Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  was to be revived for a Church in a new Orthodox world whose centre lay far to the north.12 By that time, the Second Rome had fallen to the Ottoman Sultan. The roots of its fall lay in the disaster of the Fourth Crusade. THE FOURTH CRUSADE AND ITS AFTERMATH (1204-1300) Behind the course of the Fourth Crusade lay the ambitions of Venice for expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. The Venetians had been particularly energetic in securing trading privileges from the Byzantines. Eighty years before, they had provided a foretaste of future miseries in a crusading campaign of 1122–4 which centred on the capture of Muslim-held Tyre, but which also encompassed a great deal of raiding, mayhem and robbery in Byzantine territories around the Aegean, designed to force the Emperor into extending the concessions which they had already won. From Tyre they bore back in triumph to Venice a piece of marble on which Christ had once sat, and from Byzantine Chios the bones of St Isidore; their expedition ended with duly solemn praise of God in the Te Deum.13 Now, in 1201, there were plans for a new crusade: a consortium of Western European crusaders struck an ambitious deal with Venice to build them a fleet and transport them to attack Cairo. It was a reasonable proposition if they wanted to knock out Islam’s chief power and proceed to Jerusalem, and if there were no military operations in Palestine itself, the agreement would respect a truce of 1198 with the Ayyubid ruler in Damascus. However, those involved disastrously miscalculated: they could not hold fellow crusaders to the agreement for the fleet, and not enough people turned up to fill the horrifically expensive array of ships. The Venetians were not going to lose their investment. They forced the crusaders uncomfortably camping out on the Lido to fulfil their bargain in a way that would suit Venetian interests. This involved an expedition not against Muslim Cairo, but against the great Christian power of Byzantium. The crusaders had already in their company a (not very impressive) young claimant to the Byzantine imperial throne, Alexios Angelos, and so the new scheme had a ghastly plausibility.14 Pope Innocent III, originally an enthusiastic supporter of the enterprise, felt increasingly helpless at the march of events, partly thanks to the independent actions of his agent with the crusader armies, Cardinal Peter Capuano. Innocent watched horrified as in 1202 the crusaders wrecked the Adriatic city of Zara, which was actually under the overlordship of a fellow crusader, the King of Hungary, but which had made the mistake of annoying the Venetians. Much worse followed: attacks on Constantinople in 1203 and 1204,

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When Kook arrived in Palestine, he met these young secularists for the first time. A few years earlier, their rejection of religion had appalled him, but when he saw them going about their work in the Holy Land he was forced to revise his ideas. He discovered that they had their own spirituality. Yes, they were brazen and insolent, but they also had the great qualities of “kindness, honesty, fairness, and mercy,… and the spirit of knowledge and idealism is ascendent [among them].” More important, their rebelliousness, which so offended the “weak who inhabit the world of order, the moderate, and well-mannered,” would push the Jewish people forward; their dynamism was essential if Jews were to progress and fulfill their destiny.61 When he praised the Zionist pioneers, he picked out those qualities which would have been utterly abhorrent to a sage of the premodern period, where people had to accept the rhythms and restrictions of the existing order and where individuals who stepped out of line could gravely damage society:62 These fiery spirits assert themselves, refusing to be bound by any limitation.… The strong know that this show of force comes to rectify the world, to invigorate the nation, humanity and the world. It is only in the beginning that it appears in the form of chaos.63 Had not the rabbis of the Talmudic period predicted that there would be an “age of insolence and audacity,”64 in which young men would rise up against their elders? This distressing rebellion was simply “the footsteps of the Messiah,… gloomy steps, leading to a rarefied, joyous existence.”65 Kook was one of the first deeply religious thinkers able to embrace the new secularism, though he believed that ultimately the Zionist enterprise would lead to a religious renewal in Palestine. Instead of seeing the religious and secularists—representing mythos and logos, respectively—as coexisting peacefully, he developed a Hegelian vision of a dialectical clash of opposites leading to the synthesis of Redemption. The secularists clashed with the religious, but in this rebellion the Zionists were pushing history forward to new fulfillment. The whole of creation was being propelled, often painfully, toward a final reunion with the divine. One could see this in the evolutionary processes described by modern science, Kook believed, or in the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Darwin, or Einstein, which seemed to destroy traditional ideas but which led to new understanding. Even the agony of the First World War could be seen, in Lurianic terms, as a “breaking of the vessels,” part of the creative process, which would eventually reinstate the sacred in our world.66 This was how religious Jews should see the Zionist rebellion. “There are times when the laws of the Torah must be overridden,” Kook argued audaciously. When people were searching for a different path, everything was new and unprecedented, so “there is no one to show the legitimate way and so the aim is accomplished by a bursting of bounds.” It was “outwardly lamentable but inwardly a source of joy!”67

