wife and of 5 of his children on 7! Sören was the youngest child of this second
marriage of his father with his servant. May be this is one of the reason why he
was so interested in the story of Abraham in the Bible? In fact, the young
Kierkegaard felt guilty about this curse to his family and this led him to a rather
pessimistic vision of life. But, this “spiritual curse” was compensated by a
material blessing with a lot of money inherited from his father who succeeded in
business. Kierkegaard started than a life of dandy, what he called later on the
esthetical step of existence, seeking for beauty and romantic love. Than occurred
his second big chock of his life: the love for Regina Olsen and the rupture of
matching just before to get engaged with her in marriage. The deep reason of the
rupture remains somehow mysterious, but according to Kierkegaard himself, he
had to choose between the love for God and the love for a woman. To justify his

17
chocking behaviour, Kierkegaard invocated Regina’s lack of religious
understanding, but he was not very confident in the value of such an excuse. At
the same time he felt very guilty to break the heart of Regina and wrote a lot
about this story to cure himself. It’s especially in his book Guilty- not guilty that
Kierkegaard related his love story with Regina with a deep philosophical and
spiritual analysis. Later on, in his diary he confessed that if he would have got
really the faith in God, he would have marry Regina Olsen…In 1855, when he
came to know that Regina Olsen went to some Danish colonies with her
husband who became governor, he got his third chocked that brought him to
death. It was the 11th of November and he was 42! Kierkegaard felt
somehow that he had to choose between the love for Regina and the love for
God. But he was not very confident to justify his choice and felt guilty for
making Regina suffering. Through his own suffering heart, Kierkegaard could
feel how much more God suffered after the fall of man. For him, the fall is like a
very sad love story between God and mankind. The more tragic aspect of this
story is that Kierkegaard thought that Regina would have be a spiritual obstacle
between God and him whether she was in reality the main way to lead him to
really meet God. That’s why at the end of his life Kierkegaard declared that he
would have married with Regina if he would have really got the faith…

Kierkegaard and Abraham story

Kierkegaard had a very strong biblical culture and always mentioned some
stories of the Bible to illustrate his own thinking. But Abraham was from far
away his favourite figure of the Old Testament and somehow even more
important than Jesus for him! Kierkegaard wrote a book especially about the
story of the sacrifice of Isaac: Frighten and trembling. For him, this incredible
story is the universal key point of what is really faith in God. By asking to
Abraham the offering of his own son Isaac, God asked something completely
impossible. It was even a non sense for a God of love to ask a man to kill his
own son to prove his faith. How could the God of Israel asked to a faithful man
like Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? Wasn’t this God that abolished with such anger
the pagan tradition of human sacrifice? That’s why Kierkegaard thinks that
Abraham became nearly a fool when he heard this order from God. How could
God ask him to violate the most fundamental law of ethics that is not to kill
anybody, even your offspring? What did Abraham wrong to deserve such a
terrible punishment? And, how can you still believe that God is love after such a
story? Kierkegaard doesn’t answer really to all these frightening questions, but
though he gives a very interesting interpretation in connexion with his own life!
Kierkegaard made a comparison between the sacrifice of Isaac and his own
sacrifice of Regina. Because of the guilty feeling for the faith denial of his
father, Kierkegaard felt somehow that his love for Regina was the price to pay to
be forgiven by God. Kierkegaard understood deeply that Abraham felt deeply
guilty because of his failure in his foundation of faith. Than Abraham felt that he
should make a greater sacrifice to God to overcome his failure. That’s why for
Kierkegaard Abraham deserves to be called the Father of Faith. He was ready to
commit the worse, killing his child to prove his incredible faith to God. He was
the first to open the way to enter the religious step of life beyond the moral step
where humankind was blocked until now.

