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 81 of 447 · 20 per page

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

  and it meant that throughout the rest of the long history of the Catholic Church and beyond, the principle persisted that its bishops had a power and jurisdiction independent of the emperors. Rulers and Church leaders continued to work out this complicated and conflicted relationship. What was nevertheless now apparent was that the Catholic Church had become an imperial Church, its fortunes linked to those of emperors who commanded armies, to sustain or extend their power in the ways that armies do. That had implications for Christians who lived beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire in territories where they or their ruler might regard the empire as an enemy. They might well also feel that about the imperial Church. Constantine next sponsored a council in an attempt (again not blessed with short-term success) to solve a dispute sparked in the Church of Alexandria. This was yet another episode, and in many ways one of the most decisive, in the long debates about Christology (that is, discussion of the nature and significance of Jesus Christ), and the relationship between Father and Son. An austere and talented priest there called Arius was concerned to make his presentation of the Christian faith intellectually respectable to his contemporaries. To achieve this, he would have to wrestle with the old Platonic problem of the nature of God. If God is eternal and unknowable as Plato pictured him, Jesus Christ cannot be in the same sense God, since we know of him and of his deeds through the Gospels. This means, since the supreme God is one, that Christ must in some respect come after and be other than the Father, even if we accept that he was created or begotten before all worlds. Arius’s opponents accused him of using as a slogan ‘There was when he was not’.54 Moreover, since the Father is indivisible, he cannot have created the Son out of himself; if the Son was created before all things, it would therefore logically follow that he was created out of nothing. Here, then, was Arius’s Christ: inferior or subordinate to the Father (as indeed Origen and other earlier writers had been inclined to say), and created by the Father out of nothing. In many respects, Arius was the heir of Origen and should be thought of as among theologians of Alexandrian outlook. It has been argued that Arius was not merely preoccupied by logic and that he had a warm concern to present Christians with a picture of a Saviour who was like them and participated in human struggles towards virtue; his Christ was part of the created order, not simply an image of God.55 Arius certainly found an affectionate following among ordinary Alexandrians, whom he taught simple songs about his ideas. Whatever his motives, by around 318 he had provoked an infuriated opposition in Alexandria, including his bishop, Alexander. Alexander would not be the last bishop to turn the fact that one of his clergy was a rather more acute

• 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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  and wine of the Eucharist; why otherwise had Cyril’s much-revered predecessor Athanasius fought so hard for an equality of Persons in the Trinity? Encouraged by a theological work which he thought was by Athanasius but (disastrously) was actually by Apollinaris of Laodicea, Cyril could see no reason to make a distinction between two words which for him both referred to the ‘person’ and ‘nature’ of Jesus Christ: these were the term used by the Cappadocian Fathers for ‘person’, hypostasis, and a word for ‘nature’, physis.84 By contrast, and offensively to Cyril’s ears, Theodore and those who thought like him spoke of two physeis in Jesus Christ, and made a distinction between those two natures and the one person, the theatrical mask, prosōpon.85 The Bishop of Alexandria was particularly outraged when Nestorius aggressively promoted his Antiochene views by attacking a widely popular title of honour for the Virgin Mary: Theotokos, or Bearer of God. Devotion to Mary was now becoming prominent throughout the Roman Empire: enthusiasts for the Nicene settlement of doctrine encouraged it, as a way of safeguarding Christ’s divinity against Arianism, since it emphasized the unique favour granted his earthly mother. It was true that such Marian enthusiasm had developed in the Syrian Church precociously quickly (see pp. 182–3), but Nestorius’s concern to distinguish the two natures of Christ outweighed this in his desire to be clear about what her role should be and how it should be described. Provoked in his new home of Constantinople by hearing a devotional sermon on Mary which he regarded as fatuous, he snappily responded that talk of Theotokos was nonsense: ‘The Word of God is the creator of time, he is not created within time’. He was in effect saying that the title could only be used if one simultaneously balanced it by calling Mary Anthrōpotokos, Bearer of a Human, and he insinuated that those who overpraised Mary were reviving the worship of a mother-goddess.86 Even many educated in the Antiochene tradition blanched at his reckless precision. Various victims of Nestorius’s sharp tongue and reforming zeal rallied to the cause, and with grim satisfaction Cyril exploited a groundswell of devout indignation against his rival bishop.87 The ensuing row once more plunged the entire Eastern Church into a bewildering welter of intrigue and complication which drew in the Eastern emperor, in sheer self-defence, to stop his empire being ripped apart. After a council at Ephesus in 431 and negotiations over the next two years, Theodosius II forced a compromise on the opposing sides. It vindicated the title Theotokos, ruined Nestorius’s career for good and left ‘Nestorian’ theology permanently condemned, but it also left many supporters of Cyril’s theology outraged that their own theology had not been fully vindicated with the full triumphalism that they would have wished. The death of Cyril in 444 did nothing to diminish their