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  On the day after Khomeini’s funeral, Ayatollah Khameini was proclaimed Faqih, and on July 28, 1989, Rafsanjani became the new elected president. His cabinet excluded the radicals; a third of his ministers had been educated in the West, and they pushed for more Western investment and a more capitalist, diminished role for the government in economic matters. There would still be problems. The hard-liners continued to fight the pragmatists; the conservatives on the Council of Guardians would still manage to block reforms, and the institutional apparatus remains faulty. But the needs of the state seem to be pushing Iranians toward greater pluralism and to a secularization based on Shii rather than on Western tradition. The people are less hostile to modern values than before, because they are able to approach them in an Islamic milieu. The shift in emphasis can be seen in the work of Abdolkarim Sorush, one of Iran’s leading intellectuals. Sorush had studied the history of science at London University and held important posts in Khomeini’s government after the Revolution. Today he is no longer part of the political establishment, but he strongly influences those in power. His Friday lectures are frequently broadcast, and he is one of the most prominent speakers in the mosques and universities. Sorush admires both Khomeini and Shariati, but goes beyond them. He has a more accurate view of the West, going so far as to say that by the end of the twentieth century, many Iranians had three identities: pre-Islamic, Islamic, and Western, which they must try to reconcile. Not everything Western was contaminating or toxic.36 But Sorush will not accept the more radical secularist ethos of the West. Scientific rationalism cannot, in his view, provide a viable alternative to religion. Human beings will always need a spirituality that takes them beyond the material. Iranians should learn to appreciate the values of modern science, but hold on to their own Shii traditions too.37 Islam must also change: fiqh must adapt to the modern industrial world, develop a philosophy of civil rights and an economic theory capable of holding its own in the twenty-first century.38 Sorush is also opposed to ulema rule, because “the cause of religion is too great to be entrusted only to the clergy.”39 Sorush is often harassed by the more conservative clerics, but his popularity suggests that the Islamic republic is moving toward a postrevolutionary phase that will bring it closer to the West.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  be a teacher in a school for advanced students. It was also a dramatic and continual visual sign in his everyday life and in his teaching that Justin was committed to the proposition that two traditions might speak as one. Because Justin valued the whole of his spiritual exploration, he was concerned to explain his newly acquired Christian faith to those outside its boundaries in terms that they would understand; he was chief among a series of ‘Apologists’ who, in the second century, opened a dialogue with the culture around them in order to show that Christianity was superior to the elite wisdom of the age. In particular, he was happy to explain the mysterious relationship of Jesus Christ to God the Father in terms which would make sense to intelligent Greeks puzzled by Christian claims. He deployed one of the commonplace terms used alike by Platonists, Stoics and Hellenized Jews influenced by the Jewish scholar of the first century CE Philo of Alexandria when they discussed divinity: Word (Logos), already the keynote theme of the hymn which so sonorously opens John’s Gospel. For Justin, God the Father corresponded to Plato’s discussion of a supreme Being. Justin wanted to say with the mainstream Church against gnosticism that this supreme God had created the material world, and he tried to get over the problem of relating the two by seeing the Logos as a mediator between them. This Logos had been glimpsed by the Hebrew prophets, but also by great philosophers like Plato, thus happily enrolled among Christian witnesses. The Logos was seen finally and completely in Jesus Christ, a being other than the Father, but derived from him with the fullness and intimacy of a flame which lights one torch from another: torchlight from torchlight, in a phrase which was embedded in the fourth century in the doctrinal statement which is now called the Nicene Creed.74 Such use of ‘Logos’ was popular among second-century theologians, and is to be found in Justin’s younger contemporary, Irenaeus. Probably from Smyrna on the west coast of Asia Minor, Irenaeus travelled first to Rome for study and then to southern France and the city of Lyons. Persecution devastated the Christian Church there in 177, and among those killed was the bishop, Pothinus, so Irenaeus took his place. His career as a writer was shaped by the practical concerns of a father in God for a flock troubled both by official harassment and by alternatives offered by gnostic belief. He was not an innovative thinker like Justin, but, as one might expect from someone in his position, he defended Christianity against gnosticism just as Ignatius of Antioch had done, by emphasizing the tradition which the bishop embodied, such as the credal statements already noticed (see pp. 129–30). As we have already seen (see p. 121), Irenaeus took the word hairesis (‘self-chosen opinion’), used in the latest epistles in the New Testament in the sense of ‘sect’, and reapplied it to the whole

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  8. Asia in 1260 Timur’s orgies of destruction hit Christian populations in Central Asia which had already been terribly reduced by the advance of the plague which western Europe would come to know in 1348–9 as the Black Death. From now on, outside the comparative safety of India, the story of the Church of the East recedes to the efforts by disparate enclaves to cling on to existence in the face of Islamic dominance, usually in remote upland areas out of sight of the authorities. Even when Timur found no successors in his cruelty and the Mongol threat receded, the growing power of the Ottoman Turks (see p. 483) continued the pressure on non-Muslims. In an increasingly hostile Islamic world, embittered at the memory of the alien outrage of the Western Crusades, the ancient privileged place of Christians at the Courts of monarchs disappeared. The Miaphysite Church of Armenia suffered like the Dyophysites from the calamities of the fourteenth century. The last independent Armenian kingdom, in Cilicia in south-west Turkey, fell to Mamluk forces in 1375 and more than two centuries of struggle for Christian survival followed. The Armenians had