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 The Battle for God (2000)

  Such a view had no rational objectivity, was closed to any alternative, and coherent only within its own terms. The Princeton reliance upon reason alone put it in line with modernity, but its claims were at variance with the facts. “Christianity makes its appeal by right reason,” Warfield contended in a later article. “It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way to its kingship. And it is solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet.” 17 A cursory glance at Christian history shows that, as in all premodern religion, reason had been exercised only in a mythical context. Christianity had relied on mysticism, intuition, and liturgy rather than “right reason,” which had never been the “sole” appeal of Christian faith. Warfield’s militant imagery, which looks forward to confounding the “enemies” of the faith by reason, probably reflects a buried insecurity. If Christian truth was really so clear and self-evident, why did so many people refuse to accept it? There was desperation in Princeton theology. “Religion has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men,” Charles Hodge declared in 1874. 18 It was clearly worrying to Christians who took their stand on scientific reason when the theories of natural scientists seemed to contradict the literal meaning of the Bible. That was why Hodge wrote What Is Darwinism? (1874), the first sustained religious attack on the evolutionary hypothesis. For Hodge, the Baconian, Darwinism was simply bad science. He had studied the Origin carefully and could not take seriously Darwin’s suggestion that the intricate design of nature had come into being by chance, independently of God. He revealed thereby the closed mind-set of the emergent Protestant fundamentalism: Hodge simply could not imagine that any belief that differed from his own was viable. “To any ordinarily constituted mind,” he insisted, “it is absolutely impossible to believe that the eye is not the work of design.” 19 Human beings had the duty to oppose “all spectacular hypotheses and theories”—such as Darwin’s—“which come into conflict with well-established truths.” It was a plea for “common sense”; God had given to the human mind “intuitions which are infallible,” and if Darwin contradicted these, his hypothesis was untenable and had to be rejected. 20 The scientific Christianity that was being developed at Princeton fell between two stools. Hodge was trying to put a brake on reason in the old conservative way, and refused to allow it the free play that was characteristic of modernity. But in reducing all mythical truth to the level of logos , he was flying in the face of the spirituality of the old world. His theology was bad science and inadequate religion.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By 1900, the furor seemed to have died down. The ideas of the Higher Criticism appeared to have gained ground everywhere, liberals still held important posts in most of the denominations, and the conservatives seemed stunned but quiescent. Yet this apparent peace was deceptive. Observers at this time were aware that within almost all the denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Disciples, Episcopalian, Baptist—there were two distinct “churches,” representing the “old” and the “new” ways of looking at the Bible. 28 Some Christians had already started to mobilize for the struggle that lay ahead. In 1886, the revivalist Dwight Moody (1837–99) founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to combat the teachings of the Higher Criticism. His aim was to create a cadre of “gap-men,” who could stand between the ministers and the laity and combat the false ideas which, he believed, had brought the nation to the brink of destruction. Moody has been called the father of American fundamentalism, and his Bible Institute would, like Princeton, become a bastion of conservative Christianity. But Moody was less interested in dogma than the Hodges and Warfield. His message was simple and primarily emotional: the sinful world could be redeemed by Christ. Moody’s priority was the salvation of souls, and he was ready to cooperate with any Christians, whatever their beliefs, in the work of saving sinners. He shared the liberals’ concern for social reform: the graduates of his Institute were to become missionaries to the poor. But Moody was a premillennialist, convinced that the Godless ideologies of the age would lead to the destruction of the world. Things were not getting better, as the liberals believed; they were getting worse every day. 29 In 1886, the year he founded his Bible Institute, there was a tragedy in Haymarket Square, Chicago, which shocked the nation. During a trade-union rally, when the demonstrators clashed with the police, a bomb killed seven policemen and injured seventy others. The Haymarket Riot seemed to epitomize all the evils and dangers of industrial society, and Moody could see it only in apocalyptic terms. “Either these people are to be evangelized,” he prophesied, “or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.” 30 The Bible Institute would become a crucial fundamentalist institution. Like the Volozhin yeshiva , it represented a safe and sacred enclave in a godless world, which would prepare a cadre for a future counteroffensive against modern society. Other conservative Protestants, who would play a leading role in the coming fundamentalist movement, followed Moody’s lead.