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.

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• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Woe unto them for the shame of it, that people who put on phylacteries every day sit in that assembly of the wicked called the “Knesset” and, signing their names to falsehoods, forge the signature of the Holy One, blessed be He, heaven forfend. For they think that they can decide by majority vote whether the Torah of truth will be trampled upon even further or whether God’s Torah will be granted authority.19 Yet even the Neturei Karta felt the attraction of Zionism. Blau’s description of the Zionists as “seducers” is significant. A Jewish state in a Jewish land is a temptation that tugs hard at the Jewish soul. This is part of the fundamentalists’ dilemma. They often feel fascinated and drawn toward the very modern achievements from which they recoil in horror.20 The Protestant fundamentalists’ portrayal of Antichrist, the charming, plausible deceiver, shows something of the same conflict. There is a tension in the fundamentalist vision of modernity that can be explosive. As Blau indicated, the piety of the anti-Zionists is one of principled “hatred” and hatred often goes hand-in-hand with unacknowledged love. Haredim feel rage when they contemplate the State of Israel. They do not kill, but to this day they throw stones at cars in Israel whose drivers break the law by traveling on the Sabbath. Sometimes they will attack the house of a fellow Haredi who has failed to live up to the expected standard by, say, owning a television set or permitting his wife to dress immodestly. Such acts of violence are seen as kiddush hashem, “sanctification of God’s Name,” and a blow against the forces of evil that surround the Haredim on all sides and threaten to devour them.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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This aggressive encroachment into secular space can be seen as a crude attempt to reconstruct Islam and implant it in a Westernized world. The Islamists of Minya refused to accept the universal expansion of Western civilization and were trying to change the map. Like the adoption of Islamic dress, the conversion of a profane space into a mosque constituted a rebellion against a wholly secularized way of life. For almost a century, Egyptians, like other people in the developing world, had been deemed incapable of creating history and establishing a modern society on their own terms. Now the Islamists were making something happen, on however small a scale. They were protesting against the centrality of the Western viewpoint, and pushing their own out of the margins and into the limelight once more. Like the civil rights or ethnic movements, like feminism or environmentalism, the student Muslim organizations were struggling to reassert an identity, values and issues which they felt had been repressed by industrial modernity, and to emphasize the vitality of the local and particular over against the uniformity of the global society imposed by the West. Like other postmodern movements, it was an act of symbolic decolonization, an attempt to de-center the West, and demonstrate the fact that there were other possibilities for humanity. As Sadat moved ever closer to the West and made peace with Israel (which was regarded by Islamists as the alter ego of America in the Middle East), a rupture with the regime became almost inevitable. At Minya the students became more violent. They vandalized churches, attacked students who refused to wear Islamic dress, and, in February 1979, occupied the municipal government building for a week. When the police closed down one of their mosques, the students held the Friday community prayer in the middle of the street on an important bridge, holding up traffic. Next they took over University City, the student resident block, and held thirty Christian students as hostages. Two days later, a thousand troops arrived to quell the uprising.47 Until 1977, Sadat had supported the jamaat al-islamiyyah, but the events at Minya changed his mind. On April 14, 1979, he visited Upper Egypt and addressed the faculties of the Universities of Minya and Asyut: the government would no longer tolerate this abuse of religion. In June, the General Union of Egyptian Students was banned, and its assets were frozen. But the jamaat were too strongly entrenched to disappear. At the end of the Ramadan fast, they held huge rallies in the major cities of Egypt. In Cairo, fifty thousand Muslims gathered in prayer outside the presidential Abidin Palace, tacitly reminding Sadat that he must rule according to God’s law. The distinguished Muslim Brother Yusuf al-Qaradawi was flown in from the Gulf to address the crowds. He reminded Sadat, who was currently devoting much attention to the preservation of the mummy of Ramses II:

• 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)

