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)

  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.

• 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 Art of Seduction (2001)

  Stars make us want to know more about them. You must learn to stir people's curiosity by letting them glimpse something in your private life, something that seems to reveal an element of your personality. Let them fantasize and imagine. A trait that often triggers this reaction is a hint of spirituality, which can be devilishly seductive, like James Dean's interest in Eastern philosophy and the occult. Hints of goodness and big-heartedness can have a similar effect. Stars are like the gods on Mount Olympus, who live for love and play. The things you love—people, hobbies, animals— reveal the kind of moral beauty that people like to see in a Star. Exploit this desire by showing people peeks of your private life, the causes you fight for, the person you are in love with (for the moment). Another way Stars seduce is by making us identify with them, giving us a vicarious thrill. This was what Kennedy did in his press conference about Truman: in positioning himself as a young man wronged by an older man, evoking an archetypal generational conflict, he made young people identify with him. (The popularity in Hollywood movies of the figure of the disaffected, wronged adolescent helped him here.) The key is to represent a The Star • 129 type, as Jimmy Stewart represented the quintessential middle-American, Cary Grant the smooth aristocrat. People of your type will gravitate to you, identify with you, share your joy or pain. The attraction must be unconscious, conveyed not in your words but in your pose, your attitude. Now more than ever, people are insecure, and their identities are in flux. Help them fix on a role to play in life and they will flock to identify with you. Simply make your type dramatic, noticeable, and easy to imitate. The power you have in influencing people's sense of self in this manner is insidious and profound. Remember: everyone is a public performer. People never know exactly what you think or feel; they judge you on your appearance. You are an actor. And the most effective actors have an inner distance: like Dietrich, they can mold their physical presence as if they perceived it from the outside. This inner distance fascinates us. Stars are playful about themselves, always adjusting their image, adapting it to the times. Nothing is more laughable than an image that was fashionable ten years ago but isn't any more. Stars must always renew their luster or face the worst possible fate: oblivion. Symbol: The Idol. A piece of stone carved into the shape of a god, perhaps glittering with gold and jewels. The eyes of the worshippers fill the stone with life, imagining it to have real powers. Its shape allows them to see what they want to see— a god— but it is actually just a piece of stone. The god lives in their imaginations. 130 • The Art of Seduction Dangers

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

  … Not to lovers of glory, Not to rhetoricians, not to philosophers, Not to those who have studied Hellenistic writings … Not to those who speak eloquently and with refinement … But to the poor in spirit and life, To the pure in heart and body, Who speak and even more live simply.5 It is not surprising that such potentially disruptive notions, sitting very uneasily with obedience to properly constituted authority, long met with suspicion and censorship. Symeon’s teaching was later to become a catalyst for major arguments about the nature of the monastic tradition in the fourteenth- century Hesychast controversy (see pp. 487–91). Yet Symeon the New Theologian’s reputation as one of the most profound of Orthodox writers has now reached beyond a tradition of monastic admirers. The reign of the Emperor Basil II, later famed as ‘the Bulgar-slayer’ for his conquest of Bulgaria, ended after nearly half a century in 1025. A highly capable and energetic ruler who can be given the chief credit for the conversion of the Principality of Kiev to Christianity (see pp. 506–8), he seemed to have left the empire more secure than ever, but there was one fatal problem: he never married, and he failed to produce an heir who might guarantee the long stability which his predecessors in the Macedonian dynasty had created. For more than half a century, the empire was once more disrupted by contention for supreme power, and the lack of firm leadership spread insecurity into provinces only recently annexed, especially in the Balkans. It was a momentous sign of weakness when, in the 1040s, the gold nomisma coin was debased for the first time in seven centuries.6 The international situation demanded a strong emperor in the mould of Basil, because in both West and East new powers fixed their eyes on the wealth and sophistication of Byzantium. Acquisitive-minded Latins, especially the Norman monarchy in Sicily and the Italian merchant-states of Venice and Genoa, were particularly concerned to extend their influence in the eastern Mediterranean trade routes. The Pope was fostering a crusader ideal which was increasingly looking eastwards for its fulfilment (see pp. 382–3). To the east, a new coalition of Muslim tribes under the leadership of a family of Turks called the Seljuks first overwhelmed the Muslim rulers of Baghdad and then swept into the eastern provinces of the Byzantine Empire; their Seljuk ruler took the title of Sultan, the Arabic for ‘power’. The most decisive battle in the Byzantine confrontation with the Seljuk Turks