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  During the early modern period in the Islamic world, the memory of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century had still not faded. The massacres, the vast uprooting as whole peoples had fled before the approaching hordes, and the destruction of one great Islamic city after another were still recalled with horror. Libraries and institutions of learning had also been destroyed, and with them centuries of painstakingly acquired knowledge had been lost. Muslims had recovered; the Sufi mystics had led a spiritual revival, which had proved to be as healing as Lurianic Kabbalah, and the three new empires were a sign of that recovery. The Ottoman and Safavid dynasties both had their roots in the massive displacement of the Mongol era; both had originated in militant ghazu states, led by a chieftain warrior and often linked to a Sufi order, which had sprung up in the wake of the devastation. The power and beauty of these empires and their culture were a reassertion of Islamic values and a proud statement that Muslim history was back on track. But after such a catastrophe, the natural conservatism of premodern society was likely to become more pronounced. People concentrated on recovering slowly and painfully what had been lost rather than on striking out for something new. In Sunni Islam, for example—the version of the faith practiced by most Muslims and the established religion of the Ottoman empire—it was agreed that “the gates of ijtihad (“independent reasoning”) had closed. 3 Hitherto, Muslim jurists had been allowed to exercise their own judgment in order to resolve questions that arose in relation to theology and law for which neither the Koran nor established tradition had an explicit answer. But by the early modern period, in an attempt to conserve a tradition that had almost been destroyed, Sunni Muslims believed that there was no need for further independent thought. The answers were all in place; the Shariah was a fixed blueprint for society, and ijtihad was neither necessary nor desirable. Instead, Muslims must imitate (taqlid) the past. Instead of seeking new solutions, they should submit to the rulings found in the established legal manuals. Innovation (bidah) in matters of law and practice was considered as disruptive and dangerous in Sunni Islamdom during the early modern period as was heresy in doctrinal matters in the Christian West. It would be difficult to imagine an attitude more at odds with the thrusting, iconoclastic spirit of the modern West. The idea of putting a deliberate curb on our reasoning powers is now anathema. As we shall see in the next chapter, modern culture developed only when people began to throw off this type of restraint. If Western modernity is the product of logos, it is easy to see how congenial mythos was to the conservative spirit of the premodern world. Mythological thinking looks backward, not forward.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There was desperation in Princeton theology. “Religion has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men,” Charles Hodge declared in 1874.18 It was clearly worrying to Christians who took their stand on scientific reason when the theories of natural scientists seemed to contradict the literal meaning of the Bible. That was why Hodge wrote What Is Darwinism? (1874), the first sustained religious attack on the evolutionary hypothesis. For Hodge, the Baconian, Darwinism was simply bad science. He had studied the Origin carefully and could not take seriously Darwin’s suggestion that the intricate design of nature had come into being by chance, independently of God. He revealed thereby the closed mind-set of the emergent Protestant fundamentalism: Hodge simply could not imagine that any belief that differed from his own was viable. “To any ordinarily constituted mind,” he insisted, “it is absolutely impossible to believe that the eye is not the work of design.”19 Human beings had the duty to oppose “all spectacular hypotheses and theories”—such as Darwin’s—“which come into conflict with well-established truths.” It was a plea for “common sense”; God had given to the human mind “intuitions which are infallible,” and if Darwin contradicted these, his hypothesis was untenable and had to be rejected.20 The scientific Christianity that was being developed at Princeton fell between two stools. Hodge was trying to put a brake on reason in the old conservative way, and refused to allow it the free play that was characteristic of modernity. But in reducing all mythical truth to the level of logos, he was flying in the face of the spirituality of the old world. His theology was bad science and inadequate religion.

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

  was quick to try to cover himself by adding, ‘I mean in number not in mind’.79 This did not save him from accusations that theologians like him were endangering the basic Christian idea of the unity of God; but in turn those ‘Monarchians’ who stressed unity were in danger of losing any concept of distinctiveness between Father, Son and Spirit. So it was not merely Tertullian who became deeply concerned at their assertions. Monarchian models of God could take two forms. One, ‘Adoptionist Monarchianism’, explained the nature of Christ by saying that he had been adopted by God as Son, although he was a man; he was only God in the sense that the Father’s power rested in his human form. Some early writers such as Hermas in his book the Shepherd had taken this view without being singled out for condemnation, but late-second-century Monarchians like Theodotus, who came to Rome from Byzantion, took the idea much further. For him, Jesus was a man like other men apart from his miraculous birth; at his baptism in the Jordan, the Holy Spirit had descended on him and given him the power to work miracles, but that did not mean that he became God. Because of this emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’s ‘promotion’, this view is sometimes called dynamic (from the Greek dynamis, ‘power’). The other Monarchian approach was ‘modalist’, so called because it saw the names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as corresponding merely to different aspects or modes of the same divine being, playing transitory parts in succession, like an actor on the Classical stage donning a theatrical mask to denote a tragic or a comic role. The Latin word for this theatrical mask was ‘persona’. That root word for the English word ‘person’ underlines the difficulty of talking about the Trinity, because in later Christian discussion, far from describing a series of temporary roles, the idea of ‘person’ was instead attached to the individual and unchanging natures of Father, Son or Spirit, in a view of the Trinity which represented (among other things) the defeat of the Monarchian viewpoint. Modalist Monarchianism is often known as ‘Sabellianism’, commemorating an otherwise obscure late-second-century exponent of the idea, and a term of abuse which has been flung around at various periods in Church circles with about as much discrimination as Senator Joe McCarthy once used the word ‘Communist’. The Roman authorities eventually condemned both forms of Monarchianism at the turn of the second and third centuries, but three successive Roman bishops had hesitated to do so, a symptom of the way in which earlier Christianity had not been prepared to shut down a plurality of ways of viewing its most difficult theological problems.80 Monarchian ideas were not going to disappear; they were an inevitable consequence of a faith which wants to talk about God as both one and three. In particular, many Christians associated one Greek word with