  The next day four thousand students turned out onto the streets of Qum: they demanded a return to the 1906 constitution, freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners, the reopening of the Fayziyyah Madrasah, and that Khomeini be permitted to return to Iran. What they got was a massacre. The police opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators, and, according to the ulema , seventy students were killed (though the regime claimed that only ten had died). 64 It was the bloodiest day in Iran since the 1963 riots, and for the shah it was the beginning of the end. William Beeman points out that Iranians will put up with a great deal, but that a single act of bad faith can cause an irrevocable breach in personal, business, and political relationships. Once this line has been crossed, there can be no going back. 65 For millions of ordinary religious Iranians, the shah crossed that line when he ordered SAVAK to shoot the demonstrators in Qum. They responded to the massacre with raw outrage, and the Revolution began. In recent months, the intellectuals, writers, lawyers, and businessmen had led the opposition to the shah’s regime. In January, however, after this blatant attack on the Shiah, the leadership passed to the ulema . The massacre had been so shocking that it even moved Ayatollah Shariatmadari to abandon his usual quietism and he condemned the shooting in the strongest terms. This passed a signal to the ulema throughout the country. Nothing was planned or prearranged. Khomeini issued no strategic orders from Najaf, but from the moment the Ettelaat article appeared, he was the unseen instigator and inspiration of the uprising. The struggle centered on the traditional mourning ceremonies held on the fortieth day after a death. These turned into demonstrations against the government, during which there were more killings; and, forty days later, a new series of rallies were held to commemorate the latest martyrs. The Revolution acquired an unstoppable momentum. The forty-day period between each demonstration gave the leaders time to spread the word, and, at the appointed time, the crowd would know exactly when to assemble, without any need for elaborate planning or advertising. Thus on February 18, forty days after the Qum massacre, crowds of mourners, led by the ulema and bazaaris , swarmed onto the streets of major Iranian cities to weep for the dead. Women students, many of whom wore the veil to dissociate themselves from the regime, and chadored women from the bazaar often led the processions, as if to challenge the police to fire directly at them.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  M obilization ( 1960–74 ) B Y THE 1960s, revolution was in the air throughout the West and the Middle East. In Europe and America the young people took to the streets and rebelled against the modern ethos of their parents. They called for a more just and equal system, protested against the materialism, imperialism, and chauvinism of their governments, refused to fight in their nation’s wars or to study in its universities. Sixties youth began doing what the fundamentalists had been doing for decades: they started to create a “counterculture,” an “alternative society” in revolt against the values of the mainstream. In many ways, they were demanding a more religious way of life. Most had little time for institutional faith or for the authoritarian structures of the monotheisms. Instead, they went to Katmandu or sought solace in the meditative or mystical techniques of the Orient. Others found transcendence in drug-induced trips, transcendental meditation, or personal transformation in such techniques as the Erhard Seminars Training (est). There was a hunger for mythos and a rejection of the scientific rationalism that had become the new Western orthodoxy. This was not a rejection of rationality per se , but of its more extreme forms. Twentieth-century science itself was cautious, sober, and highly conscious in a disciplined, principled way of its limitations and areas of competence. But the prevailing mood of modernity had made science ideological and had refused to countenance any other method of arriving at truth. During the sixties, the youth revolution was in part a protest against the illegitimate domination of rational language and the suppression of mythos by logos . But because the understanding of such disciplined ways of arriving at a more intuitive knowledge had been neglected in the West since the advent of modernity, the sixties quest for spirituality was often wild, self-indulgent, and unbalanced. There were flaws too in the visions and policies of the religious radicals, who were beginning to organize their own offensive against the secularization and rationalism of modern society. The fundamentalists were beginning to mobilize. They had often experienced modernity as an aggressive onslaught. The modern spirit had demanded freedom from the outmoded thought patterns of the past; the modern ideal of progress had entailed the elimination of those beliefs, practices, and institutions that were deemed to be irrational and, therefore, retarding. Religious establishments and doctrines had often been key targets. Sometimes, as in the case of the liberals at the time of the Scopes trial, the weapon had been ridicule. In the Middle East, where modernization was more problematic, the methods had been more brutal, involving massacre, despoliation, and the concentration camp. By the 1960s and 1970s, many religious people were angry and were determined to fight the liberals and secularists who had, they believed, oppressed and marginalized them. But these religious radicals were men of their time. They would have to fight with modern weapons and devise a modern ideology.

• 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 The Battle for God (2000)