centuries of experience in being buffeted by neighbouring great powers and they were long used to migrating away from disaster. These desperate years sent more of them travelling through eastern Europe as far away as Poland, let alone whatever refuge they could find in Asia – but as with the Jews in diaspora, their sufferings sharpened their skills in commerce and negotiation, skills which they were ready to apply to their religious troubles. From the fourteenth century, at odds theologically with both their Byzantine neighbours and the Church of the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  One can see why some Christians might indeed find this language hard to accept, but Maximus escaped any later censure and has remained a voice of authority in the Eastern Church. This was partly because of his passionate belief that the Church’s liturgical ceremonies served as a chief means of deification: his writing is at its most personally intense in his celebration of the liturgy’s spiritual riches. He ties every part of its observation into the ascent towards God, culminating in the reception of the eucharistic bread and wine in which ‘God fills [communicants] entirely and leaves no part of them empty of his presence’.32 So alongside all the instruction which he provided for the interior life of the individual monk, Maximus’s greatest eloquence was reserved for the communal drama which bound together clergy and laity. Of equal importance was that through his writing and sufferings at the end of his life Maximus became a chief symbol of Orthodoxy’s resistance to yet another attempt by the emperors to conciliate Miaphysite opinion in the Church by developing a common theology on the basis of Cyril of Alexandria. Among the Emperor Heraclius’s multiform efforts to defend and strengthen his empire, perhaps the most far-reaching, encouraged by Patriarch Sergius, was to promote a theological reconciliation of his warring subjects. The group of theologians chosen to find a solution to the empire’s doctrinal disagreements sought to be true to Chalcedon in acknowledging that two natures (human and divine) came together in Christ, but in order to accommodate the Miaphysites, they suggested that once these natures had thus met, the natures gained a unity of activity or will (energeia or thelēma). Maximus was one of the chief voices opposing this ‘Monenergism’ or ‘Monotheletism’. He said that God had too much respect for his creations, humans included, to allow the Logos to assume anything less than true created human nature in all its fullness: so the incarnate Christ must have had a fully human activity and fully human will. When Christ, in his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, submitted to his Father with ‘Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt’, he was as a man using his human will to obey his divine will. This was a bold claim, based on a largely novel vision of the will as self-determination both rational and beyond conscious reason; no Greek philosopher, let alone theologian, had fully enunciated this before, or made the will so central to an understanding of Christ.33 For his opposition, Maximus suffered appallingly on the orders of Emperor and Patriarch: the Confessor is said to have had his tongue cut out and his right hand amputated, to stop him speaking or writing. For all their novelty, the intensively repeated arguments in Maximus’s later writings, and his final maltreatment for his convictions, embedded them deep within Orthodoxy. The increasing desperation of the imperial authorities to reap

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  impeccably anti-Marcionist line, subsequent Christian censorship has not allowed Tatian’s harmonized Gospel text or indeed most of his other writings to come down to us complete. The worst that one can say of his individuality on the evidence available was that he was enthusiastic for the sort of world-denying lifestyle which in the next century crystallized into monasticism. His second- century assertion of ascetic values is one of the signs that we should look behind the common story of monastic origins in Egypt and give the credit to Syria. Tatian’s problem was that, in terms of the subsequent writing of Christian history, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.64 More definitely at odds with the Catholic Church developing to the west was Bar-Daisan (Bardesanes in Greek), from a generation after Tatian in the later second century. Some sources assert that, like Tatian before him, he created his own version of the Gospels (if it ever existed, it is now completely lost), and although he was another bitter opponent of Marcion, he was also accused of heresy by later authors. He certainly denied what became the mainstream Christian doctrine that the body is resurrected along with the immortal soul, and in a linked train of thought, he denied the bodily sufferings of Christ in his Crucifixion. It was small wonder that in the fourth century the much more selfconsciously orthodox Syrian theologian Ephrem looked back on Bar-Daisan as ‘the teacher of Mani’.65 Yet Ephrem gave credit to his heretical predecessor in one very significant respect: he admitted to having borrowed rhythms and melodies from Bar-Daisan’s hymns, adding to them new and theologically correct words, on the grounds that their beauty ‘still beguiled the hearts of men’.66 This highlights one of the most significant features of Syrian Christianity: it was a pioneer in creating a repertoire of church music, hymnody and chant. Although hardly anything of Bar-Daisan’s pioneering hymns survives except through the hostile filter of Ephrem, hymns are preserved from Syria in a collection known as the Odes of Solomon which are likely to be second century in date. One of them gives what may be the first reference beyond the biblical text to Mary the mother of Jesus as a virgin mother, and they pioneer a characteristic feature of Syrian Christianity, reference to the Holy Spirit as female. Grammatically, after all, ruha, the Syriac word for spirit, is feminine, although later Christians found this disconcerting and from around 400 CE arbitrarily redefined the word as masculine in grammatical gender.67 Ephrem himself triumphantly used metrical verse for a major part of his writings, whether