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet they were also men of their time, and this was a time of transition. Throughout this book, we shall see that the modernizing process can induce great anxiety. As their world changes, people feel disoriented and lost. Living in medias res, they cannot see the direction that their society is taking, but experience its slow transformation in incoherent ways. As the old mythology that gave structure and significance to their lives crumbles under the impact of change, they can experience a numbing loss of identity and a paralyzing despair. The most common emotions, as we shall see, are helplessness and a fear of annihilation that can, in extreme circumstances, erupt in violence. We see something of this in Luther. During his early life, he was prey to agonizing depressions. None of the medieval rites and practices of the faith could touch what he called the tristitia (“sorrow”) that made him terrified of death, which he imagined as total extinction. When this black horror descended upon him, he could not bear to read Psalm 90, which describes the evanescence of human life and portrays men being condemned by the anger and fury of God. Throughout his career, Luther saw death as an expression of God’s wrath. His theology of justification by faith depicted human beings as utterly incapable of contributing to their own salvation and wholly reliant on the benevolence of God. It was only by realizing their powerlessness that they could be saved. To escape his depressions, Luther plunged into a frenzy of activity, determined to do what good he could in the world, but consumed also by hatred. 4 Luther’s rage against the Pope, the Turks, Jews, women, and rebellious peasants—not to mention every single one of his theological opponents—would be typical of other reformers in our own day, who have struggled with the pain of the new world and who have also evolved a religion in which the love of God is often balanced by a hatred of other human beings. Zwingli and Calvin also experienced utter impotence before they were able to break through to a new religious vision that made them feel born again. They too had been convinced that there was nothing they could contribute to their own salvation and that they were powerless before the trials of human existence. Both stressed the absolute sovereignty of God, as modern fundamentalists would often do. 5 Like Luther, Zwingli and Calvin also had to re-create their religious world, sometimes resorting to extreme measures and even to violence in order to make their religion speak to the new conditions of a world that was unobtrusively but irrevocably committed to radical transformation. As men of their time, the reformers reflected the changes that were taking place.

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

  the local bishop. Their role in the Syrian Church continued for several centuries alongside developed monasticism.31 In Egypt there is a similar ambiguity about the first monastic institutions. It is worth noting that the richest modern find of gnostic literature, from Nag Hammadi, came from a Christian monastic community of fourth-century date. Egypt was peculiarly suited to a Christian withdrawal from the world because of its distinctive geography: its narrow fertile strip along the Nile, backed by great stretches of desert, means that it is easy literally to walk out of civilization into wilderness. It was here towards the end of the third century that the monastic movement first securely tied itself into the developed Church of the bishops and left a continuous history in conventional Christian sources, through the lives of two powerful personalities who could be presented as founder-figures: Antony and Pachomius, representatives respectively of two different forms of monastic life, that of the hermit and that of the community. The reality was more complicated. Much of this story of origins was an effort by Egyptian monks to claim priority for themselves in the monastic movement, in the face of their competitors and probable predecessors in Syria. Yet without such founding myths, it might have been less easy to integrate the new movement into the Church. In fact the biography of Antony written by the great fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria Athanasius makes it clear that he was not the first Christian hermit; from his boyhood in the 250s and 260s, Antony was already seeking out in fascination individual Christians in neighbouring villages who had taken to a solitary life or practised an ascetic discipline.32 Eventually his desire to live a Christian life out of touch with anyone else led him into the desert or wilderness: from the Greek for wilderness, erēmos, comes the word ‘hermit’. After twenty years of solitude, Antony was faced with a new problem: hordes of people were coming out to join him in the desert. Diocletian’s persecution of Christians and the sheer burden of taxation in ordinary society were powerful incentives to flee into the wilderness. As persecution ceased, not everyone wanted to go to such an extreme. So the community life already in existence in Syria found its parallel in Egypt, where groups of people withdrew from the world in the middle of the world, founding what were in effect specialized new villages in the fertile river zone: the first monasteries. They owed their existence principally to Pachomius, a soldier who converted to Christianity during the Great Persecution, impressed by Christians’ ready support for suffering fellow Christians even if they had not previously known them. Life in the army was self-selecting and communal, with clear boundaries and conventions, and it may be that the ex-soldier Pachomius drew on that

