Anger

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.

Page 113 of 447 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This Haredi refusal to accept Israel as anything but a satanic creation amounts to an act of constant rebellion against the state in which many of them live. When they stone cars on the Sabbath or tear down posters displaying scantily clad women advertising swimwear, they are rebelling against the secularist ethos of the Jewish state in which the only criterion for a course of action is its rational, practical utility. Fundamentalists in all three of the monotheistic faiths are in revolt against the pragmatic logos that dominates modern society to the exclusion of the spiritual, and which refuses the restraints imposed by the sacred. But because the secular establishment is so powerful, most have to confine their revolt to small symbolic acts. Their sense of weakness and tacit acknowledgment of their dependence upon the state in times of war, for example, can only increase the fundamentalists’ rage. The vast majority of Haredim confine their protest to a determined retreat from the secular state and to the establishment of a counterculture which challenges its values at every turn. The alternative society of the Haredim is motivated by a desire to fill the void created by the modern ethos. For Jews after the Holocaust this void is horribly graphic. Those who survived feel impelled to rebuild the Hasidic courts and Misnagdic yeshivot in Israel and the United States. It is an act of piety to the millions of Haredim who died in Hitler’s camps, and an act of rebellion against the forces of evil. They believe that by giving their Haredi institutions a new lease on life and making that dead world not only live again but become more powerful than ever, they are striking a blow for the sacred.23 After the Second World War, new yeshivot were built in Israel and the United States. In 1943, Rabbi Aaron Kotler (1891–1962) founded the first Lithuanian yeshiva in America, when he established Bais Midrash Gedolah in New Jersey, modeled on the yeshivot of Volozhin, Mir, and Slobodka. After 1948, Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv became a “city of Torah”; its newly established yeshivot drew students from all over Israel and the Diaspora. Here the guiding spirit was Rabbi Abraham Yeshayahu Karlitz (1878–1943), who was known as the Hazon Ish (the title of one of his books). These new institutions made the yeshiva more central to Haredi life than ever before. Torah study became a lifelong, full-time pursuit; men would continue their studies after they were married, and would be supported financially by their wives. In the dangerous new world of modernity, which had nearly obliterated the whole of European Jewry, a cadre of scholars who lived in the yeshiva, had minimal contact with the outside world, and immersed themselves wholly in the study of sacred texts would become the new guardians of Judaism.24

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Edah Haredis, the ultra-Orthodox community in Jerusalem, had been vehemently opposed to Zionism long before the Balfour Declaration. It was a small group, which had attracted only 9000 out of the 175,000 Jewish residents of Palestine by the 1920s. 4 Immersed in their sacred texts, the community had no idea how to organize themselves politically, but they would soon be joined by members of Agudat Israel, who had learned to play the modern political game. Agudat was still ideologically opposed to Zionism, but members had tried to balance the influence of the secularists by founding their own religious settlements in the Holy Land, where young people studied modern subjects along with Torah and Talmud. This concession appalled the more rigorous of the ultra-Orthodox, who believed that Agudat had gone over to the “Other Side.” From this intra-Orthodox conflict, a fundamentalist movement was born, inspired in the first instance, as so often, by a quarrel between coreligionists. The chief spokesman of this rejectionist Orthodoxy was Rabbi Hayyim Eleazer Shapira of Munkacs (1872–1937), one of the most eminent Hasidic leaders of Hungarian Jewry, who began a vehement campaign against Agudat in 1922. In his view, Agudat members were collaborating with the Zionists and infecting the minds of innocent schoolchildren with the “poisonweed and wormwood” of the goyische Enlightenment, as well as “songs that speak of the settlement of the Land, and the fields and the vineyards of Eretz Israel—just like the Zionist poets.” 5 They were defiling the Holy Land, which was intended only for prayer and sacred study, by tilling its sacred soil. At a meeting in Slovakia, the most radical of the Haredim agreed with the Munkaczer rebbe, and signed a ban on any association with Agudat. Their view of Agudat, which had come into existence precisely to oppose Zionism, was inaccurate; the group was also aware that they were at odds with the vast majority of the Orthodox in eastern and western Europe, who disapproved of Zionism but regarded Shapira’s ban on Agudat as too extreme. Nevertheless, they felt justified in this separatist policy by their instinctive horror of Zionism. One of the first of the Haredim to sign the ban was the young Rabbi Joel Moshe Teitelbaum (1888–1979), who would later become the leader of the Hasidim of Satmar, Hungary, and the most vigorous of all the Haredi opponents of Zionism and the State of Israel. When Shapira and Teitelbaum contemplated the Zionist kibbutzim in Palestine, they felt the same outrage and dread as, later, people felt when they heard about the Nazi death camps. This is not an exaggeration. Teitelbaum, who narrowly escaped extermination by migrating with his people to America, put the entire blame for the Holocaust on the great sin of the Zionists, who had “lured the majority of the Jewish people into awful heresy, the like of which has not been seen since the world was created.… And so it is no wonder that the Lord lashed out in anger.”