polemic or spiritual, and he wrote hundreds of hymns, often to be sung in the liturgy complementing the chanting of scripture, and they were widely translated from an early date for use in other Eastern Churches. Here he sings the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  11. The Balkans and the Black Sea in the Time of Photios The evidence suggests that even before Rastislav’s request, the brothers had embarked on an enterprise of great significance for the future: they devised an alphabet in which Slav language usage could be accurately conveyed. It was given the name Glagolitic, from an Old Slav word for ‘sound’ or ‘verb’. Constantine and Methodios did more than create a method of writing, because they also put a great deal of thought into creating an abstract vocabulary out of Greek words which could be used to express the concepts which lie behind Christianity. The Glagolitic alphabetic system is to say the least idiosyncratic, with only surreal resemblances to any other alphabetic form in existence, and when Bulgarians were looking for a way of writing their own version of Slavonic, it was an unappealing choice. They would be more familiar than the Moravians were with surviving antique inscriptions from the imperial past of their region, written in Greek. So it was probably in Bulgaria that, not long after the time of the two missionary brothers, another scholar devised a simpler alphabetic system, much more closely modelled on the uncial forms of the Greek alphabet.79 It was named Cyrillic, in honour of Constantine, but in reference to the monastic name he adopted right at the end of his life, Cyril. That was an adroit piece of homage, which apart from the graceful tribute it embodied no doubt eased the new alphabet’s acceptance in place of the holy pioneer’s less user-friendly script. Glagolitic did have a long-term survival, but mainly in relation to Slavonic liturgical texts. It was also adopted alongside Cyrillic for the Bulgarian liturgy

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  the role. Potemkin was coarse and not at all handsome (he had lost an eye the person of an English girl of twenty with a in an accident). But he knew how to make Catherine laugh, and he wor-beautiful face and a perfect shiped her so intensely that she eventually succumbed. He quickly became figure. He has had a the love of her life. Greek costume made for her which becomes her Catherine promoted Potemkin higher and higher in the hierarchy, extremely. Dressed in this, eventually making him the governor of White Russia, a large southwestern he lets down her hair and, area including the Ukraine. As governor, Potemkin had to leave St. Peters-with a few shawls, gives so burg and go to live in the south. He knew that Catherine could not do much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc. without male companionship, so he took it upon himself to name Cather-that the spectator can ine's subsequent vremienchiki. She not only approved of this arrangement, hardly believe his eyes. He she made it clear that Potemkin would always remain her favorite. sees what thousands of artists would have liked to Catherine's dream was to start a war with Turkey, recapture Constan- Confuse Desire and Reality— The Perfect Illusion • 301 tinople for the Orthodox Church, and drive the Turks out of Europe. She express realized before him offered to share this crusade with the young Hapsburg emperor, Joseph II, in movements and surprising transformations— but Joseph never quite brought himself to sign the treaty that would unite standing, kneeling, sitting, them in war. Growing impatient, in 1783 Catherine annexed the Crimea, a reclining, serious, sad, southern peninsula that was mostly populated by Muslim Tartars. She asked playful, ecstatic, contrite, Potemkin to do there what he had already managed to do in the Ukraine— alluring, threatening, anxious, one pose follows rid the area of bandits, build roads, modernize the ports, bring prosperity another without a break. to the poor. Once he had cleaned it up, the Crimea would make the per- She knows how to arrange fect launching post for the war against Turkey the folds of her veil to match each mood, and has The Crimea was a backward wasteland, but Potemkin loved the chal- a hundred ways of turning lenge. Getting to work on a hundred different projects, he grew intoxicated it into a headdress. The old with visions of the miracles he would perform there. He would establish a knight idolizes her and is quite enthusiastic about capital on the Dnieper River, Ekaterinoslav ("To the glory of Catherine"), everything she does. In her that would rival St. Petersburg and would house a university outshining he has found all the anything in Europe. The countryside would hold endless fields of corn, or- antiquities, all the profiles of Sicilian coins, even the

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  “Where does Christianity begin? In Athens, Jerusalem, or Rome? How did the early creeds of the church develop and differentiate? What was the impact of the Reformation and the Catholic Counterreformation? How have vital Christian communities emerged in Asia, Africa, and India since the eighteenth century? Award-winning historian MacCulloch attempts to answer these questions and many more in this elegantly written, magisterial history of Christianity. … He offers sketches of Christian thinkers from Augustine and Luther to Desmond Tutu. … His monumental achievement will not soon be surpassed.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A prodigious, thrilling, masterclass of a history book. MacCulloch is to be congratulated for his accessible handling of so much complex, difficult material. … He keeps the reader engaged with wit and choice anecdotes and throughout the entire book he retains his own distinctive, slightly irreverent perspective, and an unerring instinct for when to go from macro to micro history.” —John Cornwell, Financial Times “A triumphantly executed achievement. This book is a landmark in its field, astonishing in its range, compulsively readable, full of insight even for the most jaded professional and of illumination for the interested general reader. It will have few, if any, rivals in the English language.” —Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury “[MacCulloch’s] writing is brilliant, critical, inspiring, humorous.” —Brother Curtis, The Society of Saint John the Evangelist “Excellent … I suspect it will quickly become the go-to book for those seeking information on this major world religion.