  Life had changed drastically for Jews. They felt that there was no need for Jews to be constricted by the traditions belonging to the Diaspora, because the messianic age had begun. This was the first major outbreak of Jewish messianism since Shabbetai Zevi. At that time, too, Jews had felt in transition and believed that they were about to experience unprecedented change. But where Shabbateans had rebelled against the restrictions of the ghetto, Gush members felt territorially circumscribed. They were as obsessed with boundaries as the Shabbateans, and though they focused chiefly on the frontiers of Eretz Israel, they were also fighting a battle to define the limits and borders of Judaism. They wanted to break down the barriers between secular and religious Jews. 77 Kookists were convinced that, whatever the Haredim thought, it was possible to be at once fully Orthodox and Zionist; they also insisted, against the secularists, that without a religious dimension, Zionism was incomplete. But these were difficult years. Kookists felt betrayed by the Likud government, which had expelled them from Yamit, and, by making peace with the Arabs, had stalled the redemptive process. This seemed clearer than ever when the Palestinian uprising known as the intifadah (an Arabic term meaning “a shaking off”) broke out in 1987, and eventually impelled the Labor government to sign a peace treaty which, in Kookist eyes, was even more unacceptable than Camp David, because it promised to surrender parts of the holy land of the West Bank. Increasingly, Kookists felt that they were surrounded—rather as Jews had been in the Diaspora—by a hostile gentile world, but also by their fellow Jews, who were holding them back from the fulfillment they felt to be within their grasp. As a result, the Gush’s mystical joy in the Land became an ecstasy of rage, which could on occasion erupt in terrifying violence, in the first instance against the Arabs. In the early, more hopeful days of their movement, Gush settlers declared that they had come to “help” the Palestinians in the occupied territories, and to break down the “wall of hatred” between the two peoples, though the very terms in which this offer was couched revealed implacable hostility: “We have come to cleanse you of the air of murder to which you have become accustomed,” Levinger had promised in the 1970s. 78 His behavior grew increasingly provocative. He used to walk aggressively, gun in hand, through Arab towns in the West Bank.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In August 1917, William Bell Riley had sat down with A. C. Dixon (1854–1925), one of the editors of The Fundamentals, and the revivalist Reuben Torrey (1856–1928) and decided to form an association to promote the literal interpretation of scripture and the “scientific” doctrines of premillennialism. In 1919 Riley held a massive conference in Philadelphia, attended by six thousand conservative Christians from all the Protestant denominations, and formally established the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA). Immediately afterward, Riley escorted fourteen speakers with a troupe of Gospel singers on a superbly organized tour of the United States, which visited eighteen cities. The liberals were entirely unprepared for this onslaught, and the response to the fundamentalist speakers was so enthusiastic that Riley believed that he had launched a new Reformation.22 The fundamentalist campaign was perceived as a battle. Constantly, the leaders used military imagery. “I believe the time has come,” wrote E. A. Wollam in the Christian Workers Magazine, “when the evangelistic forces of this country, primarily the Bible Institutes, should not only rise up in defense of the faith, but should become a united and offensive power.” In the same issue, James M. Gray agreed, calling for the need “for an offensive and defensive alliance in the Church.”23 At a meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1920, Curtis Lee Laws defined the “fundamentalist” as one who was ready to regain territory which had been lost to Antichrist and “to do battle royal for the fundamentals of the faith.”24 Riley went further. This was not just an isolated battle, “it is a war from which there is no discharge.”25 The fundamentalists’ next objective was to expel the liberals from the denominations. Most of the fundamentalists were either Baptists or Presbyterians, and it was here that the fiercest battles were fought. In his celebrated book Christianity and Liberalism (1923), the Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), the most intellectual of the fundamentalists, argued that the liberals were pagans, who, by denying the literal truth of such core doctrines as the Virgin Birth, denied Christianity itself. There were horrific fights in the general assemblies of the denominations, when fundamentalist Presbyterians tried to impose their five-point creed on the church; after a particularly bitter dispute, Riley seceded from the Baptist Assembly to found his own Bible Baptist Union of hard-liners. Some fundamentalist Baptists remained in the mainline denomination, hoping to effect reform from within, only to earn Riley’s undying hatred.26