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Jewish and Muslim emphasis on practice had meant that fundamentalists in these faiths had turned the myths of their traditions into ideologies. Some of their worst excesses had come about because they had tried to realize these mythologies literally in the practical world of affairs. They had sought to meet the modern criterion of efficiency, in which a “truth” had to work effectively in order to be taken seriously. Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists had turned their mythoi into pragmatic logoi designed to achieve a practical result. Protestant fundamentalists had perverted myth in a different way. They had turned the Christian myths into scientific facts, and had created a hybrid that was neither good science nor good religion. This had run counter to the whole tradition of spirituality and had involved great strain, since religious truth is not rational in nature and cannot be proved scientifically. Because Protestant fundamentalists tended to overlook the intuitive and the mystical, they had also lost touch with the unconscious, deeper impulses of the personality. As a result, American revivalism had sometimes been anarchic and neurotic. By the late 1980S, some fundamentalists were ready to revolt against the constraints of this rationalistic faith. Sex, as we have seen, was problematic for fundamentalists, many of whom appeared to be anxious about potency and gender boundaries. It was not surprising, perhaps, that the rebellion, when it came, took a sexual form. Television and the public adulation that sometimes comes with it are also traps for the spiritually unwary. Not only is the narcissism involved in a personality cult incompatible with the transcendence of ego that should characterize the spiritual quest, but the televangelist could also lose touch with reality. The vast sums of money that the more successful networks could command sat uneasily with the Gospel demand to abandon the pursuit of material wealth. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of PTL (Praise The Lord and People That Love) network in North Carolina had attracted adverse criticism for their extravagant lifestyle. The Charlotte Observer had for some years been pointing out that while they urged their viewers to make sacrifices and give their money to the needy, the Bakkers themselves had spent $375,000 on an ocean-front condominium and $22,000 on floor-to-ceiling mirrors. 112 All this was a far cry from Jerry Falwell’s regime in Lynchburg, which was characterized by sobriety and self-restraint. The Bakkers were chiefly known for their Christian theme park, Heritage USA, which portrayed the evangelical experience of North America Disney- style, and attracted huge numbers of visitors. In an intriguing article, the American anthropologist Susan Harding suggests that the Bakkers were quite consciously staging a revolt against Falwell’s commonsense religiosity and pushing fundamentalism into a new, postmodern phase.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  As Charles Hodge had argued fifty years earlier, the Darwinian hypothesis was repugnant to the Baconian mind-set of the fundamentalists, who still clung to the scientific outlook of early modernity. Intellectuals and sophisticates might follow these new ideas with enthusiasm in Yale and Harvard and in the big eastern cities, but they were alien to many small-town Americans, who felt that their culture was being taken over by the secularist establishment. Yet the campaign against evolution might still never have replaced the Higher Criticism as the chief fundamentalist bugbear had it not been for a dramatic development in the South, which had hitherto taken little part in the fundamentalist battle. There had been no need for southerners to become fundamentalists. The southern states were much more conservative than the North at this point, and there were too few liberals in the southern denominations to warrant a fundamentalist campaign. But southerners were worried about the teaching of evolution in the public schools. It was an example of the “colonization” of their society by an alien ideology, and bills were introduced in the state legislatures of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas to ban the teaching of Darwinian theory. The anti-evolution laws in Tennessee were particularly severe, and to put them to the test and strike a symbolic blow for freedom of speech and the First Amendment, John Scopes, a young teacher in the small town of Dayton, confessed that he had broken the law when he had once substituted for his school principal in a biology class. In July 1925, he was brought to trial, and the new American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a team of lawyers to defend him, headed by the rationalist lawyer and campaigner Clarence Darrow (1857–1938). At the request of Riley and other fundamentalist leaders, William Jennings Bryan agreed to support the law. Once Darrow and Bryan became involved, the trial ceased to be simply about civil liberties, and became a contest between God and science. The Scopes Trial was a clash between two utterly incompatible points of view. 31 Both Darrow and Bryan were defending crucial American values; Darrow was for free speech, and Bryan for the rights of the ordinary people, who had long been leery of the influence of learned experts and specialists. Bryan’s political campaigns had all championed the common man. A review of In His Image (1922), Bryan’s answer to Darwin, claimed that he was “the spokesman for a numerically large segment of the people who are for the most part inarticulate. In fact, he is almost the only exponent of their ideas who has the public ear.

