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 Martin Luther (2016)

  Beyond it, other reformers emerged who would take his Reformation in different directions. In the Wartburg, Luther began to suffer from severe constipation, which had first affected him at Worms. As he wrote to Spalatin, “the Lord strikes me in my posterior with serious pain.” The pains were his own special “relic of the Cross,” he quipped. 9 He went for four, sometimes even six days without a bowel movement and the excrement was so hard that it caused bleeding. “Now I sit in pain like a woman in childbirth, ripped up, bloody and I will have little rest tonight,” he wrote. 10 Just as he was in isolation from the outside world, so his body also seemed sealed off, unable to “flow”—the process humoral medicine considered fundamental to physical health. The condition lasted until the autumn and must have added to Luther’s sense of physical discomfort, with a different diet, a sedentary lifestyle, and clothing that constantly constricted the body. But perhaps, after the fevered rush of the period leading up to the Diet of Worms, the constipation reflected his own turning inward, entering a period of inactivity as essential as it was difficult, before he could become creative again. 11 He also experienced attacks of the Devil. The story that was to become famous, of Luther throwing an inkpot at the Devil—the stain still visible today on the wall of his castle room—almost certainly rests on a misreading of Luther’s remark that he would fight the Devil with ink: that is, the printed word. But there was a new urgency about the Devil’s attacks, partly because without his friends and colleagues to talk to, Luther’s inner world loomed larger. “In this leisurely solitude” he was “exposed to a thousand devils,” he wrote. In one sense he was a monk because he was alone, he told Spalatin, and yet “I am not actually a monk [that is, a hermit, alone], because I have many evil and astute demons with me; they ‘amuse’ me, as one says, but in a disturbing way.” 12 What were these attacks of the Devil about? During his time in the Wartburg, Luther had to come to terms with his body in new ways. “I sit here like a fool and hardened in leisure, pray little, do not sigh for the church of God, yet burn in a big fire of my untamed body. In short I should be ardent in spirit, but I am ardent in the flesh, in lust, laziness, leisure and sleepiness.” 13 It was not just constipation that made him painfully aware of the flesh; nor was Luther describing sexual lust alone.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  To Luther, this merely showed that there was not one, but five or six different sects, and for him this was proof that “they would soon perish.” 15 It was not obvious, however, that the Lutherans were winning. They certainly published more, and in more places. And they had censorship on their side. In Leipzig and Erfurt, almost nothing was published that deviated from the Lutheran line; in Nuremberg and Basle, Karlstadt’s works on the sacrament were banned, with Nuremberg prohibiting Zwingli’s works for good measure. 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 Oecolampadius. 16 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 rumor, “for I always believed this about you,” going on to ask for his friend’s prayer that God might guide his pen against Satan. 17 Even a rumor 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 councilors: “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.” 18 Luther’s relief when Michael Stifel in Tollet, a long-standing correspondent, 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 be in the bread. 19 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. 20 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. 21 Shortly afterward, he wrote to Nikolaus Hausmann that the heresies were Satan’s “ragings,” for “the Last Days are at the door.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  For reformers like Luther, who insisted that the Word of God must be the sole religious authority, it was not easy to counter beliefs that derived so firmly from the letter of Scripture. Luther’s argument that godparents could make profession of faith on behalf of the infant had no basis in the Gospels, and instead rested on Church tradition—this from the man who at Worms rejected any argument derived from a nonscriptural source. On the whole, though, he did not spill much ink refuting Anabaptism itself, perhaps because he felt uncomfortable about his argument, perhaps because the prime concern was fighting the sacramentarians. In 1528 he wrote a pamphlet in the form of a letter to two pastors who had asked for help refuting Anabaptism. Written at speed, its argument is contradictory, mainly claiming that the Anabaptists took a spiritualist approach to baptism. The authoritative Lutheran tract was written by Justus Menius in 1530, with Luther merely supplying an approving preface.10 But the encounter with Anabaptism was important because it highlights Luther’s thought about the role of baptism and the nature of the Church, as he set about establishing the Church in Saxony. Baptism raised the fundamental question of who was a member: everyone in the community, or a minority, those who had been saved. Luther wanted an inclusive Church, with universal infant baptism, yet in his gloomier moments, he also thought that the true Church of genuine Christians was invisible and comprised only a handful of souls. Infant baptism cemented that universal membership of the Church and it aligned the community with the congregation: Everyone who was baptized automatically belonged to it. Baptism and the Eucharist were the only two of the seven Catholic sacraments that Luther regarded as scriptural; he remained unsure about the status of confession. A conservative, he made few changes to the rite because he shared much of the Catholic view of it. He believed deeply that baptism initiated the struggle against the Devil, and it is striking how often he referred to baptism when writing about Satan. Baptism is the promise made to us by God, and faith is not required to merit it: This was the deeper reason why he rejected Anabaptism. Luther’s theology shared nothing of the later Protestant emphasis on the experience of “being saved,” with which his insistence on “faith alone” is so often confused. This also gave secular authority a role in regulating the external parameters of the Church and underpinned the alliance of ecclesiastical and political authority. Rejecting infant baptism would have meant disestablishing the Church and removing the partnership with the state; it was something that Luther would never contemplate giving up.