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.

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• From A History of God (1993)

  Indeed, everything other than he is pure non being and, considered from the standpoint of the being which it receives from the First Intelligence [in the Platonic scheme], has being not in itself but in regard to the face of its Maker, so that the only thing which truly is is God’s Face. 15 Instead of being an external, objectified Being whose existence can be proved rationally, God is an all-enveloping reality and the ultimate existence which cannot be perceived as we perceive the beings that depend upon it and partake of its necessary existence: we have to cultivate a special mode of seeing. Al-Ghazzali eventually returned to his teaching duties in Baghdad but never lost his conviction that it was impossible to demonstrate the existence of God by logic and rational proof. In his biographical treatise Al-Mundiqh min al-dalal (The Deliverance from Error), he argued passionately that neither Falsafah nor Kalam could satisfy somebody who was in danger of losing his faith. He himself had been brought to the brink of skepticism (safsafah) when he realized that it was absolutely impossible to prove God’s existence beyond reasonable doubt. The reality that we call “God” lay outside the realm of sense perception and logical thought, so science and metaphysics could neither prove nor disprove the wujud of al-Lah. For those who were not blessed with the special mystical or prophetic talent, al-Ghazzali devised a discipline to enable Muslims to cultivate a consciousness of God’s reality in the minutiae of daily life. He made an indelible impression on Islam. Never again would Muslims make the facile assumption that God was a being like any other, whose existence could be demonstrated scientifically or philosophically. Henceforth Muslim philosophy would become inseparable from spirituality and a more mystical discussion of God. He also had an effect on Judaism. The Spanish philosopher Joseph ibn Saddiq (d. 1143) used Ibn Sina’s proof of the existence of God but was careful to make the point that God was not simply another being—one of the things that “exist” in our usual sense of the word. If we claimed to understand God, that would mean that he was finite and imperfect. The most exact statement that we could make about God was that he was incomprehensible, utterly transcending our natural intellectual powers. We could speak about God’s activity in the world in positive terms but not about God’s essence (al-Dhat), which would always elude us.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Reformers like Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, shared the Protestant emphasis on direct experience of God and the need to appropriate revelation and make it uniquely one’s own. The Spiritual Exercises which he evolved for his first Jesuits were intended to induce a conversion, which could be a wracking, painful experience as well as an extremely joyful one. With its emphasis on self-examination and personal decision, this thirty-day retreat undertaken on a one-to-one basis with a director was not dissimilar to Puritan spirituality. The Exercises represent a systematic, highly efficient crash course in mysticism. Mystics had often evolved disciplines that were similar to those used today by psychoanalysts and it is, therefore, interesting that the Exercises are also being used today by Catholics and Anglicans to provide an alternative type of therapy.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Habad shared the Enlightenment confidence in the ability of the human mind to reach God but did so through the time-honored method of paradox and mystical concentration. Like the Besht, Zalman was convinced that anybody could attain the vision of God: Habad was not for an elite of mystics. Even if people seemed to lack spiritual talent, they could achieve enlightenment. It was hard work, however. As Rabbi Dov Baer of Lubavitch (1773–1827), Zalman’s son, explained in his Tract on Ecstasy, one had to begin with a heartbreaking perception of inadequacy. Mere cerebral contemplation is not enough: it had to be accompanied by self-analysis, study of Torah and prayer. It was painful to give up our intellectual and imaginative prejudices about the world, and most people were deeply reluctant to give up their point of view. Once they had gone beyond this egotism, the Hasid would realize that there was no reality but God. Like the Sufi who had experienced ’fana, the Hasid would achieve ecstasy. Baer explained that he would get beyond himself: “his whole being is so absorbed that nothing remains and he has no self-consciousness whatsoever.”65 The disciplines of Habad made Kabbalah a tool of psychological analysis and self-knowledge, teaching the Hasid to descend, sphere by sphere, ever more deeply into his inner world until he reached the center of himself. There he discovered the God that was the only true reality. The mind could discover God by the exercise of reason and imagination, but this would not be the objective God of the philosophes and such scientists as Newton, but a profoundly subjective reality inseparable from the self.