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

  Divine, and the hesitant reception of his Book of Revelation into the New Testament may reflect ecclesiastical worries about this recurrent theme of prophecy among Christians in Asia Minor. Like so many converts, Montanus passionately proclaimed his enthusiasm for his new-found faith, but that extended (at a date uncertain, but probably around 165) into announcements that he had new revelations from the Holy Spirit to add to the Christian message. It was not so much the content of these messages that worried the existing Christian leadership of the area as the challenge which they posed to their authority. By what right did this man with no commission, in no apostolic succession, speak new truths of the faith and sweep crowds along with him in his excitement?What made matters worse was that Montanus was accompanied by female prophetesses who spoke in states of ecstasy. The position of women leadership in the Church had steadily diminished over the previous century, and this combination of female assertiveness and prophecy seemed dangerously reminiscent of the female seers at ancient cultic centres: the worst possible resonance for a cult seeking to demonstrate its separation from other religions. So the Church in Asia was riven: was Montanus a blessing or a danger? Both sides appealed to other Churches around the Mediterranean, and to the great distress of the Montanists, they found themselves condemned by Eleutherius, the Bishop of Rome. As is often the case, opposition and hostility drove them into ever wilder statements about their own mission; their total and final exclusion from the Catholic Church by a council of bishops was sadly inevitable after this. Elsewhere in the Christian world, only in North Africa, which came to have a tradition of high-temperature Christianity, did their passionate commitment to the Holy Spirit find a lasting sympathy among prominent Christian activists, especially the distinguished early-third-century Christian writer Tertullian (see pp. 144–7). Yet in their Phrygian homeland, the Montanists persisted obstinately until at least the sixth century. Then in 550 the morale of the proud descendants of the ‘New Prophecy’ was finally broken when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian sent in his troops to wreck their great shrine of the founder-prophets in the now-venerable Montanist stronghold at Pepouza. Eventually even Pepouza’s whereabouts were forgotten and only recently has the enthusiasm of researchers revealed its probable site.68 Yet less than a century after the imperial vandalism at Pepouza a new ‘New Prophecy’ began tearing at the fabric of the Byzantine Empire, as Muslim armies swept north from Mecca and beat at the frontiers of Asia Minor. Maybe there were still Montanists in Asia Minor to welcome the fervour of the new arrivals. While the Montanists early on became firmly convinced that they were about

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Princeton reliance upon reason alone put it in line with modernity, but its claims were at variance with the facts. “Christianity makes its appeal by right reason,” Warfield contended in a later article. “It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way to its kingship. And it is solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet.” 17 A cursory glance at Christian history shows that, as in all premodern religion, reason had been exercised only in a mythical context. Christianity had relied on mysticism, intuition, and liturgy rather than “right reason,” which had never been the “sole” appeal of Christian faith. Warfield’s militant imagery, which looks forward to confounding the “enemies” of the faith by reason, probably reflects a buried insecurity. If Christian truth was really so clear and self-evident, why did so many people refuse to accept it? There was desperation in Princeton theology. “Religion has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men,” Charles Hodge declared in 1874. 18 It was clearly worrying to Christians who took their stand on scientific reason when the theories of natural scientists seemed to contradict the literal meaning of the Bible. That was why Hodge wrote What Is Darwinism? (1874), the first sustained religious attack on the evolutionary hypothesis. For Hodge, the Baconian, Darwinism was simply bad science. He had studied the Origin carefully and could not take seriously Darwin’s suggestion that the intricate design of nature had come into being by chance, independently of God. He revealed thereby the closed mind-set of the emergent Protestant fundamentalism: Hodge simply could not imagine that any belief that differed from his own was viable. “To any ordinarily constituted mind,” he insisted, “it is absolutely impossible to believe that the eye is not the work of design.” 19 Human beings had the duty to oppose “all spectacular hypotheses and theories”—such as Darwin’s—“which come into conflict with well-established truths.” It was a plea for “common sense”; God had given to the human mind “intuitions which are infallible,” and if Darwin contradicted these, his hypothesis was untenable and had to be rejected. 20 The scientific Christianity that was being developed at Princeton fell between two stools. Hodge was trying to put a brake on reason in the old conservative way, and refused to allow it the free play that was characteristic of modernity. But in reducing all mythical truth to the level of logos, he was flying in the face of the spirituality of the old world. His theology was bad science and inadequate religion. But Princeton was not typical.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  20 Nevertheless, the prominence of the ulema gave Egyptian society a distinctly religious character. Islam gave the people of Egypt their only real security. 21 Security was at a premium in the Middle East by the late eighteenth century. The Ottoman state was now in serious disarray. The superb efficiency of its government in the sixteenth century had given way to incompetence, especially on the peripheries of the empire. The West had begun its startling rise to power, and the Ottomans found that they could no longer fight as equals with the powers of Europe. It was difficult for them to respond to the Western challenge, not simply because it occurred at a time of political weakness, but because the new society that was being created in Europe was without precedent in world history. 22 The sultans tried to adapt, but their efforts were superficial. Sultan Selim III (ruled 1789–1807), for example, saw the Western threat in purely military terms. There had been abortive attempts in the 1730s to reform the army along European lines, but when he ascended the throne in 1789 Selim opened a number of military schools with French instructors, where students became acquainted with European languages and Western books on mathematics, navigation, geography, and history. 