Anxiety

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• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Psychologists point to two crucial factors that often separate those who are able to recover faster: mastery and social support. Not to be confused with optimism or learning to “grin and bear it,” mastery refers to the ability of individuals to see themselves as having a degree of control and influence over their lives—no matter what comes their way. The concept is so important to the U.S. Army that it offers soldiers and their families a ten-day course on resilience training, with intensive sessions designed to help those who might go into stressful situations such as combat, or those who send a loved one off to war. Participants learn to counter negative self-talk with more proactive and rational thinking patterns, be grateful for the good things that occur each day, and better concentrate on current tasks to stay in the present. Through exercises, soldiers also learn how to avoid unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as psychologically minimizing events that happen to them. Second, respondents who report supportive social ties are more likely to recover from trauma faster and more successfully. When friends, family, or colleagues are unreceptive and critical of a person’s attempt to share feelings about trauma, it increases the risk of PTSD. “Researchers believe the negative impact likely arises from attempts to discourage open communication, which increases cognitive avoidance and suppression of trauma-related memories, social withdrawal, and self-blame,” says Dr. Denise Cummings, a research psychologist at the University of Illinois. It’s good for us all to remember that we cannot point to someone’s life experience to explain a lack of resilience or their anxiety. Anxiety can affect anyone at any point in their life. Many people who experience anxiety didn’t have particularly challenging childhoods. And for the many who do experience it, most won’t feel it all the time or at the same intensity throughout their lives. Yet as renowned University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman’s research showed, despite whatever difficulties we may have faced in the past, every one of us can develop more resilience, learn how to better bounce back from setbacks, and stay the course through tough times. There can be enormous benefits when leaders help those who work for them overcome hurdles and setbacks. A high school principal once said to Adrian, “It may seem ironic, but the kids I worry about the most in life never get into trouble in school; they never get sent to my office. They grow into adults who’ve never had to pick up the pieces and realize that life goes on after you mess up, and that it’s okay.” Of course, helping grown-ups do this can be a challenge. Some workers become prone to coping mechanisms when things go bad—such as defensiveness and aversion to advice; withdrawal from participation; and, in extreme cases, ghosting. In fact, it’s a good rule of thumb to assume that an anxious employee may jump there very quickly.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  In terms of spotting that someone is a perfectionist, Dr. Alice Boyes, former clinical psychologist and author of The Anxiety Toolkit , advises that they might seek excessive guidance, seem loath to take any sort of risk, and treat every decision as if it were a matter of life and death. It’s a good assumption to make that those displaying perfectionist tendencies have anxiety. Harvard University research adds that perfectionists tend to become overly defensive when criticized. Healthy strivers, by contrast, tend to take criticism in stride as they push for superior results. And while strivers tend to bounce back from failures, perfectionists often become preoccupied with their missteps or the mistakes of others. Okay, so what’s to be done to help these employees? What follows are a series of methods we’ve found are helping in leading those with perfectionist tendencies. Method 1: Clarify What Good Enough IsFirst, take a little time to consider whether you, or the organizational culture, might be stoking perfectionism in those with a tendency toward it. In our coaching of leaders, we often find that they push themselves and their team members to not only high standards, but unrealistic ones. In this way, leaders can become overly harsh in criticizing employee work, and their focus on addressing problems and putting fires out takes up so much of their time that it leads many to overlook offering praise to their people—ramping up anxiety considerably. Well-calibrated and well-timed recognition of good work can help everyone feel more confident that they’re doing all they can to help the team. It can also help people learn the boundaries of what counts as acceptable work—when good enough is good enough. If left entirely on their own to determine whether their work is up to snuff, perfectionists are more than likely to overthink and rework, make tweaks, second-guess, or even do too much—such as doing inventory for everyone instead of only on the products they were asked to count, or handing in War and Peace when their boss really wanted an executive summary. We know that most managers have no desire to handhold their people, and they rightfully worry about micromanaging, but with employees who tend toward perfectionism it’s important to guide them clearly through the standards you’re looking for. Anthony recounts how helpful this was when he transitioned from working in chemistry labs to biotechnology labs. “In chem labs, we were accurate in weighing and measuring re-agents to several decimal places,” he said. “It was time-consuming and several hours were allotted to make measurements accurate.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The pure world of Plato’s forms or the remote God of Aristotle could make little impact on the lives of ordinary mortals, a fact which their later Jewish and Muslim admirers were forced to acknowledge. In the new ideologies of the Axial Age, therefore, there was a general agreement that human life contained a transcendent element that was essential. The various sages we have considered interpreted this transcendence differently, but they were united in seeing it as crucial to the development of men and women as full human beings. They had not jettisoned the older mythologies absolutely but reinterpreted them and helped people to rise above them. At the same time as these momentous ideologies were being formed, the prophets of Israel developed their own traditions to meet the changing conditions, with the result that Yahweh eventually became the only God. But how would irascible Yahweh measure up to these other lofty visions? 