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  A moral nihilism also characterized the movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who, to the distress of most Israelis, was elected to a seat in the 1984 Knesset with 1.2 percent of the vote. 93 His career had begun in New York City, where he had organized the Jewish Defense League to avenge attacks on Jews made by black youths. In 1974, he had arrived in Israel, and eventually settled in Kiryat Arba, where he changed the name of his organization to Kach (“Thus!”). His objective now was to harass the Arabs and force them to leave Eretz Israel. Kahane’s fundamentalism was almost archetypal. His Judaism was so reductionist and ruthlessly selective that it become a deadly caricature of the faith. “There are not several messages in Judaism,” he explained to an interviewer. “There is only one. And this message is to do what God wants.” The message was simply this: “God wanted us to come to this country and create a Jewish state.” 94 The Jewish doctrine of holiness (kodesh: “separateness” “a setting apart”), which had symbolically celebrated the distinction of things by means of ritual, now had, in Kahane’s interpretation, a uniquely political meaning: “God wants us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.” 95 That meant that the Arabs must go. The promise to Abraham was as valid today as in the patriarchal period, so the Arabs were usurpers. 96 The mythos of Genesis thus became the rationale for a political program of ethnic cleansing. This reductive vision led logically to a messianic vision of utter horror. After the victory of the Six Day War, Jews had stood “on the brink of redemption.” Because of the single directive of Judaism, their mission was clear. They should have occupied the territories, expelled the Arabs, and expunged “the gentiles’ abomination from the Temple Mount.” If they had done all this, redemption would have come effortlessly and joyously. Because Israel failed, the Messiah would still come, but in a huge anti-Semitic catastrophe, far worse than the Holocaust, which would finally force all Jews to obey God’s one commandment and settle in Israel. 97 This dark vision of destruction and death is profoundly nihilistic. It is also suffused with hatred and a desire for revenge. Kahane’s horribly distorted version of the faith shows the effects of long persecution and suppression, which can, if permitted to do so, enter deeply into the soul and warp it. Kahane’s theology sees enemies everywhere, enemies that are ultimately one and the same, whether they are Christians, Nazis, blacks, Russians, or Arabs. Everything is seen from the perspective of Jewish suffering, and vengeance for that suffering. The State of Israel was not a blessing for Jews but God’s revenge on the gentiles: God created this state not for the Jew and not as a reward for his justice and good deeds.