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It represents a widespread disappointment, alienation, anxiety, and rage that no government can safely ignore. So far, efforts to deal with fundamentalism have not been very successful; what lessons can we learn from the past that will help us to deal more creatively in the future with the fears that fundamentalism enshrines? * This became even more evident in the summer of 1999, when Iranian students came out onto the streets to demand more democracy and an Islamic government that is not impeded by reactionary ulema . NOTES I ntroduction 1. Abdel Salam Sidahared and Anonshiravan Ehteshani (eds.) Islamic Fundamentalism (Boulder, Colo, 1996), 4. 2. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, “Conclusion: An Interim Report on a Hypothetical Family,” Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago and London, 1991), 814–42. 3. Johannes Sloek, Devotional Language (trans. Henrik Mossin; Berlin and New York, 1996), 53–96. 4. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (trans. Rosemary Sheed; London, 1958), 453–55. 5. Sloek, Devotional Language , 75–76. 6. Ibid., 73–74; Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past (London, 1999), 15–33. 7. Sloek, Devotional Language , 50–52, 68–71. 8. Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (London, 1988; New York and London, 1991), 3–75, 147–274. 9. Sloek, Devotional Language , 134. 1. J ews: T he P recursors ( 1482–1700 ) 1. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (London, 1987), 229; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics. I: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton, N.J., 1989), 17–18. 2. Johnson, A History of the Jews , 230; Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World 1100–1350 (trans. Janet Sondheimer; London, 1962), 318. 3. Yovel, The Marrano of Reason , 17. 4. Johnson, A History of the Jews , 217–25. 5. Ibid., 217–25; Haim Maccoby, Judaism on Trial: Jewish Christian Debates in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1982); Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial: The Inquisition in Ciudad Real (Jerusalem, 1981), 3–6. 6. Johnson, A History of the Jews , 225–29. 7. Ibid., 230–31. 8. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (London, 1955), 246–49. 9. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, The Mystical Messiah (London and Princeton, N.J., 1973), 118–19. 10. Ibid., 19. 11. Ibid., 30–45; Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism , 245–80; Gershom Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism,” in Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, 1971), 43–48. 12. Johannes Sloek, Devotional Language (trans. Henrik Mossin; Berlin and New York, 1996), 73–76. 13. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi , 24. 14. Ibid., 23–25; R. J. Werblowsky, “Messianism in Jewish History,” in Marc Saperstein (ed.), Essential Papers in Messianic Movements in Jewish History (New York and London, 1992), 48. 15. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi , 37–42. 16. Richard L. Rubinstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis, Ind., 1966). 17. R. J. Wenlowsky, “The Safed Revival and Its Aftermath,” in Arthur Green (ed.), Jewish Spirituality , 2 vols. (London, 1986, 1989), II, 15–19. 18. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1965), 150. 19.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  So far, efforts to deal with fundamentalism have not been very successful; what lessons can we learn from the past that will help us to deal more creatively in the future with the fears that fundamentalism enshrines? *This became even more evident in the summer of 1999, when Iranian students came out onto the streets to demand more democracy and an Islamic government that is not impeded by reactionary ulema. Afterword WE CANNOT BE RELIGIOUS in the same way as our ancestors in the premodern conservative world, when the myths and rituals of faith helped people to accept limitations that were essential to agrarian civilization. We are now oriented to the future, and those of us who have been shaped by the rationalism of the modern world cannot easily understand the old forms of spirituality. We are not unlike Newton, one of the first people in the Western world to be wholly imbued by the scientific spirit, who found it impossible to understand mythology. However hard we try to embrace conventional religion, we have a natural tendency to see truth as factual, historical, and empirical. Many have become convinced that if faith is to be taken seriously, its myths must be shown to be historical and capable of working practically with all the efficiency that modernity expects. An increasing number of people, especially in Western Europe, which has experienced such tragedy during the twentieth century, have rejected religion. For those who see reason as providing the sole path to truth, this is a principled and honest position. As scientists would be the first to insist, rational logos cannot address questions of ultimate meaning that lie beyond the reach of empirical inquiry. Confronted with the genocidal horrors of our century, reason has nothing to say. Hence, there is a void at the heart of modern culture, which Western people experienced at an early stage of their scientific revolution. Pascal recoiled in dread from the emptiness of the cosmos; Descartes saw the human being as the sole living denizen of an inert universe; Hobbes imagined God retreating from the world, and Nietzsche declared that God was dead: humanity had lost its orientation and was hurtling toward an infinite nothingness. But others have felt emancipated by the loss of faith, and liberated from the restrictions it had always imposed. Sartre, who acknowledged the God-shaped hole in modern consciousness, argued that it was still our duty to reject deity, which negated our freedom. Albert Camus (1913–60) believed that rejecting God would enable men and women to concentrate all their attention and love upon humankind. Others put their faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment, looking forward to a future in which human beings will become more rational and tolerant; they venerate the sacred liberty of the individual instead of a distant, imaginary God.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Jafar as-Sadiq effectively separated religion from politics, privatizing faith and confining it to the personal realm. He did this to protect religion and enable it to survive in a world that seemed essentially hostile to it. This secularization policy sprang from a profoundly spiritual impulse. Shiis knew that it could be dangerous to mix religion and politics. A century later, this became tragically evident. In 836, the Abbasid caliphs moved their capital to Samarra, some sixty miles south of Baghdad. By this date, Abbasid power was disintegrating, and though the caliph remained the nominal ruler of the whole Muslim world, real authority lay with the local amirs and chieftains throughout the far-flung empire. The caliphs felt that in these disturbed times they could not permit the Imams, the descendants of the Prophet, to remain at large, and in 848, Caliph al-Mutawakkil summoned the Tenth Imam, Ali al-Hadi, from Medina to Samarra, where he was placed under house arrest. He and his son, the Eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari, could only maintain contact with the Shiah by means of an agent (wakil) who lived in al-Karkh, the mercantile quarter of Baghdad, practicing a trade to deflect the attention of the Abbasid authorities. 