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

  Apostles in every diocese. It was another stage in the discussion which Ignatius, Clement and Irenaeus had begun. In Rome the argument was mainly over whether there could be any forgiveness at all for those who had lapsed. The priest Novatian, a hardliner on this issue, opposed the election of his colleague Cornelius as bishop, since Cornelius held that forgiveness was possible at the hands of a bishop. The Church in Rome was bitterly divided as to whom to support. Cyprian and Cornelius, who had arrived at similar conclusions about the powers of a bishop, allied with each other and the supporters of Novatian found themselves an isolated minority. Matters became worse when, in their initial enthusiasm, the Novatianists started making new Christian converts in North Africa as well as in Rome. When many of their sympathizers decided that the division had gone too far, and the newly baptized applied to rejoin the Catholic Church in communion with Cyprian and Cornelius, Carthage and Rome were faced with the problem of deciding the terms. Was Novatianist baptism valid? Cyprian thought not, but a new Bishop of Rome, Stephen, wishing to be conciliatory to those who were coming in, disagreed with him. Now a furious argument broke out between them, partly an expression of Rome’s growing feeling that the North African bishops were inclined to think too well of their own position in the Western Church. Stephen not only called Cyprian Antichrist, but in seeking to clinch the rightness of his own opinion, he appealed to Christ’s punning proclamation in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16.18).46 It is the first time known to us that the text had been thus used by a Bishop of Rome; this row in 256 represents another significant step in Rome’s gradual rise to prominence. In the end, North Africa and Rome agreed to differ on the issue of baptism, the North Africans saying that valid baptism could take place only within the Christian community which is the Church, the Romans saying that the sacrament belonged to Christ, not to the Church, and that therefore it was valid whoever performed it if it was done in the right form and with the right intentions. Comparative peace then descended on the Church for several decades, and it is likely that the steady expansion of Christian numbers was one significant factor in the decline of traditional religious institutions during that period (see p. 168). In 272 the Church even called in the Emperor Aurelian for legal support in a long-running effort to evict the obstinate deposed Bishop of Antioch, Paul of Samosata, who had refused to end his occupation of the cathedral church complex in Antioch: the first recorded imperial intervention in Christian affairs. Nevertheless there followed the most serious bout of persecution yet, designed to wipe out Christianity in the empire, led by the reforming Emperor Diocletian.

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

  subsequent ecclesiastical lawyers to pore over and argue about. Thanks to the Emperor’s forceful role as travel agent, the council had attracted unprecedented attendance and geographical coverage among its participants; the traditional but mystically inspired number of 318 delegates is probably not far wrong. Nicaea has always been regarded as one of the milestones in the history of the Church, and reckoned as the first council to be styled ‘general’ or ‘oecumenical’.59 As we will see, that status did not win ready consent, and twelve hundred years later there once more emerged Christian Churches which looked askance at the work and consequences of Nicaea (see p. 624). COUNCILS AND DISSIDENTS FROM NICAEA TO CHALCEDON Arius himself faded from public life and, although pardoned by Constantine, eventually died obscurely, reputedly as the result of an acute attack of dysentery in a latrine in Constantinople, which circumstance afforded his enemies some unchristian pleasure, and was eventually commemorated with exemplary lack of charity in the Orthodox liturgy.60 He had tried to exercise the sort of independence of mind and as a teacher which had been possible in the Alexandria of Origen’s day, but which was becoming dangerous in an age when bishops were seeking to monopolize control of instruction; nevertheless, he had raised questions which would not go away. There were problems with the word homoousios (the Homoousion). To begin with, and most troublingly, it was not a word used in the Bible. Second, it had a history, which we have already touched on when discussing the Monarchian disputes (see pp. 146–7). Arius had asserted to his bishop that it expressed the views of the hated Manichaeans about Christ’s nature, and it is likely that his known detestation of the term was a major factor in dragging it into the new creed. Likewise for Eusebius of Nicomedia, it was a word tainted by the likes of Paul of Samosata, and he spared no effort to place like-minded bishops in positions of power over the next decades. The campaign to get rid of the Homoousion from Christian credal statements split the Church in the empire for another half-century and more.61 Constantine was initially furious with Eusebius of Nicomedia for his obstructiveness, but he may have come to realize that the Homoousion which he had effectively imposed at Nicaea was an obstacle to his aim of unity in the Church. He may also have been galvanized by accusations of misconduct, substantiated or trumped up by the Eusebians, against Eustathius, Bishop of Antioch, a key figure among the voting majority at Nicaea.62 So Eusebius and his sympathizers were remarkably successful in building up influence with the

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

  thinker than himself into a matter of ecclesiastical discipline. His feelings cannot have been eased by the fact that Arius seems to have been previously associated with the rigorist schism of Melitius of Lycopolis.56 Finding himself condemned by a synod (local council) of Egyptian bishops, Arius appealed to a significantly large number of friends further afield, not least the wily and politically minded Bishop of Nicomedia, a city which, until the founding of Constantinople, had been the Eastern imperial capital. The bishop was called Eusebius, not to be confused with his contemporary the historian who was Bishop of Caesarea – Eusebios (‘pious’) was then a common name among Christians. The Bishop of Nicomedia was in a powerful position to rally support for Arius, so the dispute began overtaking the entire Church in the eastern Mediterranean. Constantine was now consolidating his power in the East after eliminating his last imperial rival, Licinius, and he was determined to reunite the warring churchmen. His instinct was to try the tactics of a decade earlier as at Arles, summoning a council of bishops to solve the dispute, but his first plans in 324 to summon a council to the city of Ancyra were pre-empted by Arius’s enemies, who seized the chance of the death of the Bishop of Antioch to gather there, both to choose one of their supporters as the new bishop for that key diocese and once more to condemn Arius’s views. They also issued what they claimed was a definitive creed: a precedent for many more official statements which would make the same claim.57 Furious, Constantine now summoned a council at which nothing could go amiss.58 He chose the city of Nicaea (now the pleasant lakeside town of Iznik, still contained in its grand imperial walls), conveniently near his headquarters at Nicomedia. He told the delegates that they would enjoy the climate and also, with a hint of menace, that he intended to ‘be present as a spectator and participator in those things which will be done’: the first time in Christian history that this had happened. Some think that he actually presided at the council. It was he, probably on the recommendation of his ecclesiastical adviser, a Spanish bishop, Hosius or Ossius of Cordova, who proposed a most significant clause in the creed which emerged as the council’s agreed pronouncement: the statement that the Son was ‘of one substance’ (homoousios) with the Father. Faced with the awe-inspiring presence of the emperor of the known world, there could be little opposition to this: only two bishops are recorded as standing out against it. A large accumulation of other matters controversial in the life of the Church were discussed at this council. They included precedence among the leading bishops, a prohibition on moneylending among the clergy and over-hasty promotion of recent converts to the episcopate, the reconciliation of schismatics, even a ban on voluntary eunuchs being ordained as clergy. There was much for