• From A History of God (1993)

  They did not experience the world as “good,” the work of a benevolent deity. A similar dualism and dislocation marked the doctrine of Marcion (100–165), who founded his own rival church in Rome and attracted a huge following. Jesus had said that a sound tree produced good fruit: 37 how could the world have been created by a good God when it was manifestly full of evil and pain? Marcion was also appalled by the Jewish scriptures, which seemed to describe a harsh, cruel God who exterminated whole populations in his passion for justice. He decided that it was this Jewish God, who was “lustful for war, inconstant in his attitudes and self-contradictory,” 38 who had created the world. But Jesus had revealed that another God existed, who had never been mentioned by the Jewish scriptures. This second God was “placid, mild and simply good and excellent.” 39 He was entirely different from the cruel “juridical” Creator of the world. We should, therefore, turn away from the world, which, since it was not his doing, could tell us nothing about this benevolent deity and should also reject the “Old” Testament, concentrating simply upon those New Testament books which had preserved the spirit of Jesus. The popularity of Marcion’s teachings showed that he had voiced a common anxiety. At one time it seemed as though he were about to found a separate Church. He had put his finger on something important in the Christian experience; generations of Christians have found it difficult to relate positively to the material world, and there are still a significant number who do not know what to make of the Hebrew God. The North African theologian Tertullian (160–220), however, pointed out that Marcion’s “good” God had more in common with the God of Greek philosophy than the God of the Bible. This serene deity, who had nothing to do with this flawed world, was far closer to the Unmoved Mover described by Aristotle than the Jewish God of Jesus Christ. Indeed, many people in the Greco-Roman world found the biblical God a blundering, ferocious deity who was unworthy of worship. In about 178 the pagan philosopher Celsus accused the Christians of adopting a narrow, provincial view of God. He found it appalling that the Christians should claim a special revelation of their own: God was available to all human beings, yet the Christians huddled together in a sordid little group, asserting: “God has even deserted the whole world and the motions of the heavens and disregarded the vast earth to give attention to us alone.” 40 When Christians were persecuted by the Roman authorities, they were accused of “atheism” because their conception of divinity gravely offended the Roman ethos. By failing to give the traditional gods their due, people feared that the Christians would endanger the state and overturn the fragile order. Christianity seemed a barbarous creed that ignored the achievements of civilization.

• From A History of God (1993)