30 In 874, the Eleventh Imam died, probably poisoned at the behest of the caliph. He had been kept in such strict seclusion that Shiis knew very little about him. Did he have a son? If not, what would happen to the succession? Had the line died out, and, if so, did this mean that the Shiah was deprived of mystical guidance? Speculation ran rife, but the most popular theory insisted that Hasan al-Askari indeed had a son, Abu al-Qasim Muhammad, the Twelfth Imam, who had gone into hiding to save his life. It was an attractive solution, because it suggested that nothing had changed. The last two Imams had been virtually inaccessible. Now the Hidden Imam would continue to make contact with the people through his wakil, Uthman al-Amri, who would dispense spiritual advice, collect the zakat alms, interpret the scriptures, and deliver legal judgments. But this solution had a limited life span. As time passed beyond the point where the Twelfth Imam seemed likely to be still alive, Shiis became anxious once again, until, in 934, the current agent, Ali ibn Muhammad as-Samarri, brought the Shiah a message from the Hidden Imam. He had not died, but had been miraculously concealed by God; he would return one day shortly before the Last Judgment to inaugurate a reign of justice. He was still the infallible guide of the Shiah and the only legitimate ruler of the ummah, but he would no longer be able to commune with the faithful through agents, or have any direct contact with them. Shiis should not expect his speedy return. They would only see him again “after a long time has passed and the earth has become filled with tyranny.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Krochmal, for example, was an observant Jew who was faithful to the old rites that the Reformers were abolishing. Frankel and Zunz both believed that there was great danger in such wholesale abolition of tradition. In 1849, Zunz wrote an article that presented Jewish rituals as outer signs of fundamental truths. Dietary laws and the wearing of phylacteries had, over the centuries, become an essential part of the Jewish experience; without these rites, Judaism would degenerate into a system of abstract doctrines. Zunz could appreciate the crucial importance of cult, which alone made the myths and beliefs of religion comprehensible. Frankel could also see the importance of ritual in helping people to create the correct spiritual attitudes. He feared that the Reformers were becoming so rational that they were losing touch with their feelings. Reason alone could not satisfy the emotions or produce the joy and delight that traditional Judaism, at its best, had always been able to inspire. It was wrong to abolish the complex, ancient rites of Yom Kippur or to omit all mention of a messianic return to Zion, because these images had shaped Jewish consciousness and helped Jews to cultivate a sense of awe and find hope in intolerable circumstances. 25 Some change was certainly necessary, but the Reformers often seemed insensitive to the role of emotion in worship. Zunz and Frankel were alert to the essentially mythical component of religion and did not subscribe wholly to the modern tendency to see reason alone as the gateway to truth. Geiger, for his part, was an out-and-out rationalist, and in favor of sweeping reforms. Yet, over the years, Reform Jews have recognized the wisdom of Zunz’s and Frankel’s concerns, and have reinstated some of the traditional practices, finding that without an emotive, mystical element, faith and worship lose their soul. Both the Reformers and the scholars of the Science of Judaism were preoccupied with the survival of their religion in a world that seemed, however benevolently, bent on destroying it. As they watched their fellow Jews rushing to the baptismal font, they were deeply concerned for the future of Judaism and were desperate to find ways of ensuring that it continued to exist. We shall find that many religious people in the modern world have shared this anxiety. In all three of the monotheistic faiths, there has been recurrent alarm that the traditional faith is in deadly danger. The dread of annihilation is one of the most fundamental of human terrors, and many of the religious movements that have arisen in the modern world have sprung from this fear of extinction. As the secular spirit took hold and as the prevailing rationalism became more hostile to faith, religious people became increasingly defensive and their spirituality more embattled. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, traditional Jews—whom the Reformers called Altglaubigen, “old believers”—had certainly begun to feel beleaguered.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he inaugurated a new phase in the relations of East and West. His plan was to establish a base in Suez, whence he could harass Britain’s sea-lanes to India and also, perhaps, attack the Ottoman empire from Syria. This meant that Egypt and Palestine became a theater in the war for world domination between England and France. It was a European power game, but Napoleon presented himself to the Egyptians as the bearer of progress and enlightenment. After he defeated the Mamluk cavalry in the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21, 1798, he issued a proclamation in Arabic in which he promised to liberate Egypt from foreign rule. For centuries, Mamluks from Circassia and Georgia had exploited the people of Egypt, but now this tyranny was at an end. He was no latter-day Crusader, he assured the ulema, whom he knew to be the representatives of the indigenous Egyptians. Anybody who believed that he had come to destroy their religion should be assured that I have come to restore your rights, which have been invaded by usurpers—that I adore God more than the Mamelukes and that I respect the Prophet Muhammad and the Noble Koran. Tell them that all men are equal before God—that intelligence, virtue, and science, are the only distinctions between them. 30 But this liberation and science had come with a modern army. The Egyptians had just watched this extraordinary fighting machine inflict a devastating defeat upon the Mamluks; only ten French soldiers had been killed and thirty wounded, whereas the Mamluks had lost over two thousand men, four hundred camels, and fifty guns. 31 This liberation obviously had an aggressive edge, as did the modern scientific Institut d’Egypte, whose careful researches into the history of the region had enabled Napoleon to make his proclamation in Arabic and to be reasonably conversant with the ideals and institutions of Islam. Scholarship and science had become a means of promoting European interests in the Middle East and subjecting its peoples to French rule. The ulema were not impressed. “All this is nothing but deceit and trickery, they said, to entice us. Bonaparte is nothing but a Christian, son of a Christian.” 