23 Learning a few military techniques and a smattering of modern sciences, however, would not prove sufficient to contain the Western threat, because Europeans had evolved an entirely new way of life and thought, so that they operated on entirely different norms. To meet them on their own ground, the Ottomans would need to develop a wholly rational culture, dismantle the Islamic structure of society, and be prepared to sever all sacred links with the past. A few members of the elite might be able to achieve this transition, which had taken Europeans almost three hundred years, but how would they persuade the masses, whose minds and hearts were imbued with the conservative ethos, to accept and understand the need for such radical change? On the margins of the empire, where Ottoman decline was most acutely felt, people responded to the change and unrest as they had always done—in religious terms. In the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92) managed to break away from Istanbul and create a state of his own in central Arabia and the Persian Gulf region. Abd al-Wahhab was a typical Islamic reformer. He met the current crisis by returning to the Koran and the Sunnah, and by vehemently rejecting medieval jurisprudence, mysticism, and philosophy. Because they diverged from this pristine Islam, as he envisaged it, Abd al-Wahhab declared the Ottoman sultans to be apostates, unworthy of the obedience of the faithful and deserving of death. Their Shariah state was inauthentic. Instead, Abd al-Wahhab tried to create an enclave of pure faith, based on the practice of the first Muslim community in the seventh century.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1917, British and Russian troops overran the country. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russians withdrew, but the British moved into the areas they had vacated in the north of the country, while holding on to their own bases in the south. Britain was now eager to make Iran a protectorate. Oil had been discovered in the country in 1908, and the concession had been granted to a British subject, William Knox D’Arcy; in 1909, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed, and Iranian oil fueled the British navy. Iran was now a rich prize. But the Majlis held out against British control. There were anti-British demonstrations throughout the country in 1920, the Majlis appealed for help from Soviet Russia and the United States, and Britain was forced to abandon this plan. But Iranians were miserably aware that they had managed to retain their independence only by appealing to other great powers, who had their own designs on Iranian oil. Iran now had a constitution and representative government, but this was useless, since the Majlis had no real power. Even the Americans noted that the British constantly rigged the elections and that Iranians were “prevented from public expression of opinion or giving vent to feelings in any manner by the existing martial law and controlled press.” 94 The prevailing mood of dissatisfaction made it relatively easy for a small group, under the leadership of Seyyid Zia ad-Din Tabatabai, a civilian, and Reza Khan (1877–1944), the commander of the shah’s Cossack brigade, to overthrow the government. In February 1921, Zia ad-Din became prime minister, with Reza Khan as his minister of war. The British acquiesced because Zia ad-Din was known to be pro-British, and they hoped that his election would further their plans for a protectorate, which they had not abandoned entirely. But Reza Khan was the stronger of the two leaders, and he was soon able to force Zia ad-Din into exile, form a new cabinet, and become sole ruler. Reza at once began to modernize the country, and, because the people were so frustrated and ready for any change, he was able to succeed where his predecessors had failed. Reza had no interest in social reform and no concern for the poor. His objective was simply to centralize the country, strengthen the army and the bureaucracy, and make Iran function more effectively. Any opposition was ruthlessly cut down. From the very beginning, Reza courted Soviet Russia and the United States in order to rid the country of the British, granting an oil concession to the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey in return for American technical advice and investment. In 1925, Reza was in a strong enough position to force the last Qajar shah to abdicate.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Until the seventeenth century, Islamdom was the greatest world power. But this political, intellectual, and artistic endeavor had been conducted within a mythological context which would be alien to the values of the new Western culture that had been developing in Europe. Many of the ideals of modern Europe would be congenial to Muslims. We have seen that their faith had encouraged them to form attitudes that would be similar to those promoted by the modern West: social justice, egalitarianism, the freedom of the individual, a humanly based spirituality, a secular polity, a privatized faith, and the cultivation of rational thought. But other aspects of the new Europe would be difficult for people shaped by the conservative ethos to accept. By the end of the eighteenth century, Muslims had fallen behind the West intellectually, and, because the Islamic empires were also politically weak at this date, they would be vulnerable to the European states which were about to make their bid for world hegemony. The British had already established themselves in India, and France was determined to create its own empire. On May 19, 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte set sail for the Middle East from Toulon with 38,000 men and 400 ships to challenge British power in the Orient. The French fleet crossed the Mediterranean and on July 1 Napoleon landed 4300 troops on the beach at Alexandria and took the city shortly after dawn the following day. 57 He thus achieved a base in Egypt. Napoleon had brought with him a corps of scholars, a library of modern European literature, a scientific laboratory, and a printing press with Arabic type. The new scientific, secularist culture of the West had invaded the Muslim world, and it would never be the same again. 5. B attle L ines ( 1870–1900 ) B Y THE END of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the new society which had finally come to fruition in the West was not quite the universal panacea that some had imagined. The dynamic optimism that had inspired Hegel’s philosophy had given way to perplexing doubt and malaise. On the one hand, Europe was going from strength to strength; there was confidence and an exultant sense of mastery as the industrial revolution brought some of the nation-states more wealth and power than they had ever achieved before.