5 Unity: The God of Islam I N ABOUT THE YEAR 610 an Arab merchant of the thriving city of Mecca in the Hijaz, who had never read the Bible and probably never heard of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, had an experience that was uncannily similar to theirs. Every year Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a member of the Meccan tribe of Quraysh, used to take his family to Mount Hira just outside the city to make a spiritual retreat during the month of Ramadan. This was quite a common practice among the Arabs of the peninsula. Muhammad would have spent the time praying to the High God of the Arabs and distributing food and alms to the poor who came to visit him during this sacred period. He probably also spent much time in anxious thought. We know from his later career that Muhammad was acutely aware of a worrying malaise in Mecca, despite its recent spectacular success. Only two generations earlier, the Quraysh had lived a harsh nomadic life in the Arabian steppes, like the other Bedouin tribes: each day had required a grim struggle for survival. During the last years of the sixth century, however, they had become extremely successful in trade and made Mecca the most important settlement in Arabia. They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Yet their drastically altered lifestyle meant that the old tribal values had been superseded by a rampant and ruthless capitalism. People felt obscurely disoriented and lost. Muhammad knew that the Quraysh were on a dangerous course and needed to find an ideology that would help them to adjust to their new conditions. At this time, any political solution tended to be of a religious nature. Muhammad was aware that the Quraysh were making a new religion out of money.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Despite the advantages of clear, regular one-on-one communication, many managers still express frustration that their people want that kind of guidance. Instead, they hope their team members will act with more autonomy. It’s true that a degree of autonomy is not only vital for efficacy but for feelings of empowerment, and no one enjoys being micromanaged. But managers typically have a lot of know-how and valuable examples to share about ways they’ve tackled the work their people are doing. When they don’t take the time to share that wisdom, they can raise anxiety levels considerably. With the very specific ways in which firms operate today, and unique platforms for almost every team, getting things right is truly in the details. Providing the minutiae may seem tedious, but leaders should consider how they’d approach tasks as if it were for the first time. Many of the mundane details they might rush through may become the focal point of important conversations with their team members. Six Methods to Meet Uncertainty Head-OnFrom our work coaching leaders, we have developed a set of methods that any manager can use to communicate with employees to help reduce uncertainty. These methods include ways to help team members feel needed and engaged by meeting regularly with them as a group to discuss and debate industry changes and how those might affect their team; incorporating active ways of listening to concerns and suggestions from employees one-on-one; and developing metrics to measure success at helping people feel informed about potential challenges the organization is facing and involved in seeking solutions. Method 1: Make It Okay to Not Have All the Answers When Lutz Ziob was general manager of Microsoft Learning, he led his team of four hundred employees through a significant transformation. For years, his externally focused learning organization had made their money inside client corporations, teaching workers how to use the Microsoft toolkit. The company had a multibillion-dollar operation based around this business model. With an eye to the horizon, the debate became whether to let go of this profitable way of doing things and instead start training people in Microsoft products much earlier, in university or high school. Ziob didn’t have the answers, so he turned to his people and introduced a structured way to debate. He asked team members to come to a series of discussions with evidence and a point of view. They were to defend their opinion vehemently, and then be willing to switch sides. Chris, for instance, would argue against the change from a sales perspective, and Lee Anne in the affirmative from a marketing perspective. Then Ziob would have the two switch sides and continue the discussion. Explained bestselling author Liz Wiseman, “In the end it was hard to know who won debates.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yahweh God fashioned man ( adam ) of dust from the soil ( adamah ). Then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and thus man became a living being. 6 This was an entirely new departure. Instead of concentrating on the creation of the world and on the prehistoric period like his pagan contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Canaan, J is more interested in ordinary historical time. There would be no real interest in creation in Israel until the sixth century BCE , when the author whom we call “P” wrote his majestic account in what is now the first chapter of Genesis. J is not absolutely clear that Yahweh is the sole creator of heaven and earth. Most noticeable, however, is J’s perception of a certain distinction between man and the divine. Instead of being composed of the same divine stuff as his god, man ( adam ), as the pun indicates, belongs to the earth ( adamah ). Unlike his pagan neighbors, J does not dismiss mundane history as profane, feeble and insubstantial compared with the sacred, primordial time of the gods. He hurries through the events of prehistory until he comes to the end of the mythical period, which includes such stories as the Flood and the Tower of Babel, and arrives at the start of the history of the people of Israel. This begins abruptly in Chapter 12 when the man Abram, who will later be renamed Abraham (“Father of a Multitude”), is commanded by Yahweh to leave his family in Haran, in what is now eastern Turkey, and migrate to Canaan near the Mediterranean Sea. We have been told that his father, Terah, a pagan, had already migrated westward with his family from Ur. Now Yahweh tells Abraham that he has a special destiny: he will become the father of a mighty nation that will one day be more numerous than the stars in the sky, and one day his descendants will possess the land of Canaan as their own. J’s account of the call of Abraham sets the tone for the future history of this God. In the ancient Middle East, the divine mana was experienced in ritual and myth. Marduk, Baal and Anat were not expected to involve themselves in the ordinary, profane lives of their worshippers: their actions had been performed in sacred time. The God of Israel, however, made his power effective in current events in the real world. He was experienced as an imperative in the here and now. His first revelation of himself consists of a command: Abraham is to leave his people and travel to the land of Canaan. But who is Yahweh?