32 They were perturbed by the prospect of infidel rule. The Koran taught that as long as men and women organized their societies according to God’s will, they could not fail, yet now the Islamic forces had been soundly defeated by a foreign power. Al-Jabarti, a sheikh of the Azhar madrasah, saw the invasion as the beginning of major battles; formidable happenings; calamitous occurrences; terrible catastrophes; the multiplication of evils, ... the disruption of time; the inversion of the natural order; the bouleversement of manmade conventions. 33 He was experiencing that sense of the world turned upside down which has so often accompanied the onset of modernization. For all its inflated rhetoric, al-Jabarti’s dismay was not entirely misplaced.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But a religious reform could not of itself modernize a country and stave off the Western threat. Unless Egypt could industrialize, develop a vibrant modern economy, and transcend the limitations of agrarian civilization, no ideology could bring the country to the same level as Europe. In the West, the modern ideals of autonomy, democracy, intellectual freedom, and toleration had been as much a product of the economy as of the philosophers and political scientists. Events would shortly prove that no matter how free and modern Egyptians might feel themselves to be, their economic weakness would make them politically vulnerable and dependent upon the West, and this humiliating subservience would make it even harder for them to cultivate a truly modern spirit. But despite his hunger for modernity, Afghani, like the Iranian intellectuals with whom he was in touch, still belonged in many respects to the old world. He was a personally devout Muslim, who prayed, observed Islamic rituals, and lived according to Islamic law. 57 He practiced the mysticism of Mulla Sadra, whose vision of evolutionary change was deeply appealing to him. He also taught his disciples the esoteric lore of Falsafah, and often argued like a medieval philosopher. Like other religious thinkers of this period, he tried to prove that his faith was rational and scientific. He pointed out that the Koran taught Muslims to take nothing on trust and to demand proof; it was, therefore, admirably suited to the modern world. Indeed, Afghani went so far as to argue that Islam was identical with modern scientific rationalism, that the Law that the Prophet had received was at one with the laws of Nature, and that all the doctrines of Islam could be demonstrated by logic and natural reason. 58 This was patently false. Like any traditional faith, Islam went beyond the reach of logos and depended upon prophetic and mystical insight; and, indeed, that was how Afghani himself experienced religion. In another mood, he could write eloquently of the limitations of science, which “however beautiful, ... does not completely satisfy humanity, which thirsts for the ideal and which likes to exist in dark and distant regions that the philosophers and the scholars can neither perceive nor explore.” 59 Like the Iranian intellectuals, Afghani still had a foot in the old world at the same time as he aspired to the new. He wanted his faith to be wholly rational, but, like any mystic of the conservative period, he knew in his heart that the mythos of his religion gave humanity insights that science could not. This inconsistency was, perhaps, inevitable, because Afghani was a transitional figure. But it also sprang from his anxiety. Time was running out, and Afghani could not wait to iron out all the contradictions in his thought. Muslims must make themselves more rational.

• From The Lover (1984)

  She looks at him. Asks him who he is. He says he’s just back from Paris where he was a student, that he lives in Sadec too, on this same river, the big house with the big terraces with blue-tiled balustrades. She asks him what he is. He says he’s Chinese, that his family’s from North China, from Fushun. Will you allow me to drive you where you want to go in Saigon? She says she will. He tells the chauffeur to get the girl’s luggage off the bus and put it in the black car. Chinese. He belongs to the small group of financiers of Chinese origin who own all the working-class housing in the colony. He’s the one who was crossing the Mekong that day in the direction of Saigon. • • • She gets into the black car. The door shuts. A barely discernible distress suddenly seizes her, a weariness, the light over the river dims, but only slightly. Everywhere, too, there’s a very slight deafness, or fog. Never again shall I travel in a native bus. From now on I’ll have a limousine to take me to the high school and back from there to the boarding school. I shall dine in the most elegant places in town. And I’ll always have regrets for everything I do, everything I’ve gained, everything I’ve lost, good and bad, the bus, the bus driver I used to laugh with, the old women chewing betel in the back seats, the children on the luggage racks, the family in Sadec, the awfulness of the family in Sadec, its inspired silence. He talked. Said he missed Paris, the marvelous girls there, the riotous living, the binges, ooh là là, the Coupole, the Rotonde, personally I prefer the Rotonde, the nightclubs, the “wonderful” life he’d led for two years. She listened, watching out for anything to do with his wealth, for indications as to how many millions he had. He went on. His own mother was dead, he was an only child. All he had left was his father, the one who owned the money. But you know how it is, for the last ten years he’s been sitting staring at the river, glued to his opium pipe, he manages his money from his little iron cot. She says she sees. He won’t let his son marry the little white whore from Sadec. The image starts long before he’s come up to the white child by the rails, it starts when he got out of the black car, when he began to approach her, and when she knew, knew he was afraid.