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Most Kookists believed that Arabs should be allowed to stay in Eretz Israel, but only as gerim toshavim (“resident aliens”). As long as they respected the State of Israel, they must be treated decently, but they could never become citizens or have political rights. Others would deny the Palestinians even this much consideration, and would press them to emigrate. A tiny minority have proposed extermination, using the biblical precedent of the Amalekites, a people so cruel that God commanded the Israelites to slay them without mercy.85 In 1980, Rabbi Israel Hess published an article entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” in the official magazine of Bar-Ilan University. He argued that the Palestinians were to Jews what darkness was to light, and that they deserved the same fate as the Amalekites.86 In the same year, the Gush settler Haim Tzuria wrote that hatred was “natural and healthy”: In each generation we have those who rise up to wipe us out, therefore each generation has its own Amalek. The Amalekism of our generation expresses itself in the extremely deep hatred of the Arabs to our national renaissance in the land of our forefathers.87 On May 3, 1980, six yeshiva students were murdered in Hebron. This inspired some of the most extreme Kookists to take revenge. Menachem Livni, a settler at Kiryat Arba, and Yehuda Etzion, a veteran Gush settler, planted bombs in the cars of five Arab mayors, intending not to kill but to mutilate them, so that they should be living reminders of the consequences of anti-Jewish terror. When he heard the news, Rabbi Haim Drukman exclaimed in rapture: “Thus may all Israel’s enemies perish!”88 Most Israelis, however, were horrified by this attack, which, in the event, only maimed two of the targeted mayors. They were even more disgusted when they learned that for Livni and Etzion this act of terror was just a sideline. In April 1984, the government revealed the existence of a Jewish underground in Israel which had plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the Islamic world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They must combine together and form a tight-knit group to fight this encroaching and la dini (“religionless”) secularism. To mobilize the people, Mawdudi tried to present Islam in a reasoned, systematic way, so that it could be taken as seriously as the other leading ideologies of the day. 5 He was, therefore, attempting to turn the whole complex mythos and spirituality of Islam into logos , a rationalized discourse designed to persuade and to lead to pragmatic activism. Any such attempt would have been condemned as utterly wrongheaded in the old conservative world, but Muslims were not living in the premodern period any longer. If they wanted to survive in the dangerous, violent twentieth century, maybe they had to revise their old conceptions and make their religion modern? The basis of Mawdudi’s ideology, like that of the other modern Muslim thinkers whose work we shall consider, was the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. This immediately threw down the gauntlet to the modern world, because it contradicted every one of its sacred truths. Because God alone ruled human affairs and was the supreme legislator, human beings had no right to make up their own laws or take control of their destiny. By attacking the whole notion of human freedom and human sovereignty, Mawdudi was defying the whole secularist ethos: It is neither for us to decide the aim and purpose of our existence nor to prescribe the limits of our worldly authority, nor is anyone else entitled to make these decisions for us.… Nothing can claim sovereignty, be it a human being, a family, a class, or a group of people, or even the human race in the world as a whole. God alone is the Sovereign, and His commandments the Law of Islam. 6 Locke, Kant, and the Founding Fathers of America would be turning in their graves. But in fact Mawdudi was as enamored of liberty as any modern, and was proposing an Islamic liberation theology. Because God alone was sovereign, nobody was obliged to take orders from any other human being. No ruler who refused to govern according to God’s will (as revealed in the Koran and the Sunnah) could command the obedience of his subjects. In such a case, revolution was not simply a right but a duty. The Islamic system, therefore, ensured that the state was not subject to the whims and ambitions of the ruler. It freed Muslims from the caprice and possible evil of human control. By the principle of shurah (“consultation”) in Islamic law, the caliph was bound to deliberate with his subjects, but that did not mean that government derived its legitimacy from the people, as in the democratic ideal. Neither the caliph nor the people could create their own legislation. They could simply administer the Shariah.

