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 105 of 501 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  22 Again, this is not dissimilar to the Buddhist belief that, since all Buddhas had become one with the Absolute, the human ideal was to participate in Buddhahood. In his letter to the Church at Philippi, Paul quotes what is generally considered to be a very early Christian hymn which raises some important issues. He tells his converts that they must have the same self-sacrificing attitude as Jesus, Who subsisting in the form of God did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself, to assume the condition of a slave, and became as men are; and being as men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross. But God raised him high and gave him the name which is above all names so that all beings in the heavens, on earth and in the underworld, should bend the knee at the name of Jesus and that every tongue should acclaim Jesus Christ as Lord (kyrios) to the glory of God the Father. 23 The hymn seems to reflect a belief among the first Christians that Jesus had enjoyed some kind of prior existence “with God” before becoming a man in the act of “self-emptying” (kenosis) by which, like a bodhisattva, he had decided to share the suffering of the human condition. Paul was too Jewish to accept the idea of Christ existing as a second divine being beside YHWH from all eternity. The hymn shows that after his exaltation he is still distinct from and inferior to God, who raises him and confers the title kyrios upon him. He cannot assume it himself but is given this title only “to the glory of God the Father.” Some forty years later, the author of St. John’s Gospel (written ca. 100) made a similar suggestion. In his prologue, he described the Word (logos) which had been “with God from the beginning” and had been the agent of creation: “Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him.” 24 The author was not using the Greek word logos in the same way as Philo: he appears to have been more in tune with Palestinian than Hellenized Judaism. In the Aramaic translations of the Hebrew scriptures known as the targums, which were being composed at this time, the term Memra (word) is used to describe God’s activity in the world. It performs the same function as other technical terms like “glory,” “Holy Spirit” and “Shekinah” which emphasized the distinction between God’s presence in the world and the incomprehensible reality of God itself. Like the divine Wisdom, the “Word” symbolized God’s original plan for creation.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Thomas Aquinas, since the new theologians were not as interested in the content of Aristotle’s thought as in his rational method. They wanted to present Christianity as a coherent and rational system that could be derived from syllogistic deductions based on known axioms. This was deeply ironic, of course, since the Reformers had all rejected this type of rationalistic discussion of God. The latter-day Calvinist theology of predestination showed what could happen when the paradox and mystery of God were no longer regarded as poetry but were interpreted with a coherent but terrifying logic. Once the Bible begins to be interpreted literally instead of symbolically, the idea of its God becomes impossible. To imagine a deity who is literally responsible for everything that happens on earth involves impossible contradictions. The “God” of the Bible ceases to be a symbol of a transcendent reality and becomes a cruel and despotic tyrant. The doctrine of predestination shows the limitations of such a personalized God. Puritans based their religious experience on Calvin and clearly found God a struggle: he did not seem to imbue them with either happiness or compassion. Their journals and autobiographies show that they were obsessed with predestination and a terror that they would not be saved. Conversion became a central preoccupation, a violent, tortured drama in which the “sinner” and his spiritual director “wrestled” for his soul. Frequently the penitent had to undergo severe humiliation or experience real despair of God’s grace until he appreciated his utter dependence upon God. Often the conversion represented a psychological abreaction, an unhealthy swing from extreme desolation to elation. The heavy emphasis on hell and damnation combined with an excessive self-scrutiny led many into clinical depression: suicide seems to have been prevalent. Puritans attributed this to Satan, who seemed as powerful a presence in their lives as God. 39 Puritanism did have a positive dimension: it gave people pride in their work, which had hitherto been experienced as a slavery but which was now seen as a “calling.” Its urgent apocalyptic spirituality inspired some to colonize the New World. But at its worst, the Puritan God inspired anxiety and a harsh intolerance of those who were not among the elect. Catholics and Protestants now regarded one another as enemies, but in fact their conception and experience of God were remarkably similar. After the Council of Trent (1545–63), Catholic theologians also committed themselves to the neo-Aristotelian theology, which reduced the study of God to a natural science.