• From A History of God (1993)

  Not surprisingly, many strict Talmudists found this an abhorrent idea, but the exile of the Shekinah, which echoed the ancient myths of the goddess who wandered far from the divine world, became one of the most popular elements of Kabbalah. The female Shekinah brought some sexual balance into the notion of God, which tended to be too heavily weighted toward the masculine, and it clearly fulfilled an important religious need. The notion of the divine exile also addressed that sense of separation which is the cause of so much human anxiety. The Zohar constantly defines evil as something which has become separated or which has entered into a relationship for which it is unsuited. One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves. It can then be pushed away and made monstrous and inhuman. The terrifying image of Satan in Western Christendom was such a distorted projection. The Zohar finds the root of evil in God himself: in Din or Stern Judgment, the fifth sefirah. Din is depicted as God’s left hand, Hesed (Mercy) as his right. As long as Din operates harmoniously with the divine Mercy, it is positive and beneficial. But if it breaks away and becomes separate from the other sefiroth, it becomes evil and destructive. The Zohar does not tell us how this separation came about. In the next chapter, we shall see that later Kabbalists reflected on the problem of evil, which they saw as the result of a kind of primordial “accident” that occurred in the very early stages of God’s self-revelation. Kabbalah makes little sense if interpreted literally, but its mythology proved psychologically satisfying. When disaster and tragedy engulfed Spanish Jewry during the fifteenth century, it was the Kabbalistic God which helped them to make sense of their suffering. We can see the psychological acuity of Kabbalah in the work of the Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia (1240–after 1291). The bulk of his work was composed at about the same time as The Zohar, but Abulafia concentrated on the practical method of achieving a sense of God rather than with the nature of God itself. These methods are similar to those employed today by psychoanalysts in their secular quest for enlightenment. As the Sufis had wanted to experience God like Muhammad, Abulafia claimed to have found a way of achieving prophetic inspiration.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet it is also clear that Husain could not imagine the predicament of a person who wanted to but found that he could not believe: the reality of al-Lah is taken for granted. In one early issue, an article by Yusuf al-Dijni had outlined the old teleological argument for the existence of God. Smith notes that the style was essentially reverential and expressed an intense and lively appreciation of the beauty and sublimity of nature which revealed the divine presence. Al-Dijni had no doubt that al-Lah existed. His article is a meditation rather than a logical demonstration of God’s existence, and he was quite unconcerned that Western scientists had long since exploded this particular “proof.” Yet this attitude was outdated. The circulation of the magazine slumped. When Farid Wajdi took over in 1933, the readership doubled. Wajdi’s prime consideration was to assure his readers that Islam was “all right.” It would not have occurred to Husain that Islam, a transcendent idea in the mind of God, might require a helping hand from time to time, but Wajdi saw Islam as a human institution under threat. The prime need is to justify, admire and applaud. As Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out, a profound irreligiousness pervades Wajdi’s work. Like his forebears, he constantly argued that the West was only teaching what Islam had discovered centuries earlier but, unlike them, he scarcely referred to God. The human reality of “Islam” was his central concern: and this earthly value had in some sense replaced the transcendent God. Smith concludes: A true Muslim is not a man who believes in Islam—especially Islam in history; but one who believes in God and is committed to the revelation through his Prophet. The latter is there sufficiently admired. But commitment is missing. And God appears remarkably seldom throughout these pages. 28 Instead, there is instability and lack of self-esteem: the opinion of the West has come to matter too desperately. People like Husain had understood religion and the centrality of God but had lost touch with the modern world. People who were in touch with modernity had lost the sense of God. From this instability would spring the political activism which characterizes modern fundamentalism, which is also in retreat from God. The Jews of Europe had also been affected by hostile criticism of their faith. In Germany, Jewish philosophers developed what they called “the Science of Judaism,” which rewrote Jewish history in Hegelian terms to counter the charge that Judaism was a servile, alienating faith. The first to attempt this reinterpretation of the history of Israel was Solomon Formstecher (1808–89). In The Religion of the Spirit (1841), he described God as a world Soul, immanent in all things. This Spirit did not depend upon the world, however, as Hegel had argued. Formstecher insisted that it lay beyond the reach of reason, reverting to the old distinction between God’s essence and his activities.