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As Sadat moved ever closer to the West and made peace with Israel (which was regarded by Islamists as the alter ego of America in the Middle East), a rupture with the regime became almost inevitable. At Minya the students became more violent. They vandalized churches, attacked students who refused to wear Islamic dress, and, in February 1979, occupied the municipal government building for a week. When the police closed down one of their mosques, the students held the Friday community prayer in the middle of the street on an important bridge, holding up traffic. Next they took over University City, the student resident block, and held thirty Christian students as hostages. Two days later, a thousand troops arrived to quell the uprising. 47 Until 1977, Sadat had supported the jamaat al-islamiyyah , but the events at Minya changed his mind. On April 14, 1979, he visited Upper Egypt and addressed the faculties of the Universities of Minya and Asyut: the government would no longer tolerate this abuse of religion. In June, the General Union of Egyptian Students was banned, and its assets were frozen. But the jamaat were too strongly entrenched to disappear. At the end of the Ramadan fast, they held huge rallies in the major cities of Egypt. In Cairo, fifty thousand Muslims gathered in prayer outside the presidential Abidin Palace, tacitly reminding Sadat that he must rule according to God’s law. The distinguished Muslim Brother Yusuf al-Qaradawi was flown in from the Gulf to address the crowds. He reminded Sadat, who was currently devoting much attention to the preservation of the mummy of Ramses II: Egypt is Muslim, not pharaonic … the youth of the jamaat islamiyyah are the true representatives of Egypt, and not the Avenue of the Pyramids, the theatre performances, and the films.… Egypt is not naked women, but veiled women who adhere to the prescriptions of divine law. Egypt is young men who let their beards grow.… It is the land of al-Azhar! 48 Repression and coercion had their usual effect. The Islamist students now redoubled their efforts to turn the campuses into Islamic bastions; there were more attacks on cinemas, theaters, Christians, and unveiled women. They also began to spread the word outside the universities. There was now a state of open warfare against the regime and its secularized ethos. The jamaat were not allowed to regroup, and many of their members joined the new secret cells dedicated to a more violent jihad . These events all took place against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution. While Sadat, in his attempt to draw closer to the West, spoke proudly of the shah as his friend, Islamic militants in Egypt gloried in the reports of the Iranian revolutionaries who were bringing the shah down. The Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 was a watershed. It was an inspiration to thousands of Muslims all over the world, who had long felt that their religion was under attack.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But Banna always felt that precise discussions about a possible Islamic state were premature, because there was still much basic preparation to be done. 78 Banna simply asked that Egypt be allowed to make its state Islamic; the Soviets had chosen communism, and the West democracy; countries where the population was predominantly Muslim should have the right to construct their polity on an Islamic basis, if and when they so wished. 79 The Society was not perfect. Because of its appeal to the masses, it tended to be anti-intellectual. Its pronouncements were often defensive and self-righteous. The Brothers’ image of the West, which stressed its greed, tyranny, and spiritual bankruptcy, had been distorted by the colonial experience. The object of Western imperialism had not simply been, as one of the Society’s spokesmen maintained, “to humiliate us, to occupy our lands and begin destroying Islam.” 80 The Society’s leaders were intolerant of dissension in the ranks. Banna insisted on absolute obedience and did not delegate responsibility sufficiently. As a result, after his death, nobody could take his place, and the Society was virtually destroyed from within by fruitless infighting. But by far its most serious and damaging failing was the emergence in 1943 of a terrorist unit known as “The Secret Apparatus” ( al jihaz al-sirri ). 81 It remained marginal to the Society as a whole. Because it was so clandestine, we have very little information about it, but in his definitive study of the Society, Richard P. Mitchell states his belief that by 1948, the unit only had about a thousand members, and that most of the Brothers had never heard of its existence until this date. 82 For the vast majority of members, social and spiritual reform was the raison d’être of the Society, and they abhorred the terrorism of the Apparatus. Nevertheless, once a movement has started killing in the name of God, it has embarked on a nihilistic course that denies the most fundamental religious values. The 1940s were very turbulent years in Egypt. It had become obvious that liberal democracy had failed, and most Egyptians were thoroughly pessimistic about the parliamentary system. Neither the British nor the Egyptian nationalists had understood that it was not possible to impose a modern system of government on a country that, as a result of superficial and too rapid modernization, was still basically feudal and agrarian. Between 1923 and 1950, all seventeen general elections were won by the nationalist Wafd party, but they were only allowed to rule five times.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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.19 Howard W. Kellogg of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles insisted that the philosophy of evolution was responsible for “a monster plotting world domination, the wreck of civilization, and the destruction of Christianity itself.”20 This acrimonious and, on both sides, unchristian dispute had clearly touched a raw nerve, and evoked a deep fear of annihilation. There was no longer any possibility of reconciliation on the subject of the Higher Criticism, which, for the conservatives, now had an aura of absolute evil. The literal truth of scripture was a matter of the life and death of Christianity itself. The critics’ attacks on the Bible would result in anarchy and the total collapse of civilization, the Baptist minister John Straton declared in a famous sermon entitled “Will New York City Be Destroyed If It Does Not Repent?”21 The conflict had got out of hand and it would become almost impossible to heal the rift.