  They had managed to keep the Assyrians at bay and had thus avoided the fate of the ten northern tribes, who had endured the punishments described by Moses. But in 606 BCE , the Babylonian King Nebupolassar would crush the Assyrians and begin to build his own empire. In this climate of extreme insecurity, the Deuteronomist’s policies made a great impact. Far from obeying Yahweh’s commands, the last two kings of Israel had deliberately courted disaster. Josiah instantly began a reform, acting with exemplary zeal. All the images, idols and fertility symbols were taken out of the Temple and burned. Josiah also pulled down the large effigy of Asherah and destroyed the apartments of the Temple prostitutes, who wove garments for her there. All the ancient shrines in the country, which had been enclaves of paganism, were destroyed. Henceforth the priests were only allowed to offer sacrifice to Yahweh in the purified Jerusalem Temple. The chronicler, who recorded Josiah’s reforms nearly 300 years later, gives an eloquent description of this piety of denial and suppression: [Josiah] looked on as the altars of the Baals were demolished; he tore down the altars of incense standing on them, he smashed the sacred poles and the carved and cast idols; he reduced them to dust, scattering it over the graves of those who had offered them sacrifices. He burned the bones of their priests on their altars, and so purified Judah and Jerusalem; he did the same in the towns of Manasseh, Ephraim, Simeon, and even Naphtali, and in the ravaged districts around them. He demolished the altars and the sacred poles, smashed the idols and ground them to powder, and tore down all the altars of incense throughout the land of Israel. 36 We are far from the Buddha’s serene acceptance of the deities he believed he had outgrown. This wholesale destruction springs from a hatred that is rooted in buried anxiety and fear. The reformers rewrote Israelite history. The historical books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings were revised according to the new ideology and, later, the editors of the Pentateuch added passages that gave a Deuteronomist interpretation of the Exodus myth to the older narratives of J and E. Yahweh was now the author of a holy war of extermination in Canaan. The Israelites are told that the native Canaanites must not live in their country, 37 a policy which Joshua is made to implement with unholy thoroughness: Then Joshua came and wiped out the Anakim from the highlands, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anoth, from all the highlands of Judah and all the inhabitants of Israel; he delivered them and their towns over to the ban. No more Anakim were left in Israelite territory except at Gaza, Gath and Ashod. 38 In fact we know nothing about the conquest of Canaan by Joshua and the Judges, though doubtless a good deal of blood was shed.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The notion of the divine exile also addressed that sense of separation which is the cause of so much human anxiety. The Zohar constantly defines evil as something which has become separated or which has entered into a relationship for which it is unsuited. One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves. It can then be pushed away and made monstrous and inhuman. The terrifying image of Satan in Western Christendom was such a distorted projection. The Zohar finds the root of evil in God himself: in Din or Stern Judgment, the fifth sefirah. Din is depicted as God’s left hand, Hesed (Mercy) as his right. As long as Din operates harmoniously with the divine Mercy, it is positive and beneficial. But if it breaks away and becomes separate from the other sefiroth, it becomes evil and destructive. The Zohar does not tell us how this separation came about. In the next chapter, we shall see that later Kabbalists reflected on the problem of evil, which they saw as the result of a kind of primordial “accident” that occurred in the very early stages of God’s self-revelation. Kabbalah makes little sense if interpreted literally, but its mythology proved psychologically satisfying. When disaster and tragedy engulfed Spanish Jewry during the fifteenth century, it was the Kabbalistic God which helped them to make sense of their suffering.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This also disturbed many Protestants at the time of Galileo’s trial. Neither Luther nor Calvin had condemned Copernicus, but Luther’s associate Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) rejected the idea of the earth’s motion around the sun because it was in conflict with certain, passages of the Bible. This was not just a Protestant concern. After the Council of Trent, Catholics had developed a new enthusiasm for their own Scripture: the Vulgate, St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible. In the words of the Spanish Inquisitor Leon of Castro in 1576: “Nothing may be changed that disagrees with the Latin edition of the Vulgate, be it a single period, a single little conclusion or a single clause, a single word of expression, a single syllable or one iota.”47 In the past, as we have seen, some rationalists and mystics had gone out of their way to depart from a literal reading of the Bible and the Koran in favor of a deliberately symbolic interpretation. Now Protestants and Catholics had both begun to put their faith in an entirely literal understanding of scripture. The scientific discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus might not have disturbed Ismailis, Sufis, Kabbalists or hesychasts, but they did pose problems for those Catholics and Protestants who had embraced the new literalism. How could the theory that the earth moved round the sun be reconciled with the biblical verses: “The world also is established, that it cannot be moved”; “The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down and hasteth to his place where he arose”; “He appointed the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth his going down”?48 Churchmen were highly disturbed by some of Galileo’s suggestions. If, as he said, there could be life on the moon, how could these men have descended from Adam and how had they got out of Noah’s Ark? How could the theory of the motion of the earth be squared with Christ’s ascension into heaven? Scripture said that the heavens and the earth had been created for man’s benefit. How could this be so if, as Galileo claimed, the earth was just another planet revolving around the sun? Heaven and Hell were regarded as real places, which it was difficult to locate in the Copernican system. Hell, for example, was widely believed to be situated at the center of the earth, where Dante had put it. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Jesuit scholar who was consulted on the Galileo question by the newly established Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, came down on the side of tradition: “Hell is a subterranean place distinct from the tombs.” He concluded that it must be at the center of the earth, basing his final argument on “natural reason”:

• From A History of God (1993)

  Philipp Frank, Einstein: His Life and Times (New York, 1947), pp. 189–90. 8 A God for Reformers T HE 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? It was also a period of crisis for Greeks, Jews and Muslims. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks conquered the Christian capital of Constantinople and destroyed the empire of Byzantium. Henceforth the Christians of Russia would continue the traditions and spirituality developed by the Greeks. In January 1492, the year of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World, Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada in Spain, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe: later Muslims would be expelled from the Iberian peninsula, which had been their home for 800 years. The destruction of Muslim Spain was fatal for the Jews. In March 1492, a few weeks after the conquest of Granada, the Christian monarchs gave Spanish Jews the choice of baptism or expulsion. Many of the Spanish Jews were so attached to their home that they became Christians, though some continued to practice their faith in secret: like the Moriscos , the converts from Islam, these Jewish converts were then hounded by the Inquisition because they were suspected of heresy. Some 150,000 Jews refused baptism, however, and were forcibly deported from Spain: they took refuge in Turkey, the Balkans and North Africa.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In the Low Countries, Jakob Arminius argued that this was an example of bad theology, since it spoke of God as though he were a mere human being. But Calvinists believed that God could be discussed as objectively as any other phenomenon. Like other Protestants and Catholics, they were developing a new Aristotelianism, which stressed the importance of logic and metaphysics. This was different from the Aristotelianism of St. 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)