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

  In his public career, Martin retained enough of his soldierliness to emerge as a notably aggressive campaigner for the elimination of the traditional religion still strong in rural areas of western Europe such as his. His ministry, played out against formidable opposition, was clearly dramatic. The outlines of it are now luridly obscured by a biography created by his fervent admirer Sulpicius Severus, who had not known Martin particularly well, but built on his fond memories of their meetings to produce a picture of a man with sensational powers. Martin, for instance, had on one occasion undermined a tree sacred to old gods, then stood in the path of its fall, but forced it to fall elsewhere by making the sign of the Cross. The audience loved it and, as a result, ‘you may be sure salvation came to that region’, Sulpicius said with satisfaction.60 Perhaps a less miraculous explanation of such triumphs in the face of conflict is to be found in Martin’s evident ability to fascinate young aristocrats from important Gallo-Roman families, which resulted in his drawing them into the religious life. In other situations we know of complaints that the monastic life deprived society of the public duties which noblemen were expected to perform, but the accretion of powerful friends cannot have done Martin’s campaigns any harm. Sulpicius proudly pointed out that many of them went on to take up new public responsibilities, as bishops.61 People who had known Bishop Martin rather better than Sulpicius Severus were infuriated by his exuberant stories, but their opinions were drowned out in the course of time by the wild popularity of Sulpicius’s book, which addressed the same spiritual market as Athanasius’s Life of Antony. A story told by Sulpicius gave Western Christianity one of its most frequently used technical terms: chapel. Martin was said to have torn his military cloak in half to clothe a poor man, who was later revealed to him in a dream as Christ himself. The cut- down ‘little cloak’, capella in Latin, later became one of the most prized possessions of the Frankish barbarian rulers who succeeded Roman governors in Gaul (see pp. 323–5), and the series of small churches or temporary structures which sheltered this much-venerated relic were named after it: capellae. Thus the West gained its name for any private church of a monarch, and later just for any small church. What Sulpicius had achieved was a strident assertion that the Latin West could produce a holy man who was the equal of any wonder-worker or spiritual athlete in the East – yet another building block in the growing edifice of Western self-confidence. More than a millennium later, in 1483, a little boy was born on St Martin’s day in north Germany, so he was given the name of the much-loved saint. His surname was Luther and he also left something of a mark on Western Christianity.62 Perhaps without the example of the country missions undertaken by Martin

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  THE MUSLIMS of Egypt and Iran, as we have seen, had first experienced modernity as aggressive, invasive, and exploitative. 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