• From A History of God (1993)

  8 A God for ReformersTHE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH centuries were decisive for all the people of God. It was a particularly crucial period for the Christian West, which had not only succeeded in catching up with the other cultures of the Oikumene but was about to overtake them. These centuries saw the Italian Renaissance, which quickly spread to Northern Europe, the discovery of the New World and the beginning of the scientific revolution, which would have fateful consequences for the rest of the world. By the end of the sixteenth century, the West was about to create an entirely different kind of culture. It was, therefore, a time of transition and, as such, characterized by anxiety as well as achievement. This was evident in the Western conception of God at this time. Despite their secular success, people in Europe were more concerned about their faith than ever before. The laity were especially dissatisfied with the medieval forms of religion that no longer answered their needs in the brave new world. Great reformers gave voice to this disquiet and discovered new ways of considering God and salvation. This split Europe into two warring camps—Catholic and Protestant—which have never entirely lost their hatred and suspicion of one another. During the Reformation, Catholic and Protestant reformers urged the faithful to rid themselves of peripheral devotion to saints and angels and to concentrate on God alone. Indeed, Europe seemed obsessed by God. Yet by the beginning of the seventeenth century, some were fantasizing about “atheism.” Did this mean that they were ready to get rid of God?

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yahweh asked: “Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?” and, like Moses before him, Isaiah immediately replied: “Here I am! (hineni!) send me!” The point of this vision was not to enlighten the prophet but to give him a practical job to do. Primarily the prophet is one who stands in God’s presence, but this experience of transcendence results not in the imparting of knowledge—as in Buddhism—but in action. The prophet will not be characterized by mystical illumination but by obedience. As one might expect, the message is never easy. With typical Semitic paradox, Yahweh told Isaiah that the people would not accept it: he must not be dismayed when they reject God’s words: “Go and say to this people: ‘Hear and hear again, but do not understand; see and see again, but do not perceive.’ ”6 Seven hundred years later, Jesus would quote these words when people refused to hear his equally tough message.7 Humankind cannot bear very much reality. The Israelites of Isaiah’s day were on the brink of war and extinction, and Yahweh had no cheerful message for them: their cities would be devastated, the countryside ravaged and the houses emptied of their inhabitants. Isaiah would live to see the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722 and the deportation of the ten tribes. In 701 Sennacherib would invade Judah with a vast Assyrian army, lay siege to forty-six of its cities and fortresses, impale the defending officers on poles, deport about 2000 people and imprison the Jewish king in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage.”8 Isaiah had the thankless task of warning his people of these impending catastrophes: There will be great emptiness in the country and, though a tenth of the people remain, it will be stripped like a terebinth of which, once felled, only the stock remains.9 It would not have been difficult for any astute political observer to foresee these catastrophes. What was chillingly original in Isaiah’s message was his analysis of the situation. The old partisan God of Moses would have cast Assyria in the role of the enemy; the God of Isaiah saw Assyria as his instrument. It was not Sargon II and Sennacherib who would drive the Israelites into exile and devastate the country. It is “Yahweh who drives the people out.”10

• From Little Birds (1979)

  SiroccoWhenever I went down to the beach in Deya I saw two young women, one small and boyish, with short hair and a round, humorous face; the other, like a Viking, with a regal head and body. They kept to themselves during the day. Strangers always spoke to one another in Deya because there was only one food shop, and everyone met at the small post office. But the two women never spoke to anyone. The tall one was beautiful, with heavy eyebrows, thick dark hair, and light-blue eyes densely fringed. I always looked at her with wonder. Their secrecy troubled me. They were not joyous. They lived a sort of hypnotic life. They swam quietly, lay on the sand reading. Then came the sirocco from Africa. It lasts for several days. Not only is it hot and dry, but it travels in a series of whirlwinds, turning feverishly, encircling one, beating one, battering doors, breaking shutters, sending fine dust into the eyes, into the throat, drying everything and irritating the nerves. One cannot sleep, cannot walk, cannot sit still, cannot read. The mind is set whirling exactly like the wind. The wind is charged with perfumes from Africa, heavy sensual animal odors. It gives a kind of fever and turmoil of the nerves. One afternoon I had been caught by it while I still had a half-hour’s walk to my house. The two women were walking ahead of me, holding on to their skirts, which the wind tried to raise around their heads. As I passed their house they saw me struggling against the dust and blinding heat and said, “Come in and wait until it calms down.” We went in together. They lived in a Moorish tower that they had bought for very little money. The old doors did not close well, and the wind opened them over and over again. I sat with them in a big circular stone room with peasant furniture. The younger woman left us to make tea. I sat with the Viking princess, whose face was flushed by the fever of the sirocco. She said, “This wind will drive me crazy if it does not stop.” She got up several times to close the door. It was exactly as though some intruder wanted to enter the room and was each time repulsed, only to succeed again in opening the door. The woman must have felt this, for she repulsed the intrusion with anger and a growing fear. What the wind seemed to be pushing into the tower room, the Viking knew she could not keep out altogether; for she began to talk. She spoke as though she were in a confessional, in a dark Catholic confessional, with her eyes lowered, trying not to see the face of the priest, and seeking to be truthful and to remember everything.