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

  patriarch once released from Polish imprisonment in 1619. Since the Patriarch then became the real ruler of Muscovy through a decade and a half of his son’s reign, there could hardly have been a closer union of Church and throne. Deeply anti-Catholic after his Polish captivity, Filaret made sure that no innovation such as Mohyla was promoting in Kiev sullied the Church of Moscow, and he also steadily promoted the imposition of an even tighter autocracy on Muscovite society.Such a regime was not likely to appeal to the Orthodox noble class of Lithuania, enjoying the remarkable political freedom of action which the Commonwealth had fostered, but there was a fatal flaw in their constitutional arrangements. One of the conditions of the Union of Lublin was a transfer of most of what is today the Republic of the Ukraine from Lithuania into the kingdom of Poland, including the city of Kiev itself. It confirmed existing political privileges to the nobilities of Poland and Lithuania, but did not so effectively grant rights to peoples of the Ukraine. They included the warlike people known as Cossacks, few of whom enjoyed noble status. Cossack political discontents combined with their fury both at what they saw as the violation of their Orthodox faith in the Union of Brest and at the steadily more aggressive Counter-Reformation Catholicism of the Polish monarchy, especially under King Sigismund III (reigned 1587–1632). Patriarch Jeremias on his great visit of 1588–9 had encouraged lay activism by giving his blessing to religious gilds of Orthodox laymen, and these remodellings of medieval urban gilds proved very important in strengthening Orthodox consciousness and maintaining religious life in the virtual absence of an episcopal hierarchy. It was not a good idea for the monarchy to alienate the Cossacks, who provided one of the most effective fighting forces available to the Commonwealth.71 The situation boiled over in 1648, after five years during which fatally the Commonwealth had failed to pay its Cossack fighters. A bitter personal grievance led to the devoutly Orthodox Cossack Bohdan Kmel’nyts’kyi rallying a revolt against Polish rule. He proved an inspired leader in a struggle with both the Commonwealth and fellow Cossack leaders who sought some variety of renegotiation of the Union of Lublin. In the course of the fighting, Kmel’nyts’kyi came to ally directly with Muscovy in 1654: a move of huge significance for the future. Nearly two decades marked by exceptional atrocities left the Commonwealth shattered, perhaps a third of its population dead; it was the beginning of its long decline towards eighteenth-century partition and oblivion, and also the beginning of a long identity crisis between East and West for the Ukrainian people. By a treaty with the Tsar at Andrusovo in 1667, the Ukraine experienced its first partition, and Kiev was finally in the hands of

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

  exactions by their lords and by governments, saw Luther’s defiance of authority as a sign that all authority was collapsing in God’s final judgement on human sin. The Last Days had arrived, and everyone had a duty to hurry along God’s plan, which included overthrowing God’s enemies in high places. In 1525 large areas of central Europe were convulsed by revolts against princes and Church leaders: the Bauernkrieg, often misleadingly translated into English as the ‘Peasants’ War’, but better rendered the ‘Farmers’ War’ to get a sense of the sort of prosperous people – not so different from Luther’s family – who in their righteous anger and excitement led the crowds. The revolts were brutally crushed – and Luther, terrified by the disorder, applauded the rulers’ brutality. Another text from Paul lit up for him: Romans 13.1, ‘Let everyone obey the superior powers, for there is no authority except from God’. This has been described as the most important text of the Reformation. Many humanist scholars now drew back from the Reformation in fright; others committed themselves to an ordered, modulated programme of change. For many of the cowed, resentful rebels, the Reformers’ message of liberation now seemed as big a sham and betrayal as the pope’s old offer of salvation. Luther and his supporters would have to find some other means for pursuing their revolution than their first idealistic appeal to the good sense of all God’s people.What they did was to woo the ‘magistrates’: the term which sixteenth-century Europe used to describe all its temporal leaders outside the Church hierarchy. These magistrates were indeed the superior powers referred to in Romans 13.1, just as the Roman emperor had been when Paul was writing. The leaders of the Church, the bishops, for the most part did not defect from the old organization, particularly those who were ‘prince-bishops’ of the Holy Roman Empire, temporal rulers as well as heads of their dioceses. Other magistrates might well be interested in a reformation which stressed theologies of obedience and good order, and also offered the chance to put the Church’s wealth to new purposes. The first prince to come over was a major coup from a rather surprising quarter: the current Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Brandenburg- Ansbach, a Hohenzollern and cousin of Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz. The Teutonic Order had met increasing reverses in its long struggle with Poland- Lithuania (see pp. 516–17), and demoralized by major defeats in 1519–21, many of the Grand Master’s knights had turned to evangelical religion, quitting the order. To save himself from ruin, he begged another cousin, King Sigismund I of Poland, to remodel the order’s Polish territories in east Prussia into a secular fief of the Polish kingdom, with the Grand Master himself as its first hereditary duke; he did his first act of fealty to a gratified Sigismund in Cracow in April 1525. Naturally such a radical step as secularizing the territory of a religious

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

  the balance of power in Church and State was really going to lie between patriarch and tsar. This was about to be demonstrated all the more emphatically in the reign of Peter the Great. Yet during Nikon’s exercise of his patriarchate, he took a second initiative in liturgical reform which struck at the very heart of Russian tradition. In Russia, the details of Christian doctrine mattered much less to people than the details of Christian practice in worship. Popular religion based itself on the sacred drama which was the liturgical round controlled by the Church’s kalendar, but Nikon was conscious that in many respects this drama had departed from the script set by the contemporary Church in Constantinople. Moreover, it was mixed up with a good deal of local ritual which he strongly suspected predated the arrival of Christianity, particularly since most of it seemed designed to enhance the gaiety of everyday life. He therefore announced reforms which he claimed were based on deep research into the most venerable of liturgical texts; in reality what he did was to take the most recent editions of Greek liturgical texts printed in Venice and have them translated into Church Slavonic.75 This was enough to outrage many of the faithful, who were accustomed to thinking of the liturgy as an unchangeable ordinance of God. In particular, Nikon courted disaster by insisting on an alteration in that most powerful of Christian visual sacramental actions, and that most frequently performed by clergy, the manual blessing. In 1667 a synod of the Church backed up earlier directives of Nikon ordering all Orthodox, clergy and laity alike, to make the sign of the cross with three fingers, symbolizing the Trinity, rather than with two, symbolizing the two natures of Christ.76 Amid a welter of reforms which antagonized both clergy and congregations, this apparently trivial but salient symbol of change became the rallying point for a movement of resistance to centralized interference in personal devotion. The opposition drew on centuries of less than reverent obedience to the commands of the hierarchy, and popular lay dissidence combined with clerical outrage. In the matter of liturgical reform, Tsar Aleksei was at one with the deposed patriarch despite their otherwise complete breach, and he persisted in enforcing the changes. Intellectual leadership in the Church increasingly went to clergy trained in the Ukraine and to those who had visited Greece; both these groups were irredeemably tainted by Roman Catholic deviance in the perspective of traditionalist-minded clergy. Non-compliance was led by the priest Avvakum (Habbakuk), whose remarkable autobiography does not underplay his own saintly qualities.77 Avvakum possessed as formidable a will as Patriarch Nikon, and like Nikon he had started as a close friend of the Tsar. His talents and connections had