• From A History of God (1993)

  32 Later Christians would need to give a more theoretical account of their faith and would develop a passion for theological debate that is unique in the history of world religion. We have seen, for example, that there was no official orthodoxy in Judaism but that ideas about God were essentially private matters. The early Christians would have shared this attitude. During the second century, however, some pagan converts to Christianity tried to reach out to their unbelieving neighbors in order to show that their religion was not a destructive breach with tradition. One of the first of these apologists was Justin of Caesarea (100–165), who died a martyr for the faith. In his restless search for meaning, we can sense the spiritual anxiety of the period. Justin was neither a profound nor a brilliant thinker. Before turning to Christianity, he had sat at the feet of a Stoic, a peripatetic philosopher and a Pythagorean but had clearly failed to understand what was involved in their systems. He lacked the temperament and intelligence for philosophy but seemed to need more than the worship of cult and ritual. He found his solution in Christianity. In his two apologiae (ca. 150 and 155), he argued that Christians were simply following Plato, who had also maintained that there was only one God. Both the Greek philosophers and the Jewish prophets had foretold the coming of Christ—an argument which would have impressed the pagans of his day, since there was a fresh enthusiasm for oracles. He also argued that Jesus was the incarnation of the logos or divine reason, which the Stoics had seen in the order of the cosmos; the logos had been active in the world throughout history, inspiring Greeks and Hebrews alike. He did not, however, explain the implications of this somewhat novel idea: how could a human being incarnate the logos ? was the logos the same as such biblical images as Word or Wisdom? What was its relation to the One God? Other Christians were developing far more radical theologies, not out of love of speculation for its own sake but to assuage a profound anxiety. In particular, the gnostikoi , the Knowing Ones, turned from philosophy to mythology to explain their acute sense of separation from the divine world. Their myths confronted their ignorance about God and the divine, which they clearly experienced as a source of grief and shame. Basilides, who taught in Alexandria between 130 and 160, and his contemporary Valentinus, who left Egypt to teach in Rome, both acquired a huge following and showed that many of the people who converted to Christianity felt lost, adrift and radically displaced.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Some people still find it possible to find meaning in the idea of God. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968) set his face against the Liberal Protestantism of Schleiermacher, with its emphasis on religious experience. But he was also a leading opponent of natural theology. It was, he thought, a radical error to seek to explain God in rational terms not simply because of the limitations of the human mind but also because humanity has been corrupted by the Fall. Any natural idea we form about God is bound to be flawed, therefore, and to worship such a God was idolatry. The only valid source of God-knowledge was the Bible. This seems to have the worst of all worlds: experience is out; natural reason is out; the human mind is corrupt and untrustworthy; and there is no possibility of learning from other faiths, since the Bible is the only valid revelation. It seems unhealthy to combine such radical skepticism in the powers of the intellect with such an uncritical acceptance of the truths of scripture. Paul Tillich (1868–1965) was convinced that the personal God of traditional Western theism must go, but he also believed that religion was necessary for humankind. A deep-rooted anxiety is part of the human condition: this is not neurotic, because it is ineradicable and no therapy can take it away. We constantly fear loss and the terror of extinction, as we watch our bodies gradually but inexorably decay. Tillich agreed with Nietzsche that the personal God was a harmful idea and deserved to die: The concept of a “Personal God” interfering with natural events, or being “an independent cause of natural events,” makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God.7 A God who kept tinkering with the universe was absurd; a God who interfered with human freedom and creativity was a tyrant. If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thou, a cause separate from its effect, “he” becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who made everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther was convinced that these were satanic attacks, and he was maintaining that because he had not been martyred for his faith, he was suffering in this way instead. It is always impossible to say exactly how spiritual warfare happens, because we are talking of an invisible realm, but the multitude of experiences related over the centuries has given us enough of a baseline from which to fathom these things, and Luther’s interpretation of what he experienced was guided by the accounts with which he was familiar. The Plague Returns, Aetatis 43During that summer, the plague again struck Wittenberg. Many left the town, as was the custom, to avoid contagion. On August 15, the entire university temporarily moved to Jena. Melanchthon and Justus Jonas took their families away too, but Luther felt obliged to stay and care for the sick. Kathie and their son, Hans, also remained in Wittenberg. There is no question that Luther’s faith is on display here, because he knew that remaining behind put him in physical danger, but he felt a responsibility to risk his life—and even the lives of his family—by remaining where he was and caring for the sick. God had called him, and he would answer God’s call. The only thing he feared was not doing this. But during this period, little Hänschen did get quite sick. Pastor Bugenhagen stayed in Wittenberg too, even moving with his family into the cloister a few months later. As was expected when the plague struck, people began to die. Karlstadt’s own sister-in-law, Margarethe von Mochau, was ill with the plague and came to live at the cloister, as did the doctor Augustine Schurff’s wife, who was also stricken. The Black Cloister during this time functioned very much as a hospital. When the wife of the Wittenberg Bürgermeister contracted the plague, she too came to the Black Cloister; but she did not survive, dying just moments after Luther had held her in his arms. Bugenhagen’s pregnant sister Hanna—who was married to Luther’s secretary, Deacon George Rörer—had also contracted the plague. She had come to the Black Cloister and had a terribly difficult birth in which the child was stillborn. Not long after the birth, she died too. This whole tragic scene affected Luther particularly powerfully, not least because his own Kathie was herself again pregnant and due in December: I am concerned about the delivery of my wife, so greatly has the example of the Deacon’s wife terrified me. . . . My little Hans cannot now send his greetings to you because of his illness, but he desires your prayers for him. Today is the twelfth day that he has eaten nothing; somehow he is sustained only by liquids. Now he is beginning to eat a little bit. It is wonderful to see how this infant wants to be happy and strong as usual, but he cannot, because he is too weak.