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

  militancy. Their discontent was given practical expression in further political manoeuvres led by Cyril’s aggressive admirer and successor, Bishop Dioscorus, which culminated in a second Council of Ephesus (449), humiliating all opponents of Alexandrian claims and outlawing all talk of two natures in Christ. Such was the Alexandrians’ determination to assert their position that this council ignored a statement of the Western view on the natures of Christ presented by delegates from Leo, the Bishop of Rome (the ‘Tome’ of Leo). This infuriated and permanently alienated a see which had been Alexandria’s long- term ally against other Eastern bishoprics; yet the fault was not entirely on the Alexandrians’ side. The Pope had not quite understood Nestorius’s position aright, and it was easy for the hypersensitive to see in the ‘Tome’ an affirmation that there were two agents in Christ. Leo and indeed the later Roman Church always maintained the absolute authority of his statement, a stance which was now becoming a habit in Rome, but the fact that Leo himself later wrote a revised statement on the same subject for an Eastern audience probably indicates that he privately recognized its shortcomings. In the words of one of the latest studies of his thought, the ‘Tome’ ‘contributed to bitter divisions which continued for sixteen centuries’.88 Once more a political revolution intervened and proved the downfall of the Alexandrian party. A palace coup on the death of Theodosius in 450 brought to power his formidable sister, Pulcheria, a bitter enemy of the ‘one-nature’ theologians who had found political backing in Constantinople. She selected Marcian as a biddable husband for herself to occupy the imperial throne (biddable enough to respect her previous vows of chastity), and in 451 the new regime with Marcian as emperor called a council to a city where the imperial troops could keep an eye on what was going on: Chalcedon, near Constantinople. The main concern at Chalcedon was to persuade as many people as possible to accept a middle-of-the-road settlement. The council accepted as orthodoxy the ‘Tome’ presented to Ephesus by Pope Leo’s envoys two years before, and it constructed a carefully balanced definition of how to view the mystery of Christ: ‘the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity …’ This still remains the standard measure for discussion of the person of Christ, in Churches otherwise as diverse as Greek, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and mainstream Protestants. So, like Nicaea in 325, 451 remains an important moment in the consolidation of Christian doctrine into a single package for much of the Church.89 But by no means all. The Chalcedonian agreement centred on a formula of

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  67 The jails were crammed with political prisoners, and the number of dead revealed the naked aggression of a regime that had turned against its own people. This was the ultimate passion play. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Kerbala, and every day is Ashura.” 68 The word for martyr, shaheed, meant “witness,” as in Christianity. The demonstrators who died were bearing witness to the duty to fight tyranny, as Imam Husain had done, and to defend the values of the Unseen spiritual world, which the regime seemed determined to violate. People spoke of the Revolution as a transforming and purifying experience; they felt that they were purging themselves and their society of a poison that had debilitated them and that, in the struggle, they were returning to themselves. This was not a revolution that was simply using religion for political ends. It was the Shii mythology that gave it meaning and direction, especially among the poor and uneducated, who would have been quite unmoved by a more strictly secularist ideology. 69 In June and July, the shah made some concessions, promising free elections and the restoration of the multiparty system. During these months, the demonstrations were quieter. There seemed to be a lull, and the Western-educated secularists and intellectuals, who had hitherto taken no part in the mourning processions but had supported the demonstrators by making purely verbal protests against the regime, assumed that the battle had been won. But on August 19, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy in 1953, an arson attack on the Rex Cinema in Abadan killed four hundred people. This was immediately attributed to SAVAK, and ten thousand mourners attended the funeral, chanting “Death to the shah! Burn him!” 70 Iranian students organized big demonstrations against the regime in Washington, Los Angeles, and The Hague. The shah made more concessions: the Majlis debates became freer, orderly demonstrations were permitted, some of the casinos were closed, and the Islamic calendar was restored. 71 But it was too late. During the last week of Ramadan, when Muslims usually keep vigil in the mosques, there were demonstrations in fourteen Iranian cities, in which between fifty and one hundred people died. On September 4, the last day of Ramadan, there was a massive peaceful demonstration in Tehran. The crowds prostrated themselves in prayer in the streets, and handed out flowers to the soldiers. For the first time, the army and the police did not open fire, and on this occasion—a highly significant development—the middle classes began to join in. A small group of marchers processed through the streets of some of the residential districts, shouting: “Independence! Freedom! and Islamic Government!” On September 7, a huge parade marched from North Tehran down to the Parliament building, carrying large pictures of Khomeini and Shariati, and calling for an end to Pahlavi rule and for an Islamic government.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It is difficult to chart the activities and ideals of Christian Identity, which is not a monolithic movement but a constellation of affiliated organizations. Their numbers are small; there are probably no more than 100,000 members, and could be as few as 50,000.133 But as a trend, Christian Identity is worrying. Like fundamentalists, they have retreated from the world in contempt and fear, and plan to take it over. Like the most extreme types of fundamentalists, members see conspiracy everywhere and cultivate a theology of rage and resentment. But they have outdone the fundamentalists in their overtly fascist ideology, their pure hatred of the United States government, and the extremity of their withdrawal from modern life. No longer concerned with problems of doctrine and biblical inerrancy, the Identity groups want to carve out for themselves a separate Aryan state in America. Christian Identity has developed an ideology of alienation and terror unparalleled in American history. Like Reconstructionism, this loose confederation of Identity communities is a small but disturbing indication of the way religion could be used to articulate helplessness, disappointment, and discontent in the future. The secularist establishment and mainstream denominations may feel that the fundamentalist threat is receding in the United States, but as far as some Christians are concerned the war is still on, the federal government must be destroyed, and the conflict will certainly continue into the twenty-first Christian century. Religion did not disappear after all, and in some circles it has become more militant than ever. In all three of the monotheistic faiths, fundamentalists have reacted angrily to attempts to privatize or to suppress religion, and have, as they believe, rescued it from oblivion. It has been a hard struggle and in the course of it, the faith has often been distorted; this represents a defeat for religion. But fundamentalism is now part of the modern world. It represents a widespread disappointment, alienation, anxiety, and rage that no government can safely ignore. So far, efforts to deal with fundamentalism have not been very successful; what lessons can we learn from the past that will help us to deal more creatively in the future with the fears that fundamentalism enshrines? *This became even more evident in the summer of 1999, when Iranian students came out onto the streets to demand more democracy and an Islamic government that is not impeded by reactionary ulema.Afterword