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Society repudiated these killings, and Banna professed horror at the murder of Nuqrashi.87 Nevertheless, the new prime minister, Ibrahim al-Hadi, who was loathed by all the articulate sectors of society, seized the opportunity of eliminating the Brotherhood, which had become far too powerful. The Society was suppressed, members were rounded up, arrested, and tortured, and by the end of July 1949, when Abd al-Hadi finally resigned, there were over four thousand Brothers in prison.88 But on February 12, 1949, Banna had been shot in the street outside the headquarters of the Young Men’s Muslim Association, almost certainly at the behest of the prime minister. The Society began to regroup secretly in 1950 and elected a new leader, Hasan Ismail al-Hudaybi, a judge who was known for his moderation and aversion to violence. It was hoped that he would give the Society much-needed respectability. But Hudaybi was unequal to the task. Without Banna’s strong leadership, factional strife broke out among the leaders, and Hudaybi proved to be incapable of controlling the Secret Apparatus, which brought the Society down once again in 1954. By that time, Egypt was ruled by the formidable young army officer Jamal Abd al-Nasser (1918–70), who had overthrown the old, discredited regime in a military coup on July 22, 1952, with his association of Free Officers, and set about creating a revolutionary republic in Egypt. Nasser espoused a militant nationalism that was quite different from the old liberal ideal. Unlike the Egyptian intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, the new Arab nationalists were not enamored of the West, and had no time for the parliamentary “liberalism” that had so signally failed in the Middle East. Nasser’s regime was defiantly socialist, and he courted the Soviets. He was determined to get the British out of Egypt once and for all; his attitude toward both Israel and the West was cathartically defiant for his people. His foreign policy was pan-Arab and emphasized Egypt’s solidarity with other Asian and African countries who were struggling to free themselves from European control. Nasser was also a determined secularist; nothing, including religion, must be allowed to interfere with the national interest; everything, including religion, must be subordinated to the state. Eventually Nasser would become the most popular ruler in the Middle East, and “Nasserism” the dominant ideology. But in these first years, Nasser was struggling: he was not very popular and could not permit any major rival to survive.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Eventually, Khomeini went too far. On October 27, 1964, he delivered a strong attack against the recent granting of diplomatic immunity to American military personnel and other advisers, and to the shah’s acceptance of 200 million dollars for arms. Iran, he claimed, was virtually an American colony. What other nation would submit to such indignity? An American maidservant would go virtually unpunished for a serious crime committed in Iran, whereas the case of an Iranian citizen who inadvertently ran over an American’s dog would have to come to trial. For decades foreigners had been plundering Iran’s oil, so that it was of no benefit to the Iranian people, and meanwhile the poor were suffering. He concluded: There is no redress for the Iranian people. I am deeply concerned about the condition of the poor next winter, as I expect many to die, God forbid, from cold and starvation. The people should think of the poor and take action now to prevent the atrocities of last winter. The ulema should appeal for contributions for this purpose.49 After this speech, Khomeini was deported, and eventually took up residence in the holy Shii city of Najaf. The regime was now determined to muzzle the clerics. After Khomeini’s departure, the government began to appropriate the religiously endowed properties (awqaf) and brought the madrasahs under stricter bureaucratic control. As a result, by the late 1960s, the number of theological students had markedly declined.50 In 1970, Ayatollah Riza Saidi was tortured to death for objecting to a conference to promote American investment in Iran, and for denouncing the regime as a “tyrannical agent of imperialism.” Thousands of demonstrators poured onto the streets in Qum, and in Tehran, outside Ayatollah Saidi’s mosque, a huge crowd gathered to listen to an address by Ayatollah Taleqani.51 At the same time, the government attempted to create a form of “civil Islam,” obedient to the state: a Religious Corps was established, composed of lay graduates from the theological faculties of the secular universities, to work closely with the new Department of Religious Propaganda for Rural Areas. These “mullahs of modernization” would explain the White Revolution to the peasants, promote literacy, build bridges and reservoirs, and vaccinate livestock. It was a transparent attempt to undermine the traditional ulema.52 But the shah was also anxious to sever the connection between Iran and the Shiah. In 1970, he abolished the Islamic calendar, and the following year there were lavish celebrations in Persepolis to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of the ancient Persian monarchy. Not only was this a tasteless demonstration of the immense gap that now existed between rich and poor in Iran, but it was a very public assertion of the regime’s desire to found its identity on Islam’s pre-Islamic heritage.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When the Internal Revenue Service threatened to withdraw charitable tax-exempt status from certain fundamentalist colleges on the grounds that their rules contravened public policy, it seemed an act of war on the part of liberal society. Only fundamentalists, it appeared, were not allowed “free exercise” of the principles of their faith. In the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court endorsed IRS rulings against Goldsborough Christian Schools in North Carolina, which did not admit Afro-Americans, and Bob Jones University, which was not segregationist but which banned interracial dating on campus, claiming that it was forbidden by the Bible. It was another clash between two value systems, similar to the Scopes trial of 1925. Both sides believed that they were absolutely in the right. A deep rift ran through the nation. Increasingly, during the late 1960s and 1970s, as the state expanded its notion of what constituted the public arena, very conservative Christians on the margins of modern society experienced these interventions as a secularist offensive. They felt “colonized” by the world of Manhattan, Washington, and Harvard. Their experience was not entirely dissimilar to that of the Middle Eastern countries who had so bitterly resented being taken over by an alien power. The government seemed to have invaded the inner sanctum of the family: a Constitutional amendment giving women equal rights of employment seemed to fly in the face of biblical injunctions that a woman’s place was in the home. Legislation limited the physical chastisement of children, even though the Bible made it clear that a father had a duty to discipline his children in this way. Civil rights and freedom of expression were granted to homosexuals, and abortion was legalized. Reforms that seemed just and moral to liberals in San Francisco, Boston, or Yale seemed sinful to religious conservatives in Arkansas and Alabama, who believed that the inspired word of God must be interpreted and obeyed to the letter. They did not feel liberated by the permissive society. When they reflected that in the 1920s, two-thirds of the states had voted for the prohibition of liquor, but that now throughout North America people were openly campaigning for the legalization of marijuana, they could only conclude that America was falling under the influence of Satan. 101 There was a new urgency. People felt that true religion was being destroyed. If Christians did not fight back, there might not be another generation of believers. During the 1970s, more parents than ever before removed their children from the public schools to Christian establishments, where they could be instructed in Christian values and were given Christian role models, and where all learning was conducted within a biblical context. Between 1965 and 1983, enrollment in these evangelical schools increased six-fold, and about 100,000 fundamentalist children were taught at home.

