Anxiety

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 104 of 501 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  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 Men have always speculated about this Absolute, but none of their explanations have been adequate. It is impossible to describe the Godhead, which is neither “good” nor “evil” and cannot even be said to “exist.” Basilides taught that in the beginning, there had been not God but only the Godhead, which, strictly speaking, was Nothing because it did not exist in any sense that we can understand. 34 But this Nothingness had wished to make itself known and was not content to remain alone in Depth and Silence. There was an inner revolution in the depths of its unfathomable being which resulted in a series of emanations similar to those described in the ancient pagan mythologies.

• From A History of God (1993)

  By a sudden conversion to docility, he tamed a mind too stubborn for its years.” 35 God alone was in control and Calvin absolutely powerless, yet he felt singled out for a special mission precisely by his acute sense of his own failure and impotence. The radical conversion had been characteristic of Western Christianity since the time of Augustine. Protestantism would continue the tradition of breaking abruptly and violently with the past in what the American philosopher William James called a “twice-born” religion for “sick souls.” 36 Christians were being “born again” to a new faith in God and a rejection of the host of intermediaries that had stood between them and the divine in the medieval Church. Calvin said that people had venerated the saints out of anxiety; they had wanted to propitiate an angry God by gaining the ear of those closest to him. Yet in their rejection of the cult of the saints, Protestants often betrayed an equal anxiety. When they heard the news that the saints were ineffective, a good deal of the fear and hostility they had felt for this intransigent God seemed to explode in an intense reaction. The English humanist Thomas More detected a personal hatred in many of the diatribes against the “idolatry” of saint-worship. 37 This came out in the violence of their image-smashing. Many Protestants and Puritans took the condemnation of graven images in the Old Testament very seriously when they shattered the statues of the saints and the Virgin Mary and hurled whitewash over the frescoes in the churches and cathedrals. Their frantic zeal showed that they were just as fearful of offending this irritable and jealous God as they had been when they had prayed to the saints to intercede for them. It also showed that this zeal to worship God alone did not spring from a calm conviction but from the anxious denial that had caused the ancient Israelites to tear down the poles of Asherah and pour torrents of abuse upon their neighbors’ gods. Calvin is usually remembered for his belief in predestination, but in fact this was not central to his thought: it did not become crucial to “Calvinism” until after his death. The problem of reconciling God’s omnipotence and omniscience with human free will springs from an anthropomorphic conception of God. We have seen that Muslims had come up against this difficulty during the ninth century and had found no logical or rational way out of it; instead, they had stressed the mystery and inscrutability of God.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  He wrote with consummate irony to tell Melanchthon this “news from Augsburg”! (WB 5, 1693, Aug. 24, 1530.) By late August, Luther was becoming ever more mistrustful. Even so, on September 11, 1530, he told Melanchthon not to be worried about those who thought he had conceded too much to the papists (1716). 66. WB 5, 1613, June 30, 1530, 416:19; 21. 67. WB 5, 1705, Aug. 28, 1530, “viriliter”; WB 5, 1709 29 Aug. 1530: Philip of Hesse also believed that Melanchthon was conceding too much and blamed his “Kleinmutigkeit” (lack of boldness) (600:6); and Luther replied on September 11, 1530, to put his mind at rest, explaining that nothing had been conceded and the negotiations had been broken off (1717). Linck also wrote to Luther, complaining about Melanchthon’s willingness to compromise (see 1720, Sept. 20, 1530). 68. Walch, XVI, 1379, 1382 (Spalatin’s report of Eck’s view); 1383, 1384; WB 5, 1708, Aug. 29, 1530. 69. See WB 5, 1618, 433, Article 7; Spalatin, Annales, 264–65. 70. This was also the line he had taken in the Exhortation: WS 30, 2, 340–45. 71. WB 5, 1708, Aug. 29, 1530; 1710, Sept. 1, 1530. 72. See WB 5, 1708, Aug. 29, 1530 (Melanchthon to Luther); on the Eucharist, the Lutheran side was insisting that it could never be right to give Communion in one kind only, and that those who did so sinned, though those laity who received Communion in one kind only did not sin; that is to say, they were not willing to accept Communion in one kind for the rest of the Church. They would also not accept private Masses, or the canons of the Mass that presented it as a sacrifice. However, monks and nuns who were living in monasteries could, the Lutherans agreed, continue to live there, and in monasteries that were empty, new members could be taken on, but they should not follow rules or orders—a solution that might have permitted compromise. Fasting should not become an issue of conscience, but secular authorities might make regulations about it. See also Philip of Hesse’s understanding of what was on offer (1709, Aug. 29, 1530). He was particularly concerned about the concessions on fasting and the power of bishops. Schnepf, his preacher, thought it would be very dangerous to concede to the bishops their previous power, though in other respects he agreed with Melanchthon. The model of peaceful coexistence Schnepf had in mind was like that with the Jews (Förstemann, Urkundenbuch, II, 311–12, late August), but this model became one the Lutherans would reject. 73. WB 5, 1711, Sept. 4, 1530. He also worried that the Lutherans’ allies were starting to sympathize with the Swiss, and so it was even more important to conclude peace soon. 74. Later it gained support from Heilbronn, Kempten, Windsheim, Weissenburg, and Frankfurt.