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Reconstruction movement, founded by the Texan economist Gary North and his father-in-law, Rousas John Rushdoony, is also engaged in a war against secular humanism, in a more extreme form than that waged by the Moral Majority. Reconstructionists have abandoned the old premillennial pessimism for a more galvanizing ideology. Like Muslim fundamentalists, North and Rushdoony are principally concerned about the sovereignty of God. A Christian civilization must be established that will defeat Satan and usher in the millennial Kingdom. The key concept of Reconstructionism is Dominion. God gave Adam and later Noah the task of subduing the world. Christians have inherited this mandate and they have the responsibility of imposing Jesus’ rule on earth before the Second Coming of Christ. There will be no need, however, for Christians to take action to achieve this, since God himself will bring the modern state down in a terrible catastrophe. Christians will simply reap the victory that God will effect. In the meantime, the Reconstructionists are training themselves to take control when the secular humanist state is destroyed.123 Their vision is a complete distortion of Christianity in its abandonment of the ethos of compassion. When the Kingdom comes, there will be no more separation of church and state; the modern heresy of democracy will be abolished, and society reorganized on strictly biblical lines. This means that every single law of the Bible must be put literally into practice. Slavery will be reintroduced; there will be no more birth control (since believers must “increase and multiply”); adulterers, homosexuals, blasphemers, astrologers, and witches will all be put to death. Children who are persistently disobedient must also be stoned, as the Bible enjoins. A strictly capitalist economy must be enforced; socialists and those who incline to the left are sinful. God is not on the side of the poor. Indeed, as North explains, there is a “tight relationship between wickedness and poverty.”124 Taxes should not be used in welfare programs, since “subsidizing sluggards is the same as subsidizing evil.”125 The same goes for the Third World, which has brought its economic problems on its own head because of its addiction to moral perversity, paganism, and demonology. Foreign aid is forbidden by the Bible.126 While waiting for victory—which, North admits, may be some time off—Christians must prepare to rebuild society according to God’s blueprint and must support government policies which approximate to these strict biblical norms.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  God had commanded the Prophet Muhammad to establish a truly Islamic state. Faraj opened his treatise with a Koranic quotation that shows that only thirteen years after the first revelations to Muhammad, God was already growing impatient with Muslims who failed to obey his orders. “Is it not high time” for Muslims to act? God asks indignantly. 43 How much more impatient he must be after fourteen centuries! Muslims must, therefore, make “every conceivable effort” to do God’s will. They must not be like the previous generations, who imagined that they could establish an Islamic state by peaceful, nonviolent means. The only way was by jihad , a holy war. 44 The jihad was the “neglected duty” of the title. Even though Muslims no longer practiced this sacred violence, Faraj argued that it was the most important duty of all. This was flying in the face of centuries of Islamic tradition. To argue his case, Faraj, like Qutb, had to be ruthlessly selective, and, in the process, he inevitably distorted the Muslim vision. Again, it was a distortion that sprang from the experience of suppression. Faraj insisted that the sword was the only way to establish a just society. He cited a hadith in which the Prophet is reported to have said that anyone who was not willing to fight for his religion would die “as if he had never been a Muslim, or like someone who, filled with some form of hypocrisy, only outwardly pretended to be a Muslim.” 45 In the Koran, God tells Muslims clearly that “fighting is ordained for you, even though it be hateful to you.” 46 He commands Muslims to slay those who ascribe divinity to aught beside God wherever you may come upon them, and take them captive, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every conceivable place. 