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

  Certainly it would exclude Augustine’s theology of grace; yet it was Augustine whom the Western Church recognized as a saint, while ecclesiastical history left Cassian under a cloud of disapproval, like Origen and Evagrius before him. Nevertheless, Cassian’s legacy went beyond controversy: he proved as important for Western monasticism as Evagrius in the East. Much as Cassian admired the Egyptian hermits, he felt that their life represented a way of perfection which was not for all, and that most ascetics should live in community. His instructions for such communities, principally set out in his Institutes, were of great influence on a later monk apparently born around 480, a half-century after Cassian’s death. This monk, Benedict, admiring what Cassian had written, created a Rule which became the basis of Western monastic life. Benedict is a shadowy figure who quickly attracted a good deal of legend, lovingly collected into a life by Pope Gregory I at the end of the sixth century. The implausibility of much of Gregory’s narrative has led to suggestions that Benedict may not even have been a single individual, but a representative ‘blessed one’ (Benedictus in Latin), to whom a bundle of ideas came to be attributed as the ‘Rule’ of St Benedict, which was certainly compiled in the sixth century.72 In fact we now know that the Rule draws heavily on a previous text called ‘The Rule of the Master’ (Regula Magistri), probably drawn up some decades before, at the beginning of the sixth century. The later Rule both prunes the text and adds material, and the result is itself the best evidence against Benedict’s identity having been constructed from the collective efforts of some committee of monastic founders. His changes breathe the simplicity, common sense and practical wisdom of a single gifted individual, with a sense of terse style, and a gentler, less autocratic attitude than the Master to the community which an abbot must lead. He is notably kindlier than the Master in the treatment which he offers to monks who fall ill.73 This Rule was intended to guide a number of monastic communities in south Italy, principally the mountain-top house of Monte Cassino (so cruelly bombarded to rubble during an epic siege in the Second World War). In the opening chapter, both the Master and Benedict give honourable mention to the hermit’s vocation, seeing it as a more heroic stage of asceticism than community life, but then Benedict takes over the Master’s brutally contemptuous description of two other variants on the monastic life: groups of two or three living without a Rule, and those individual monks who wandered from place to place – the Rule regards them as parasites on settled communities. This attitude set a pattern which made Western monasticism distinctive, because the wandering holy man remained a common and widely honoured figure in the Eastern Churches. The Rule was there to describe how to construct a single community, living in

• 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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  crossed the sea, the second time to freedom, and that he had particular power over snakes, like the loa (Haitian equivalent of orisha) Dambala Wèdo. And so the evangelist and patron saint of Ireland, that land so ruined and distorted by English colonial rule, found new hospitality among other peoples whose lives had been stolen by colonial regimes.56 After such fertile and sophisticated amalgamations of symbolism, it is not surprising to find the Fon/Yoruba deity Ogou, a warrior with a strong sense of justice, joining identities with the warrior St James of Compostela (complete with Moorish corpses), and both of them in Haiti absorbing the identities of the island’s heroes of liberation such as Jean- Jacques Dessalines, Toussaint L’Ouverture or Henri Christophe. When it was forbidden to speak of Dessalines in nineteenth-century Haiti, it was always possible triumphantly to process around the town with an image of the original St-Jacques.57 Again and again, missionary Jesuits and friars proved their heroic commitment to spreading their Christian message throughout the world. The prolonged sufferings and ghastly deaths of Jesuit missionaries at the hands of hostile First Nations on the borders of the French colonies in Canada in the early seventeenth century rank high in the history of Christian suffering. Even the hazards of travel were a martyrdom in themselves: of 376 Jesuits who set out for China between 1581 and 1712, 127 died at sea.58 The perpetual trouble everywhere was European reluctance to accept on equal terms the peoples whom they encountered, even when Europeans distinguished between what they saw as varied levels of culture. Such attitudes meant that the missionaries were always loath to ordain native priests on a large scale or with equal authority to themselves. In Kongo, many clergy (generally from elite backgrounds) were so infuriated at being patronized or marginalized by European colleagues that they became a major force in articulating local hatred of the Portuguese. As in America, that old problem of compulsory clerical celibacy gnawed away at the credibility of the Church. In step with increasing weakness in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, it was not surprising that when a Church infrastructure which remained overwhelmingly European fell into decay in any area of the world Christianity itself began to fade. It had been a remarkable achievement for comparatively ill- endowed Iberian kingdoms to put together world empires, but they faced mounting problems and increasing interference from other European powers, first the Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands, and later Britain and France. The Catholic French to some extent filled the gap as the settlement of the Edict of Nantes began to enable the kingdom to recover its leading place in European life; during the seventeenth century, France assumed the role of patron