  They find that the established rituals provide them with a link with tradition and give them a sense of security. They do not expect brilliant ideas from the sermon and are disturbed by changes in the liturgy. In rather the same way, many of the pagans of late antiquity loved to worship the ancestral gods, as generations had done before them. The old rituals gave them a sense of identity, celebrated local traditions and seemed an assurance that things would continue as they were. Civilization seemed a fragile achievement and should not be threatened by wantonly disregarding the patronal gods, who would ensure its survival. They would feel obscurely threatened if a new cult set out to abolish the faith of their fathers. Christianity, therefore, had the worst of both worlds. It lacked the venerable antiquity of Judaism and had none of the attractive rituals of paganism, which everybody could see and appreciate. It was also a potential threat, since Christians insisted that theirs was the only God and that all the other deities were delusions. Christianity seemed an irrational and eccentric movement to the Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius (70–160), a superstitio nova et prava , which was “depraved” precisely because it was “new.” 31 Educated pagans looked to philosophy, not religion, for enlightenment. Their saints and luminaries were such philosophers of antiquity as Plato, Pythagoras and Epictetus. They even saw them as “sons of God”: Plato, for example, was held to have been the son of Apollo. The philosophers had maintained a cool respect for religion but saw it as essentially different from what they were doing. They were not dried-up academics in ivory towers but men with a mission, anxious to save the souls of their contemporaries by attracting them to the disciplines of their particular school. Both Socrates and Plato had been “religious” about their philosophy, finding that their scientific and metaphysical studies had inspired them with a vision of the glory of the universe. By the first century CE , therefore, intelligent and thoughtful people turned to them for an explanation of the meaning of life, for an inspiring ideology and for ethical motivation. Christianity seemed a barbaric creed. The Christian God seemed a ferocious, primitive deity, who kept intervening irrationally in human affairs: he had nothing in common with the remote, changeless God of a philosopher like Aristotle. It was one thing to suggest that men of the caliber of Plato or Alexander the Great had been sons of a god, but a Jew who had died a disgraceful death in an obscure corner of the Roman empire was quite another matter.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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.” 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. As these radical ideas spread to the Continent, a new breed of historians began to examine church history objectively. Thus in 1699 Gottfried Arnold published his nonpartisan History of the Churches from the Beginning of the New Testament to 1688 , arguing that what was currently regarded as orthodox could not be traced back to the primitive church. Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1694–1755) deliberately separated history from theology in his magisterial Institutions of Ecclesiastical History (1726) and recorded the development of doctrine without arguing for its veracity.

• 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)

  This was hardly surprising, because they must have felt that their new wealth had “saved’ them from the perils of the nomadic life, cushioning them from the malnutrition and tribal violence that were endemic to the steppes of Arabia, where each Bedouin tribe daily faced the possibility of extinction. They now had almost enough to eat and were making Mecca an international center of trade and high finance. They felt that they had become the masters of their own fate, and some even seem to have believed that their wealth would give them a certain immortality. But Muhammad believed that this new cult of self-sufficiency ( istaqa ) would mean the disintegration of the tribe. In the old nomadic days the tribe had had to come first and the individual second: each one of its members knew that they all depended upon one another for survival. Consequently they had a duty to take care of the poor and vulnerable people of their ethnic group. Now individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm. Individuals were starting to build personal fortunes and took no heed of the weaker Qurayshis. Each of the clans, or smaller family groups of the tribe, fought one another for a share of the wealth of Mecca, and some of the least successful clans (like Muhammad’s own clan of Hashim) felt that their very survival was in jeopardy. Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh learned to put another transcendent value at the center of their lives and overcome their egotism and greed, his tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife. In the rest of Arabia the situation was also bleak. For centuries the Bedouin tribes of the regions of the Hijaz and Najd had lived in fierce competition with one another for the basic necessities of life. To help the people cultivate the communal spirit that was essential for survival, the Arabs had evolved an ideology called muruwah , which fulfilled many of the functions of religion. In the conventional sense, the Arabs had little time for religion. There was a pagan pantheon of deities and the Arabs worshipped at their shrines, but they had not developed a mythology that explained the relevance of these gods and holy places to the life of the spirit. They had no notion of an afterlife but believed instead that darh , which can be translated as “time” or “fate,” was supreme—an attitude that was probably essential in a society where the mortality rate was so high.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Like the Sufis, the Kabbalists made use of the Gnostic and Neoplatonic distinction between the essence of God and the God whom we glimpse in revelation and creation. God himself is essentially unknowable, inconceivable and impersonal. They called the hidden God En Sof, (literally, “without end”). We know nothing whatever about En Sof: he is not even mentioned in either the Bible or the Talmud. An anonymous thirteenth-century author wrote that En Sof is incapable of becoming the subject of a revelation to humanity. 54 Unlike YHWH, En Sof had no documented name; “he” is not a person. Indeed it is more accurate to refer to the Godhead as “It.” This was a radical departure from the highly personal God of the Bible and the Talmud. The Kabbalists evolved their own mythology to help them to explore a new realm of the religious consciousness.