For Kierkegaard, Regina was in the same position as Isaac for Abraham. But the
difference is that God sent an angel to stop the arm of Abraham on the way to
kill Isaac, but didn’t do anything to prevent the separation between Sören
Kierkegaard and Regina Olsen…In fact, Kierkegaard believed that he could
later on restore his love relation with Regina, but this dream collapsed when he
came to know that she married with Frederic Schlegel. At this moment,
Kierkegaard was to the point to loose his faith in God, but he could overcome
his feeling by his “jump into the faith”. He understood somehow that he was not
Abraham and that God was no more the same He used to be…Kierkegaard came
to know that a God of love gives what he gives without condition and never
asked him to sacrifice his love for Regina. Abraham made his jump into faith by
following the absurd order of God and Kierkegaard should have done the same
by entering into marriage, sacrificing his freedom as a single philosopher.
Already, it’s so difficult for a man to sacrifice his love for a woman. But nothing
is worse to make such a sacrifice and to realise afterward that God never asked
such a thing. We can understand the despair of Kierkegaard and his attempt to
commit suicide! The proof that Kierkegaard understood his mistake lay in his
beautiful essay about the deep value of marriage, About esthetical legitimacy of
marriage. Kierkegaard realised too late that marriage is the ideal place where
the Love of God can dwell.

God’s Love, freedom and anguish

In the concept of anguish one of his main book, Kierkegaard gives his own
interpretation of the chapter 3 of Genesis, relating the fall of man. Basically
Kierkegaard agrees with Augustine conception that identifies the serpent with
the devil and the forbidden fruit with sexual love. But Kierkegaard wants to go
more deep in knowing the psychological background of such an incredible.
Kierkegaard feels something wrong with the fact that a God of Love could have
put such a dangerous tree in the Garden of Eden. He knows very well that
children are always attracted by what is forbidden. And this is not the result of
something evil in their mind but the consequence of there original desire to
experiment their freedom. But for Kierkegaard, freedom doesn’t go without
anguish. According to him, Adam and Eve were anguished by the order of God
not to eat the fruit of the tree of life and felt guilty even before to commit the
fall. So, they became week to resist to the evil temptation of the serpent that

19
took advantage of the situation. The serpent is a very interesting symbol to
represent the Archangel Lucifer. Serpent is at the same time the symbol of
wisdom and male sexuality. As an animal, the serpent is also the perfect
symbol of anguish. Some serpents kill their prey by suffocating them and some
others by hypnotising them with their eyes. Anguish is at the same time a
physical feeling of suffocation and a psychological feeling of vertigo. And isn’t
temptation a kind of spiritual vertigo where you reject and desire at the same
time the forbidden object?

But God had no other choice to give this order to Adam and Eve, otherwise
they wouldn’t experiment their freedom and wouldn’t properly become human
beings. They were free to say no to the temptation and to obey to God, but
unfortunately they choose the way to follow the advice of the serpent. With such
an explanation Kierkegaard preserves the idea that God is love. Generally,
Christian theology considers that the fall was necessary and Augustine himself
declared: ”Happy fall that made necessary the coming of such a Messiah”.
Kierkegaard rejects absolutely such an idea that is against the love of God.
Because God is love, he created man and woman as free that make it possible to
be betrayed by them. But this vulnerability is the price for love because when
you love somebody you can never treat him as an object. True love always
exposes the lover to the possibility of betrayal and there is no exception for God.
As the Creator of the Universe, God is absolutely almighty, but in his relation
with mankind God is absolutely vulnerable. Because God is love, God made
love higher than power or anything else. This is the supreme and beautiful
paradox of God. And Kierkegaard knows that the real religious life is full of
paradoxes.