• From A History of God (1993)

  At this time, any political solution tended to be of a religious nature. Muhammad was aware that the Quraysh were making a new religion out of money. This was hardly surprising, because they must have felt that their new wealth had “saved’ them from the perils of the nomadic life, cushioning them from the malnutrition and tribal violence that were endemic to the steppes of Arabia, where each Bedouin tribe daily faced the possibility of extinction. They now had almost enough to eat and were making Mecca an international center of trade and high finance. They felt that they had become the masters of their own fate, and some even seem to have believed that their wealth would give them a certain immortality. But Muhammad believed that this new cult of self-sufficiency (istaqa) would mean the disintegration of the tribe. In the old nomadic days the tribe had had to come first and the individual second: each one of its members knew that they all depended upon one another for survival. Consequently they had a duty to take care of the poor and vulnerable people of their ethnic group. Now individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm. Individuals were starting to build personal fortunes and took no heed of the weaker Qurayshis. Each of the clans, or smaller family groups of the tribe, fought one another for a share of the wealth of Mecca, and some of the least successful clans (like Muhammad’s own clan of Hashim) felt that their very survival was in jeopardy. Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh learned to put another transcendent value at the center of their lives and overcome their egotism and greed, his tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Aristotle himself may have abandoned his theology later in life. As men of the Axial Age, he and Plato were both concerned with the individual conscience, the good life and the question of justice in society. Yet their thought was elitist. The pure world of Plato’s forms or the remote God of Aristotle could make little impact on the lives of ordinary mortals, a fact which their later Jewish and Muslim admirers were forced to acknowledge. In the new ideologies of the Axial Age, therefore, there was a general agreement that human life contained a transcendent element that was essential. The various sages we have considered interpreted this transcendence differently, but they were united in seeing it as crucial to the development of men and women as full human beings. They had not jettisoned the older mythologies absolutely but reinterpreted them and helped people to rise above them. At the same time as these momentous ideologies were being formed, the prophets of Israel developed their own traditions to meet the changing conditions, with the result that Yahweh eventually became the only God. But how would irascible Yahweh measure up to these other lofty visions? I 2 One God N 742 BCE, a member of the Judaean royal family had a vision of Yahweh in the Temple which King Solomon had built in Jerusalem. It was an anxious time for the people of Israel. King Uzziah of Judah had died that year and was succeeded by his son Ahaz, who would encourage his subjects to worship pagan gods alongside Yahweh. The northern Kingdom of Israel was in a state of near-anarchy: after the death of King Jeroboam II, five kings had sat on the throne between 746 and 736, while King Tigleth Pilesar III, King of Assyria, looked hungrily at their lands, which he was anxious to add to his expanding empire. In 722, his successor, King Sargon II, would conquer the northern Kingdom and deport the population: the ten northern tribes of Israel were forced to assimilate and disappeared from history, while the little Kingdom of Judah feared for its own survival. As Isaiah prayed in the Temple shortly after King Uzziah’s death, he was probably full of foreboding; at the same time he may have been uncomfortably aware of the inappropriateness of the lavish Temple ceremonial. Isaiah may have been a member of the ruling class, but he had populist and democratic views and was highly sensitive to the plight of the poor.

• From A History of God (1993)

  During the second century, however, some pagan converts to Christianity tried to reach out to their unbelieving neighbors in order to show that their religion was not a destructive breach with tradition. One of the first of these apologists was Justin of Caesarea (100–165), who died a martyr for the faith. In his restless search for meaning, we can sense the spiritual anxiety of the period. Justin was neither a profound nor a brilliant thinker. Before turning to Christianity, he had sat at the feet of a Stoic, a peripatetic philosopher and a Pythagorean but had clearly failed to understand what was involved in their systems. He lacked the temperament and intelligence for philosophy but seemed to need more than the worship of cult and ritual. He found his solution in Christianity. In his two apologiae (ca. 150 and 155), he argued that Christians were simply following Plato, who had also maintained that there was only one God. Both the Greek philosophers and the Jewish prophets had foretold the coming of Christ—an argument which would have impressed the pagans of his day, since there was a fresh enthusiasm for oracles. He also argued that Jesus was the incarnation of the logos or divine reason, which the Stoics had seen in the order of the cosmos; the logos had been active in the world throughout history, inspiring Greeks and Hebrews alike. He did not, however, explain the implications of this somewhat novel idea: how could a human being incarnate the logos? was the logos the same as such biblical images as Word or Wisdom? What was its relation to the One God? Other Christians were developing far more radical theologies, not out of love of speculation for its own sake but to assuage a profound anxiety. In particular, the gnostikoi, the Knowing Ones, turned from philosophy to mythology to explain their acute sense of separation from the divine world. Their myths confronted their ignorance about God and the divine, which they clearly experienced as a source of grief and shame. Basilides, who taught in Alexandria between 130 and 160, and his contemporary Valentinus, who left Egypt to teach in Rome, both acquired a huge following and showed that many of the people who converted to Christianity felt lost, adrift and radically displaced. The Gnostics all began with an utterly incomprehensible reality which they called the Godhead, since it was the source of the lesser being that we call “God.” There was nothing at all that we could say about it, since it entirely eludes the grasp of our limited minds. As Valentinus explained, the Godhead was perfect and pre-existent … dwelling in invisible and unnameable heights: this is the prebeginning and forefather and depth. It is uncontainable and invisible, eternal and ungenerated, is Quiet and deep Solitude for infinite aeons. With It was thought, which is also called Grace and Silence.33