• From A History of God (1993)

  I was a good monk, and kept my order so strictly that if ever a monk could get to heaven by monastic discipline, I was that monk. All my companions in the monastery would confirm this.… And yet my conscience would not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, “You didn’t do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.” 17 Many Christians today—Protestant as well as Catholic—will recognize this syndrome, which the Reformation could not entirely abolish. Luther’s God was characterized by his wrath. None of the saints, prophets or psalmists had been able to endure this divine anger. It was no good simply trying “to do one’s best.” Because God was eternal and omnipotent, “his fury or wrath toward self-satisfied sinners is also immeasurable and infinite.” 18 His will was past finding out. Observance of the Law of God or the rules of a religious order could not save us. Indeed, the Law could only bring accusation and terror, because it showed us the measure of our inadequacy. Instead of bringing a message of hope, the Law revealed “the wrath of God, sin, death and damnation in the sight of God.” 19 Luther’s personal breakthrough came about when he formulated his doctrine of justification. Man could not save himself. God provides everything necessary for “justification,” the restoration of a relationship between the sinner and God. God is active and humans only passive. Our “good works” and observance of the Law are not the cause of our justification but only the result. We are able to observe the precepts of religion simply because God has saved us. This was what St. Paul had meant by the phrase “justification by faith.” There was nothing new about Luther’s theory: it had been current in Europe since the early fourteenth century. But once Luther had grasped it and made it his own, he felt his anxieties fall away. The revelation that ensued “made me feel as though I had been born again, and as though I had entered through open gates into paradise itself.” 20 Yet he remained extremely pessimistic about human nature. By the year 1520 he had developed what he called his Theology of the Cross. He had taken the phrase from St. Paul, who had told his Corinthian converts that the cross of Christ had shown that “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The Wittenberg delegation stopped off not at a monastery but, perhaps tellingly, at the house of the printer Melchior Lotter." Despite the cheerful summer mood, there was an underlying menace in the Wittenbergers’ behaviour, however. Luther’s and Karlstadt’s wagons were escorted by ranks of students, armed with spears and halberds. Armed men were posted to prevent fights breaking out in the lodgings where the students stayed, while seventy-six guards stood watch daily at the castle where the debates took place.” The disputation lasted nearly three weeks, beginning on 27 June and concluding on 15 July 1519. It was held in the parlour of the castle, where a room had been especially decorated for the event. Two pulpits stood facing each other, one decorated with a tapestry featuring St George in honour of the Saxon duke, the other, St Martin. After a festive Mass in the Church of St Thomas — a new twelve-part Mass had been specially composed for the occasion — the audience adjourned to the castle where Petrus Mosellanus, the university’s professor of Greek, gave a ceremonial speech, admonishing both sides to stick to the substance of the matter and to avoid harshness in their exchanges.” The contest was not confined to the debate, however: when Luther was invited to preach by the duke of Pomerania, he attracted such large crowds that the event had to be moved from the ducal chapel to the disputation chamber. Eck felt compelled to preach three sermons in response to the attention his rival was attracting.” Appearances mattered, too. Eck, a strong, tall and vigorous man, was described by some of the humanist onlookers who wrote about the debate as a ‘soldier’ and a ‘butcher’, a ‘lion’ and a Hercules whose comportment conveyed self-confidence and ease.” He presented himself as a man of the people, a ‘peasant priest’ who loved nothing THE LEIPZIG DEBATE 133 better than to ride across the fields. He would spend the time outside the debate — discussions were held from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. — in his beloved woods, whilst his opponents sat indoors poring over the last session’s transcripts. Luther, by contrast, was painfully thin after years of mortifying the flesh. Johannes Rubius — who had been a student at Wittenberg but was a supporter of Eck, and who wrote an account of the debate — described him as ‘pale of face’; while Petrus Mosellanus wrote of Luther's ‘thin body, so exhausted by cares and study that if you look closely you can almost count all his bones’.