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Diarmaid MacCulloch’s splendid account of Christianity’s long, momentous, non-ignorable life among us is in one way an account of everything that has gone on during the three millennia in which he sets his story. … A well- informed and—bless the man—witty narrative, fluent, well-judged and wholly free of cant. Christianity, the book, is more than informative, more than measured and temperate. It’s enjoyable—a jolly good read.” —The Washington Times “I heartily recommend Christianity to anyone with an interest in the history of the Church. The book is very accessible and readable. Both the novice and the expert should find it profitable. Believers will find challenges which we should be willing to face, and which should be a catalyst for some appropriate soul- searching. Cynics may just find some things that might make them willing to open up a dialog with the Faithful.” —HollywoodJesus.com “Diarmaid MacCulloch’s monumental book is essential reading for those enthralled by Christianity and for those enraged by it, while those who protest indifference may be ambushed by surprise at its force in world culture over the millenniums.” —Melvyn Bragg, The Observer, choosing Christianity as Book of the Year

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Their ruthlessly pragmatic ideology was the logos that human beings needed in order to survive and function effectively in this world. But unless this was linked creatively to the mythos of Judaism, it would lose its meaning and, cut off from the source of life, would wither away. When Kook arrived in Palestine, he met these young secularists for the first time. A few years earlier, their rejection of religion had appalled him, but when he saw them going about their work in the Holy Land he was forced to revise his ideas. He discovered that they had their own spirituality. Yes, they were brazen and insolent, but they also had the great qualities of “kindness, honesty, fairness, and mercy,… and the spirit of knowledge and idealism is ascendent [among them].” More important, their rebelliousness, which so offended the “weak who inhabit the world of order, the moderate, and well-mannered,” would push the Jewish people forward; their dynamism was essential if Jews were to progress and fulfill their destiny. 61 When he praised the Zionist pioneers, he picked out those qualities which would have been utterly abhorrent to a sage of the premodern period, where people had to accept the rhythms and restrictions of the existing order and where individuals who stepped out of line could gravely damage society: 62 These fiery spirits assert themselves, refusing to be bound by any limitation.… The strong know that this show of force comes to rectify the world, to invigorate the nation, humanity and the world. It is only in the beginning that it appears in the form of chaos. 63 Had not the rabbis of the Talmudic period predicted that there would be an “age of insolence and audacity,” 64 in which young men would rise up against their elders? This distressing rebellion was simply “the footsteps of the Messiah,… gloomy steps, leading to a rarefied, joyous existence.” 65 Kook was one of the first deeply religious thinkers able to embrace the new secularism, though he believed that ultimately the Zionist enterprise would lead to a religious renewal in Palestine. Instead of seeing the religious and secularists—representing mythos and logos , respectively—as coexisting peacefully, he developed a Hegelian vision of a dialectical clash of opposites leading to the synthesis of Redemption. The secularists clashed with the religious, but in this rebellion the Zionists were pushing history forward to new fulfillment. The whole of creation was being propelled, often painfully, toward a final reunion with the divine. One could see this in the evolutionary processes described by modern science, Kook believed, or in the scientific revolutions of Copernicus, Darwin, or Einstein, which seemed to destroy traditional ideas but which led to new understanding.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Chinese Buddhist term which in turn translated the Sanskrit for liberation, one of many such familiar terms which the missionaries deployed to arouse recognition in their audiences. And in his Lord of the Universe’s discourse on almsgiving, Alopen could warm to the Lord of the Universe’s chosen theme so much that he raised the real possibility of salvation beyond those who recited the creeds of Christianity: Therefore, you who have already embraced the faith, OR you who do all kinds of meritorious deeds, OR who will walk in his way with an honest heart, shall all enter heaven and remain in that abode of happiness for ever and ever.28 All this suggests a faith which, to a degree highly unusual in Christian history, allowed itself to listen to other great interpretations of the divine. Perhaps this was inevitable. Christianity’s previous encounter with ancient, sophisticated wisdom had been with Plato and Aristotle; and that encounter had transformed it in the second century CE. Now, for the first time, it was meeting a variety of highly developed religious systems, in a situation where it had no power of coercion. Moreover, the Church of the East pushed forward its frontiers through Syrian merchants, who were renowned throughout Asia for their bargaining skills. Can it be any surprise that the result was a form of Christianity which delighted in theological give and take? The problem for the Dyophysites of China was that integration into Chinese society also meant dependence on power within it. As so often in the history of the Church of the East, the years of good fortune were comparatively brief. During the mid-ninth century the Emperor Wuzong turned against all religions which he regarded as foreign and the Church suffered accordingly. When the Tang dynasty finally collapsed in 907, the western trade routes which remained the lifeline of the Church were closed and the possibility of renewal through missions for the time being came to an end. But only for the time being. Three centuries later the accidents of history nevertheless offered a second chance for the Church of the East in China, because of its persisting ancient presence in Central Asia, and maybe in China too. Once more the Church came close to achieving what Islam was able to make permanent: winning the allegiance of successful military dynasties. The near-miss took place among the Mongols: the last in a centuries-long sequence of Central Asian nomadic peoples whose migrations shaped the history of both Asia and Europe, and, with it, the future of the Christian religion. THE MONGOLS: NEW HOPE AND CATASTROPHE