• From A History of God (1993)

  They qualified this immanence by showing that nobody could approach God himself but only God as he manifested himself to mankind in his “glory” (kavod) or in “the great radiance called Shekinah.” The Pietists were not worried by the apparent inconsistency. They concentrated on practical matters rather than theological niceties, teaching their fellow Jews methods of concentration (kawwanah) and gestures that would enhance their sense of God’s presence. Silence was essential; a Pietist should close his eyes tightly, cover his head with a prayer shawl to avoid distraction, pull in his stomach and grind his teeth. They devised special ways of “drawing out prayer,” which was found to encourage this sense of Presence. Instead of simply repeating the words of the liturgy, the Pietist should count the letters of each word, calculating their numerical value and getting beyond the literal meaning of the language. He must direct his attention upward, to encourage his sense of a higher reality. The situation of the Jews in the Islamic empire, where there was no anti-Semitic persecution, was far happier, and they had no need of this Ashkenazic pietism. They were evolving a new type of Judaism, however, as a response to Muslim developments. Just as the Jewish Faylasufs had attempted to explain the God of the Bible philosophically, other Jews tried to give their God a mystical, symbolic interpretation. At first these mystics constituted only a tiny minority. Theirs was an esoteric discipline, handed on from master to disciple: they called it Kabbalah, or “inherited tradition.” Eventually, however, the God of Kabbalah would appeal to the majority and take hold of the Jewish imagination in a way that the God of the Philosophers never did. Philosophy threatened to turn God into a remote abstraction, but the God of the Mystics was able to touch those fears and anxieties that lie deeper than the rational. Where the Throne Mystics had been content to gaze upon the glory of God from without, the Kabbalists attempted to penetrate the inner life of God and the human consciousness. Instead of speculating rationally about the nature of God and the metaphysical problems of his relationship with the world, the Kabbalists turned to the imagination.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  This is my way of demystifying the whole gender, plus giving myself wardrobe opportunities—an excuse for witchy shoes and lip gloss. There comes a string of good eggs who never make boyfriends, all ages and shapes. If it moves, I’ll date it. At a faculty party, I agree to dinner with a surgeon who turns out—how?—to be in his mid-twenties. (Our sole point of commonality is that I’d babysat one of his undergrad frat brothers.) I date a local mogul twice that age and stay friends with his family for years. A comedian and a fireman, a legendary undercover narc, the occasional prof or publishing dude, an arbitrager. None of these do I so much as press lips to. Only one straitlaced captain of industry even tempts me. Fit and well traveled, he shows up in a snazzy convertible, and it thrills me that he doesn’t drink. On our second phone call, though, he confesses a sex addiction that involves—among other shockers— hospitalization for masturbation injuries . Meanwhile, I’m broke enough to be filching toilet paper from the school bathroom. It’s Patti who suggests I put God in charge of my financial woes, which sounds nuts unless you’ve spent a few years during which prayer keeps you from driving into stuff. God’s just gonna tell me to have another tag sale, I say, I’d sold every silver pie server and cake plate we got for our wedding. So you know what God thinks now? ( What is your source of information? ) I confess I don’t much know what God thinks. Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I’m in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold ingots to roll to my door. I manage it for three or four nights max. Then—when Dev and I pick through trash piles for furniture—I find myself upending dresser drawers and (once) even pawing through an old golf bag in case somebody accidentally threw out any bearer bonds. After the mortgage, I have a few hundred bucks each month for every bill, morsel of food, and tube sock. During a sweaty night praying over a stack of unpaid bills, I literally kneel before them (in some ways worshipping my fear, it strikes me now). Because I signed up to take my whole salary over the nine-month academic year, all money clicks off in June. Even with summer jobs, I face missing mortgage payments. If I had a few years to cobble up a book, maybe some publisher with sufficiently low standards would pony up enough to pay off my maxed-out credit cards so I could qualify for a rust-bucket car loan. But that’ll take years. How to start while teaching, raising a kid, and working in some local restaurant? It’s a bone I pin between my paws at night and work with my jaw teeth.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Calvin also based his reformed religion on God’s absolute rule. He has not left us with a full account of his conversion experience. In his Commentary on the Psalms , he simply tells us that it was entirely the work of God. He had been completely enthralled by the institutional Church and “the superstitions of the papacy.” He was both unable and unwilling to break free, and it had taken an act of God to shift him: “At last God turned my course in a different direction by the hidden bridle of his providence.