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Intellectuals tried to fight the regime with ideas. They were disturbed by the malaise in the country, and could see that modernization had been too rapid and had resulted in widespread alienation. The brilliant philosopher Ahmed Fardid (1912–94), who became a professor at the University of Tehran in the late 1960 S , coined the term gharbzadegi (“West-toxication”) to describe the Iranian dilemma: the people had been poisoned and polluted by the West; they must create a new identity for themselves. 37 This theme was amplified by the secularist and onetime socialist Jalal Al-e Ahmad (1923–69), whose Gharbzadegi (1 962) became a cult book for Iranians during the 1960s. This “rootlessness” and “Occidentosis” was “a disease from without, spreading in an environment susceptible to it.” It was the plight of a people “having no supporting tradition, no historical continuity, no gradient of transformation.” 38 This plague could devastate Iran’s integrity, eradicate her political sovereignty, and destroy the economy. But Al-e Ahmad was himself torn both ways: he was influenced by such Western writers as Sartre and Heidegger, and attracted by the Western ideals of democracy and liberty; but he did not see how they could be successfully transplanted in the alien soil of Iran. He expressed what has been described as the “agonized schizophrenia” of the Western-educated Iranians, who felt pulled in two directions, 39 and though he could articulate the problem memorably, he had no solution to propose—though it appears that, toward the end of his life, he was beginning to see Shiism as an authentically Iranian institution that could provide a basis for a genuine national identity and become a healing alternative to the Westernizing disease. 40 The Iranian ulema were quite unlike the Egyptian clergy. Many were aware that they would have to modernize themselves and their institutions if they were to support the people. They were increasingly distressed by the shah’s autocratic rule, which offended fundamental Shii principles, and his obvious indifference to religion. In 1960, even Ayatollah Borujerdi, the supreme Marja, who had forbidden the clergy to take any part in politics, was moved to condemn the shah’s Land Reform Bill. It was a pity that he chose this issue, because it made the ulema , many of whom were landowners, seem selfish and reactionary. In fact, Borujerdi’s intervention probably sprang from an instinctive feeling that this could be the thin end of the wedge. 41 The Land Reform contravened Shariah laws of ownership, and Borujerdi may have feared that to deprive the people of rights guaranteed by Islamic Law in one sphere could lead to worse abuses in other areas.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The experience of the Sephardic Jews was an extreme form of the uprooting and displacement that other peoples would later experience when they were caught up in an aggressive modernizing process. We shall see that when modern Western civilization took root in a foreign environment, it transformed the culture so drastically that many people felt alienated and disoriented. The old world had been swept away, and the new one was so strange that people could not recognize their once-familiar surroundings and could make no sense of their lives. Many would become convinced, like the Sephardics, that their very existence was threatened. They would fear annihilation and extinction. In their confusion and pain, many would do what some of the Spanish exiles did, and turn to religion. But because their lives were so utterly changed, they would have to evolve new forms of faith to make the old traditions speak to them in their radically altered circumstances. But this would take time. In the early sixteenth century, the exiled Jews found that traditional Judaism did nothing for them. The disaster seemed unprecedented, and they found that old pieties no longer worked. Some turned to messianism. For centuries, Jews had waited for a Messiah, an anointed king of the house of David, to bring their long exile to an end and return them to the Promised Land. Some Jewish traditions spoke of a period of tribulation immediately before the advent of the Messiah, and it occurred to some of the Sephardic exiles who had taken refuge in the Balkans, that the suffering and persecution that had befallen themselves and so many of their fellow Jews in Europe could only mean one thing: this must be the time of trial foretold by the prophets and sages, and called the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” because out of this anguish deliverance and new life would come.9 Other peoples who have felt that their world has been destroyed by the onset of modernity would also evolve millennial hopes. But messianism is problematic, because, until now, every single messianic movement that has expected an imminent Redeemer has been disappointed. The Sephardic Jews avoided this dilemma by finding a more satisfying solution. They developed a new mythos.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet during the early stages of this transformation of Western society this was not the case. Many of the explorers, scientists, and thinkers at the cutting edge of change believed that they were finding new ways of being religious rather than abolishing religion altogether. We shall examine some of their solutions in this chapter and consider their deeper implications. But it is important to be clear that the men who became the spokesmen of the modern spirit did not themselves create it. By the sixteenth century, a complex process was at work in Europe and, later, in its American colonies which was transforming the way that people thought and experienced the world. Change would occur gradually and often unobtrusively. Inventions and innovations, none of which seemed particularly decisive at the time, were occurring simultaneously in many different fields, but their cumulative effect would be conclusive. All these discoveries were characterized by a pragmatic, scientific spirit that slowly undermined the old conservative, mythical ethos and made an increasing number of people receptive to new ideas about God, religion, the state, the individual, and society. Europe and the American colonies would need to accommodate these changes in different political arrangements. Like any other period of far-reaching social change, this was a violent era. There were destructive wars and revolutions, violent uprooting, the despoliation of the countryside, and hideous religious strife. In the course of three hundred years, Europeans and Americans had to employ ruthless methods to modernize their society. There was bloodshed, persecution, inquisition, massacre, exploitation, enslavement, and cruelty. We are witnessing the same bloody upheavals in countries in the developing world which are going through the painful modernizing process today.