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The establishment looked with disdain upon Dow, Stone, and Joseph Smith, regarding them as mindless demagogues who had nothing to offer the modern world. These preachers seemed to be barbarous anachronisms, relics of a primitive bygone world. The response of the mainline clergy and American aristocrats to these latter-day prophets was not dissimilar to the way in which liberals and secularists regard fundamentalist leaders today. But they were wrong to dismiss them. Men such as Dow or Joseph Smith have been described as folk geniuses.74 They were able to bring the revolutionary modern ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech, and independence to the folk in an idiom that uneducated people could understand and make their own. These new ideals that were going to be essential in the new world that was coming to birth in America were brought to the less privileged majority in a mythological context that gave them meaning, and provided a necessary continuity during this time of turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. These new prophets demanded recognition, and, though they were reviled by the established elite, their reception by the people showed that they answered a real need. They were not content with individual conversions, like the preachers of the First Great Awakening, but wanted to change society. They were able to mobilize the population in nationwide mass movements, using popular music and the new communications media to skilled effect. Instead of trying to impose the modern ethos from above, like the Founding Fathers, they built from the ground up and led what amounted to a grassroots rebellion against the rational establishment. They were highly successful. The sects founded by Elias Smith, O’Kelly, Campbell, and Stone, for example, amalgamated to form the Disciples of Christ. By 1860, the Disciples had some 200,000 members and had become the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in the United States.75 Like the Mormons, the Disciples had institutionalized a popular discontent that the establishment could not ignore.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Council) bought from the Venetian pawnbroker of the hard-up Latin Emperor of Byzantium the actual Crown of Thorns worn by Christ at the Crucifixion. This was a major acquisition to equal the sacred relics accumulated by Louis’s Merovingian predecessors, confirming that his Capetian dynasty had inherited all their anciently earned divine favour and sanctification – and what could be more appropriate for a saintly king (canonized as early as 1297) than possession of a crown more holy than his own? As display cabinet for the crown, Louis built the Sainte-Chapelle in the royal palace complex at the centre of Paris. The fury of the French Revolution spared enough that we can still marvel at its thrillingly soaring (though now empty) space and its exuberance in sculpture and glass.20 Once the Latins had been expelled from Constantinople in 1261, duplicates of many of these purloined relics began to appear back in their original homes in the city and the Byzantines declared the restorations to be a series of miracles.21 The greater miracle was more gradual: a painstaking reconstruction of Byzantine society, but in a new and unprecedented mould. While the hated Latins still held ‘the City’, Byzantine leaders would have to rule from other cities of the shattered empire. Far away to the north-east on the Black Sea, members of the Komnenos family took over Trebizond, founding an ‘empire’ which continued to be independent (initially under Mongol protection against the Seljuks), even beyond the Ottoman capture of Constantinople, until 1461. At the other extreme of the pre-1204 empire, a nobleman related to the old imperial families set up a principality in the region of Epiros on the western Greek coast, but among all these new statelets, the city of Nicaea in the mountains of Asia Minor inland from the Sea of Marmara became the capital of what was the most convincingly imperial of the successor states. It enjoyed the very considerable advantage that a successor Greek Oecumenical Patriarch was installed there, alongside the imperial prince, whom he duly anointed as emperor. It was eventually the rulers in Nicaea who recaptured Constantinople from the Latins in 1261. Successive popes loudly agitated for aid in restoring the deposed Latin emperor, but they had many other concerns, and the artificial construct of Latin Byzantium had few friends in the West: the Nicaean emperor actually drew on support from Venice’s bitter commercial rival Genoa in recapturing the city.22 A darkly intriguing find in modern Istanbul symbolizes the dead end of the Latin Empire of Byzantium. In 1967 a little chapel was discovered in excavating the lower layers of one of Istanbul’s former monastic churches, now the mosque of Kalenderhane Camii. Its interior was filled with earth and its entrance blocked and plastered over with paintings; inside, on its walls were Western-style frescoes of the life of St Francis of Assisi, in fact the earliest now