• From A History of God (1993)

  You honor the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress. This cannot be, my dear!” 4 God did not act in such an arbitrary way. Khadija suggested that they consult her cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, now a Christian and learned in the scriptures. Waraqa had no doubts at all: Muhammad had received a revelation from the God of Moses and the prophets and had become the divine envoy to the Arabs. Eventually, after a period of several years, Muhammad was convinced that this was indeed the case and began to preach to the Quraysh, bringing them a scripture in their own language. Unlike the Torah, however, which according to the biblical account was revealed to Moses in one session on Mount Sinai, the Koran was revealed to Muhammad bit by bit, line by line and verse by verse over a period of twenty-three years. The revelations continued to be a painful experience. “Never once did I receive a revelation without feeling that my soul was being torn away from me,” Muhammad said in later years. 5 He had to listen to the divine words intently, struggling to make sense of a vision and significance that did not always come to him in a clear, verbal form. Sometimes, he said, the content of the divine message was clear: he seemed to see Gabriel and heard what he was saying. But at other times the revelation was distressingly inarticulate: “Sometimes it comes unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message.” 6 The early biographers of the classical period often show him listening intently to what we should perhaps call the unconscious, rather as a poet describes the process of “listening” to a poem that is gradually surfacing from the hidden recesses of his mind, declaring itself with an authority and integrity that seem mysteriously separate from him. In the Koran, God tells Muhammad to listen to the incoherent meaning carefully and with what Wordsworth would call “a wise passiveness.” 7 He must not rush to force words or a particular conceptual significance upon it until the true meaning revealed itself in its own good time: Move not thy tongue in haste [repeating the words of the revelation]; for, behold, it is for Us to gather it [in thy heart], and cause it to be recited [as it ought to be recited]. Thus when We recite it, follow thou its wordings [with all thy mind]: and then, behold, it will be for Us to make its meaning clear. 8 Like all creativity, it was a difficult process.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Most Jews held aloof, however, and tension developed between Jews and Greeks in the Hellenistic cities of the Middle East. In the ancient world, religion was not a private matter. The gods were extremely important to the city, and it was believed that they would withdraw their patronage if their cult were neglected. Jews, who claimed that these gods did not exist, were called “atheists” and enemies of society. By the second century BCE this hostility was entrenched: in Palestine there had even been a revolt when Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid governor, had attempted to Hellenize Jerusalem and introduce the cult of Zeus into the Temple. Jews had started to produce their own literature, which argued that wisdom was not Greek cleverness but the fear of Yahweh. Wisdom literature was a well-established genre in the Middle East; it tried to delve into the meaning of life, not by philosophical reflection, but by inquiring into the best way to live: it was often highly pragmatic. The author of the Book of Proverbs, who was writing in the third century BCE, went a little further and suggested that Wisdom was the master plan that God had devised when he had created the world and, as such, was the first of his creatures. This idea would be very important to the early Christians, as we shall see in Chapter 4. The author personifies Wisdom so that she seems a separate person: Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded before the oldest of his works. From everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning, before earth came into being … when he laid the foundations of the earth, I was at his side, a master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence, at play everywhere in the world, delighting to be with the sons of men.70 Wisdom was not a divine being, however, but is specifically said to have been created by God. She is similar to the “glory” of God described by the Priestly authors, representing the plan of God that human beings could glimpse in creation and in human affairs: the author represents Wisdom (Hokhmah) wandering through the streets, calling people to fear Yahweh. In the second century BCE, Jesus ben Sira, a devout Jew of Jerusalem, painted a similar portrait of Wisdom. He makes her stand up in the Divine Council and sing her own praises: she had come forth from the mouth of the Most High as the divine Word by which God had created the world; she is present everywhere in creation but has taken up permanent residence among the people of Israel.71

• From A History of God (1993)

  90 Like the early Christians, the Israelites were encouraged by their Rabbis to see themselves as a united community with “one body and one soul.” 91 The community was the new Temple, enshrining the immanent God: thus when they entered the synagogue and recited the Shema in perfect unison “with devotion, with one voice, one mind and one tone,” God was present among them. But he hated any lack of harmony in the community and returned to heaven, where the angels chanted the divine praises “with one voice and one melody.” 