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

  venerable University of Cracow and in major towns of the Commonwealth, hated the Jesuits, rightly suspecting them of wanting to take over existing Dominican educational institutions, and they frequently obstructed Jesuit work, earning themselves sad and angry royal rebukes. The Dominicans’ consistent and open hostility to the Jesuits demonstrated that it was perfectly possible to be a good Catholic and still detest the Society of Jesus: one did not have to go over to the Protestant side.38 Equally significant was King Sigismund III’s triumphant Catholic diplomacy which led to the creation of the Greek Catholic Church in the Commonwealth through the Union of Brest in 1596 (see pp. 534–6). The existence of the Greek Catholic Church, whatever its subsequent troubles in relation to Russian Orthodoxy, meant that there was yet a third possible identity for those Poles and Lithuanians who wished to keep their allegiance to the Holy See in Rome. Ultimately they had the choice of placing their faith in the Society of Jesus, applauding cussed Dominican harassment of the Society, or exercising their religion in churches of Orthodox tradition, adorned with icons, whose clergy wore beards and had wives and families. All these options represented Catholicism. Accordingly, the Catholic Church increasingly flourished in its diversity, while a long slow decay affected the divided ranks of the Protestants in the Commonwealth. Polish constitutional toleration was undermined by the monarchy’s steadily more confessional Catholicism and by the circumstance that further dynastic problems, which gave the kings of Sweden a claim to the Polish throne, ranged Lutheran Sweden against Poland in war. It was easy in that traumatic era to see Protestantism as an enemy of the Commonwealth’s independence. The Socinians were expelled en masse from the Commonwealth in 1660, although in their dispersal they were to have a remarkable effect on western Europe and the Christian story generally (see pp. 778–9). This sign of a new intolerance in Poland-Lithuania came amid the growing stream of conversions back to Catholicism among its Protestant elites. Thus the future of Poland, once such a fertile seminary of Protestant experiment, proved against all the odds to be bound into that of the Catholic Church. When the political institutions of Poland-Lithuania were wrecked and then utterly destroyed by the selfish acquisitiveness of eighteenth-century monarchs in Prussia, Russia and Austria, the Catholic Church was all the Poles and Lithuanians had left to carry forward the identity of their once-mighty commonwealth. One extraordinary twentieth-century product of the alliance between Polish national identity and an increasingly monolithic Catholic Church was the career of Karol Wojtyłla, who as Pope John Paul II might be seen as a belated embodiment of the Counter-Reformation (see pp. 994–1000). Yet