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I told her the phone was making my face sweat, but she’d already relaunched into her plan to auction off my unemployable ass to some husband as if I were chattel. She sketched for me an artsy, wire-rimmed guy with a wardrobe of turtlenecks, a shiny car unmarred by the blurring circle of the sanding machine. Which hunk of whimsy failed to account for the fact that I’d bolt like a startled cheetah before such a man—a beast of an unknown phylum. On my last day, dropping an armload of ratty cutoffs and salt-crusted bikinis into the apartment complex’s garbage cans, I spied a thrown-out notebook and nicked it for my disheveled pages—for some reason, all unlined typing paper. I used a pen to poke holes into every margin, which seemed to take a long time, hole by hole. It was dusk when the sheets slid bumpily together and the notebook’s silver claws snapped shut. There was sweat on my upper lip. I stepped out the sliding door into the dusty odor of eucalyptus, a light wind. Over the valley of orange tile roofs, you could catch just a gray strip of sea from there. I set out walking the hills for the last time. With my ponytailed hair and the sweater tied around my neck like a sitcom coed, I looked into any undraped picture window at the families around lamplit tables, pretending they’d celebrate my homecoming at term break.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Then he pulls his hat over his ears as if to steady himself from above. He sits down hard in the dirt, looking puzzled a second. C’mon, angel puff, I say to him. He climbs up and staggers toward me. The three of us are walking toward the street when he says, Who made all this? The park? Some nice liberals, I say. No, this, he says, sweeping his upturned palm across the autumn landscape. Joan says, I believe there’s a magic force that made it. Like God? Dev said. Because it’s Dev saying it, nothing in me resists the sweetness of Joan’s saying, Like God. He grabs her hand, and the three of us stop at a crosswalk down from the church. Joan asks if I can fill in for her at Thursday night’s charity event. Our group visits a distant group to put on a meeting, swap ideas, basically mix it up. Isn’t Warren home then? she asks. The green light flashes. Dev drags us across the street. Hurry, he says. I tell Joan I don’t know the guy driving or anybody else in the car. The prospect of riding off with strangers sans Joan feels like being dragged to some hideous school dance without a date. But I’m either practicing a kind of surrender or following instructions my inner outlaw would never have gone for. She hands me a slip of paper with directions, saying, You show up at the post office in Lexington. Be there by six. James’ll show up. He drives a silver Benz. He’s a lawyer. David will be there—you know David? Sounds like directives for a drug deal, I say. We’re coming up on the white church, light spilling down its steps, where a few down-jacketed humans stand in small groups. About the Thursday meeting, Joan says. Anybody with at least nine months can speak. You just sit and look pretty. Try to identify with whoever’s talking without comparing yourself. And confide in at least one person. Get some advice other than mine. You promise none of these guys is an ax murderer? I didn’t say that. Unsupervised, I could go to that distant group and spontaneously pull my dress over my head. If you do, just yell out, My higher power told me to do that . Climbing the stairs, Dev says, This is a church? Once inside, he beelines for the cookies, and I follow with my bag of coloring books and toys. (In daycare, Dev’ll introduce himself: My name is Dev, and I’m an alcoholic …) We settle into two folding chairs close to the door. People are starting to end conversations and sit. A guy comes up and with extreme courtesy says, Excuse me. There are no children at this meeting. For a minute I sag in my midsection. I don’t have any child care. Sorry, he says, next time get a sitter. Being here is life or death for me, I say.