92 The higher union of God and Israel could only exist when the lower union of Israelite with Israelite was complete: constantly, the Rabbis told them that when a group of Jews studied the Torah together, the Shekinah sat among them. 93 In exile, the Jews felt the harshness of the surrounding world; this sense of presence helped them to feel enveloped by a benevolent God. When they bound their phylacteries (tfillin) to their hands and foreheads, wore ritual fringes (tzitzit) and nailed the mezuzah containing the words of the Shema over their doors, as Deuteronomy prescribed, they should not try to explain these obscure and peculiar practices. That would limit their value. Instead they should allow the performance of these mitzvot to nudge them into an awareness of God’s enveloping love; “Israel is beloved! The Bible surrounds him with mitzvot: tfillin on the head and arm, a mezuzah on the door, tzitzit on their clothes.” 94 They were like the gifts of jewels that a king gave to his wife to make her more beautiful to him. It was not easy. The Talmud shows that some people were wondering whether God made much difference in such a dark world. 95 The spirituality of the Rabbis became normative in Judaism, not merely among those who had fled Jerusalem but among Jews who had always lived in the diaspora. This was not because it was based on a sound theoretical foundation: many of the practices of the Law made no logical sense. The religion of the Rabbis was accepted because it worked. The vision of the Rabbis had prevented their people from falling into despair. This type of spirituality was for men only, however, since women were not required—and therefore not permitted—to become Rabbis, to study Torah or to pray in the synagogue. The religion of God was becoming as patriarchal as most of the other ideologies of the period. The woman’s role was to maintain the ritual purity of the home. Jews had long sanctified creation by separating its various items, and in this spirit women were relegated to a separate sphere from their menfolk, just as they were to keep milk separate from meat in their kitchens.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In one way, however, Kirmani was right when he accused Shiism of impeding progress. One of the tasks of conservative, premodern faith had been to help people accept the inherent limitations of their society and, if Iranians wanted to take a full part in the modern world, which was dedicated to progress, religion could no longer be allowed to do that. Islam would have to change. But how? Like many modern secularists, Kirmani and his friends blamed religion for the disorders of their nation. They believed that the Arabs had foisted Islam upon the Iranian people to their detriment, and so they tried to create a Persian identity based on their sketchy knowledge of pre-Islamic Iran. Their view of the West was equally inadequate and naive, based on an unsystematic reading of European books. 44 These reformers did not fully understand the complex nature of Western modernity, but regarded its institutions as a sort of “machine” (that nineteenth-century symbol of progress, science, and power) which could infallibly and mechanically manufacture the entire European experience. If only Iranians could acquire a Western secular law code (instead of the Shariah) or a European-style education, they would be modern and progressive too. They did not appreciate the importance of industrialization and a modern economy. A European education would certainly open new doors to young Iranians, but if the infrastructure of their society remained unchanged, there would be little they could do with their education. Modernization was not yet even in its infancy in Iran; Iranians would have to undergo the wrenching and distressing process of transforming their agrarian culture into an industrialized, technicalized society. This alone would make it possible for Iranians to have the kind of liberal civilization that these reformers wanted, where everybody could think, write, and explore whatever ideas they chose. An agrarian society could not support this freedom. Western institutions might be beneficial, but they could not by themselves transform the mentality of a people whose horizons were still those of the conservative period. Indeed, the reformers themselves still had a foot in the old world. This was hardly surprising, given the rudimentary nature of their exposure to modern society. They had come by their progressive ideas through Babism, the mystical philosophy of the school of Isfahan, and Sufism, as well as by reading Western books. These Shii spiritualities had given them the freedom and courage to throw off old restraints, but in a thoroughly conservative manner. Kirmani used to claim that he was a total rationalist: “reason and scientific proofs are the sources of my words and the bases of my deeds,” 45 he insisted. But his rationalism was entirely bound by a mythical and mystical perspective. He had an evolutionary view of history, but identified Darwinism with Mulla Sadra’s vision of the progressive development of all beings toward a perfect state. Mulkum Khan did the same. They were simply expanding the ancient Muslim conception of ilm (“essential knowledge”) to include Western scientific rationalism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Unlike the Torah, however, which according to the biblical account was revealed to Moses in one session on Mount Sinai, the Koran was revealed to Muhammad bit by bit, line by line and verse by verse over a period of twenty-three years. The revelations continued to be a painful experience. “Never once did I receive a revelation without feeling that my soul was being torn away from me,” Muhammad said in later years.5 He had to listen to the divine words intently, struggling to make sense of a vision and significance that did not always come to him in a clear, verbal form. Sometimes, he said, the content of the divine message was clear: he seemed to see Gabriel and heard what he was saying. But at other times the revelation was distressingly inarticulate: “Sometimes it comes unto me like the reverberations of a bell, and that is the hardest upon me; the reverberations abate when I am aware of their message.”6 The early biographers of the classical period often show him listening intently to what we should perhaps call the unconscious, rather as a poet describes the process of “listening” to a poem that is gradually surfacing from the hidden recesses