47 These Verses of the Sword, Faraj believed, were revealed to Muhammad later than those which urged Muslims to make peace with their enemies and address them courteously. They had, therefore, abrogated those teachings in which the Koran seems averse to violence. 48 But Faraj had a difficulty. The Koran targets only idolaters (“who ascribe divinity to aught beside God”), whereas Sadat claimed that he was a Muslim who observed the five “pillars.” How could Muslims fight him? Faraj found help in a fatwa of Ibn Taymiyyah, who had argued in the fourteenth century that the Mongol rulers, who had converted to Islam, were in fact apostates, because they ruled according to their own laws instead of the Shariah. 49 The current rulers of Egypt, Faraj declared, were worse than the Mongols. The Mongol codes had, at least, contained some Jewish and Christian legislation, but the legal system of Egypt today was based on the “laws of unbelief,” created by infidels and imposed on the Muslim people by the colonialists.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At the end of Muharram 1978, the shah yet again cast himself as the enemy of the Shiah. On January 8, the semiofficial newspaper Ettelaat published a slanderous article about Khomeini, calling him “an adventurer, without faith, and tied to the centers of colonialism.” He had led a dissolute life, the article averred, had been a British spy, and was even now in the pay of the British, who wanted to undermine the White Revolution.63 This scurrilous and preposterous attack was a fatal mistake on the part of the shah. 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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  To counter the danger and to woo the Sephardics, he founded a new Sephardic party, Shas Torah Guardians, with the Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Ovadia Yosef. Sephardics did not have the same aversion to Zionism as the European Jews. Until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, they had not been persecuted in the Muslim world and had not developed a ghetto mentality. They were not squeamish about taking part in state affairs and took to political life with gusto. In the 1984 elections, Shas won four seats in the Knesset. In 1988, however, the Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe decided to counter the influence of Rabbi Schach and the Misnagdim. He ordered all his followers to vote for Agudat in the forthcoming elections. 73 He also wanted to force Agudat to press for a more stringent government definition of Jewishness. This move showed the indifference of the Haredim toward the political welfare of the State of Israel. Had the Israeli government complied with the Rebbe’s wishes and declared that an offspring of a mixed marriage or somebody who had been converted by a Reform rabbi was not Jewish, it would have antagonized many of the American Jews who lobbied so successfully for Israel in the United States. American support was absolutely crucial to Israel’s survival, but the Lubavitcher Rebbe did not care about that. He simply wanted to further his own mission to the Jewish world. Some of his emissaries had difficulty with people who considered themselves Jewish but did not meet halakhic criteria. If the State of Israel would formally declare that such people were not Jewish, that would make life a great deal easier for the Lubavitch. The Rebbe’s intervention, however, greatly increased the Hasidic membership of Agudat, so to oppose this, Rabbi Schach formed a new Misnagdic party, Degel ha-Torah (Torah Banner). To the astonishment of the Israeli public, the religious parties gained a record number of eighteen seats in the 1988 elections, and as a result found that they now held the balance of power between Labor and Likud. The secularist politicians, who had previously despised the Orthodox and regarded them as hopeless anachronisms, now had to come to them cap in hand to ask them to join their camp and enable them to form a government. The Haredim were as deeply opposed to the State of Israel as ever; they still believed that secular Jews were determined to destroy religion. They regarded their political work as a necessary evil, an act of self-defense. It could “be defined as stealing into the camp of the enemy,” wrote Rabbi Nathan Grossman in 1991 in the Lithuanian newspaper Yated Neeman .

• 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.