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for understanding the divine-human relationship and another root metaphor, that which sees God to be found within reality and especially within the human heart, rather than above us in the heavens. The earliest direct statement of this competition is found in the Torah itself, when Moses, in his final speeches to the Israelites, proclaims: “The word I command you this day is not too wondrous for you and is not far off. It is not in heaven, as though to say ‘Who will go up to the heavens to fetch it and bring it to us.’ Nor is it over the sea…. But it is very close to you, within your own mouths and hearts to be fulfilled” (Deut. 30:11-13). I imagine this text as a counterpoint to the Torah's own great story of Moses going up the mountain and receiving the word from God in heaven. This seems to be another voice speaking from within the text, or at least one offering a different level of understanding. Here we are being told not to take that tale too literally, to understand Sinai rather as a vertical metaphor for an internal event. The true Torah already dwells within you.

The first truly important postbiblical Jewish religious thinker, Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE-50 CE), was a great champion of the internalization of Scripture as he created a Judaism transposed into a Platonic setting.2 Philo was the first of many who saw the detailed descriptions of the tabernacle in the book of Exodus as metaphorically referring to an inner sanctum, to a “place” for God that we fashion within the human heart.3 “Let them make me a sanctuary,” as later interpreters read the verse, “and I will dwell within them” (Ex. 25:8). So too, “They shall know that I am Y-H-W-H their God who brought them forth from the Land of Egypt to dwell within them [originally “in their midst”]; I am Y-H-W-H their God” (Ex. 29:46).

In Christianity, the presence of God within the self, as indeed the whole immanent pole within theology, came to be defined by Christology. As God chose to become manifest within the person Jesus, so is it Christ, the this-worldly embodiment of God (indeed, the new “Tabernacle” or “Temple”), who becomes manifest within the hearts of the faithful. The indwelling God, for the Christian, is usually experienced as “Christ within the heart.” In the Qur'an and classical Islam, perhaps in reaction to what its founder perceived as the “excesses” of Christianity in this matter, there is rather little room for expressions of immanence. It was only as Islam absorbed Neoplatonism that a language was found for this understanding of the God who dwells within. Later the Sufis and their poets became perhaps the most outspoken Western witnesses to the presence of God within the heart and the journey to God as an internal one, undertaken by the seeking soul.

My own favorite setting for the face-off between the vertical and internal root metaphors within Judaism is a certain page of the Babylonian Talmud. The second chapter of the Tractate Hagigah (14b) tells the famous story of Rabbi Akiva and his friends, the four who entered the pardes, or “orchard” of mystical experience. To understand the nature of this experience we turn to RaShI, the eleventh-century French commentator who is usually our best guide to what the Talmud text means. On “four entered the orchard” RaShI says: “They ascended to the sky by use of a [divine] name.” For RaShI the vertical picture of the universe is alive and well, taken quite literally in a somewhat magical context. There are powerful divine names that, when recited with proper intention and within appropriate bounds, can transport one up to heaven. But if we are unhappy with RaShI's reading,4 we turn to another corner of the Talmudic page, where his contemporary, Rabbi Hananel of Kairouan in North Africa, tells us that there really was no heavenly journey at all. The event is an internal one, he says, “an understanding of the heart.”5

Another aspect of the ancient Near Eastern legacy that abides with us has to do with the incomplete vanquishing of the primordial forces of chaos. God is indeed all-powerful and the single