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

  two branches of Christianity in fundamental disagreement with one another about their relationship with the parent Judaism: there would be a Jewish Church looking to the tradition represented by James and a Gentile Church treasuring the writings of Paul and John. In fact this is not so. There is one epistle in the New Testament which has been given James’s name, and which does represent a rather different view of the Christian life and the role of the Law from that of Paul, but otherwise all Christians alive today are the heirs of the Church which Paul created. The other type of Christianity once headed by the brother of the Lord has disappeared. How did this happen? A great political crisis intervened to transform the situation. THE JEWISH REVOLT AND THE END OF JERUSALEM In 66 CE a Jewish revolt broke out in Palestine which drew its inspiration from the traditions of Jewish self-assertion and rage against outside interference which looked back to the heroic era of Judas Maccabeus (see pp. 65–6). The comforts provided by Roman rule were not enough to persuade everyone in the Jewish community that they should outweigh the constant reminder from the Roman authorities that Jews were not masters of their own destinies. The rebels eventually took control in Jerusalem and massacred the Sadducee elite, whom they regarded as collaborators with the Romans. The Jewish Christian Church, interestingly, fled from the city; it was distant enough from the world of Jewish nationalism to wish to keep out of this struggle. The result of the revolt was in the long term probably inevitable: the Romans could not afford to lose their grip on this corner of the Mediterranean and they put a huge effort into crushing the rebels. In the course of the capture of Jerusalem, whether by accident or by design, the great Temple complex went up in flames, never to be restored; its site lay as a wasteland for centuries.79 Jewish fury accumulated at this highly unusual destruction of one of the Mediterranean world’s most renowned shrines and in 132–5 they rose again in revolt. Now the Romans erased the name of Jerusalem from the map and created a city, Aelia Capitolina. It took its name with deliberate offensiveness from a new temple of Jupiter, the chief god of the Roman pantheon as worshipped on the Capitoline Hill in Rome itself (the temple was built apparently on a site which encompassed the place of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial, although this was probably coincidental). So Aelia Capitolina was not even intended to be a Greek city; it was a Roman colony.80 After the revolt of 66–70 no substantial Christian community returned to Aelia/Jerusalem until the fourth century. The Jewish-led Christ-followers

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

  K’art’li proved to be a major force in prompting hostility to Chalcedon among the Georgians. In his teenage years, the prince was sent to Constantinople as an official hostage for K’art’li’s alliance with the Roman Empire, and he was brought up at the imperial Court in the turbulent years which witnessed the abrupt twists and turns in theological supremacy around the Council of Ephesus in 431 (see pp. 225–6). He took the name Peter when he turned to the monastic life in Palestine, where, despite extensive travels around the Middle East, he spent most of his life. He briefly became a bishop in Maiuma in what is now the Gaza Strip, as well as founding the first Georgian monastery in the city of Jerusalem. A great admirer of Cyril of Alexandria, Peter was infuriated when Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, abandoned his support for Alexandrian theology (Juvenal literally crossed the floor from one party to another at the Council of Chalcedon); Peter’s reputation as an ascetic lent authority to his bitter denunciations of Chalcedon.19 His uncompromising Miaphysite views have been problematic for the later Georgian Church to square with its devotion to Peter the Iberian as one of the premier national saints – for the Georgians eventually agreed to recognize the Chalcedonian Definition, although it took until the beginning of the seventh century, long after Peter’s time.20 By contrast, the Armenians specifically declared themselves against Chalcedon in the sixth century and have never been reconciled to its formulae since. They saw its language as expressing unacceptable novelties, partly because, like the Georgians, their normal word for ‘nature’ was closely related to the Iranian root-word for ‘foundation’, ‘root’ or ‘origin’ – so any description of Christ as having two natures, even the qualified definition of Chalcedon, sounded like blasphemous nonsense to them. They took care to construct their own Armenian theological vocabulary on the basis of Greek writings from an impeccable succession of theologians from the Cappadocian Fathers to Cyril of Alexandria – all dating before the taint of Chalcedon.21 In fact, the Armenian Church was so concerned to build up an arsenal of Christian literature to guarantee its own view of orthodoxy that it undertook a sustained programme of translating classic Greek and Syriac theological manuscripts. This has proved an immense service to modern students of the ancient Church, because thanks to accidental destruction or deliberate censorship of the originals, often these Armenian translations are the only texts surviving.22 Armenian liturgy came to incorporate a distinctive feature which was a permanent reminder of the conflicts of the fifth and sixth centuries. Characteristic of Eastern Christian worship generally, used in every service, is the chanting of a plea for mercy, ‘Holy God, Holy and Strong, Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us’ – the Trisagion (‘Thrice-Holy’).23 There is no