According to me Kierkegaard is the thinker who understood the more deeply

about the loving heart of God with all the tragic consequences of such a reality.
The great merit of the Danish philosopher was to be courageous enough to
reveal his intimate life and particularly his love failure through his philosophical
writings. So, through his own suffering Kierkegaard could understand deeply the
broken heart of God after the loss of true love. But it’s sad that Kierkegaard had
to pass through the suffering of frustration and guilt to feel the love of God. It
would be so stimulating that one day a philosopher could testify of the love of
God through his joyful love experience…

Bibliography: Kierkegaard, Guilty - not guilty, Tel Gallimard 1975 - Frighten

and trembling, Rivages 2000 - The esthetical legitimacy of marriage, Tel
Gallimard, 1943
Chapter 5: The feminine God from past to nowadays

“The Spirit of the Valley don’t die

It is the Mysterious Feminine”

Lao Tzu

With the Advent of the Third Millennium we passed from the Age of the Fish to
the Age of the Aquarius. The Aquarius is the symbol of feminine values, so that
we can interpret that we are passing from the Age of man to the age of woman.
On the other hand the English historian Arnold Toynbee declared that the 21st
century will be spiritual or won’t be. The 21st century is and it seems to be more
and more spiritual! And the Christian spiritualist from Middle Age Joachim de
Flores said that soon humankind will enter the Age of the Holy Spirit after
having crossed the Age of the Father and the Age of the Son. The Age of the
Father corresponds to the Age of the Old Testament dominated by the Law of
Moses. The Age of the Son corresponds to the Age of the New Testament
characterized by the Word of Jesus. Then, the Age of the Holy Spirit
corresponds to the Age of the Completed Testament nourished by the Love of
the New Eva…

The Goddess of the old religions

When Christianity took the power in Rome in 392 becoming state religion, the
Empire was still filled with so many religious believes. In the beginning, the
Christian power was quite tolerant with the other faiths because the Christians
had still in memory the atrocity of religious persecution. But, unfortunately, the
desire of power of the Christian leaders betrayed bit by bit the Gospel spirit and
started to persecute the other religions or philosophy. The Council of Nicaea in
461 was the dark turning point of the Roman Catholic Church that set up a very
dogmatic theology, based on masculine power. God received the definition as an
Almighty male Creator ruling the universe like a king. Such a vision leads later
on Michelangelo to paint the famous old beard man to decorate the roof of
Vatican! Any reference to the divine feminine aspect of God was strictly
forbidden and considered as a pagan heresy! In fact, this was a non-sense even
from the point of view of the Bible. In Genesis it is clearly written that God
created man and woman as his image that means obviously that God has also a
feminine aspect! And the Jewish mystical tradition compare the wife of Jacob,

21
Rachel to the Shekina, the feminine aspect of God…Rebecca, the mother of
Jacob played a very important role in God’s Providence by making it possible
for Jacob to receive the Isaac’s Blessing instead of Esau. In the Bible, women
were usually more to the side of God than men. Among the Jew people, only
women remained faithful to Moses by refusing to give their jewellery to be
melted to build the Golden Calf. And they are so many other examples in Old
Testament showing that women respected more than men the Will of God. Also
in the New Testament, Jesus was more supported by women at the end of his
course. And after the Cross it was a woman who saw the spiritual body of Jesus
and spread the good new of his resurrection!

Somehow, it seems that the Bible took some inspiration of the Goddess of the
old pagan religions to describe the women fulfilling the Will of God. Among so
many famous Goddess of the polytheist pantheon we can mention about Isis
from Egypt and Kali from India. Why choosing to speak about this two figures
among so many others? Firstly it is because Isis like Kali became the main God
of some new feminine religions. And secondly it is because Kali and Isis
represent very well the two complementary aspect of woman: Kali represents
the woman as sensual and seductive being weather Isis represents the woman as
the being who gives the life and protect it…

Kali- Kali is a very important Goddess among the Pantheon of Hinduism. She is
often mentioned as the third God among the original Trinity of Hinduism with
Shiva and Vishnu. Kali is known as the Goddess of destruction and
regeneration. But often Kali is also represented as the Goddess of dance and
sexual love. The idea is that the cycle of life is like a dance between the creation
through sex and the destruction through death. Kali became the main God in
some branch of the Tantric religion in India. Even Freud adapted this idea in his
deepest intuition that is the duality in man of the impulse for life, Eros and the
impulse for death, Thanatos.