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

  Luther’s patron saint, north Germany would not have become Christian. Bishop Martin’s work excited those who sought to preach their faith in similar areas where city life was either decaying or had never existed, and it can be no coincidence that now a number of individuals began taking missionary initiatives beyond Gaul and even beyond the empire. A common thread was that they had spent time in Gaul or even in Rome. North of the furthest imperial frontiers in Britain, an ascetic called Ninian established a mission around 400 in what is now south-west Scotland, reputedly building a church in stone, such a rare sight in the area that it was called the ‘White House’, Candida Casa. Ninian or one of his early successors dedicated this church in honour of Martin the Gaulish bishop, who had only very recently died; the site at Whithorn is still marked by the rather stolid ruins of a medieval cathedral, and it was probably the first Christian outpost north of Hadrian’s Wall.63 Much would follow in Ireland and Scotland which blew Christianity back across the North Sea into northern Europe (see pp. 333–44). Just as in the East, the new monastic movement caused tensions and problems. A good deal of Jerome’s troubles in Rome stemmed from his fervent promotion of asceticism among his aristocratic Roman patrons, provoking particular public hostility when one of his spiritual protégées, a young lady called Blesilla, apparently died as a result of fasting and generally excessive spiritual rigour. Jerome also aroused anger by a hostility to sex and even marriage which far exceeded even the general early Christian prudishness about sexuality. He and the Greek philosopher Pythagoras were jointly credited with a particularly chilling sentiment by one much-read later author, Vincent of Beauvais, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar who wrote the most widely esteemed compendium of knowledge of the high Middle Ages: ‘One who loves his wife rather eagerly is an adulterer … all love for another man’s wife is indeed shameful, but so is excessive love for one’s own wife’.64 Jerome was nevertheless able to draw on support from the general Christian assumptions of his day to rout theologians who felt differently. First, it was Helvidius, who took the plain meaning of scripture to say that Jesus patently had brothers and sisters, so therefore his mother, Mary, had enjoyed a normal family life rather than remaining perpetually virgin. It was then the turn of the kindly former monk Jovinian, who became repelled by ascetic practice – ‘a new dogma against nature’, he called it – and insisted that any baptized Christian, married, celibate or just single, had an equal chance of getting to Heaven.65 By leading the campaigns to label these two for posterity as theological deviants, Jerome took a significant step in the long process, particularly pronounced in the Western Church, by which the celibate state came to be considered superior to marriage.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When the Israelis annexed Jerusalem after the war, they promised that Christians and Muslims would have unrestricted access to their holy places. Muslims continued to control the Haram al-Sharif, even though this official government policy was deeply unpopular with both ultranationalist Israelis and the more extreme religious Zionists, who maintained that it should be returned to the Jewish people. However, the official Jewish position remained unchanged. The Temple could not be rebuilt until the Messiah had brought about the Redemption; it was a prohibition that over the centuries had acquired the force of a taboo. By the early 1980s, however, this was beginning to change. Livni and Etzion were not the only Jewish extremists who dreamed of rebuilding the Temple as a prelude to the Redemption. How could the Messiah return when the sacred site was “polluted” by the Dome of the Rock? Like other fundamentalists, they believed that they should take the initiative, cast caution to the winds, and clear the Temple Mount of this Muslim shrine in order to prepare the way for the Messiah. If they took the first step, God would certainly intervene and reward this act of faith by intervening in history, sending the long-awaited Messiah and redeeming the people of Israel. Livni and Etzion and their fellow-conspirators believed that the Israeli government had committed a great sin in permitting the Arabs to remain in control of the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount. The Dome of the Rock, in their eyes, was an “abomination,” and the “root cause of all the spiritual errors of our generation.”89 One of the chief ideologues of the Jewish underground was Yeshua ben Shoshan, a gentle, soft-spoken Kabbalist who believed that the Dome of the Rock was the abode of the evil forces of the “Other Side” that were impeding redemption. It was he who had approached Livni and Etzion with the idea of purging the “abomination” during the Camp David negotiations, which, in his view, had been inspired by these demonic influences. Their power would be neutralized by the destruction of the Dome, and the accursed peace process would come to an abrupt end. At the very least, the dramatic action would shock the Jewish people worldwide into a proper awareness of their religious responsibilities, and cause them to abandon this talk of reconciliation with the enemy.

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

  which would be a conscious rival to the Christian faith and which, in the fashion of Christians like Justin Martyr, might make an effort to combine ritual observance with a serious and systematic interest in the great questions of Classical philosophy. Christians had tried to engage philosophers; now philosophers would have to decide on their attitude to Christianity. At the beginning of the third century Philostratus, tame philosopher in the household of Septimius Severus’s wife, Julia Domna, wrote a biography of Apollonius of Tyana, an austere, ascetic philosopher who had been born about the time of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. He presented Apollonius as a performer of miracles and a spiritual healer, like Christ, but Apollonius’s story ended without crucifixion or suffering. After a spirited confrontation with the Emperor Domitian (also a běte noire of Christian writers), he had avoided the tyrant’s rage through an unspectacularly discreet exit from the imperial Court. In contrast to this unfussy practicality, he later demonstrated extraordinary powers when he was able to enjoy watching Domitian’s murder in Rome by long-distance vision in Ephesus. It hardly matters how much truth or fiction there is in Apollonius’s biography (though the fictional element is very evident); it is valuable in revealing what someone in the age of Septimius Severus felt was the most admirable possible portrait of a philosopher, and it is also very striking that Philostratus never once mentions Christianity in his writing. Apollonius was intended to upstage Christ, and he excited fury among Christians – the Christian historian Eusebius of Caesarea wrote an attack on him a century later.33 Intelligent people were now regarding it as respectable to take an interest in the sort of wonder-working which Philostratus described Apollonius as practising. They were also increasingly drawn to forms of philosophy which wore a religious and even magical aspect. Stoicism lost the intellectual dominance which in the second century had led an emperor, Marcus Aurelius, to become one of its most interesting and important exponents. Now the intellectual fashion was for Neoplatonism, a development from Plato’s thought which emphasized its religious character. The greatest Neoplatonist teacher was Plotinus (c. 205–70). Accounts of him include what seems the first recognizable description in Western history of acute dyslexia, which probably explains why he was a reluctant writer; his inspirational oral teachings were mediated to a rapidly growing circle of admiring intellectuals through his somewhat self- important biographer and editor Porphyry, who published Plotinus’s works at the beginning of the fourth century.34 Plotinus was a younger contemporary of Origen in the advanced schools of Alexandria and his picture of the supreme God has resemblances to Origen’s. He spoke in a trinitarian fashion of a divine nature consisting of an ultimate One, of