… 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Where Luther’s and Karlstadt’s theology converged was in their admiration for the Theologia deutsch and the mystic Johannes Tauler.” Indeed, as we have seen, in the preliminary skirmishes before the Leipzig Debate, one of the major points at issue between Luther and Eck had been that the latter would not accept the authority of the Theologia deutsch because it was not a work by one of the Church Fathers and was written in German, not Latin. In October 1520, two weeks after he had received news of Eck’s bull — which to Karlstadt’s shock named him alongside Luther and five others’ — Karlstadt wrote a treatise on Gelassenheit, the meditative ‘letting go’ of human attachments in order to allow God to enter, which reveals the extent of his debt to medieval mysticism. It was personal, written in the form of a letter to his ‘dear mother and all my friends’.® Just as Luther did at times, Karlstadt likened his situation to Christ’s: ‘I stand in hellish anguish, in pain of death, in hellish trials, with hands and feet I am nailed to your cross.’ He saw himself as standing at a junction: on the right, there was death 222 MARTIN LUTHER which threatened to kill his spirit, and “On the left, stands the death to my flesh.’”° By contrast, Luther did not draw on the theology of Gelassenheit when preparing himself for martyrdom. While he regularly considered the possibility of his own death in his letters, he was also concerned about protecting others. As he worked out his strategy with Spalatin before Worms, one of the arguments he deployed was that if he were not given a hearing, then everyone in Wittenberg would be imperiled. From quite early on, therefore, he tried to stop Karlstadt attacking Eck because he thought it would endanger his colleague. And he ensured through his negotiations via Spalatin that he alone was summoned to Worms. For Karlstadt, on the other hand, Gelassenheit gave him strength for his own martyrdom. The concept was locked into his emotional experience of being saved; it was part of the cycle of dark anxiety, and feelings of worthlessness, to which the answer was to develop a ‘tough, serious and rigorous hatred and envy against myself’. From this sprang detachment, or leaving behind all things and all human bonds.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  Pierre tried to console Jeanette as best he could, then went back to sleep. She wandered aimlessly about the apartment, picking up books and dropping them, trying to eat, telephoning the police. At all hours of the night she entered Pierre’s room to talk about her anxieties, and she remained gazing at him wistfully, helplessly. Finally she dared to ask him, “Do you think Jean does not want me about anymore? Do you think I should go away?” “I think you should return home,” said Pierre, weary and sleepy and indifferent to the young girl. But the next day she was still there, and something happened to disturb his indifference. Jeanette sat at the end of his bed to talk to him. She was wearing a very thin dress that seemed like a light sachet around her, merely a cover to hold the perfume of her body. A composite perfume, so strong and penetrating, Pierre could catch all its nuances—the bitter, strong odor of the hair; the few drops of perspiration on her neck, under her breasts, under her arms; her breath, both acid and sweet, like some mixture of lemon and honey; and beneath all this the odor of her femininity, which the summer heat wakened as it awakened the smell of flowers. He became fully aware of his own body, feeling the caress of his pajamas on his skin, aware that they were open at the chest and that she could perhaps smell his odor as he was smelling hers. His desire suddenly asserted itself, violently. He pulled Jeanette towards him. He made her slide beside him, and he felt her body through the thin dress. But at the same moment he remembered how Jean had made her moan and croon by the hour, and he wondered if he could do it as well. Never before had he been so near to another man making love or overheard the sounds of a woman being exhausted by pleasure. He had no reason to doubt his own power. He had ample proofs of his success as a good and satisfying lover. But this time, as he began to caress Jeanette, a doubt took hold of him—such a fear that his desire died.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  John stopped at an inn and I took the girls to the ladies’ room. They immediately went in to the toilet together. One was saying: “There is no blood. I guess he didn’t break through.” The other one was crying. We took them home. One of the girls thanked me and said, “I hope that never happens to you.” While my mother was talking I was wondering if she feared this and was preparing me. I cannot say that when Monday came I was not uneasy. I felt that if the painter was attractive I would be in greater danger than if he was not, for if I liked him I might get wet between the legs. The first one was about fifty, bald, with a rather European face and little mustache. He had a beautiful studio. He placed the screen in front of me so that I could change