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

  The extension of this story of religious dissidence into the Balkans opens up another dimension of ninth-century Byzantium which proved crucial in the formation of Orthodox identity: a sudden expansion of mission west into central Europe, both into areas which had formerly been Christian in the Roman Empire and into new territories beyond the old imperial frontiers. The development was the result both of a new vigour in the Byzantine Empire after years of struggle and of the vision of one man, Photios, who took charge as Patriarch at a time of continuing crisis. In the wake of the iconophile victory of 843, the bitterly divided Church desperately needed strong leadership, and it was not going to be provided by the compromised Patriarch Methodios, who lasted only four years before being deposed. His successor, Ignatios, did not look much more promising: a castrated imperial prince who was Empress Theodora’s puppet nominee, and was accordingly dismissed when she was ousted from power in 856.69 In Ignatios’s place, Photios came as a more obviously qualified choice. He was the son of a wealthy layman who had died in exile in wretched circumstances because of his iconophile commitment, and the greatnephew of the patriarch who had presided at the iconophile second Council of Nicaea; but besides the resonance provided by his family history, he was one of the most gifted and creative men ever to occupy the patriarchal throne. Photios was responsible for a literary work without parallel in the ancient world, a summary review of around four hundred works of Christian and pre-Christian literature which he had read in his first three decades of literate life – a feat of reading itself probably unparalleled at the time.70 Indeed, Photios’s exceptional learning aroused suspicions among monks who accused him of being a closet pagan – it was claimed that he recited secular poetry under his breath during the liturgy. They also found it difficult to believe that a priest who, albeit celibate, was not a monk had any right to rule the Church, and their hostility combined with the anger of the former Patriarch, Ignatios, who proved to have remarkable staying power as a rival for the patriarchal throne. These allied malices twice conspired to bring about Photios’s deposition as patriarch, first in 867 in favour of a restored Ignatios, and finally in 886, after which his various enemies did their best to make sure that his historical record would look discreditable. The Eastern Church nevertheless eventually decided that he should be celebrated as a saint (adroitly linking his name in liturgical acclamations with that of his eunuch rival), and there is good reason for such an expression of gratitude.71 Photios’s periods of patriarchal power coincided fruitfully with the coming of a succession of capable emperors who did much to restore the fortunes of the empire after two hundred years of miseries. They

• 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)

  communities.36 How could Antony receive the Eucharist out in the desert, and how therefore did he relate to the authority of the bishop? Moreover, he was not part of the dominant Greek culture of the urban Church – he did not even speak Greek, but the native Egyptian language, Coptic. Pachomius came from an even humbler Coptic background.37 As it happened, Antony amply proved himself in the eyes of the Church authorities, first by leaving his isolation during Diocletian’s persecution to comfort suffering Christians in Alexandria. He then became a great friend of Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, who wrote an admiring biography of him, which has been described as ‘the most read book in the Christian world after the Bible’: a risky claim, but certainly in the right order of magnitude.38 Athanasius painted a portrait of Antony which suited his own purposes: an ascetic who was soundly opposed to Athanasius’s opponents, the Arians (see pp. 211–22), and was a firm supporter of bishops such as Athanasius himself. The biography was specifically addressed to monks beyond Egypt; the bishop’s aim was a triumphant assertion of Egypt’s spiritual prowess, providing a model for all monastic life. Its first half was a dramatic account of the solitary’s twenty years of lonely struggle with demons of the desert, often in the shape of wild animals, snakes and scorpions; worse still, in the form of a seductive woman. At the end of the first great contest, the Devil, deranged in his exhaustion and frustration, was reduced to the shape of a little black boy from Ethiopia, and Antony was able to sneer at the ‘despicable wretch … black of mind, and … a frustrated child’. That was an unfortunate literary conceit, since many early monks in imitation came to use the same image for the Prince of Darkness, with a conscious racism directed towards Africans: a backhanded compliment to the success of Athanasius’s work, and not the best of stereotypes for promoting good relations with the Church of Ethiopia.39 It was not the last time that Christians would associate black races with evil and fallenness (see pp. 867–8). If anything bonded monasticism into the episcopally ordered Church, it was this pioneering hagiography (‘saint-writing’) from one of the most powerful bishops of the fourth century. It also established Egyptian monasticism in its image of desert solitude, encapsulated in that paradoxical word ‘monachos’, and equally in Athanasius’s gleeful paradox that ‘the desert was made a city by monks’.40 The image was a significant and useful one, because Christian cities were presided over by bishops; it was a symbol of victory over the Devil’s city and his rebellion against the purposes of God (not to mention the purposes of God’s bishops). As a description of the origins and development of monasticism, however, it was to a large extent a fabrication. Athanasius deliberately emphasized the desert as he told Antony’s story, and the accidents of later