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Faced with the universal-ism of modern society, some people instinctively retreated into tribalism. This type of conspiracy fear, which makes people feel that they are fighting for their lives, can easily become aggressive. Jesus was no longer the loving savior preached by Dwight Moody. As the leading premillennialist, Isaac M. Haldeman, explained, the Christ of the Book of Revelation “comes forth as one who no longer seeks either friendship or love.… His garments are dipped in blood, the blood of others. He descends that he may shed the blood of men.” 14 The conservatives were ready for a fight, and, at this crucial moment, the liberal Protestants went on the offensive. The liberals had their own difficulties with the war, which challenged their vision of a world progressing inexorably toward the Kingdom of God. The only way they could cope was to see this as the war to end all wars, which would make the world safe for democracy. They were horrified by the violence of premillennialism, and its devastating critique of democracy and the League of Nations. These doctrines seemed not only un-American but a denial of Christianity itself. They decided to attack, and, despite their Gospel of love and compassion, their campaign was vicious and unbalanced. In 1917, theologians at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, the leading scholastic institution of liberal Christianity in the United States, began to attack the Moody Bible Institute on the other side of town. 15 Professor Shirley Jackson Chase accused the premillennialists of being traitors to their country and of taking money from the Germans. Alva S. Taylor compared them to the Bolsheviks, who also wanted to see the world remade in a day. Alfred Dieffenbach, the editor of the Christian Register , called premillennialism “the most astounding mental aberration in the field of religious thinking.” 16 By linking the devout teachers of the Moody Bible Institute with foes who were not only their political enemies but whom they regarded as satanic, the liberals had hit below the belt. The conservatives struck back, hard. The editor of the Moody Bible Institute Monthly and president of the Institute, James M. Gray, retorted that it was the pacifism of the liberals which had caused the United States to fall behind Germany in the arms race, so it was they who had jeopardized the war effort. 17 In The King’s Business , a premillennial magazine, Thomas C. Horton argued that it was the liberals who were in league with the Germans, since the Higher Criticism which they taught in their Divinity School had caused the war and was responsible for the collapse of decent values in Germany. 18 Other conservative articles blamed rationalism and evolutionary theory for the alleged German atrocities.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet the failure of fundamentalist faith is most plainly demonstrated in the rage and hatred that the televangelists displayed toward one another during the scandal. When Swaggart got wind of Bakker’s sexual relationship with Jessica Hahn, he “took on Jim Bakker like a pit bulldog taking on a French poodle,” one of Swaggart’s former aides recalled. “Just ripped him to shreds, destroyed the man.”119 Next, Bakker turned on Jerry Falwell, who had come to the rescue of PTL, and accused him of exploiting the situation to get control of the network. Falwell retaliated by calling a press conference where he produced sworn affidavits by men who claimed to have had homosexual relations with Jim Bakker, together with a note from Tammy Faye listing what she wanted from PTL in return for going quietly: $300,000 a year for Jim, and $100,000 for herself; royalties on all PTL records and books; their $400,000 mansion, two cars, security staff, legal fees, plus the fees of the accountants who were trying to sort out the Bakkers’ highly irregular finances. The grand fundamentalist enterprise seemed to have ended in a barren, unedifying cul-de-sac. The year before the scandals, Falwell had been full of confidence. He had renamed the Moral Majority “the Liberty Federation,” and declared that many of its members would be running for office in the 1988 elections at the local, state, and federal levels. But after the PTL debacle, Falwell resigned on November 4, 1987, from the presidency of the Moral Majority and the Liberty Federation and announced that his political career was over. He would never again work for a candidate as he had for Ronald Reagan, and never again lobby for legislation. In the wake of the scandals, the income from his own Old Time Gospel Hour had declined, and Falwell felt compelled to return to his private Gospel ministry.120 He would still surface from time to time to fulminate about the nation’s ills, but he could no longer look forward to the imminent creation of a coalition of religious conservatives that would take America by storm. When Pat Robertson’s bid for the presidency failed, the fundamentalist offensive, which had started in 1979 with such great hopes, seemed to have failed. The New Christian Right, discredited, appeared to have ignominiously fizzled out, and though Christians would individually continue to lobby and try to bring voters to the polls, it was generally assumed by secularists that the fundamentalist threat was over.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  21 But it is not impossible that these violent assaults are an attempt to kill a buried yearning and attraction in their own hearts. These anti-Zionist Haredim constitute a small minority: there are only about ten thousand of them in Israel, and several tens of thousands in the United States. But their influence is considerable. 22 Even though most of the ultra-Orthodox are a-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, the Neturei Karta and other radicals, such as the Satmar Hasidim, confront them with the dangers of cooperating too closely with the state. Their determined withdrawal from the State of Israel reminds the less zealous Haredim, who often feel a lack of integrity and authenticity in their cooperation with the Jewish state, that no matter how powerful and successful Israel has become in worldly terms, Jews are still in a state of existential exile and can take no legitimate part in the political and cultural life of the modern world . This Haredi refusal to accept Israel as anything but a satanic creation amounts to an act of constant rebellion against the state in which many of them live. When they stone cars on the Sabbath or tear down posters displaying scantily clad women advertising swimwear, they are rebelling against the secularist ethos of the Jewish state in which the only criterion for a course of action is its rational, practical utility. Fundamentalists in all three of the monotheistic faiths are in revolt against the pragmatic logos that dominates modern society to the exclusion of the spiritual, and which refuses the restraints imposed by the sacred. But because the secular establishment is so powerful, most have to confine their revolt to small symbolic acts. Their sense of weakness and tacit acknowledgment of their dependence upon the state in times of war, for example, can only increase the fundamentalists’ rage. The vast majority of Haredim confine their protest to a determined retreat from the secular state and to the establishment of a counterculture which challenges its values at every turn. The alternative society of the Haredim is motivated by a desire to fill the void created by the modern ethos. For Jews after the Holocaust this void is horribly graphic. Those who survived feel impelled to rebuild the Hasidic courts and Misnagdic yeshivot in Israel and the United States. It is an act of piety to the millions of Haredim who died in Hitler’s camps, and an act of rebellion against the forces of evil. They believe that by giving their Haredi institutions a new lease on life and making that dead world not only live again but become more powerful than ever, they are striking a blow for the sacred.