Ron Charles's Reviews > God: An Anatomy

“God: An Anatomy,” by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, has won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. The U.K. award, worth about $2,500, honors the best nonfiction book on any historical subject.

“God,” like God, offers a host of surprising revelations. And the timing of this award — in the season of Christmas and Hanukkah — feels strangely ordained.

Although Stavrakopoulou is an atheist, she’s fascinated, even perturbed, by what Christians and Jews have done to God. In ancient times, she notes, God had a body, “a supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking” physique.

But that divine studmuffin began to deflate toward the close of the first millennium BCE and into the first centuries of the Common Era. Influenced by erudite Greek philosophy, Jewish and Christian intellectuals “began to re-imagine their deity in increasingly incorporeal, immaterial terms.” Since the Enlightenment, that transformation has grown more radical, Stavrakopoulou claims. “Prominent Western intellectuals have not only rendered the biblical God lifeless, but reduced him to a mere phantom, conjured by the human imagination.”

Her investigation, more like a reclamation, takes her through the Bible text to lift up, pick apart and examine the very physical body of the supreme being described there: his feet, his hands, his face, even his private parts. What do they look like? What are the dimensions, the vital signs and especially the implications for those who organized their lives around Him? (And it’s definitely Him.)

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