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

  task of acquiring the specialist skill of Greek; Greek would open up to him the writings of then little-known early Fathers of the Church, together with the ultimate source of Christian wisdom, the New Testament. He produced new critical editions of a range of key early Christian texts, the centrepiece of which was his 1516 edition of the Greek New Testament, accompanied by an expanding range of commentaries on the biblical text. The effect of his superbly presented editions was much enhanced by his collaboration from 1516 with one of the most brilliant and artistically sensitive publishers of his day, Johann Froben of Basel. Erasmus’s New Testament was an inspiration to many future Reformers, because he provided not only the Greek original but also an easy way of puzzling out what this difficult text might mean with the aid of a parallel new Latin translation, tacitly designed to supersede the Vulgate and the commentary which Jerome had created around it. Erasmus hugely admired Jerome’s industry and energy, but his work of retranslation and commentary amounted to a thoroughgoing onslaught on what Jerome had achieved a millennium before. To attack Jerome was to attack the structure of understanding the Bible which the Western Church took for granted. Most notorious was Erasmus’s retranslation of Gospel passages (especially Matthew 3.2) where John the Baptist is presented in the Greek as crying out to his listeners in the wilderness, ‘metanoeite’. Jerome had translated this as poenitentiam agite, ‘do penance’, and the medieval Church had pointed to the Baptist’s cry as biblical support for its theology of the sacrament of penance. Erasmus said that John had told his listeners to come to their senses, or repent, and he translated the command into Latin as resipiscite. Indeed, throughout the Bible, it was very difficult to find any direct reference to Purgatory, as Orthodox theologians had been pointing out to Westerners since the thirteenth century. Much thus turned on one word. In Erasmus’s view, bad theology stemmed from faulty grammar, or faulty reading of the Bible. The characteristic medieval way of making sense of the frequently puzzling or apparently irrelevant contents of the Bible was to allegorize them in the manner pioneered by Origen (see pp. 151–2). Commentators found justification for their allegorizing by quoting a biblical text, John 6.63: ‘The Spirit gives life, but the flesh is of no use’ – allegory was the spiritual meaning, the literal meaning the fleshly. This text became a favourite of Erasmus too, but he was irritated that it should be used as a support for allegory. Readers of the Bible were right to note allegory in its text, but they should do so with caution and common sense. This principle was particularly significant in the cult of Mary, the Mother of God; it had been a natural impulse for commentators to try to expand the rather slim biblical