Isis- Isis is the Egyptian Goddess of Nature. She is the spouse of Horus, the
God of Heaven. According to one of the most famous Egyptian myth, Horus
was killed by his evil brother Seth who cut his body in pieces spread in several
places in order to prevent any resurrection! But, the love of Isis for Horus was so
deep that she patiently collected all pieces of the body of her dead husband to
put them again together and resurrect him by the strength of her love. Isis
became the universal symbol of the loving heart of the ideal spouse. After the
collapse of Egyptian civilisation at the time of Alexandrine culture, Isis became
the object of a specific religion called the cult of Isis. This feminine and loving
religion spread very quickly in the Roman Empire at the same time than
Christianity that finally absorbed it…The cult of Isis could have bring to
Christianity the feminine aspect that was lacking, but the believers of Isis were
persecuted by Christians when they got the power…

The meaning of the cult of Holy Virgin in Catholicism

Through the influence of the Greco-roman culture based on male power, the
Roman Catholic Church became a very masculine religion with a male God
incarnated by a single man. Paul was the one who emphasize a lot about the
inferiority of woman compared to man. But after the collapse of Roman Empire
through Alaric in 476, the German pagans started to convert to Christianity.
Because their religion was respecting very much woman through important
Goddess, they transformed Christianity into a more feminine aspect. Bit by bit,
in the Middle Age something like a special respect for Maria, the mother of
Jesus, spread among Christian consciousness. Woman in general became an
object of devotion through the troubadour tradition in south of France or the
legend of the Knights of Round Table in Britain. Nevertheless, it’s only in the
XIXth century that the virgin conception of Jesus through Maria became an
official dogma of Catholic religion! And it’s only in 1950 through the Pope Pie
XII that the dogma of Immaculate Conception was set. This dogma asserts that
Maria herself was conceived without the original sin, her mother Anna
conceiving her without any sexual intercourse…It’s also in 1950 that the 15 th of
august became an official Holy Day dedicated to the Holy Virgin!

Whatever we may think about the beauty or the absurdity of such a dogma that
belongs to Faith, nobody can deny the psychological power of this idea of a
Saviour born from a Virgin mother. On a psychological point of view, the
Catholic idea of the birth of Jesus through a virgin woman constitutes an
important compensation to the lack of feminine aspect in the Christian God. If
we consider that Jesus is the Son of God, we can assert that Maria is the wife of
God. For some Catholics who believe that Jesus is God himself, Maria is raised
to the position of the mother of God…The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav
Jung admired such a dogma on a psychological aspect, even though he was
from a protestant background. He explained that the cult of Maria was some
kind of “revenge” of the Divine feminine forgotten in Monotheism. Somehow,
Maria has many common points with some famous Goddess from the past. We
may think in particular about Demeter the Greek Goddess of Vegetation and
Fertility. Demeter is famous also for her mother instinct, sacrificing everything
else to find back her lost daughter. Maria risked also her life to save Jesus when
she heard about the project of the king Herod to kill all the baby boys born at
that time. In any case Maria became the most famous symbol of Motherhood,
exalted in so many master pieces of painting like the Madonna of Michelangelo.
But at the same time Maria has some resemblance with Athena the famous
Goddess of Wisdom. Athena was famous to be a Virgin that rejects men’s

23
seduction and fight without weakness against the Evil. We shouldn’t forget that
in some Catholic interpretation of the Book of Revelation, it is Mary who is
supposed to crash the head of the Dragon at the Last Days…

The divine feminine in New Age spirituality

After the atrocity of the Second World War, showing clearly the shortcoming
of the male power incarnated by two “moustache men”, Hitler and Stalin, the
Western World started some kind of conversion. The apparition of the New Age
movement in the sixties is one of the main manifestations of such a rejection of
the past model based on the “masculine” values of authority and competition.
The New Age is a broad movement promoting a new spirituality based also on
feminine and ecological values. The New Age movement may include elements
of older spiritual and religious traditions from both East and West, many of
which have been melded with ideas from modern science, particularly
psychology and ecology. Because New Age is more a spontaneous courant
than an organized structure, it’s difficult to give a precise birthday. Nevertheless,
the publishing of the book of Marilyn Ferguson The Aquarian conspiracy in
1980 can be considered as the event that brought the New Age in the lights of
mass media.