my dress. I threw my clothes over the screen. As I threw my last piece of underwear over the top of the screen I saw the painter’s face appear at the top, smiling. But it was done so comically and ridiculously, like a scene in a play, that I said nothing, got dressed, and took the pose. Every half-hour I would get a rest. I could smoke a cigarette. The painter put on a record and said: “Will you dance?” We danced on the highly polished floor, turning among the paintings of beautiful women. At the end of the dance, he kissed my neck. “So dainty,” he said. “Do you pose in the nude?” “No.” “Too bad.” I thought this was not so difficult to manage. It was time to pose again. The three hours passed quickly. He talked while he worked. He said he had married his first model; that she was unbearably jealous; that every now and then she broke into the studio and made scenes; that she would not let him paint from the nude. He had rented another studio she did not know about. Often he worked there. He gave parties there too. Would I like to come to one on Saturday night? He gave me another little kiss on the neck as I left. He winked and said: “You won’t tell the club on me?” I returned to the club for luncheon because I could make up my face and freshen myself, and they gave us a cheap lunch. The other girls were there. We fell into conversation. When I mentioned the invitation for Saturday night, they laughed, nodding at one another. I could not get them to talk. One girl had lifted up her skirt and was examining a mole way up her thighs. With a little caustic pencil she was trying to burn it away. I saw that she was not wearing panties, just a black satin dress which clung to her. The telephone would ring and then one of the girls would be called and go off to work.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But now he was determined to marry before he died, even if it just be ‘an engaged marriage of Joseph’ — that is, an unconsummated engagement of an old man and a young woman.” Such words hardly sound like the sexual bravado that had begun to colour his letters to Spalatin, the ‘sluggish lover who does not dare to become the husband of even one woman’, perhaps because Spalatin was, like him, a bachelor, whilst 280 MARTIN LUTHER Riihel, to whom he wrote about Albrecht, was married. For Luther, now aged forty-one, sex may have been a daunting prospect, given that Katharina was fifteen years younger than him. Sixteenth-century weddings were not for the faint-hearted. Wedding feasts were ribald occasions, and the couple would be bedded down together in front of the guests, with a cover placed over them; later, the revellers would ‘sing them on’ as they spent the night together. As was customary in Saxony, Luther and Katharina’s marriage was consummated before the wedding, in the first half of June, and the celebrations — ‘leading her home’ — took place two or three weeks later. If the marriage was not or could not be consummated it could be annulled: according to late medieval understandings of the sacra- ment of marriage, it consisted in the free exchange of a marriage promise between the couple plus their physical union. Sexual inter- course made a promise of marriage fully binding, or to put it another way, what we would call an ‘engagement’ became a fully binding marriage if the couple had sex. By mid-June, Luther’s tone in his letters changed markedly, as he joked to none other than Leonhard Koppe that when he came to the wedding banquet, he should ‘help my bride give good testimony, how I am a man’. In the same letter he wrote that ‘I’m woven into my girl’s plaits’, a remarkable metaphor that had nothing of the usual masculine bravado about possessing a woman.” It was also a male joke about female sexual power. In other invitations, he referred to Katharina as ‘my mistress’.¥ There was much innuendo at weddings about who would ‘wear the trousers’ in the marriage.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I feel my mouth slurring words as I ask him to pick me up at the airport in the morning for my birthday—the only present I want. I thought you wanted that party we’re having, he says, with your sister coming for a week. This party—our first—was long negotiated. He’s noting the traffic to and from the airport, the hours of writing he’ll lose. Should I offer to cancel the party in order to be picked up? When he hangs up, I feel confident that I’ll see him at the gate. Having touched down in Boston at dawn, I wander through the airport with an inner plunging sense—no sign of Warren. When the magic doors glide open on the empty taxi stand, I feel the regressed terror of a kid lost in the glass cubicles of a department store because her manic mother has just wandered off—maybe on purpose, maybe not. (Crazy to admit this, but true.) How do you get past it, I ask my shrink, when you never got that sense of acceptance and security as a kid? You’ve got to nurture yourself through those instants, he says, recognize the source of the misery as out of kilter with the stimulus. Realize you’re not lost. You’re an adult. Warren didn’t hurt you on purpose. You were perfectly capable of getting yourself home. Nuture myself. Now, there’s an idea I can glom on to. I say, Like I could have a drink when I got home? If that calms you, he says. One drink. Just what I hoped he’d say.