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Such faith was revolutionary because it constituted a revolt against the hegemony of the Western spirit. A Westerner was likely to find Khomeini’s theory of Velayat-e Faqih (“the Government of the Jurist”) sinister and coercive, but the “modern” government that Iranians had experienced had not brought them the freedoms that people took for granted in Europe and America. Khomeini was coming to embody in his own person an alternative Shii ideal to the Pahlavi monarchy. He was known to be a mystic and to embody divine knowledge in a way that was similar, if not identical, to that of the Imams. Like Husain, he had challenged the corrupt rule of a tyrant; like the Imams, he had been imprisoned and almost put to death by an unjust ruler; like some of the Imams, he had been forced into exile and deprived of what was rightfully his. Now in Najaf, living beside the shrine of Imam Ali, Khomeini seemed rather like the Hidden Imam: physically inaccessible to his people, he still guided them from afar and would one day return. There was a rumor that Khomeini had dreamed that, despite his present exile, he would die in Qum. Western people found it difficult to understand how Khomeini, who had none of the charm or charisma that they expected in a political leader, had managed to inspire such devotion in the Iranian people. Had they known more about Shiism, they might have found this less of a mystery. When Khomeini wrote Islamic Government, he probably had no idea that revolution was imminent. He believed that it would be two hundred years before Iran would be ready to implement Velayat-e Faqih.75 Khomeini was at this date more concerned with the religious ideal than with the practical underpinning of his theory. In 1972, the year after the publication of Islamic Government, Khomeini wrote an article which he called “The Greater Jihad,” which found a mystical justification for the controversial Velayat-e Faqih. The title refers to one of his favorite hadith, which has the Prophet say after returning home from a battle: “We are returning from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.” This perfectly expressed Khomeini’s conviction that the battles and campaigns of politics were the “lesser” struggle, of far less import than the effort to effect the spiritual transformation of society and to integrate one’s own heart and desires. He was convinced, like Shariati, that a political solution could not succeed without a deeply religious renewal in Iran.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Intellectuals like Kirmani and Mulkum Khan would continue to play an important part in the development of Iran, and they would often find themselves in conflict with the ulema. But toward the end of the century, the clergy showed that they were not always immersed in old texts but were prepared to intervene in politics if they felt that the shahs had put the people’s welfare in jeopardy. In 1891, Nasir ad-Din Shah (1829–96) gave a British company the monopoly on the production and sale of tobacco in Iran. The Qajar shahs had been granting such concessions for years, but hitherto only in areas where Iranians were not involved. But tobacco was a popular crop in Iran, and provided thousands of landowners, shopkeepers, and exporters with their major source of income. There were huge protests all over the country, led by the bazaaris and the local ulema. But in December, Hajj Mirza Hasan Shirazi, the leading mujtahid in Najaf, issued a fatwa that banned the sale and use of tobacco in Iran. It was a brilliant move. Everybody stopped smoking, even the non-Muslim Iranians and the shah’s wives. The government was forced to climb down and rescind the concession.47 It was a prophetic moment, and showed the potential power of the Iranian ulema, who, as the sole spokesmen of the Hidden Imam, could even command the obedience of the shahs. The fatwa was rational, pragmatic, and effective, but made sense only in the old mythical context, deriving as it did from the Imam’s authority.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  “NOTHING SHORT OF AMAZING … Karen Armstrong established herself as a religion scholar to be reckoned with in the twentieth century. Now, with her newest book, The Battle for God , Armstrong takes her place of leadership in these new times as well.… Armstrong has posed a question for the ages. She has also crafted a book that should not be ignored. If you want to know why fundamentalists do what they do, read The Battle for God.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune “Informative and illuminating … All of us, [Armstrong] asserts, need to confront the fears generated by the modern world, and if the dominant culture fails to do so, others, such as fundamentalists, will. That is a key message, one that is easily drowned out in contemporary society, with only occasional voices like Armstrong’s reminding us that we forget it at our peril.” —Los Angeles Times “Intriguing … Armstrong succeeds—brilliantly—in placing fundamentalist movements in a historical context, showing how each is both a product of its times and typical of recurring trends.… No episode in The Battle for God better illustrates the sweeping power of fundamentalist belief than the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic government in Iran. Armstrong charts Khomeini’s ascent in eye-opening detail.” —The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle “The Battle for God provides a timely and perceptive review of the international surge of militant religion.… A strength of the author’s study is her effort to understand not only the historical-cultural contexts and consequences of this battle, but what its ‘soldiers’ perceive to be at stake.… The book deserves a wide audience because it provides insights that the advocates of modernity ignore at their peril. It is especially relevant for political leaders who aspire to more than the politics of division.” —The Washington Times “An impressive achievement. Armstrong has mastered a mountain of material, added some brilliant insights of her own, and made it accessible to the general reader.” —R ABBI H AROLD K USHNER Author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People A B ALLANTINE B OOK P UBLISHED BY T HE R ANDOM H OUSE P UBLISHING G ROUP Copyright © 2000 by Karen Armstrong Reader’s Guide copyright © 2001 by Karen Armstrong and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Preface copyright © 2001 by Karen Armstrong All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. www.thereaderscircle.com Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Hutchinson and Amir Taheri: Excerpt from “On the Day the Imam Returns” from The Spirit of Allah, Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution by Amir Taheri (London: Hutchinson, 1985).

