Obviously, I am not the first person to whom the problem of glory has occurred, nor do I claim to be.
How can the problem of glory be solved? There are a variety of strategies for working on this problem, which can be utilized by thinkers in the Jewish tradition, the Christian tradition, the Muslim tradition, and other traditions.
One way is to simply deny the premise: that all things exist for the glory of God. Perhaps existents, like humans, exist not for his glory, but simply by dint of his mercy. He doesn't so much will us to exist; rather, he simply allows us to exist. As finite beings, we cannot substantially diminish his perfection, so why should he care about us? In other words, it's not so much that he created us, let alone that he created us for a purpose - it's just that so far, he hasn't bothered to destroy us. We are so meaningless that we aren't even worth the trouble of destroying.
Another, perhaps related strategy, is not so much to deny the premise, but simply to deny that this is a problem. Yes, humans are worthless and meaningless. All glory to God. Deal with it. (Something like this, I think, might be construed as the message of Job - and perhaps also Ecclesiastes.)
And there are other, more subtle answers to the problem of glory, and there is indeed a rich literature out there, if you know how to find it - not always an easy task. Of course, discussion of this kind borders on heresy, if not blasphemy, and so when mainstream theologians broach the subject, they usually do so cautiously, and sometimes in very guarded or even disguised language. Yet all deeply thoughtful and sensitive religious people have felt the anguish of the problem of glory at least once in their lives, and once one develops an eye to see it, it's impossible to miss.
One way, or group of ways, of tackling the problem of glory is to notice that it is in some sense essentially the same as the problem of evil, turned on its head. The problem of evil is, of course, an equally ancient theological problem - namely, if God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, and God created the universe, how can evil exist? St. Augustine famously solved the problem of evil (at least in his own mind) by denying that evil exists - "evil" is simply the name we give to the absence of good. Well, what, exactly, does that mean - and how far can we take this argument? If evil doesn't exist, does that mean that "less good" also doesn't exist? If we take this argument all the way to its most extreme, it would seem to follow that nothing exists except the most good, the perfect good, good itself - i.e., God. Only God truly exists.
And of course there are a huge number of mystics, over the centuries, that would affirm just that. After practicing their prayer, or meditation, or whatever spiritual practice they employ, for a sufficient amount of time, they come to the realization that they themselves do not exist as individuals, nor does anyone else, or anything else - indeed, the ultimate reality is nothing but God. Something like this is the message of certain Sufi mystics, such as Ibn 'Arabi, who took the tawhid (the doctrine that "God has no partner") to such an extreme that they wind up denying the existence of anything other than God. (The negation of the negation, as it were.... some of you out there might see where I'm going with this.)
But this still leaves us with a problem, the problem of phenomena. If the ultimate reality is a profound unity, known as God, why is there even the appearance of the multiplicity of the things of this world? If we omit the "known as God" part of that question, we can see that this kind of philosophical wonder even animates traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism, in which the question, "Why the ten thousand things?" is the subject of a vast and profound spiritual literature. If the ultimate reality is the absolute unity of everything, why does it seem like there are ten thousand things around us? Why the apparent disunity?
And we can follow this question back along another historical track, as well: the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy. As I mentioned three paragraphs ago, one strategy of tackling this problem is to say that the only thing that exists is the perfect good, good itself. Well, for some of you, that will have lighted up some associations, namely Plato's "form of the good". I told you that the problem of glory was ancient! It is, indeed, not only older than Islam, but older than Christianity, and a good bit older than rabbinic Judaism. One can see some of the beginnings of this discussion in the writings of Plato, for instance in the Timaeus and especially in the Parmenides, in which Plato tackles the thorny paradoxes of "the One" - and maybe even before that, in some of the cryptic writings of Heracleitus. And one can find an even richer, more extensive literature on this topic throughout the Greek philosophy that followed later from these writers - especially in Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. One way of restating the problem of glory in Aristotelian terms - that is to say, non-religious terms, or at least non-Christian, non-Jewish, non-Muslim terms (although Plato and Aristotle did use the word "theology" to describe their own practices!) would be to put it this way: if everything has both essential characteristics and accidental characteristics, why do these accidental characteristics exist? How can we account for the meaning of that which, by definition, has no intrinsic meaning?
Though these are all ancient questions, they came roaring back in the 20th century. For instance, it may surprise you, but I see the problem of glory as the central concern of Jacques Derrida. That's where we turn next.
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