• From A History of God (1993)

  At one point, the early sources tell us, it seemed as though the whole of Mecca would accept Muhammad’s reformed religion of al-Lah. The richer establishment, who were more than happy with the status quo, understandably held aloof, but there was no formal rupture with the leading Qurayshis until Muhammad forbade the Muslims to worship the pagan gods. For the first three years of his mission it seems that Muhammad did not emphasize the monotheistic content of his message, and people probably imagined that they could go on worshipping the traditional deities of Arabia alongside al-Lah, the High God, as they always had. But when he condemned these ancient cults as idolatrous, he lost most of his followers overnight and Islam became a despised and persecuted minority. We have seen that the belief in only one God demands a painful change of consciousness. Like the early Christians, the first Muslims were accused of an “atheism” which was deeply threatening to society. In Mecca, where urban civilization was so novel and must have seemed a fragile achievement for all the proud self-sufficiency of the Quraysh, many seem to have felt the same sinking dread and dismay as those citizens of Rome who had clamored for Christian blood. The Quraysh seem to have found a rupture with the ancestral gods profoundly threatening, and it would not be long before Muhammad’s own life was imperiled. Western scholars have usually dated this rupture with the Quraysh to the possibly apocryphal incident of the Satanic Verses, which has become notorious since the tragic Salman Rushdie affair. Three of the Arabian deities were particularly dear to the Arabs of the Hijaz: al-Lat (whose name simply meant “the Goddess”) and al-Uzza (the Mighty One), who had shrines at Taif and Nakhlah respectively, to the southeast of Mecca, and Manat, the Fateful One, who had her shrine at Qudayd on the Red Sea coast. These deities were not fully personalized like Juno or Pallas Athene. They were often called the banat al-Lah , the Daughters of God, but this does not necessarily imply a fully developed pantheon. The Arabs used such kinship terms to denote an abstract relationship: thus banat al-dahr (literally, “daughters of fate”) simply meant misfortunes or vicissitudes. The term banat al-Lah may simply have signified “divine beings.” These deities were not represented by realistic statues in their shrines but by large standing stones, similar to those in use among the ancient Canaanites, which the Arabs worshipped not in any crudely simplistic way but as a focus of divinity. Like Mecca with its Kabah, the shrines at Taif, Nakhlah and Qudayd had become essential spiritual landmarks in the emotional landscape of the Arabs.