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

  element in her unpopularity, but her proposed marriage to Charlemagne (see pp. 349–50) seems to have been the last straw. From 813, the iconoclastic struggle resumed with even greater ferocity, after Emperor Leo V declared war on images and once more pulled down a key icon from the Great Palace.58 The fury of the iconophile party revealed that the Church’s reverence for the emperor remained conditional, even in Constantinople. Theodore the Stoudite (then abbot of the monastery of Stoudios, and a major reformer of monastic life) was emerging as the chief champion of icons, and he had no compunction in telling Leo ‘Your responsibility, Emperor, is with affairs of state and military matters. Give your mind to these and leave the Church to its pastors and teachers.’59 Theodore and a network of monks kept in touch with each other even after the Stoudite had been packed off into exile; they were confident of support from the Pope in the West, who remained determinedly cold to the Emperor’s conciliatory overtures. Meanwhile, iconoclasm proved no more capable of delivering military success than the armies of Empress Irene. A particularly bitter blow came in 838 with the fall to Muslim armies of the major frontier city of Amorion in Asia Minor. The loss was long remembered in Byzantine folklore and song, and one cannot help thinking that this was partly thanks to its association with the last iconoclast emperor, Theophilos. It was Theophilos’s empress, Theodora, who finally reversed the iconoclastic policy, from motives which, like those of Irene, are now permanently obscured by grateful Orthodox hagiographers. Once Theophilos was dead, Theodora as regent ordered the Patriarch Methodios to restore the icons to the churches. The occasion of this restoration, the first Sunday in Lent, 11 March 843, is commemorated as one of the most significant feasts of the Eastern Church, the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’. On that day icons are paraded around Orthodox churches with particular ceremony, and a document enshrining the ninth-century decision and composed about that time is solemnly read out. This Synodicon theatrically includes a list of the chief personalities who could be seen as the defenders of icons, each followed by the acclamation ‘eternal memory!’ The Empress, worried about the reputation of her son, made sure that the parallel list of those condemned in the Synodikon did not include his father, her husband, Theophilos, and that broad hint prevented any campaign of revenge attacks on iconoclasts, who continued to argue their case throughout the later ninth century, but never again enjoyed official patronage. The two iconophile empresses had effectively closed down the possibility of alternative forms of worship in the Orthodox tradition. They made veneration of icons a compulsory part of it, an essential badge of Orthodox identity (see Plate 33). They and their supporters not merely pronounced on a question of aesthetic

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

  was a characteristic substitution in iconoclast art. The Cross meant a great deal to iconoclasts: it was a symbol not merely of Christ’s death and resurrection, but of the conquest of the Churches in the East by Islam and the loss to Arab armies of Jerusalem together with Heraclius’s painfully recovered True Cross (see pp. 253–4).43 Crosses from this period still lurk in shadowy form under later figural mosaics in other churches besides Hagia Eirene. The iconoclast emperors of the eighth century enjoyed a run of luck in their military campaigns, which must for the time being have vindicated their policies. They do seem to have been riding a widespread mood in Eastern Christianity, as is indicated by church mosaics excavated in what had now become Umayyad- and Abbasid-ruled Palestine. Some of these mosaics have been carefully altered to replace figured by non-figured designs. The dates of the original mosaics help to date the alterations to the decades beyond the second quarter of the eighth century – so the changes are contemporary with the iconoclastic campaigns of Leo’s dynasty, but they are to be found beyond the Byzantine frontiers.44 Equally, we know of a rather earlier iconoclastic movement beyond the north- east frontier of the empire in Armenia.45 What is also clear is the high level of destruction; there are very few surviving icons in the Byzantine world dating before this period, the most notable collection being those preserved beyond the reach of the emperors at the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai. However much popular support there was for iconophobia, the iconoclastic controversy badly damaged the empire. The policy caused deep offence in Rome, driving popes into increasingly close alliance with the Frankish monarchy (see p. 350). In the emperors’ own dominions, it provoked much anger, bitterly dividing Byzantium during its continuing military emergencies. It is not surprising that monks were prominent in the iconophile opposition, because Constantine V was not merely a vigorously opinionated man, passionately fond of secular theatre and music, but he was also contemptuous of the monastic way of life. He took measures to restrict monasticism and executed a number of iconophile monks; one was whipped to death in Constantinople’s Hippodrome.46 His reward for this was his bad press in Byzantine historiography, despite his military achievements and the fact that he did much to rebuild Constantinople after a sequence of natural disasters. Far away in St Sabas’s monastery in Palestine, beyond the imperial frontiers, the greatly respected John of Damascus (see pp. 263–4), after a lifetime contemplating and criticizing Islam at close quarters, saw the developing conflict as a familiar struggle. If Muslims despised the veneration of the Cross, he asked in his dialogue with a straw-man Muslim opponent, how did they justify the veneration of a black stone in the Ka’aba?47 John proved one of the most