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In Egypt too, modern Europe was regarded as exciting and inspiring during the 1870s, It was also seen as congenial to the Islamic spirit, and this despite the difficulties and pain of the modernization process. This enthusiasm is clearly reflected in the work of the Egyptian writer Rifah al-Tahtawi (1801–73),48 who was a great admirer of Muhammad Ali, had studied at the Azhar, and served as an imam in the new Egyptian army, an institution for which Tahtawi had the deepest respect. But in 1826, Tahtawi became one of the first students sent by Muhammad Ali to study in Paris. It was a revelation to him. For five years, he read French, ancient history, Greek mythology, geography, arithmetic, and logic. He was particularly enthralled by the ideas of the European Enlightenment, whose rational vision he found very similar to Falsafah.49 Before returning home, Tahtawi published his diary, which gives us a valuable early glimpse of the modern West as seen by an outsider. Tahtawi had his reservations. He found the European view of religion reductive and modern French thinkers arrogant in their lofty assumption that their rational insights were superior to the mystical inspiration of the prophets. But Tahtawi loved the way everything worked properly in Paris. He praised the clean streets, the careful education of French children, the love of work, and the disapproval of laziness. He admired the rational acuity and precision of French culture, noting that the Parisians “are not prisoners of tradition, but always love to know the origin of things and the proofs of them.” He was impressed that even the common people could read and write, “and enter like others into important matters, every man according to his capacity.” He was also intrigued by the passion for innovation, the essential ingredient of the modern spirit. It could make people changeable and erratic, but not in such serious matters as politics. “Everyone who is master of a craft wishes to invent something which was not known before, or to complete something which has already been invented.”50

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Antwerp. The tale’s travels had by no means ended. It spread from the Byzantine Empire through western Europe and south via Egypt: one could pick up copies of it in Latin, Hebrew, Old Norse, Old Russian, Ethiopic, medieval Catalan, Portuguese, Icelandic, Italian, French and English. The pioneering English printer William Caxton showed his usual commercial good sense when, in 1483, he chose to print it in his new translation of the great collection of saints’ lives known as The Golden Legend, and Shakespeare used an episode from it in The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps we can appreciate just how far the Eastern Christian legacy eventually reached if we join the cultured English Roundhead military commander Thomas Fairfax, third Lord Fairfax of Cameron, in his Yorkshire study in the 1650s. Smarting from the end of his military career after a principled quarrel with Oliver Cromwell, Fairfax pulled his Latin or Greek Barlaam from his bookshelves and whiled away his retirement with his own English translation, some 204 folio pages long. Puritan (and Chalcedonian) Yorkshire was a long way from the home of the Buddha, and Fairfax would have had no idea of his debt to that long-dead Georgian monk.2 All this was thanks to the large number of Eastern Christians who hated the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon and decided to ignore or oppose them. It took a long time for those who felt like this to make a formal break with the Church authorities who had accepted the council’s pronouncements. Of the two opposite points of view excluded by Chalcedon, Miaphysitism and Dyophysite ‘Nestorianism’, it was the Miaphysites who most worried the emperors in Constantinople. The Miaphysites’ power base, Alexandria, was one of the most important cities in the Eastern Empire, essential to the grain supply which kept the population of Constantinople in compliant mood, and Miaphysites continued to have support in the capital itself. Already at the Council of Chalcedon, the Egyptian bishops present insisted that if they signed its Definition, they faced death back home, and it soon became clear that they were not exaggerating. Alexandria was, after all, the city which had lynched Hypatia forty years before. The council had infuriated opinion in Alexandria by deposing its bishop, Dioscorus, a punishment for his prominence in the group who had disruptively proclaimed ‘one-nature’ theology as orthodoxy at the previous Council of Ephesus in 449 (see pp. 225–6). The Emperor Marcian and his wife, Pulcheria, were determined to find a pliable successor for Dioscorus. They brought pressure to bear on the Alexandrian clergy, which led to the election of one of Dioscorus’s assistant clergy, Proterius, but the new bishop found his position steadily eroded. On Marcian’s death in 457, he was left defenceless. A mob who regarded him as a traitor to Dioscorus pursued him into the baptistery of a city

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Today Western people have become accustomed to hearing Muslim fundamentalists inveighing against their culture, denouncing their policies as satanic, and pouring scorn on such values as secularism, democracy, and human rights. There is an assumption that “Islam” and the West are quite incompatible, their ideals utterly opposed, and that “Islam” is at odds with everything that the West stands for. It is, therefore, important to realize that this is not the case. As we saw in Chapter 2 , under the impetus of their own spirituality Muslims arrived at many ideas and values that are similar to our own modern notions. They had evolved an appreciation of the wisdom of separating religion and politics and a vision of the intellectual freedom of the individual, and seen the necessity for the cultivation of rational thought. The Koranic passion for justice and equity is equally sacred in the modern Western ethos. It is not surprising, therefore, that at the end of the nineteenth century, many leading Muslim thinkers were entranced by the West. They could see that Europeans and Muslims held common values, even though the people of Europe had obviously moved on to fashion a much more efficient, dynamic, and creative society, which they longed to reproduce in their own countries. In Iran, during the second half of the nineteenth century, a circle of intellectual thinkers, politicians, and writers were passionate in their admiration of European culture. 41 Fathadi Akhundzada (1812–78), Malkum Khan (1833–1908), Abdul Rahim Talibzada (1834–1911), and Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (1853–96) were in some ways as rebellious as the Zionists. They constantly clashed with the ulema , wanted to establish a wholly secular polity, and tried to use religion to effect fundamental change. Like the Zionists, they believed that conventional faith—in their case, Shiism—had held the people back, put a brake on progress, and precluded the free discussion of ideas that had been so crucial to the Great Western Transformation. Kirmani was particularly outspoken. If religion was not practical, in his view, it was useless. What was the point of weeping over Husain, if there was no real justice for the poor? While European learned men are busy studying mathematics, sciences, politics and economics, and the rights of man, in this age of socialism and struggle for the improvement of the conditions of the poor, the Iranian ulema are discussing problems of cleanliness and the ascension of the Prophet to heaven. 42 True religion, Kirmani insisted, meant rational enlightenment and equal rights. It meant “tall buildings, industrial inventions, factories, expansion of the means of communication, promotion of knowledge, general welfare, implementing just laws.” 43 But, of course, Kirmani was wrong. Religion did none of these things; it was logos , rational thought, which addressed itself to these practical projects.