of his mind, declaring itself with an authority and integrity that seem mysteriously separate from him. In the Koran, God tells Muhammad to listen to the incoherent meaning carefully and with what Wordsworth would call “a wise passiveness.”7 He must not rush to force words or a particular conceptual significance upon it until the true meaning revealed itself in its own good time: Move not thy tongue in haste [repeating the words of the revelation]; for, behold, it is for Us to gather it [in thy heart], and cause it to be recited [as it ought to be recited]. Thus when We recite it, follow thou its wordings [with all thy mind]: and then, behold, it will be for Us to make its meaning clear.8 Like all creativity, it was a difficult process. Muhammad used to enter a tranced state and sometimes seemed to lose consciousness; he used to sweat profusely, even on a cold day, and often felt an interior heaviness like grief that impelled him to lower his head between his knees, a position adopted by some contemporary Jewish mystics when they entered an alternative state of consciousness—though Muhammad could not have known this.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Finally the gods, who were now seen as the angelic ministers of the One, transmitted the divine influence to the sublunary world of men. The Platonist needed no barbaric tales of a deity who suddenly decided to create the world or who ignored the established hierarchy to communicate directly with a small group of human beings. He needed no grotesque salvation by means of a crucified Messiah. Since he was akin to the God who had given life to all things, a philosopher could ascend to the divine world by means of his own efforts in a rational, ordered way. How could the Christians explain their faith to the pagan world? It seemed to fall between two stools, appearing to be neither a religion, in the Roman sense, nor a philosophy. Moreover, Christians would have found it hard to list their “beliefs” and may not have been conscious of evolving a distinctive system of thought. In this they resembled their pagan neighbors. Their religion had no coherent “theology” but could more accurately be described as a carefully cultivated attitude of commitment. When they recited their “creeds,” they were not assenting to a set of propositions. The word credere, for example, seems to have derived from cor dare: to give one’s heart. When they said “credo!” (or pisteno in Greek), this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position. Thus Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia from 392 to 428, explained to his converts: When you say “I engage myself” (pisteuo) before God, you show that you will remain steadfastly with him, that you will never separate yourself from him and that you will think it higher than anything else to be and to live with him and to conduct yourself in a way that is in harmony with his commandments. 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Some had fallen back into idolatry and superstition. Yet God had sent a succession of prophets to put them back on course. Pythagoras had learned about this religion and brought it to the West. Jesus had been one of these prophets sent to call mankind back to the truth, but his pure religion had been corrupted by Athanasius and his cohorts. The Book of Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism—“this strange religion of ye West,” “the cult of three equal Gods”—as the abomination of desolation. 15 Western Christians had always found the Trinity a difficult doctrine, and their new rationalism would make the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment anxious to discard it. Newton had clearly no understanding of the role of mystery in the religious life. The Greeks had used the Trinity as a means of holding the mind in a state of wonder and as a reminder that human intellect could never understand the nature of God. For a scientist like Newton, however, it was very difficult to cultivate such an attitude. In science people were learning that they had to be ready to scrap the past and start again from first principles in order to find the truth. Religion, however, like art often consists of a dialogue with the past in order to find a perspective from which to view the present. Tradition provides a jumping-off point which enables men and women to engage with the perennial questions about the ultimate meaning of life. Religion and art, therefore, do not work like science. During the eighteenth century, however, Christians began to apply the new scientific methods to the Christian faith and came up with the same solutions as Newton. In England, radical theologians like Matthew Tindal and John Toland were anxious to go back to basics, purge Christianity of its mysteries and establish a true rational religion. In Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), Toland argued that mystery simply led to “tyranny and superstition.” 16 It was offensive to imagine that God was incapable of expressing himself clearly. Religion had to be reasonable. In Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), Tindal tried, like Newton, to recreate the primordial religion and purge it of later accretions. Rationality was the touchstone of all true religion: “There’s a religion of nature and reason written in the hearts of every one of us from the first creation, by which all mankind must judge of the truth of any institutional religion whatever.