• From A History of God (1993)

  How tiny is the area of our lives that is already secularized, compared to everything that is still governed, regulated and shaped by religion!” 43 Even if an exceptional man could have achieved the objectivity necessary to question the nature of religion and the existence of God, he would have found no support in either the philosophy or the science of his time. Until there had formed a body of coherent reasons, each of which was based on another cluster of scientific verifications, nobody could deny the existence of a God whose religion shaped and dominated the moral, emotional, aesthetic and political life of Europe. Without this support, such a denial could only be a personal whim or a passing impulse that was unworthy of serious consideration. As Febvre has shown, a vernacular language such as French lacked either the vocabulary or the syntax for skepticism. Such words as “absolute,” “relative,” “causality,” “concept” and “intuition” were not yet in use. 44 We should also remember that as yet no society in the world had eliminated religion, which was taken for granted as a fact of life. Not until the very end of the eighteenth century would a few Europeans find it possible to deny the existence of God. 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Ivan is not troubled by evolutionary theory but by the suffering of humanity in history: the death of a single child is too high a price to pay for the religious perspective that all will be well. We shall see later in this chapter that Jews would come to the same conclusion. On the other hand, it is the saintly Alyosha who admits that he does not believe in God—an admission that seems to burst from him unawares, escaping from some uncharted reach of his unconscious. Ambivalence and an obscure sense of dereliction have continued to haunt the literature of the twentieth century, with its imagery of wasteland and of humanity waiting for a Godot who never comes. There was a similar malaise and disquiet in the Muslim world, though it sprang from quite a different source. By the end of the nineteenth century, the mission civilisatrice of Europe was well under way. The French had colonized Algiers in 1830, and in 1839 the British colonized Aden. Between them they took over Tunisia (1881), Egypt (1882), the Sudan (1898) and Libya and Morocco (1912). In 1920, Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them into protectorates and mandates. This colonial project only made a more silent process of Westernization official, since Europeans had been establishing a cultural and economic hegemony during the nineteenth century in the name of modernization. Technicalized Europe had become the leading power and was taking over the world. Trading posts and consular missions had been established in Turkey and the Middle East which had undermined the traditional structure of these societies long before there was actual Western rule. This was an entirely new kind of colonization. When the Moghuls had conquered India, the Hindu population had absorbed many Muslim elements into its own culture, but eventually the indigenous culture had made a comeback. The new colonial order transformed the lives of the subject people permanently, establishing a polity of dependence. It was impossible for the colonized lands to catch up. Old institutions had been fatally undermined, and Muslim society was itself divided between those who had become “Westernized” and the “others.” Some Muslims came to accept the European assessment of them as “Orientals,” lumped indiscriminately with Hindus and Chinese. Some looked down on their more traditional countrymen. In Iran, Shah Nasiruddin (1848–96) insisted that he despised his subjects.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The passivity and craven self-effacement (which Iqbal put down to Persian influence) of the Muslims of India must be laid aside. The Muslim principle of ijtihad (independent judgment) should encourage them to be receptive to new ideas: the Koran itself demanded constant revision and self-examination. Like al-Afghani and Abduh, Iqbal tried to show that the empirical attitude, which was the key to progress, had originated in Islam and passed to the West via Muslim science and mathematics during the Middle Ages. Before the arrival of the great confessional religions during the Axial Age, the progress of humanity had been haphazard, dependent as it was upon gifted and inspired individuals. Muhammad’s prophecy was the culmination of these intuitive efforts and rendered any further revelation unnecessary. Henceforth people could rely on reason and science. Unfortunately individualism had become a new form of idolatry in the West, since it was now an end in itself. People had forgotten that all true individuality derived from God. The genius of the individual could be used to dangerous effect if allowed absolutely free rein. A breed of Supermen who regarded themselves as Gods, as envisaged by Nietzsche, was a frightening prospect: people needed the challenge of a norm that transcended the whims and notions of the moment. It was the mission of Islam to uphold the nature of true individualism against the Western corruption of the ideal. They had their Sufi ideal of the Perfect Man, the end of creation and the purpose of its existence. Unlike the Superman who saw himself as supreme and despised the rabble, the Perfect Man was characterized by his total receptivity to the Absolute and would carry the masses along with him. The present state of the world meant that progress depended upon the gifts of an elite, who could see beyond the present and carry humanity forward into the future. Eventually everybody would achieve perfect individuality in God. Iqbal’s view of the role of Islam was partial, but it was more sophisticated than many current Western attempts to vindicate Christianity at the expense of Islam. His misgivings about the Superman ideal were amply justified by events in Germany during the last years of his life. By this time, the Arab Muslims of the Middle East were no longer so confident about their ability to contain the Western threat. The year 1920, when Britain and France marched into the Middle East, became known as the am-al-nakhbah, the Year of the Disaster, a word that has connotations of cosmic catastrophe. Arabs had hoped for independence after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, and this new domination made it seem that they would never control their own destiny: there was even a rumor that the British were going to hand over Palestine to the Zionists, as though its Arab inhabitants did not exist.