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

  the most potent links between Rome and Greece, since Virgil’s monumental epic poem told of the wanderings of Aeneas, both refugee from the Greek siege of Troy and ancestor of the founders of Rome. Elite culture was unthinkable without it. Luckily the great Augustan poet could be pictured as foretelling the coming of Christ in one of his Eclogues, where he spoke of the birth of a boy from a virgin who would usher in a golden age. Constantine I or his speechwriter had already noted this in one of the Emperor’s very first speeches to Christians after his conversion to the faith. That was Virgil’s passport to a central place in medieval Western Christian literature, symbolized by his role as Dante’s guide through the underworld in the great fourteenth-century poem Inferno.20 Dante’s homage was anticipated in the fourth century by a conscientious Christian senator’s daughter. Her resoundingly aristocratic name, Faltonia Betitia Proba, proclaimed her ancient lineage, but she was also blessed with a good education and a pride in the Roman past. She took it upon herself as a labour of love to meld together little fragments of Virgil’s poetry into a sort of literary quilt (cento in Roman usage), using her quotations to retell the biblical stories of the Creation and the life of Christ. Jerome, stern biblical purist, was not impressed, but others, maybe in imitation of her, played this literary game in Christian interests.21 If Proba’s work was ingenious, the lyric poetry of Prudentius (348–c. 413) might be said to be the first distinguished Latin verse written in the Christian tradition but not intended for the Church’s liturgy; some has nevertheless been adapted into it as hymnody. Many will know Prudentius’s majestic celebration of Christ’s Incarnation which has become the hymn ‘Of the Father’s heart begotten, ere the world from chaos rose’.22 That celebration of Jesus Christ as ‘Alpha and Omega’ is also a celebration of the Christ of the Nicene Creed, one substance with the Father. Prudentius, like Constantine’s adviser Bishop Hosius, like Pope Damasus and the Emperor Theodosius, was a Spaniard. Spain (Hispania) was a bastion of resistance to attacks on the decisions of the Council of Nicaea, and the Latin-speaking Hispanic elite had a long tradition of deep pride in Roman institutions and history, back to the great second-century Spanish emperor, Trajan, and beyond. That pride shines through the poetry of Prudentius, which he revealed in a single collection at the end of a distinguished career which had taken him to being a provincial governor. He entered the argument over the Senate’s statue of Victory, urging Rome to celebrate its successes in war, hanging the trophies of victory in the Senate House, but to ‘break the hideous ornaments that represent gods thou hast cast away’ – so the empire’s glorious history was beautified, not distorted, by jettisoning the falsehoods of the old gods. Yet Prudentius also

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

  Germany commonly known as Saxony; they increasingly received more encouragement from the bishops of the Frankish Church and from local secular rulers than Columbanus had done. For Anglo-Saxons, the mission to Low Countries areas like Frisia was to people with a consciousness of a common ancestry, close trade links and variants on a language which would still be comprehensible either side of the North Sea; even beyond the Low Countries in Saxony, they came as cousins. They were given a cue by that most flamboyant of seventh-century Anglo-Saxon prelates, Bishop Wilfrid, who had a lucky break in that his very successful campaign of preaching in Frisia coincided with one of the best fishing catches in the North Sea for years. Then in the next generation there was Boniface, a monk of southern England who put to shame the bishops of Francia with his prodigious energy in extending the frontiers of the faith, and who was at the end both Archbishop of Mainz and a much-celebrated martyr for the Church, hacked to death in 754 by those same close relatives of the English in Frisia.43 These conversions sponsored by missionaries from Ninian through Patrick and Augustine far into central Europe were not conversions in the sense often demanded by evangelists in the twenty-first century, accepting Christ as personal Saviour in a great individual spiritual turnaround. In the medieval West, there were only one or two recorded examples of such experiences, taking their cue from the New Testament’s description of what happened to the Apostle Paul. So Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century and Anselm of Canterbury in the twelfth do indeed write about spiritual struggles which sound like those of Paul on the Damascus Road: they talk of dramatic new decisions, realigning their whole personality. In the Reformation, Protestants picked up the same tradition, and since then personal conversion based on assent to an itemized package of doctrine has become almost a compulsory experience in some versions of Christianity. Yet from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, one of the most successful periods in the expansion of the faith, when all Europe became Christian, people rarely talked about conversion in that sense. If they did, they generally meant something very different: they had already been Christians, but now they were becoming a monk or a nun.44 How, then, did the Western Church convert Europe piece by piece between the thousand years which separated Constantine I from the conversion of Lithuania in 1386? At the time, those who described the experience normally used more passive and more collective language than the word ‘conversion’: a people or a community ‘accepted’ or ‘submitted to’ the Christian God and his representatives on earth. This was language which came naturally: groups mattered more than single people, and within groups there was no such thing as