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Bible colleges and the fundamentalist universities created during these years were, like the Haredi yeshivot, separatist citadels. Fundamentalists felt that their faith was imperiled; they had been displaced from the center of American life, and were taught to regard themselves as “outside the gate.”48 The militancy expressed deep anger. This surfaced in the utterances of the more extremist Christians in these years, who voiced many of the fears, hatreds, and prejudices of the most marginalized sectors of the population. Gerald Winrod, a Baptist who organized the Defenders of the Christian Faith to combat the teaching of evolution during the 1920s, traveled in Nazi Germany during the 1930S and returned determined to expose the “Jewish menace” to the American people. At the same time, he denounced Roosevelt’s “Jewish New Deal” as satanic. With Carl McIntyre and Billy James Hargis, Winrod condemned every “liberal” trend in the United States. Fundamentalists blamed liberals of any hue, secularist or Christian, for the marginal status of the “true” Christians. They were beginning their swing to the political Right. In the nineteenth century, evangelicals had seen patriotism as idolatrous. Now it became a sacred duty to defend the American way of life. Hargis, the founder of the Christian Crusade, an anticommunist ministry, saw the Soviet Union as demonic, and battled tirelessly against what he regarded as communist infiltration: the liberal press, leftist teachers, and the Supreme Court were all, in his view, part of a conspiracy to turn America “red.” Carl McIntyre, who seceded from the Presbyterian Church to found the Bible Presbyterian Church and the Faith Theological Seminary, saw hidden enemies everywhere. The mainline denominations themselves were part of a satanic plot to destroy Christianity in America. In the 1950s, McIntyre joined Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade. These extremists were not typical, but they were influential. By 1934, some 600,000 people subscribed to Winrod’s Defender Magazine; 120,000 took McIntyre’s Christian Beacon. McIntyre reached thousands more in his Twentieth Century Christian Hour, a radio program which condemned all Christians who did not subscribe to his theology of hatred, and all liberal clergy, who might seem loving and Christian to the uninformed, but who were really “atheistic, communistic, Bible-ridiculing, blood-despising, name-calling, sex-manacled sons of green-eyed monsters.”49

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was in this context of internal conflict that, on February 14, 1989, four months before his death, Khomeini issued his fatwa against the British Indian author Salman Rushdie. In his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had created what many Muslims regarded as a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad, which presented him as a lecher, a charlatan, and a tyrant, and—most dangerously—suggested that the Koran had been tainted by satanic influence. It was a novel that brilliantly expressed the giddy confusion of the postmodern world, where there are no boundaries, no certainties, and no clearly or easily defined identity. The passages that gave offense were the recorded dreams and fantasies of a deracinated Indian film star, who is suffering a breakdown and has interiorized the anti-Islamic prejudices of the West. The blasphemy was also an attempt to cancel the clinging relics of the past and to achieve an independent identity, free of old shibboleths. But many Muslims experienced this portrait of Muhammad as profoundly wounding. It seemed a violation of something sacred to their own Muslim personae. Dr. Zaki Badawi, one of Britain’s most liberal Muslims, told The Guardian newspaper that Rushdie’s words were “far worse to Muslims than if he had raped one’s own daughter.” So internalized was the Prophet by the practices of Islam in every Muslim’s being, that the novel was “like a knife being dug into you or being raped yourself.”34 There were riots in Pakistan, and the novel was ceremonially burned in Bradford, England, where there was a large community of Muslims of Indian and Pakistani origin, who objected to the British blasphemy laws that punished only insults to Christianity, and were aware of widespread prejudice in England against Islam. On February 13, Khomeini saw the Pakistani police open fire on the demonstrators and concluded that the novel must be evil. His fatwa commanded Muslims all over the world “to put to death Salman Rushdie and his publishers, wherever they are found.”

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

  occupied the Church for the next five centuries and the answers then hammered out have often been contested since. Rather than see the questions as a problem, Paul and the communities to whom he was writing would no doubt have said that all he was doing was trying to express a reality which they had found in their midst. Indeed, one of Paul’s motives for writing to the Church at Corinth was that they were celebrating their experience of the Spirit in ways which he found imprudent; he sent them an extended health warning on this theme (I Corinthians 14), particularly the practice of speaking ecstatically in unknown ‘languages’. The power of the Spirit was like a volcano under the community, showing itself in forms ranging from such spectacular displays to the everyday. The Spirit might perfect or express our prayers with sighs too deep for words, yet might also use us like ventriloquists’ dolls, making us echo Jesus’s cry to his Father, Abba!, and make it our own.70 In one of the earliest stories in the Book of Acts (2.1–13), it took over the reconstituted Twelve Apostles and made them speak the languages of all those who heard, on the Jewish feast which was known by Hellenized Jews as Pentecost. Eighteen centuries later, Christians would remember that first Pentecost of the Church and make something new of it (see pp. 912–13). Entering Paul’s theological world in his letters is rather like jumping on a moving merry-go-round: the point of entry hardly matters. It is an intensely painted set of portraits of how a Christian community works and what a Christian community signifies – but one has to remember that it is only one vision of Christian community. It has curiously little interest in the life and teaching of its founder, concentrating instead on the effect of his death and resurrection in God’s cosmic plan. The individual, living in Christ, is never his own person. Love, participation, indwelling bind all together: such relationships transcend the usual human bonds of marriage, family ties or social status, which are allowed to survive precisely because they are irrelevant to the categories of the new age to come. The Christian future was to present many alternative situations and possibilities. THE GOSPEL OF JOHN AND REVELATION Paul was not alone in his development of a Christ message which strayed away from Jesus’s own emphases. Some very similar themes are to be found in the fourth Gospel, John, which is thought to have been written rather later than the Synoptic Gospels, some time around the turn of the first and second centuries CE. Perhaps it should be seen as a fruitful meditation on the tradition which the