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  The conservative tendency had surfaced during the fourteenth century in champions of the Shariah like Ahmad ibn Taymiyah of Damascus (d. 1328) and his pupil Ibn al-Qayin al-Jawziyah. Ibn Taymiyah, who was dearly loved by the people, wanted to extend the Shariah to enable it to apply to all the circumstances in which Muslims were likely to find themselves. This was not meant to be a repressive discipline: he wanted to shed obsolete rules to make the Shariah more relevant and to assuage the anxiety of Muslims during these difficult times. The Shariah should provide them with a clear, logical answer to their practical religious problems. But in his zeal for Shariah, Ibn Taymiyah attacked Kalam, Falsafah and even Asherism. Like any reformer, he wanted to go back to the sources—to the Koran and the hadith (on which the Shariah had been based)—and to shed all later accretions: “I have examined all the theological and philosophical methods and found them incapable of curing any ills or of quenching any thirst. For me the best method is that of the Koran.”1 His pupil al-Jawziyah added Sufism to this list of innovations, advocating a literalist interpretation of scripture and condemning the cult of Sufi saints in a spirit that was not entirely dissimilar to that of the later Protestant Reformers in Europe. Like Luther and Calvin, Ibn Taymiyah and al-Jawziyah were not regarded by their contemporaries as backward-looking: they were seen as progressives, who wanted to lighten the burden of their people. Hodgson warns us not to dismiss the so-called conservatism of this period as “stagnation.” He points out that no society before our own could either afford or envisage progress on the scale that we now enjoy.2 Western scholars have often chided the Muslims of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for failing to take account of the Italian Renaissance. True, this was one of the great cultural florescences of history, but it did not exceed or differ much from that of the Sung dynasty in China, for example, which had been an inspiration to Muslims during the twelfth century. The Renaissance was crucial to the West, but nobody could have foreseen the birth of the modern technical age, which, with hindsight, we can see that it foreshadowed. If Muslims were underwhelmed by this Western Renaissance, this did not necessarily reveal an irredeemable cultural inadequacy. Muslims were, not surprisingly, more concerned with their own not inconsiderable achievements during the fifteenth century.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  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 MONASTERY 61 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’. By the time Luther had left the monastery and broken with the Church of Rome, the Anfechtungen were more clearly centred on his battle with the Devil, though they still took physical form. He suffered from fits of ringing in the ears, sure that they were a diabolic attack. As he grew older, he confided to trusted companions about his temp- tations. Complaining in 1529 to a friend in Breslau that he had suffered headaches, nausea and a dull noise in his ears for eight days, he wondered ‘whether it was exhaustion or a temptation of Satan’. In 1530 he wrote to Melanchthon about a weakness in his head that stopped him from working: like Paul’s suffering, the angel of Satan was ‘beating him with his fists’. At the same time he suggested that those suffering from melancholia should not only eat and drink more, but also joke and play games so as to spite the Devil.* We do not know how far the early Anfechtungen were the same as the attacks of depression and sadness he experienced later, nor whether at this early stage he thought that the Devil was involved; but it is clear that they concerned his relationship with God — and to that extent, Staupitz was quite right that they were essential to Luther’s form of devotion. a Every monastery is a living as well as a devotional community, involving practical organisation and labour within a clear system of hierarchy. Despite his apparent difficulties with paternal authority, this was an environment in which Luther thrived, rapidly moving up the monastic ladder. He quickly became a sub-deacon, and then a deacon; and in 1508-9 he was sent briefly to the University of Wittenberg, where he taught philosophy and continued studies in theology. Erfurt was a prosperous monastery, and it had many properties to administer. Luther learned how to ensure that debts were paid, annual dues delivered and the monastery provisioned.

• From A History of God (1993)

  What, then, did people mean when they accused one another of “atheism”? The French scientist Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), who was also a member of a strict Franciscan order, declared that there were about 50,000 atheists in Paris alone, but most of the “atheists” he named believed in God. Thus Pierre Carrin, the friend of Michel Montaigne, had defended Catholicism in his treatise Les Trois Vérités (1589), but in his chief work, De La Sagesse, he had stressed the frailty of reason and claimed that man could only reach God through faith. Mersenne disapproved of this and saw it as tantamount to “atheism.” Another of the “unbelievers” he denounced was the Italian rationalist Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), even though Bruno believed in a sort of Stoic God who was the soul, origin and end of the universe. Mersenne called both these men “atheists” because he disagreed with them about God, not because they denied the existence of a Supreme Being. In rather the same way, pagans of the Roman empire had called Jews and Christians “atheists” because their opinion of the divine had differed from their own. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word “atheist” was still reserved exclusively for polemic. Indeed, it was possible to call any of your enemies an “atheist” in much the same way as people were dubbed “anarchists” or “communists” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the Reformation, people had become anxious about Christianity in a new way. Like “the witch” (or, indeed, “the anarchist” or “the communist”), “the atheist” was the projection of a buried anxiety. It reflected a hidden worry about the faith and could be used as a shock tactic to frighten the godly and encourage them in virtue. In the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker (1554–1600) claimed that there were two kinds of atheists: a tiny group who did not believe in God and a much larger number who lived as though God did not exist. People tended to lose sight of this distinction and concentrated on the latter, practical type of atheism. Thus in The Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597), Thomas Beard’s imaginary “atheist” denied the providence of God, the immortality of the soul and the afterlife but not, apparently, the existence of God. In his tract Atheism Closed and Open Anatomized (1634), John Wingfield claimed: “the hypocrite is an Atheist; the loose wicked man is an open Atheist; the secure, bold and proud transgressor is an Atheist: he that will not be taught or reformed is an Atheist.”45 For the Welsh poet William Vaughan (1577–1641), who helped in the colonization of Newfoundland, those who raised rents or enclosed commons were obvious atheists. The English dramatist Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) proclaimed that the ambitious, the greedy, the gluttons, the vainglorious and prostitutes were all atheists.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like Kant, Wesley welcomed the emancipation of faith from reason, and declared that religion was not a doctrine in the head but a light in the heart. It could even be a blessing that the rational and historical evidence for Christianity had become “clogged and encumbered” in recent years. This would free men and women, forcing them “to look into themselves and attend to the light shining in their hearts.” 33 Christians were becoming divided: some followed the philosophes and tried to demystify and rationalize their faith; others jettisoned reason altogether. This was a worrying development that was especially marked in the American colonies. One of the repercussions of this split would be the development of fundamentalism in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. In the early years, most of the colonists, except the Puritan New Englanders, had been indifferent toward religion; it seemed as though the colonies were becoming almost entirely secularized by the end of the seventeenth century. 34 But during the early eighteenth century, the Protestant denominations revived, and Christian life became more formal in the new world than in the old. Even such dissenting sects as the Quakers, the Baptists, and the Presbyterians, which had all originally rejected ecclesiastical authority and insisted on the right to follow their own leadings, set up Assemblies in Philadelphia that kept a sharp eye on the local communities, supervised the clergy, vetted the preachers, and snuffed out heresy. All three denominations flourished as a result of this coercive but modernizing centralization, and numbers increased dramatically. At the same time, the Church of England was established in Maryland, and elegant churches transformed the skylines of New York City, Boston, and Charleston. 35 But while on the one hand there was a move for greater control and discipline, there was also a vehement, grassroots reaction against this rationalized restraint. Conservative religion had always seen mythology and reason as complementary; each would be the poorer without the other. This had also been the case in religious matters, where reason was often allowed to play an important, if subsidiary, role. But the new tendency to sideline or even to jettison reason in some of the new Protestant movements (a development that can be traced back to Luther) led to a disturbing irrationality. The Quakers were so called because, in the early days, they would often express their religious transports so vehemently: they were known to tremble, howl, and yell, making— an observer noted—the dogs bark, the cattle run madly about, and the pigs scream.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  C. I. Scofield explained this dispensational vision of salvation history in detailed notes accompanying the biblical text, notes that for many fundamentalists have become almost as authoritative as the text itself. Premillennialism manifests that lust for certainty which is a reaction to a modernity that deliberately leaves questions open and denies the possibility of absolute truth. American Protestants had long been hostile to the expert who alone was deemed capable of understanding the way a modern society worked. By the late nineteenth century, apparently, nothing was as it seemed. The American economy suffered wild fluctuations during this period which were bewildering to people used to the routines of agrarian life. Booms were followed by depressions, which consumed huge fortunes overnight; society seemed controlled by mysterious, unseen “market forces.” Sociologists also argued that human life was controlled by an economic dynamic that could not be discerned by the unskilled observer. Darwinists told people that existence was dominated by a biological struggle, unseen by the naked eye. Psychologists talked about the power of the hidden, unconscious mind. The Higher Critics insisted that even the Bible itself was not all that it claimed to be, and that the apparently simple text was actually composed of a bewildering number of different sources and written by authors of whom nobody had ever heard. Many Protestants, who expected their faith to bring them security, felt mental vertigo in this complicated world. They wanted a plain-speaking faith that everybody could understand. But because by the end of the nineteenth century science and rationalism were the watchwords of the day, religion had to be rational too if it was to be taken seriously. Some Protestants were determined to make their faith logical and scientifically sound. It must be as clear, demonstrable, and objective as any other logos. Yet much modern science was too slippery for those in need of total certainty. The discoveries of Darwin and Freud came from unproven hypotheses, which seemed “unscientific” to the more traditional Protestants. Instead, they looked back to the early scientific vision of Francis Bacon, who had had no time for such guesswork. Bacon had believed that we could trust our senses absolutely, because they alone could provide us with sound information. He had been convinced that the world was organized on rational principles by an all-knowing God, and that the task of science was not to make wild conjectures but to catalog phenomena and to organize its findings into theories based on facts that were obvious to everyone. Protestants were also drawn to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, which had opposed the subjectivist epistemology of Kant, and claimed that truth was objective and available to any sincere human being of sound “common sense.” 