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was a very different story in Europe. There the chief ideologies taking people into the modern world were not religious but secularist, and, increasingly, people’s attention focused on this world rather than the next. This was clear in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who brought the transcendent God down to earth and made it human. Fulfillment was to be found in the mundane, not in the supernatural. In Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), the universal Spirit could only achieve its full potential if it immersed itself in the limiting conditions of space and time; it was most fully realized in the human mind. So too, human beings had to give up the old idea of a transcendent God in order to understand that they were themselves divine. The myth, a new version of the Christian doctrine of incarnation, can also be seen as a cure for the alienation from the world experienced by many modern people. It was an attempt to resacralize a world that had been emptied of the divine, and to enhance the vision of the human mind whose powers had seemed so curtailed in the philosophy of Descartes and Kant. But above all, Hegel’s myth expressed the forward-thrusting dynamic of modernity. There was no harking back to a Golden Age; Hegel’s world was continually re-creating itself. Instead of the old conservative conviction that everything had already been said, Hegel envisaged a dialectical process in which human beings were constantly engaged in the destruction of past ideas that had once been sacred and incontrovertible. In this dialectic, every state of being inevitably brings forth its opposite; these opposites clash and are integrated and fulfilled in a more advanced synthesis; then the whole process begins again. In this vision, there was to be no return to fundamentals, but a continuous evolution toward entirely new and unprecedented truth. Hegel’s philosophy expressed the driving optimism of the modern age, which had now irrevocably left the conservative spirit behind. But some could not see why Hegel should even have bothered with God. Religion and mythology were beginning to be viewed by some Europeans as not only outmoded but positively harmful. Instead of curing our sense of alienation, they were thought to compound it. By setting up God as the antithesis of humanity, Hegel’s pupil Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued, religion was bringing about “the disuniting of man from himself.… God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak.”88 For Karl Marx (1818–83), religion was a symptom of a sick society, an opiate that made the diseased social system bearable and removed the will to find a cure by directing attention away from this world to the next.89

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Kook was anxious lest Zionism become equally oppressive and the Jewish state a dangerous idolatry. But he was also convinced that any attempt to separate a Jewish state from God was doomed, because Jews were existentially connected to the divine, whether they knew it or not. When he arrived in Palestine, one of Kook’s first duties was to deliver a eulogy in honor of Theodor Herzl, who had died tragically young. To the fury of the Orthodox community in Palestine, who saw Zionism as inherently evil, Kook presented Herzl as the Messiah of the House of Joseph, a doomed Redeemer in popular Jewish eschatology who was expected to arrive at the start of the messianic era to fight the enemies of the Jews and would die at the gates of Jerusalem. His campaign would, however, have paved the way for the final Messiah of the House of David, who would bring Redemption. This was how Kook saw Herzl. Many of his achievements had been constructive, but insofar as he had tried to eliminate religion from his ideology, his work had been damaging. It was, like the efforts of the Josephic Messiah, destined to fail. But Kook also argued that the Orthodox who opposed Zionism were equally destructive; by making themselves “an enemy of material change,” they had made the Jewish people weak. 60 Religious and secularist Jews needed one another; neither could exist without the other. This recast the old conservative vision. In the premodern world, religion and reason had occupied separate but complementary spheres. Both had been necessary and each would be the poorer without the other. Kook was a Kabbalist, inspired by the mythology and mysticism of the conservative period. But, like some of the other reformers we have considered, he was modern in his conviction that change was now the law of life and that it was essential to throw off the constraints of agrarian culture, however painful this might be. He believed that the young Zionist settlers would make Jews move forward and— ultimately—bring Redemption. Their ruthlessly pragmatic ideology was the logos that human beings needed in order to survive and function effectively in this world. But unless this was linked creatively to the mythos of Judaism, it would lose its meaning and, cut off from the source of life, would wither away. When Kook arrived in Palestine, he met these young secularists for the first time. A few years earlier, their rejection of religion had appalled him, but when he saw them going about their work in the Holy Land he was forced to revise his ideas.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  History also shows that attempts to suppress fundamentalism simply make it more extreme. It was clear that we had to learn how to decode the fundamentalist imagery so that we could understand what fundamentalists in all three faiths were trying to express, because these movements expressed an anxiety and disquiet that no society could safely ignore. Since September 11, it has become more urgent than ever to comprehend the fundamentalist movements that in many parts of the world are becoming more extreme. In the United States, it seems that some members of the Christian Right have gone beyond the fundamentalism of the 1970s. In the last chapter of this book, I discussed the movements of Reconstructionism and Christian Identity, which have left Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority far behind. These are a form of post-fundamentalism, which is more frightening, intransigent, and extreme. In the same way, the hijackers seem to represent some sinister new development in Islamic fundamentalism. While bin Laden speaks in the traditional fundamentalist idiom of Sayyid Qutb, the hijackers, whom bin Laden, in Qutbian terms has described as “vanguard,” could herald a wholly new type of fundamentalism, something that we have not seen before. Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker who was driving the first plane, was a near-alcoholic and was drinking vodka before he boarded the aircraft. Ziad Jarrahi, the alleged Lebanese hijacker of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, was also a drinker and frequented the nightclubs of Hamburg. The hijackers also enjoyed the clubs and women of Las Vegas. As this information emerged, I became aware that something very odd was happening. Muslims are forbidden by their religion to drink alcohol. The idea that a Muslim martyr could go to meet God with vodka on his breath is as bizarre a thought as that of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish fundamentalist who gunned down twenty-nine Muslims in the Great Mosque of Hebron in 1994 and was himself killed during the attack, enjoying a breakfast of bacon and eggs before carrying out the action. No devout Muslim, or Jew, would dream of indulging in this kind of behavior. Most fundamentalists live strictly orthodox lives, and alcohol, nightclubs, and loose women are aspects of the jahiliyyah, the ignorant, godless barbarism that Muslim fundamentalists, following Sayyid Qutb’s instructions, have vowed not only to abjure but also to eliminate. The hijackers seem to have gone out of their way not only to disobey the basic laws of the religion they have vowed to defend but to also trample on the principles that motivate the traditional fundamentalist. In these pages, I have described various antinomian movements in which people deliberately violate the most sacred norms in times of acute distress and change. These include the seventeenth-century Messiah figure, Shabbetai Zevi, his disciple Jakob Frank, and the revolutionary prophets of seventeenth- century England, who all advocated a form of “holy sin.” The times were so desperate that something entirely new was required.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  96 There were three factors that contributed to this new growth and confidence during the 1960s and 1970s. First was the development of the South. Hitherto, fundamentalism had been a product of the big northern cities. The South was still predominantly agrarian. Liberal Christianity had made little progress in the churches, and there had, therefore, been no need for “fundamentalists” to fight against the new ideas and the Social Gospel. But during the 1960s, the South began to modernize. There was an influx of people from the North. They were looking for employment in the oil industry and the new technical and aerospace projects located there. The South had begun to experience the same kind of rapid industrialization and urbanization as the North had a century earlier. During the 1930s, two-thirds of southerners had lived in the country. By 1960, less than half lived there. The South was beginning to acquire a higher national profile. In 1976, Jimmy Carter became the first southerner since the Civil War to be elected to the presidency; he was succeeded in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, the governor of California. But though southerners welcomed their new preeminence, they found their world completely changed. The immigrants from the North brought modern and liberal ideas with them. Not all were Protestants or even Christians. Values and beliefs that had hitherto been taken for granted now had to be defended. In the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations especially, conservative Protestants were as ripe for a fundamentalist movement as their northern co-religionists had been at the turn of the century, and for all the same reasons. 97 The people of the new South, who felt uprooted and alienated from the society in which they lived, were often newcomers from the rural districts to the rapidly expanding cities. Many country people started to send their children to college and on the campus they had to encounter the new sixties liberalism. They also witnessed the loss of faith suffered by many of their fellow students. 98 Parents felt alienated and alarmed by children who were adopting apparently Godless ideas. In the churches, they encountered even more shocking notions, brought from the North by the new arrivals. Increasingly, people turned to the fundamentalist churches, and especially to the “electric” churches of the airwaves. Powerful new televangelists built empires during this period. The potential converts to fundamentalism lived along the southern rim, starting in Virginia Beach, where Pat Robertson had established his Christian Broadcasting Network and the immensely popular “700 Club.” Next came Lynchburg, Virginia, where Jerry Falwell had begun his television ministry in 1956; in Charlotte, North Carolina, was the ministry of the exuberant Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and the “Bible-Belt” ended in southern California, an area with a long tradition of political and religious conservatism. 99 The second factor that led many traditionalists to become fundamentalists was the rapid expansion of state power in the United States after the Second World War.

• From The Lover (1984)

  And I, two years after the war, I was a member of the French Communist party. The parallel is complete and absolute. The two things are the same, the same pity, the same call for help, the same lack of judgment, the same superstition if you like, that consists in believing in a political solution to the personal problem. She too, Betty Fernandez, looked out at the empty streets of the German occupation, looked at Paris, at the squares of catalpas in flower, like the other woman, Marie-Claude Carpenter. Was “at home” certain days, like her. He drives her back to the boarding school in the black limousine. Stops just short of the entrance so that no one sees him. It’s at night. She gets out, runs off, doesn’t turn to look at him. As soon as she’s inside the door she sees the lights are still on in the big playground. As soon as she turns out of the corridor she sees her, waiting for her, worried already, erect, unsmiling. She asks, Where’ve you been? She says, I just didn’t come back here to sleep. She doesn’t say why and Hélène Lagonelle doesn’t ask. She takes the pink hat off and undoes her braids for the night. You didn’t go to class either. No, she didn’t. Hélène says they’ve phoned, that’s how she knows, she’s to go and see the vice-principal. There are lots of girls in the shadowy playground. They’re all in white. There are big lamps in the trees. The lights are still on in some of the classrooms. Some of the pupils are working late, others stay in the classrooms to chat, or play cards, or sing. There’s no fixed time for them to go to bed, it’s so hot during the day they’re allowed to do more or less as they like in the evening, or rather as the young teachers on duty like. We’re the only two white girls in this state boarding school. There are lots of half-castes, most of them abandoned by their fathers, soldiers or sailors or minor officials in the customs, post, or public works department. Most of them were brought up by the Assistance Board. There are a few quadroons too. Hélène Lagonelle believes the French government raises them to be nurses in hospitals or to work in orphanages, leper colonies, and mental homes. She also thinks they’re sent to isolation hospitals to look after people with cholera or the plague. That’s what Hélène Lagonelle thinks, and she cries because she doesn’t want any of those jobs, she’s always talking about running away. I go to see the teacher on duty, a young half-caste herself who spends a lot of time looking at Hélène and me.