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

  letters to Church communities in Paul’s tradition, hence their common collective designation as the ‘Pastoral Epistles’. What is striking in this literature is the way in which the idea that the end is at hand, so prominent in Paul’s letters, has faded from view. The author of Ephesians is prepared to talk about ‘the coming ages’, which seems to mean a long time on this earth.21 Nowhere is this shift more perceptible than in one feature of these documents, also to be found in the first of the two epistles attributed to Peter, which also takes many cues from Ephesians: sets of rules for conducting a human household, which in the sixteenth century Martin Luther styled Haustafeln, ‘tables of household duties’. What is particularly remarkable about the Haustafeln is that they include commands to children ‘that they may live long in the land’: the Church must now consider the next generation and its earthly future.22 Indeed, the writer to Timothy tells women that their salvation comes from having children (not a text to find favour with countless generations of women in the monastic life in later centuries).23 These lists repeat the commonplace Hellenistic wisdom of their day, but they give it a gloss from Paul’s argument that the relationship of husband to wife is like Christ’s relationship to his Church: ‘[T]he husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Saviour.’24 Now the various gradations of status and authority to be found in the world are to shape the way in which Christians conceive their faith. And there is an extra consideration, connected to the Pastoral Epistles’ insistence that Church leaders must be beyond reproach outside the community as well as inside it.25 The Church is worried about its public image and concerned to show that it is not a subversive organization threatening the well-being of society, ‘that the word of God may not be discredited’.26 As we have seen (see pp. 103–5), the only dissident voice against this frank quest for respectability is to be found in that very unusual entrant into the Christian New Testament, the Book of Revelation. In just two respects are the first Christians recorded as having been consciously different from their neighbours. First, they were much more rigorous about matters of sex than the prevailing attitudes in the Roman Empire; they did not forget their founder’s fierce disapproval of divorce. Although with Paul’s encouragement Christians did move to make some exceptions to Jesus’s absolute ban (see pp. 90–91), their concerns to restrict such exceptions are in sharp contrast to the relative ease with which either party in a non-Christian Roman marriage could declare the relationship to be at an end. Likewise, abortion and the abandonment of unwanted children were accepted as regrettable necessities in Roman society, but, like the Jews before them, Christians were insistent that these practices were completely unacceptable. Even those Christian writers who

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. Even after emancipation, they continued to live as though the ghetto walls were still in place. They immersed themselves totally in the study of Torah and Talmud, and insisted that modernity was to be shunned. gentile studies were, they believed, incompatible with Judaism. One of their leading spokesmen was Rabbi Moses Sofer of Pressburg (1763–1839). He was opposed to any change or accommodation to modernity—God, after all, did not change; he forbade his children to read Mendelssohn’s books and refused to allow them a secular education or to participate in modern society in any way.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Karim Khan was convinced that this progressive revelation was about to be completed. Human nature would shortly achieve perfection. He was clearly responding to the changes that the Europeans were bringing to Iran. Karim Khan was no democrat; like all premodern philosophers, he was an elitist and an absolutist; impatient with the differences of opinion among the mujtahids, he intended to impose his own vision on the people. Nevertheless, he was one of the first Iranian clerics to acquaint himself with the new ideas of Europe. Where the orthodox ulema simply opposed the commercial encroachments of the British and Russians, Karim Khan was prescient enough to be more concerned about the new science and secularism of the West. In his spare time, he studied astronomy, optics, chemistry, and linguistics, and prided himself on his knowledge of science. During the 1850s and 1860s, when very few Iranians had firsthand knowledge of Europe, Karim Khan already realized that Western culture posed a grave threat to Iranian civilization. This was a period of transition, and he could see that new solutions must be found to meet this unprecedented challenge. Hence his evolutionary theology, which allowed for the possibility of something fresh, and his intuitive expectation of imminent, radical change. The Shaykhi movement was, however, rooted in the old world, with its elitist vision of knowledge. Feeling the impact of the industrialized West, it was also defensive. Karim Khan was bitterly opposed to the new Dar al-Funun, the first free high school in Tehran, founded by the reforming minister Amir Kabir. Staffed mainly by Europeans, it taught, with the aid of interpreters, natural science, higher mathematics, foreign languages, and the art of modern warfare. Karim Khan saw the school as part of a plot to extend European influence and destroy Islam. Soon the ulema would be silenced, he argued, Muslim children would be educated in Christian schools, and Iranians would become fake Europeans. He could see the dangers of alienation and anomie that lay ahead, and in the face of increasing European encroachment, his stance was rejectionist and separatist. His mystical ideology can be seen as an attempt to open the minds of Iranians to a wholly new solution, but, for better or worse, the Western presence in Iran was a fact of life and no reform movement that was unable to accommodate it could succeed. There were rumors that Karim Khan was about to establish his own religious government; he was summoned to court and kept under surveillance for eighteen months. During the 1850s and 1860s, he gradually retired from public life, kept his opinions to himself, and died, defeated and embittered, on his estate.62