12 This lust for certainty was an attempt to fill the void that lurked at the heart of the modern experience, the God-shaped hole in the consciousness of wholly rational human beings.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The American Protestant Arthur Pierson wanted the Bible explained in “a truly impartial and scientific spirit.” The very title of his book, Many Infallible Proofs (1895), shows the type of certainty that he required from religion: I like Biblical theology that ... does not begin with an hypothesis and then wraps the facts and the philosophy to fit the crook of our dogma, but a Baconian system, which first gathers the teachings of the word of God, and then seeks to deduce some general law upon which the facts can be arranged. 13 It was an understandable desire, but the mythoi of the Bible had never pretended to be factual in the way that Pierson expected. Mythical language could not satisfactorily be translated into rational language without losing its raison d’être. Like poetry, it contained meanings that were too elusive to be expressed in any other way. Once theology tried to turn itself into science, it could only produce a caricature of rational discourse, because these truths are not amenable to scientific demonstration. 14 This spurious religious logos would inevitably bring religion into further disrepute. The New Light Presbyterian seminary at Princeton, New Jersey, became the bastion of this scientific Protestantism. 15 The term “bastion” is appropriate, because the campaign for rational Christianity often used militant imagery, and seemed chronically on the defensive. In 1873, Charles Hodge, who held the chair of theology at Princeton, published the first volume of his two-volume work Systematic Theology. Again, the title reveals its scientific bias. The theologian’s task was not to look for a meaning beyond the words, Hodge insisted, but simply to arrange the clear teachings of scripture into a system of general truths. Every word of the Bible was divinely inspired and must be taken seriously; it should not be distorted by allegorical or symbolic exegesis. Charles’s son, Archibald A. Hodge, who took his father’s chair in 1878, published a defense of the literal truth of the Bible in The Princeton Review, with a young colleague, Benjamin Warfield. The article became a classic. All the stories and statements of the Bible were “absolutely errorless and binding for faith and obedience.” Everything the Bible said was absolute “truth to the facts.” If the Bible said it was inspired, it was inspired, 16 a circular argument that was anything but scientific. Such a view had no rational objectivity, was closed to any alternative, and coherent only within its own terms.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  On the night of Sadat’s death, the streets of Cairo were eerily quiet. The Egyptian people did not weep for Sadat, nor did they mass, grief-stricken, around his coffin as the Iranians would later mob the corpse of Khomeini. Once again, the modern West and the more traditional societies of the Middle East were poles apart and could not share each other’s vision of events. As we have seen, there were a significant number of Egyptians who thought that Sadat’s rule had more in common with the jahiliyyah than with Islam. In 1980, on the Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest days in the Muslim year, the student members of the jamaat al-islamiyyah , who had been forbidden to hold their summer camp in Cairo, occupied the Saladin Mosque, denounced Camp David, and condemned Sadat as a “Tartar,” one of the Mongol rulers of the thirteenth century who had supposedly converted to Islam but were Muslim only in name. 40 Other members of the suppressed jamaat had joined the network of secret cells, dedicated to violent jihad against the regime. Khaled Islambouli, who had studied at the University of Minya, was a member of this Jihad organization. Sadat was aware of this dissent and was determined to avoid the fate of his friend the shah. In 1978, while revolution mounted in Iran, he had issued what he called the Law of Shame. Any deviation in thought, word, or deed from the established order was to be punished with loss of civil rights and confiscation of passports and property. Citizens were forbidden to join any organization, take part in any broadcast, or publish anything critical of the regime that was deemed to threaten “national unity or social peace.” Even a casual private remark, made in the privacy of one’s own family, was not to go unpunished. 41 In the last months of Sadat’s life, the regime became even more oppressive. On September 3, 1981, Sadat rounded up 1536 of his known critics; they included cabinet ministers, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, preachers, and members of the Islamist groups. One of the Islamists thus imprisoned was Muhammad Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s assassin. 42 We can gain some insight into the motivation of Sadat’s killers in a treatise written by Abd al-Salam Faraj, the spiritual guide of Islambouli’s Jihad organization. Al-Faridah al-Ghaybah (“The Neglected Duty”) was published after the assassination in December 1981. It was not an apologia and was not originally intended for the general public. It seems to have been circulated privately among the members of the organization and affords a unique opportunity to learn what militant Muslims were talking to one another about, what their concerns, anxieties, and fears were. Muslims, Faraj argued, had an urgent task.