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

  dissolutions of monasteries were taking place (see p. 628). At least one prominent monk among the Non-Possessors, Nil’s disciple Vassian Patrikeev, urged that bishops should be put in charge of all Church lands, including those of the monasteries, which would have made Church wealth more readily available assets for the grand prince. Unlike his hero Nil Sorskii, Vassian really did argue for tolerance for religious dissidents.53 Given that conjunction of ideas, it is not surprising that there were such bitter cries of heresy among the Possessors against both Judaizers and Non-Possessors; it was a convenient emphasis which may have helped to pull the grand princes into line behind their cause. The Possessors were naturally also careful to stress their reverence for the God-given power of the monarch. Much of what the sixteenth-century Muscovite Church leadership condemned was simply the energy of popular devotion, creatively extending or modifying the liturgy to suit local needs, or experiencing its own unregulated encounters with the divine. This undergrowth of religious life could never wholly be contained by official weeding. After the mid-sixteenth century, the Church hierarchy deliberately restricted the number of those newly officially canonized as saints, and the candidates whom they chose tended to be drawn safely from the upper ranks of society. Into the vacuum poured a myriad of local cults, some of which became much more than local; so in 1579 it was the daughter of an ordinary soldier who discovered the hiding place in the newly Muscovite city of Kazan of an icon which became one of Russia’s most revered images of the Mother of God.54 And still the Holy Fools postured and agreeably shocked society with their consecrated antics. A sixteenth-century example of the breed, Vasilii (Basil) the Blessed, has been so centrally honoured in Russian devotion that the image of Moscow now most familiar worldwide is that of the church in Red Square containing his shrine, the Cathedral of the Intercession, now commonly known as St Basil’s Cathedral. Appropriately it is an extraordinary culmination of Russian architectural posturing, and in it also lie the bones of a second and rather more obscure Holy Fool, Ioann ‘Big Cap’, whose speciality apart from his outsize head was apparently intimidating people with gnomic innuendoes.55 IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND THE NEW PATRIARCHATE (1547-98) That anarchic fools should be honoured in Red Square is remarkable, because the Church of the Intercession was commissioned by the man who came to symbolize the dismal extremity of what Muscovite autocracy might mean: Ivan

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The campaigns continued; feeling escalated to such a point that any attempt at mediation only made matters worse. When the liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), a peaceable man and one of the most influential American clergymen of the time, pleaded for tolerance in a sermon delivered at the Baptist Convention of 1922 (later published in The Baptist as “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”), the rancor of the response showed the visceral disgust that these liberal ideas inspired.27 It spread to other denominations. After the sermon, there seemed to be a landslide movement toward the fundamentalist camp: the more conservative Disciples of Christ, Seventh-Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and the Salvation Army rallied to the fundamentalist cause. Even Methodists and Episcopalians, who had remained aloof from the controversy, were challenged by the conservatives in their ranks to define and make obligatory “the vital and eternal truths of the Christian religion.”28 By 1923, it looked as though the fundamentalists would indeed win and that they would rid the denominations of the liberal danger. But then a new campaign caught the attention of the nation and eventually brought the whole fundamentalist movement into disrepute. In 1920, the Democratic politician and Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) had launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges. In his view, it was not the Higher Criticism but Darwinism that had been responsible for the atrocities of the First World War.29 Bryan had been impressed by two books which claimed to establish a direct link between evolutionary theory and German militarism: Benjamin Kidd’s The Science of Power (1918) and Vernon L. Kellogg’s Headquarter Nights (1917), which included interviews with German officers who described the influence that Darwinism had allegedly played in persuading the Germans to declare war. Not only had the notion that only the strong could or should survive “laid the foundation for the bloodiest war in history,” Byran concluded, but “the same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brutal ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and supernatural from the Bible.”30 At the same time, in his book Belief in God and Immortality, Bryn Mawr psychologist James H. Leuba produced statistics that “proved” that a college education endangered religious belief. Darwinism was causing young men and women to lose faith in God, the Bible, and other fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Bryan was not a typical fundamentalist; he was not a premillennialist nor did he read scripture with the new stringent literalism. But his “research” had convinced him that evolutionary theory was incompatible with morality, decency, and the survival of civilization. When he toured the United States with his lecture “The Menace of Darwinism,” he drew big audiences and received extensive media coverage.