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Further, it would be a mistake to imagine that conservative society was entirely static. Throughout Muslim history, there were movements of islah (“reform”) and tajdid (“renewal”), which were often quite revolutionary.11 A reformer such as Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah of Damascus (1263–1328), for example, refused to accept the closing of the “gates of ijtihad.” He lived during and after the Mongol invasions, when Muslims were desperately trying to recover from the trauma and to rebuild their society. Reform movements usually occur at a period of cultural change or in the wake of a great political disaster. At such times, the old answers no longer suffice and reformers, therefore, use the rational powers of ijtihad to challenge the status quo. Ibn Taymiyyah wanted to bring the Shariah up to date so that it could meet the real needs of Muslims in these drastically altered circumstances. He was revolutionary, but his program took an essentially conservative form. Ibn Taymiyyah believed that to survive the crisis, Muslims must return to the sources, to the Koran and Sunnah of the Prophet. He wanted to remove later theological accretions and get back to basics. This meant that he overturned much of the medieval jurisprudence (fiqh) and philosophy that had come to be considered sacred, in a desire to return to the original Muslim archetype. This iconoclasm enraged the establishment, and Ibn Taymiyyah ended his days in prison. It is said that he died of a broken heart, because his jailers would not allow him pen and paper. But the ordinary people loved him; his legal reforms had been liberal and radical, and they could see that he had their interests at heart.12 His funeral became a demonstration of popular acclaim. There have been many such reformers in Islamic history. We shall see that some of the Muslim fundamentalists of our own day are working in this tradition of islah and tajdid.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Moroccan Sufi reformer Ahmad ibn Idris (1780–1836) had quite a different approach, which also has its followers in our own day. His solution to the disintegration of life in the peripheral Ottoman provinces was to educate the people and make them better Muslims. He traveled extensively in North Africa and the Yemen, addressing the people in their own dialect, teaching them how to perform the ritual of communal prayer, and trying to shame them out of immoral practices. This was a grassroots movement. Ibn Idris had no time for Wahhabi methods. In his view, education, not force, was the key. Killing people in the name of religion was obviously wrong. Other reformers worked along similar lines. In Algeria, Ahmad al-Tigrani (d. 1815), in Medina, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim Sameem (d. 1775), and in Libya, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi (d. 1832) all took the faith directly to the people, bypassing the ulema. This was a populist reform; they attacked the religious establishment, which they considered to be elitist and out of touch, and, unlike Abd al-Wahhab, were not interested in doctrinal purity. Taking the people back to the basic cult and rituals and persuading them to live morally would cure the ills of society more effectively than complicated figh. For centuries, Sufis had taught their disciples to reproduce the Muhammadan paradigm in their own lives; they had also insisted that the way to God lay through the creative and mystical imagination: people had a duty to create their own theophanies with the aid of the contemplative disciplines of Sufism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these reformers, whom scholars call “Neo-Sufis,” went one step further. They taught the common people to rely entirely on their own insights; they should not have to depend upon the scholars and learned clerics. Ibn Idris went so far as to reject the authority of every single Muslim sage and saint, however exalted, except the Prophet. He was thus encouraging Muslims to value what was new and to cast off habits of deference. The goal of the mystical quest was not union with God, but a deep identification with the human figure of the Prophet, who had opened himself so perfectly to the divine. These were incipiently modern attitudes. Even though the Neo-Sufis were still harking back to the archetypal persona of the Prophet, they seem to have been evolving a humanly rather than a transcendently oriented faith and were encouraging their disciples to prize what was novel and innovative as much as the old. Ibn Idris had no contact with the West, never once mentions Europe in his writings, and shows no knowledge of or interest in Western ideas. But the mythical disciplines of Sunni Islam led him to embrace some of the principles of the European Enlightenment.25