• From A History of God (1993)

  René Descartes (1596–1650), another of the new men, had far more confidence in the ability of the mind to discover God. Indeed, he insisted that the intellect alone could provide us with the certainty we seek. He would not have approved of Pascal’s wager, since it was based on a purely subjective experience, though his own demonstration of the existence of God depended upon another type of subjectivity. He was anxious to refute the skepticism of the French essayist Michel Montaigne (1533–92), who had denied that anything was certain or even probable. Descartes, a mathematician and a convinced Catholic, felt that he had a mission to bring the new empirical rationalism to the fight against such skepticism. Like Lessius, Descartes thought that reason alone could persuade humanity to accept the truths of religion and morality, which he saw as the foundation of civilization. Faith told us nothing that could not be demonstrated rationally: St. Paul himself had asserted as much in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans: “For what can be known about God is perfectly plain to [mankind] since God himself has made it plain. Ever since God created the world his everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things that he has made.” 7 Descartes went on to argue that God could be known more easily and certainly (facilius et certius) than any of the other things in existence. This was as revolutionary in its own way as Pascal’s wager, especially since Descartes’s proof rejected the witness of the external world that Paul had put forward in favor of the reflexive introspection of the mind turning in upon itself. Using the empirical method of his universal Mathematics, which had progressed logically toward the simples or first principles, Descartes attempted to establish an equally analytic demonstration of God’s existence. But unlike Aristotle, St. Paul and all previous monotheistic philosophers, he found the cosmos completely Godless. There was no design in nature. In fact the universe was chaotic and revealed no sign of intelligent planning. It was impossible for us to deduce any certainty about first principles from nature, therefore. Descartes had no time for the probable or the possible: he sought to establish the kind of certainty that mathematics could provide. It could also be found in simple and self-evident propositions, such as: “What’s done cannot be undone,” which was irrefutably true. Accordingly, while he was sitting meditating beside a wood stove, he hit upon the famous maxim: Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. Like Augustine, some twelve centuries earlier, Descartes found evidence of God in human consciousness: even doubt proved the existence of the doubter! We cannot be certain of anything in the external world, but we can be certain of our own inner experience. Descartes’s argument turns out to be a reworking of Anselm’s Ontological Proof. When we doubt, the limitations and finite nature of the ego are revealed.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Their offices and jurisdiction could certainly be reinstituted, he agreed, after Melanchthon set out the scriptural prece- dents for giving some priests senior roles within the Church.” This troubled not only the sacramentarians, whose anti-Catholicism was animated by their hatred of the old clerical hierarchy, but also many of Luther’s own supporters, especially the Nurembergers.” As many evangelicals saw it, giving the bishops back their power would allow 338 MARTIN LUTHER them to rule over the Lutherans once more, and before long burn them as heretics. Though Luther soon back-pedalled — saying he had meant a different thing by bishops, and their jurisdiction was limited — the damage had been done.” For Melanchthon, it was imperative to consider every option, for he was convinced that, if no agreement could be reached, the ultimate result would be war. By September he was worrying constantly about impending catastrophe, aware of how few princes and cities supported them, although he underestimated how much the Catholic princes were fearful of giving too much power to an already overmighty emperor.” On the evangelical side were only a handful of rulers: the dukes of Liineburg and Brandenburg, the prince of Anhalt, the Saxon Elector, Philip of Hesse, and only Nuremberg and Reutlingen had signed the confession; the sacramentarians did not sign.* Moreover, Philip might turn to the Zwinglians at any time, and Nuremberg was unlikely to risk opposing the emperor. Melanchthon understood, in ways that the isolated Luther could not, just how desperate the evangelical position would be, politically and militarily, if there was no deal. For Luther, however, compromise was now out of the question. Letters he wrote just before the end of the Diet reveal just how far relations with Melanchthon had deteriorated.” On 20 September Luther told Melanchthon that people had been complaining about his conduct of the negotiations, and asked for more detail ‘so that I can stop the mouths of your detractors’.” On the same day he wrote to Jonas without beating about the bush: he and Melanchthon had been entrusted with defending the gospel, ‘but now from some of our people, important and many of them, thunder and lightning has reached me, that you betrayed the matter and for the sake of peace would concede more . . .

• From A History of God (1993)

  Western Christians had always found the Trinity a difficult doctrine, and their new rationalism would make the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment anxious to discard it. Newton had clearly no understanding of the role of mystery in the religious life. The Greeks had used the Trinity as a means of holding the mind in a state of wonder and as a reminder that human intellect could never understand the nature of God. For a scientist like Newton, however, it was very difficult to cultivate such an attitude. In science people were learning that they had to be ready to scrap the past and start again from first principles in order to find the truth. Religion, however, like art often consists of a dialogue with the past in order to find a perspective from which to view the present. Tradition provides a jumping-off point which enables men and women to engage with the perennial questions about the ultimate meaning of life. Religion and art, therefore, do not work like science. During the eighteenth century, however, Christians began to apply the new scientific methods to the Christian faith and came up with the same solutions as Newton. In England, radical theologians like Matthew Tindal and John Toland were anxious to go back to basics, purge Christianity of its mysteries and establish a true rational religion. In Christianity Not Mysterious (1696), Toland argued that mystery simply led to “tyranny and superstition.”16 It was offensive to imagine that God was incapable of expressing himself clearly. Religion had to be reasonable. In Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), Tindal tried, like Newton, to recreate the primordial religion and purge it of later accretions. Rationality was the touchstone of all true religion: “There’s a religion of nature and reason written in the hearts of every one of us from the first creation, by which all mankind must judge of the truth of any institutional religion whatever.”17 Consequently revelation was unnecessary because the truth could be found by our own rational inquiries; mysteries like the Trinity and the Incarnation had a perfectly reasonable explanation and should not be used to keep the simple faithful in thrall to superstition and an institutional church.