The New Age movement constitutes an alternative to the Christian culture

based on the masculine principle of authority and obedience. This movement
claim obviously a feminine spirituality based on the values of tenderness and
tolerance. One of the main idea of New Age is that the feminine forms of
spirituality, including feminine images of the divine, such as the as the female
Aeon Sophia in Gnosticism, have been subordinated, masked, or obliterated by
patriarchal religions that were widely practiced when sacred teachings were first
committed to writing. Such a will to resurrect the Divine Feminine explains why
New Age is so much focused on oriental philosophy and more particularly on
Taoism and Tantrism. Taoism and Tantrism give an important role to feminine
and woman power in order to reach the Tao or the Divinity. Historically the
raise of the New Age movement was clearly prepared by the Hippie movement
in the seventies with the “pilgrimage” to Kathmandu in Nepal! And the famous
slogan during Vietnam War “Make love not war” was more particularly
supported by the American girls fed up to loose their boy friends in a lost
country! Nowadays, it was not by random that the peace movement against Iraq
war started with the Californians women. In fact, the New Age movement
spread the most successfully in California through people like the writer Aldus
Huxley, the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda or the singer Carlos Santana. By
the way, it’s good to know that according to the legend, California used to be
crowded by an Amazons tribe before to be “discovered” by the Spanish
Conquistadors…
 Bibliography: Marylyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy – Kerenyi,
Goddesses of Sun and Moon – J. Weston, The quest of the Holy Grail

25
REVELATION
“Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell, there God is dwelling too.”
William Blake

God is love! But now that we understand more logically the truth of such an
assertion we must be even more astonished to see how far our world is from
God’s love ideal. The worse is that still today we kill each other in the name of
God like in the darkest time of Middle Age. Even though the fanatics are
betraying the spirit of their religion such a terrific deviation is the clear proof
that something is wrong in traditional monotheism. Of course, Judaism,
Christianity and Islam make all the clear statement that God is a loving God. But
the problem is that such a statement reminded too abstract because of a lack of
logical explanation on what we should understand when we talk of a God of
love. The fact is that the theologians of the three revealed religions gave the
priority to the idea of the power of God and not to the idea of the love of God.
On a rational point of view it is not easy to bring together the idea that God is
Almighty and Love. The reality of evil is disturbing the unity of power and love
in God. Like the French writer Albert Camus said, in front of evil we have to
choose between the power and the love of God. If God is really Almighty, evil
shows clearly some lack of love and if God is really love, evil shows clearly
some lack of power. We have to admit that the demonstration of Camus is not
stupid even though we don’t fully agree with him! In my point of view, love is
the most essential nature of God prevailing to all others attributes. God is love
and his has other attributes like eternity, power or knowledge. But to say that
God is Almighty is a logical absurdity, because power has always a limitation by
definition. This is the convincing thesis of the Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas in
his essay The concept of God after Auschwitz. For him, the power of god is
limited by his love. And the love of God means the respect of human freedom
even though this freedom can lead to the worse crimes…

In my own philosophical thesis transformed into a book called The complex of

God, I intended to show that the idea of an Almighty God was somehow
pathological. Because man was unable to assume the freedom that implies the
love of God, he created the idea of an Almighty God deciding every thing
instead of him. But came the time when, like a rebellious child, man started to
reject the dominion of God and tried to take over his presumed absolute power.
That is the “psychological disease” that I call the complex of God. And it is the
specific disease of western civilisation…