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

  Christians had searched the Tanakh in their anxiety to find pre-echoes of their own passionate convictions about the God-Man Jesus Christ. Now even more self-consciously, in quotations in its literature and in the reading of sacred texts in communal worship, the Church vigorously reaffirmed the worth of what it called the Old Testament alongside the New. Nevertheless the new episcopal guardians of doctrine were still faced with the problem of presenting their faith in an urban culture which stretched all round the Mediterranean and beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, dominated by highly literate elites steeped in Greek learning, literature and ways of thinking. Paul of Tarsus had probably not experienced a conventional advanced education; there is certainly no trace of it in his literary style or the content or shape of his writings. He does not even bother mentioning philosophy; indeed, it attracts precisely one mention in the New Testament, where, in the words of Paul’s admirer who wrote Colossians, it is dismissed as ‘empty deceit’.72 A hundred years later, such a cavalier approach would not do. A good education was becoming more common among prominent Christians and that would affect their view of their faith. They had now accepted many of the social values of this world; they had also rejected some of the more extreme ways in which gnostics had adapted the Christian message to other systems of thought. That left large questions about the relationship of the Catholic Church to Greek and Roman high culture, which in the work of a series of authors from the later years of the first century CE reached a new peak of literary creativity and self- conscious pride in the Greek cultural past, conventionally now called the ‘Second Sophistic’. It was not surprising that thoughtful Christians who listened to the self-confident voices which dominated cultured conversations in the world around them went on to find ways of drawing on the best of this culture for their own purposes. But the problems were great. Could one call on Plato or Aristotle or their new interpreters in contemporary society to help in preaching the Gospel? The Second Sophistic offered wisdom which owed nothing to the Christian revelation in scripture; was its wisdom then worthless? A series of highly intelligent and thoughtful Christians thought that the answers to these questions were obvious: the Greek inheritance was indispensable to the Church. In their efforts to harness it to the Christian message, they can be said to have created or manufactured Christian teaching on a heroic scale, and for good or ill the Church universal has never ceased to look back at and build on what they achieved. JUSTIN, IRENAEUS, TERTULLIAN

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

  (who was in reality hostile to them), while keeping within guidelines of acceptable Christian behaviour. The Roman priest Hippolytus was the probable author of a pioneering guide to Christian life of around 200 entitled Apostolic Tradition. One of its surviving versions, now preserved only in a variant of Coptic but probably closest to the original Greek text on this point, deals fairly ineptly with the problem when listing occupations which were acceptable or unacceptable for Christian membership. It stipulates that soldiers could be admitted to the Church only on condition that they do not kill or take the military oath. Hippolytus, however, was a notoriously crotchety moralist who inclined to extremes, and versions of his text preserved in other languages than Coptic modify his unrealistic demand.6 Against his hard line, it is worth placing a funerary inscription to a man from Phrygia called Aurelius Mannos, who made no bones about proclaiming both his Christianity and his profession as a soldier. His monument commemorated his death in the 290s, at a time when the imperial authorities were about to stage their greatest confrontation yet with the Christian Church.7 As Christian communities established themselves as recognizable communities in cities, they often did not endear themselves to people. This was not because they lived austere lifestyles which made a painful contrast to a world of debauchery and luxury around them; that is a later Christian caricature which ignores the austere and world-denying character of much Greek thought in the early empire. Nor was it because they indulged in much public proclamation or systematic soliciting of converts, in the manner of modern Evangelicals. After the descriptions of such activity in the New Testament, there is very little indication that early Christians continued as flamboyant public proclaimers of the Gospel, unless they were cornered in time of persecution. What really offended was the opposite: Christian secretiveness and obstinate separation into their own world. For Christians, such separation was inevitable, given their sense of the falsity of all other religions: ancient life was saturated with observances of traditional religion, and to play any part in ordinary life was to risk pollution, particularly in public office. Christians generally avoided public baths; and the full enormity of this refusal can only be appreciated if one visits the surviving public baths of Eastern Europe or the Middle East and sees the way in which they serve as centres of social life, politics and gossip. One interesting exception is the popular story that John the Divine once entered a public bathhouse, but when he noticed the gnostic Cerinthus there, he fled screaming, terrified that God in his anger might cause the bath roof to fall in.8 Yet even this enjoyable tall tale describes a visit to the baths which proved less than successful, and it might have been

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

  again, I did not suffer.’35 Mani’s teachings equalled the spread of Eastern Christianity in time and geography, taking Manichaean faith as far as the shores of China as well as into the Roman Empire.36 Christians in the eastern Mediterranean in particular found his teachings as fascinating as previously they had the ideas of gnostic teachers, while the traditionalist Emperor Diocletian (reigned 284–305) loathed Manichees as much as he did the Christians, initiating a policy of burning them alive, even before he and his colleagues had yielded to the impulse to begin brutal persecution of Christianity.37 Discoveries of Greek, Syriac and Coptic papyri from the 1990s onwards at an Egyptian oasis, now called Ismant el- Kharab but anciently containing the small town of Kellis, have suddenly revealed fourth-century Manichees in a new light. There they had the appearance of a variant on Christianity, regarding themselves as a Church within the town, with a community life, officers and almost certainly a monastery around which their religious life probably revolved. Among the documents are two boards bearing word lists of key Manichaean phrases in Syriac with Coptic translations, revealing