• From A History of God (1993)

  When Phaedon had been published in 1767, its philosophic defense of the immortality of the soul was positively, if sometimes patronizingly, received in Gentile or Christian circles. A young Swiss pastor, Johann Caspar Lavater, wrote that the author was ripe for conversion to Christianity and challenged Mendelssohn to defend his Judaism in public. Mendelssohn was, then, drawn almost against his will into a rational defense of Judaism, even though he did not espouse such traditional beliefs as that of a chosen people or a promised land. He had to tread a fine line: he did not want to go the way of Spinoza or bring down the wrath of the Christians upon his own people if his defense of Judaism proved too successful. Like other deists, he argued that revelation could only be accepted if its truths could be demonstrated by reason. The doctrine of the Trinity did not meet his criterion. Judaism was not a revealed religion but a revealed law. The Jewish conception of God was essentially identical to the natural religion that belonged to the whole of humanity and could be demonstrated by unaided reason. Mendelssohn relied on the old cosmological and ontological proofs, arguing that the function of the Law had been to help the Jews to cultivate a correct notion of God and to avoid idolatry. He ended with a plea for toleration. The universal religion of reason should lead to a respect for other ways of approaching God, including Judaism, which the churches of Europe had persecuted for centuries. Jews were less influenced by Mendelssohn than by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was published in the last decade of Mendelssohn’s life. Kant had defined the Enlightenment as “man’s exodus from his self-imposed tutelage” or reliance upon external authority.25 The only way to God lay through the autonomous realm of moral conscience, which he called “practical reason.” He dismissed many of the trappings of religion, such as the dogmatic authority of the churches, prayer and ritual, which all prevented human beings from relying upon their own powers and encouraged them to depend upon Another. But Kant was not opposed to the idea of God per se. Like al-Ghazzali centuries earlier, he argued that the traditional arguments for the existence of God were useless because our minds could only understand things that exist in space or time and are not competent to consider realities that lie beyond this category. But he allowed that humanity had a natural tendency to transgress these limits and seek a principle of unity that would give us a vision of reality as a coherent whole. This was the idea of God. It was not possible to prove God’s existence logically, but neither was it possible to disprove it. The idea of God was essential to us: it represented the ideal limit that enabled us to achieve a comprehensive idea of the world.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Here the powerful urban communes had long traditions of defending their independence: Every male citizen paid guard-duty tax and had to own weapons, presenting their arms for inspection in military musters at regular intervals. At an annual ceremony, the whole male citizenry would bind itself by oath to obey the mayor and officials. Citizenship meant backing political responsibility with arms and was one of the reasons women were excluded from full political citizenship. 4 For Luther, by contrast, political responsibility meant obedience first of all; “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” 5 The emperor was set in authority over the princes, and like all authority, he must be respected. But by 1530 Luther was beginning to reconsider, a process that would go through many twists and turns over the coming years. Luther’s Saxon ruler and his advisors had realized that if they were to continue passively obeying the emperor, the evangelical movement would not survive. In late December 1529 Luther told Elector Johann it was too soon to be thinking of resisting Charles—a formulation that seemed to allow that eventually, and in the right circumstances, the time might come. But, Luther insisted, they must not prepare for such an eventuality by taking to the field or arming themselves—a position that might seem to put principle above practicality. Yet Luther was probably correct in thinking that if Charles got to know of any such preparations, he would at once move against Saxony. 6 Saxon politics continued to be overshadowed by the struggle between ducal and electoral Saxony, and Johann’s anxiety that the emperor might simply hand everything—land and the electoral title—to his Catholic rival Georg. This was a fear that the much more secure Philip of Hesse did not face. Luther’s unwillingness to countenance resistance was made clear in a letter of advice he wrote to the Elector on March 6, 1530. 7 Resisting the emperor, he wrote, taking a much firmer line than the previous year, was inconceivable. It would be as if the mayor of the Saxon town of Torgau were to decide to protect his citizens against the rightful authority of the Elector himself. 8 The comparison was unlikely to persuade any proud urban citizen, long used to the adage that “city air makes you free,” and to defending their rights against rapacious princes and nobles.