• From A History of God (1993)

  During the biblical period, YHWH had eventually triumphed over the ancient goddesses of Canaan and their erotic cults. But as Kabbalists struggled to express the mystery of God, the old mythologies reasserted themselves, albeit in a disguised form. The Zohar describes Binah as the Supernal Mother, whose womb is penetrated by the “dark flame” to give birth to the seven lower sefiroth . Again Yesod, the ninth sefirah , inspires some phallic speculation: it is depicted as the channel through which the divine life pours into the universe in an act of mystical procreation. It is in the Shekinah, the tenth sefirah , however, that the ancient sexual symbolism of creation and theogony appears most clearly. In the Talmud, the Shekinah was a neutral figure: it had neither sex nor gender. In Kabbalah, however, the Shekinah becomes the female aspect of God. The Bahir (ca. 1200), one of the earliest Kabbalistic texts, had identified the Shekinah with the Gnostic figure of Sophia, the last of the divine emanations which had fallen from the Pleroma and now wandered, lost and alienated from the Godhead, through the world. The Zohar links this “exile of the Shekinah” with the fall of Adam as recounted in Genesis. It says that Adam was shown the “middle sefiroth” in the Tree of Life and the Shekinah in the Tree of Knowledge. Instead of worshipping the seven sefiroth together, he chose to venerate the Shekinah alone, sundering life from knowledge and rupturing the unity of the sefiroth . The divine life could no longer flow uninterruptedly into the world, which was isolated from its divine Source. But by observing the Torah, the community of Israel could heal the exile of the Shekinah and reunite the world to the Godhead. 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet by making Jesus the only avatar, we have seen that Christians would adopt an exclusive notion of religious truth: Jesus was the first and last Word of God to the human race, rendering future revelation unnecessary. Consequently, like Jews, they were scandalized when a prophet arose in Arabia during the seventh century who claimed to have received a direct revelation from their God and to have brought a new scripture to his people. Yet the new version of monotheism, which eventually became known as “Islam,” spread with astonishing rapidity throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Many of its enthusiastic converts in these lands (where Hellenism was not on home ground) turned with relief from Greek Trinitarianism, which expressed the mystery of God in an idiom that was alien to them, and adopted a more Semitic notion of the divine reality. 5 Unity: The God of IslamIN 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  After the schism, Greeks and Latins took divergent paths. In Greek Orthodoxy, theologia, the study of God, remained precisely that. It was confined to the contemplation of God in the essentially mystical doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. They would find the idea of a “theology of grace” or a “theology of the family” contradictions in terms: they were not particularly interested in theoretical discussions and definitions of secondary issues. The West, however, was increasingly concerned to define these questions and to form a correct opinion that was binding on everybody. The Reformation, for example, divided Christendom into yet more warring camps because Catholics and Protestants could not agree on the mechanics of how salvation happened and exactly what the Eucharist was. Western Christians continually challenged the Greeks to give their opinion on these contentious issues, but the Greeks lagged behind and, if they did reply, their answer frequently sounded rather cobbled together. They had become distrustful of rationalism, finding it an inappropriate tool for the discussion of a God who must elude concepts and logic. Metaphysics was acceptable in secular studies, but increasingly Greeks felt that it could endanger the faith. It appealed to the more talkative, busy part of the mind, whereas their theoria was not an intellectual opinion but a disciplined silence before the God who could only be known by means of religious and mystical experience. In 1082, the philosopher and humanist John Italos was tried for heresy because of his excessive use of philosophy and his Neoplatonic conception of creation. This deliberate withdrawal from philosophy happened shortly before al-Ghazzali had his breakdown in Baghdad and quit Kalam in order to become a Sufi. It is, therefore, poignant and ironic that Western Christians should have begun to get down to Falsafah at the precise moment when Greeks and Muslims were starting to lose faith in it. Plato and Aristotle had not been available in Latin during the Dark Ages, so inevitably the West had been left behind. The discovery of philosophy was stimulating and exciting. The eleventh-century theologian Anselm of Canterbury, whose views on the Incarnation we discussed in Chapter 4, seemed to think that it was possible to prove anything. His God was not Nothing but the highest being of all. Even the unbeliever could form an idea of a supreme being, which was “one nature, highest of all the things that are, alone sufficient unto itself in eternal beatitude.”28 Yet he also insisted that God could only be known in faith. This is not as paradoxical as it might appear. In his famous prayer, Anselm reflected on the words of Isaiah: “Unless you have faith, you will not understand”: I yearn to understand some measure of thy truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to have faith but I have faith in order to understand (credo ut intellegam). For I believe even this: I shall not understand unless I have faith.29