the sense of a commonality in this Coptic- and Greek-speaking community with Manichees a thousand miles away in Syria, rather reminiscent of Catholic Christianity’s own worldwide vision.38 No wonder the episcopal Christian Church loathed the Manichees so much and sought to eliminate them as competitors once it got the chance. It never challenged Diocletian’s provision for burning Manichees alive; indeed, centuries later the Western Latin Church imitated and extended Diocletian’s policy to apply it to other Christian ‘heretics’. FROM PERSECUTION TO PERSECUTION (250–300) Celsus had made it clear that it was now impossible for the Roman authorities to ignore Christianity. By the end of the second century, this religion from an obscure eastern province was beginning to find a presence even in the imperial palace. Marcia, the Emperor Commodus’s mistress and instigator of his murder, might seem a rather disconcerting pioneer patroness of Christians at Court, but it is noticeable that the first identifiably Christian gravestones for members of the imperial household date from only just after Commodus’s death.39 In their wake come rather less lurid connections to the imperial family: Julia Mamaea, mother to the Emperor Severus Alexander (great-nephew of Septimius Severus), was clearly interested in Christianity, inviting Origen to talk with her about the faith, and the aggressive Roman priest Hippolytus was courtly enough to dedicate a

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As the seventeenth century progressed, conflict between the Usulis and their opponents became more heated. Safavid power was beginning to decline, and society starting to fragment. People looked to the ulema as the only authorities capable of restoring order, but they differed among themselves about the nature of their authority. At this stage, most Iranians opposed the Usulis and followed the so-called Akhbaris, who relied on past tradition. The Akhbaris condemned the use of ijtihad and promoted a narrowly literal interpretation of the Koran and the Sunnah. They insisted that all legal decisions must be based on explicit statements of the Koran, the Prophet, or the Imams. If cases arose where there were no inspired rulings, the Muslim jurist must not depend upon his own judgment but should refer the matter to the secular courts. 53 The Usulis wanted a more flexible approach. Jurists could use their own reasoning powers to reach valid decisions, based on legal principles hallowed by Islamic tradition. They thought that the Akhbaris would get so enmeshed in the past that Islamic jurisprudence would be unable to meet new challenges. In the absence of the Hidden Imam, they argued, no jurist could have the last word and no precedent could be binding. Indeed, they went so far as to say that the faithful should always follow the rulings of a living mujtahid rather than a revered authority of the past. Both sides were trying to remain true to the conservative spirit at a time of social and political instability, and both were principally concerned with the divine law. Neither the Usulis nor the Akhbaris insisted on intellectual conformity; it was only in matters of behavior or religious practice that the faithful must submit to either a literal reading of scripture or the rulings of a mujtahid. Nevertheless, both sides had lost something. The Akhbaris had confused the primordial divine imperative symbolized by the law with the historical traditions of the past; they had become literalists, and were essentially out of touch with the symbolic religion of the old Shiah. In their vision, the faith had become a series of explicit directives. The Usulis had more confidence in human reason, which was still anchored in the mythos of their religion. But in demanding that the faithful conform to their judgment, they had lost Mulla Sadra’s belief in the sacred freedom of the individual. By the end of the seventeenth century, it had become crucial to establish a legal authority that could compensate for the weakness of the state. Trade had declined, bringing economic insecurity, and the incompetence of the later shahs made their state vulnerable. When Afghan tribes attacked Isfahan in 1722, the city surrendered ignominiously. Iran entered a period of chaos, and, for a time, it seemed that it might even cease to exist as a separate entity. The Russians invaded from the north, the Ottomans from the west, and the Afghans consolidated their position in the south and east.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Nor did he have to face the fact that, fifty years after the creation of the State of Israel, most of the Jews in the Holy Land would still be secularists. His son, Zvi Yehuda, would see these things, and, in his old age, would make his father’s mythos a program for practical, political action and create a fundamentalist movement. But in these terrible times, was it possible for Jews to keep out of political life? Not only was modern society becoming increasingly anti-Semitic, but secularism was making great inroads into Jewish communities and undermining the traditional way of life. In eastern Europe, modernization was only just beginning. Some of the rabbis of Russia and Poland continued to turn their backs on the new world and held aloof from politics. How could any Jew worthy of the name soil his integrity by taking part in the bargaining and compromise that were an essential part of modern political life in a democratic state? How could they square this with the absolute demands of the Torah? By making deals with gentiles and getting involved in their political institutions, Jews would bring the profane world into the community, and this would inevitably corrupt it. But the principals of the great Misnagdic yeshivot and the Hasidim of the Polish town of Ger disagreed. They could see that the various Zionist parties and the Jewish socialist parties were enticing Jews into a godless way of life. They wanted to stop the drift toward secularism and assimilation, and believed that these essentially modern dangers must be met on their own terms in modern ways. Religious Jews must fight the secularists with their own weapons. That meant the creation of a modern political party to protect Orthodox interests. This was not a wholly new idea, they contended. For a long time, the Jews of Russia and Poland had engaged in shtadlanut (political dialogue or negotiations) with the government to safeguard the welfare of the Jewish communities. The new Orthodox party would continue this work, but in a more efficient and organized manner. In 1912, the Misnagdic roshey yeshivot and the Ger Hasidim founded a new party, Agudat Israel (“The Union of Israel”). They were joined by members of Mizrachi, an association of “religious Zionists” formed by Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines (1839–1915) in 1901. Mizrachi was quite different from and less radical than Rabbi Kook, who saw the secular Zionist enterprise in Palestine as a profoundly religious development.