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther’s Anfechtungen were physically overwhelming. They were not to do with sexual desire but concerned what Luther called “the real knots”—his struggles with faith. So apparently untroubled was he by his sexuality that he unabashedly mentioned experiencing nocturnal emissions, which he simply dismissed as physical phenomena. For him, true “concupiscence of the flesh” was not primarily lust but concerned bad feelings toward a brother, such as envy, anger, or hate.29 Luther worried at this time about his relations with others: Living in a monastic community, where he had to get on with the same small group of people all the time, could not have been easy. It may well have reawakened in him feelings of jealousy and anxieties about the envy of others that sprang from childhood relations with his siblings. Whatever the reasons, it was not lusts of the flesh, but Luther’s troubled relationship with God the Father that lay at the heart of his distress. These temptations or tribulations would continue all his life and they are fundamental to understanding Luther’s religiosity. For the first year in the monastery, he recalled, they did not trouble him; later he had a rest from them when he got married and had “a good time,” before they returned once more. During his time as a monk, the Anfechtungen seem to have chiefly concerned the idea that if he was a sinner, and if God was a judge, then God must hate him. The Anfechtungen were the corollary of his growing sense that there were no intermediaries, that nothing stood between the believer and God, and that nothing could be done to make the sinner acceptable. Looking back on these experiences in 1531 he concluded that the Anfechtungen were also necessary, for they set him on his path that would lead to the Reformation. He added a wry reminiscence about his superior Staupitz, who had remarked that he himself had never experienced temptations of this kind, “but, as I see, they are more necessary to you than eating and drinking.”30

• From A History of God (1993)

  He himself was forced to become a sign of this strangeness. Yahweh frequently commanded him to perform weird mimes, which set him apart from normal beings. They were also designed to demonstrate the plight of Israel during this crisis and, at a deeper level, showed that Israel was itself becoming an outsider in the pagan world. Thus, when his wife died, Ezekiel was forbidden to mourn; he had to lie on one side for 390 days and on the other for 40; once he had to pack his bags and walk around Tel Aviv like a refugee, with no abiding city. Yahweh afflicted him with such acute anxiety that he could not stop trembling and moving about restlessly. On another occasion, he was forced to eat excrement, as a sign of the starvation that his countrymen would have to endure during the siege of Jerusalem. Ezekiel had become an icon of the radical discontinuity that the cult of Yahweh involved: nothing could be taken for granted, and normal responses were denied. The pagan vision, on the other hand, had celebrated the continuity that was felt to exist between the gods and the natural world. Ezekiel found nothing consoling about the old religion, which he habitually called “filth.” During one of his visions, he was conducted on a guided tour of the Temple in Jerusalem. To his horror he saw that, poised as they were on the brink of destruction, the people of Judah were still worshipping pagan gods in the Temple of Yahweh. The Temple itself had become a nightmarish place: the walls of its rooms were painted with writhing snakes and repulsive animals; the priests performing the “filthy” rites were presented in a sordid light, almost as if they were engaged in backroom sex: “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the throne of Israel do in the dark, each in his painted room?” 51 In another room, women sat weeping for the suffering god Tammuz. Others worshipped the sun, with their backs toward the sanctuary. Finally, the prophet watched the strange chariot he had seen in his first vision fly away, taking the “glory” of Yahweh with it. Yet Yahweh was not an entirely distant deity. In the final days before the destruction of Jerusalem, Ezekiel depicts him fulminating against the people of Israel in a vain attempt to catch their attention and force them to acknowledge him. Israel had only itself to blame for the impending catastrophe. Alien as Yahweh frequently seemed, he was encouraging Israelites like Ezekiel to see that the blows of history were not random and arbitrary but had a deeper logic and justice. He was trying to find a meaning in the cruel world of international politics.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Ezekiel’s strange career emphasizes how alien and foreign the divine world had become to humanity. He himself was forced to become a sign of this strangeness. Yahweh frequently commanded him to perform weird mimes, which set him apart from normal beings. They were also designed to demonstrate the plight of Israel during this crisis and, at a deeper level, showed that Israel was itself becoming an outsider in the pagan world. Thus, when his wife died, Ezekiel was forbidden to mourn; he had to lie on one side for 390 days and on the other for 40; once he had to pack his bags and walk around Tel Aviv like a refugee, with no abiding city. Yahweh afflicted him with such acute anxiety that he could not stop trembling and moving about restlessly. On another occasion, he was forced to eat excrement, as a sign of the starvation that his countrymen would have to endure during the siege of Jerusalem. Ezekiel had become an icon of the radical discontinuity that the cult of Yahweh involved: nothing could be taken for granted, and normal responses were denied. The pagan vision, on the other hand, had celebrated the continuity that was felt to exist between the gods and the natural world. Ezekiel found nothing consoling about the old religion, which he habitually called “filth.” During one of his visions, he was conducted on a guided tour of the Temple in Jerusalem. To his horror he saw that, poised as they were on the brink of destruction, the people of Judah were still worshipping pagan gods in the Temple of Yahweh. The Temple itself had become a nightmarish place: the walls of its rooms were painted with writhing snakes and repulsive animals; the priests performing the “filthy” rites were presented in a sordid light, almost as if they were engaged in backroom sex: “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the throne of Israel do in the dark, each in his painted room?”51 In another room, women sat weeping for the suffering god Tammuz. Others worshipped the sun, with their backs toward the sanctuary. Finally, the prophet watched the strange chariot he had seen in his first vision fly away, taking the “glory” of Yahweh with it. Yet Yahweh was not an entirely distant deity. In the final days before the destruction of Jerusalem, Ezekiel depicts him fulminating against the people of Israel in a vain attempt to catch their attention and force them to acknowledge him. Israel had only itself to blame for the impending catastrophe. Alien as Yahweh frequently seemed, he was encouraging Israelites like Ezekiel to see that the blows of history were not random and arbitrary but had a deeper logic and justice. He was trying to find a meaning in the cruel world of international politics.