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

  source beyond itself, in Jerusalem. Now that the city was in the hands of Muslims, there was a natural desire to preserve its spiritual tradition from possible extinction, as the iconoclasts’ devotion to the Cross had demonstrated. Many Palestinian monks found that, at the end of the eighth century, Muslim rule was becoming a good deal more burdensome than in the past and they moved inside the empire to practise their faith. Theodore was an admirer of Palestinian monk-saints like St Sabas, and the Stoudite monastery became a laboratory for experiments with the ceremonies and texts of the worship from the monasteries of Palestine. Soon the liturgies used by monasteries, lovingly commented on in treatises by a sequence of monks from the time of Maximus the Confessor onwards, merged with the liturgy of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia to create a liturgy for the whole Church.62 What the Palestinian monasteries offered the Church of Constantinople was a tradition of music and hymnody which has remained at the heart of Byzantine liturgy; it was also in Palestine that the eight musical modes were developed. They were not only now used in Constantinople, but were soon adopted by the Carolingians and the Western Church as a whole to organize its musical composition and chant, and so they stand at the origin of the whole Western musical tradition.63 Previously the music of churches in Constantinople had been dominated by the set sung narrative sermon in verse known as the kontakion, a dialogue between chanter and choir or congregation who sing a refrain. Now only one kontakion is customarily sung in full, in praise of the Virgin on the fifth Saturday in Lent, known as the Akathistos (‘unseated’), since it is given the particular honour of being the one part of the liturgy for which all must stand. The other kontakia which still appear in the liturgy are much abbreviated. The liturgical form of hymn which replaced the kontakion was the canon, a set of nine hymns. These sets of hymns originated in Palestinian monasteries as meditations on themes from the Bible which were performed in the liturgy; the nine climaxed in an ode to the Theotokos. The canon is only one element making Orthodox liturgy a constant refraction of scriptural texts, a web of interpretations and elaborations, especially in the non-eucharistic liturgical offices in the morning and the evening. To quote fragments gives only a taste of the effect: here are two kontakia from the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, the first from the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, appropriately penitential in mood as the weeks approach Lent, the second sung during the days of festival in high summer commemorating the moment when Christ’s Transfiguration revealed his face full of divine light, and he conversed with Moses and Elijah:64

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Without a cult, without prayer and ritual, myths and doctrines have no meaning. Without the special ceremonies and rites that made the myth accessible to the Kabbalists, Luria’s creation story would have remained a senseless fiction. It was only in a liturgical context that any religious belief became meaningful. Once people were deprived of that type of spiritual activity, they would lose their faith. This is what happened to some of the Jews who decided to convert to Christianity and remain in the Iberian Peninsula. This has also happened to many modern people who no longer meditate, perform rituals, or take part in any ceremonial liturgy, and then find that the myths of religion mean nothing to them. Many of the conversos were able to identify wholly with Catholicism. Some, indeed, such as the reformers Juan de Valdes (1500–41) and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), became important leaders of the Counter Reformation and thus made a significant contribution to early modern culture in rather the same way that secularized Jews such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig Wittgenstein had a profound impact on later modernism after their assimilation into mainstream society. One of the most illustrious of these influential conversos was Teresa of Avila (1515–82), the mentor and teacher of John of the Cross and the first woman to be declared a Doctor of the Church. She was a pioneer of the reform of spirituality in Spain and was especially concerned that women, who did not have the benefit of a good education and were frequently led into unhealthy mystical practices by inept spiritual directors, receive a proper grounding in religious matters. Hysterical trances, visions, and raptures had nothing to do with holiness, she insisted. Mysticism demanded extreme skill, disciplined concentration, a balanced personality, and a cheerful, sensible disposition, and must be integrated in a controlled and alert manner with normal life. Like John of the Cross, Teresa was a modernizer and a mystic of genius, yet had she remained within Judaism she would not have had the opportunity to develop this gift, since only men were allowed to practice the Kabbalah. Yet, interestingly, her spirituality remained Jewish. In The Interior Castle, she charts the soul’s journey through seven celestial halls until it reaches God, a scheme which bears a marked resemblance to the Throne Mysticism that flourished in the Jewish world from the first to the twelfth centuries CE. Teresa was a devout and loyal Catholic, but she still prayed like a Jew and taught her nuns to do the same.