• From Satyricon (1)

  It was about this time that the Oppian law came up for repeal. The stipulations of this law were as follows: No woman should have in her dress above half an ounce of gold, nor wear a garment of different colors, nor ride in a carriage in the city or in any town, or within a mile of it, unless upon occasion of a public sacrifice. This sumptuary law was passed during the public distress consequent upon Hannibal’s invasion of Italy. It was repealed eighteen years afterward, upon petition of the Roman ladies, though strenuously opposed by Cato (Livy 34, 1; Tacitus, Annales, 3, 33). The increase of wealth among the Romans, the spoils wrung from their victims as a portion of the price of defeat, the contact of the legions with the softer, more civilized, more sensuous races of Greece and Asia Minor, laid the foundations upon which the social evil was to rise above the city of the seven hills, and finally crush her. In the character of the Roman there was but little of tenderness. The well-being of the state caused him his keenest anxiety. One of the laws of the twelve tables, the “Coelebes Prohibito,” compelled the citizen of manly vigor to satisfy the promptings of nature in the arms of a lawful wife, and the tax on bachelors is as ancient as the times of Furius Camillus. “There was an ancient law among the Romans,” says Dion Cassius, lib. xliii, “which forbade bachelors, after the age of twenty-five, to enjoy equal political rights with married men. The old Romans had passed this law in hope that, in this way, the city of Rome, and the Provinces of the Roman Empire as well, might be insured an abundant population.” The increase, under the Emperors, of the number of laws dealing with sex is an accurate mirror of conditions as they altered and grew worse. The “Jus Trium Librorum,” under the empire, a privilege enjoyed by those who had three legitimate children, consisting, as it did, of permission to fill a public office before the twenty-fifth year of one’s age, and in freedom from personal burdens, must have had its origin in the grave apprehensions for the future, felt by those in power. The fact that this right was sometimes conferred upon those who were not legally entitled to benefit by it, makes no difference in this inference. Scions of patrician families imbibed their lessons from the skilled voluptuaries of Greece and the Levant and in their intrigues with the wantons of those climes, they learned to lavish wealth as a fine art. Upon their return to Rome they were but ill-pleased with the standard of entertainment offered by the ruder and less sophisticated native talent; they imported Greek and Syrian mistresses. ‘Wealth increased, its message sped in every direction, and the corruption of the world was drawn into Italy as by a load-stone.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But Luther heard from all sides that it was the sacramentarian pamphlets that were selling and setting the intellectual agenda. Those loyal to Luther — Amsdorf, Bugenhagen, his Nuremberg friend Andreas Osiander — were men with personal ties to him; he was therefore overjoyed when, without any urging, ‘the very learned Swabians’ took up the cause and wrote ‘excellently’ against Zwingli and Oecolampa- dius.** For the first time, however, Luther and his supporters were on the defensive, with Luther no longer the first to develop new and intellectually exciting positions. As a result, his mood became increasingly apocalyptic, and his tone to correspondents more and more strident. In early January 1527 he worried that even his old friend Nikolaus Hausmann might be falling for the sacramentarians. When reassured by Hausmann, Luther replied that he had not credited the rumour, ‘for I always believed this about you’, going on to ask for his friend’s prayer that God might guide his pen against Satan.” Even a rumour that the town council of Memmingen had decided to abolish Communion as a compulsory sacrament was enough to make Luther pick up his pen and hector the councillors: ‘Oh dear lords, act before matters become worse! The Devil, let in this far, will not rest until he has made things yet worse. Be warned, watch out, dear friends. It is time, it is an emergency.” Luther’s relief when Michael Stifel in Tollet, a long-standing corres- pondent, turned out to have remained ‘constant in faith’ leaps off the page. Luther goes on to tell him that it is because of ‘God’s anger’ that so many are persuaded by the ‘absurd and childish’ arguments of those who say that since Christ is at God’s right hand, he cannot 312 MARTIN LUTHER be in the bread.” In a letter to Johann Hess in Silesia in 1526, he mourned the loss of Crautwald and Schwenckfeld to ‘these evils’ and warned that the fight with the dragon of the Apocalypse was at hand.*° In another letter to Thomas Neuenhagen in Eisenach, whom he hardly knew, Luther admonished him not to follow the Eisenach preacher Jacob Strauss. “You should serve Christ, he has served Satan’, he wrote.”