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Origen is, perhaps, best known for his self-castration. In the Gospels, Jesus said that some people had made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, and Origen took him at his word. Castration was quite a common operation in late antiquity; Origen did not rush at himself with a knife, nor was his decision inspired by the kind of neurotic loathing of sexuality that would characterize some Western theologians, such as St. Jerome (342–420). The British scholar Peter Brown suggests that it may have been an attempt to demonstrate his doctrine of the indeterminacy of the human condition, which the soul must soon transcend. Apparently immutable factors such as gender would be left behind in the long process of divinization, since in God there was neither male nor female. In an age where the philosopher was characterized by his long beard (a sign of wisdom), Origen’s smooth cheeks and high voice would have been a startling sight. Plotinus (205–270) had studied in Alexandria under Origen’s old teacher Ammonius Saccus and had later joined the Roman army, hoping that it would take him to India, where he was anxious to study. Unfortunately the expedition came to grief and Plotinus fled to Antioch. Later he founded a prestigious school of philosophy in Rome. We know little else about him, since he was an extremely reticent man who never spoke about himself and did not even celebrate his own birthday. Like Celsus, Plotinus found Christianity a thoroughly objectionable creed, yet he influenced generations of future monotheists in all three of the God-religions. It is important, therefore, to give some detailed consideration to his vision of God. Plotinus has been described as a watershed: he had absorbed the main currents of some 800 years of Greek speculation and transmitted it in a form which has continued to influence such crucial figures in our own century as T. S. Eliot and Henri Bergson. Drawing on Plato’s ideas, Plotinus evolved a system designed to achieve an understanding of the self. Again, he was not at all interested in finding a scientific explanation of the universe or attempting to explain the physical origins of life; instead of looking outside the world for an objective explanation, Plotinus urged his disciples to withdraw into themselves and begin their exploration in the depths of the psyche.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Muslims had little time or energy to develop their understanding of God in the traditional way. They were engaged in a struggle to catch up with the West. Some saw Western secularism as the answer, but what was positive and invigorating in Europe could only seem alien and foreign in the Islamic world, since it had not developed naturally from their own tradition in its own time. In the West, “God” was seen as the voice of alienation; in the Muslim world it was the colonial process. Cut off from the roots of their culture, people felt disoriented and lost. Some Muslim reformers tried to hasten the cause of progress by forcibly relegating Islam to a minor role. The results were not at all as they had expected. In the new nation-state of Turkey, which had emerged after the defeat of the Ottoman empire in 1917, Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), later known as Kemal Atatürk, tried to transform his country into a Western nation: he disestablished Islam, making religion a purely private affair. Sufi orders were abolished and went underground; the madrasahs were closed and the state training of the ulema ceased. This secularizing policy was symbolized by the banning of the fez, which reduced the visibility of the religious classes and was also a psychological attempt to force the people into a Western uniform: “to put on the hat” instead of the fez came to mean “to Europeanize.” Reza Khan, Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941, admired Atatürk and attempted a similar policy: the veil was banned; mullahs were forced to shave and wear the kepi instead of the traditional turban; the traditional celebrations in honor of the Shii Imam and martyr Husayn were forbidden. Freud had wisely seen that any enforced repression of religion could only be destructive. Like sexuality, religion is a human need that affects life at every level. If suppressed, the results are likely to be as explosive and destructive as any severe sexual repression. Muslims regarded the new Turkey and Iran with suspicion and fascination. In Iran there was already an established tradition whereby the mullahs opposed the shahs in the name of the people. They sometimes achieved extraordinary success. In 1872, when the shah sold the monopoly for the production, sale and export of tobacco to the British, putting Iranian manufacturers out of business, the mullahs issued a fatwa forbidding Iranians to smoke. The shah was forced to rescind the concessions. The holy city of Qom became an alternative to the despotic and increasingly draconian regime in Teheran. Repression of religion can breed fundamentalism, just as inadequate forms of theism can result in a rejection of God. In Turkey, the closure of the madrasahs led inevitably to the decline of the authority of the ulema. This meant that the more educated, sober and responsible element in Islam declined, while the more extravagant forms of underground Sufism were the only forms of religion left.