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)

  There have, of course, been secularist ideologies that have helped people to cultivate a deep sense of the sacred inviolability of each human being without recourse to the supernatural. And religions have been just as murderous as any secular ideal. But Kook uttered a timely warning, since the twentieth century, from start to finish, has been characterized by one act of genocide after another, committed by nationalist, secularist rulers. 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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Jewish history had gone awry; Jews had defected from sacred tradition; it was now time to put Jewish history back on track and, if Jews took the first step, made the exodus from the corrupt Diaspora, and returned to their original values, living according to the Torah in their Land, God would send the Messiah. 76 The Jewish scholar Alan L. Mittelman notes that the early experience of Agudat shows the way fundamentalism works. It is not an immediate, knee-jerk response to modern secular society but only develops when the modernization process is fairly advanced. At first, traditionalists—like the eastern European members of Agudat—try simply to find ways of adapting their faith to the new challenge. They adopt some modern ideas and institutions, and attempt to prove that these are not alien to tradition, that the faith is strong enough to absorb these changes. But once society has become more completely secular and rational, some find its innovations unacceptable. They begin to realize that the whole thrust of secular modernity is diametrically opposed to the rhythms of conservative premodern religion, and that it threatens essential values. They begin to formulate a “fundamentalist” solution that returns to first principles and plans a counteroffensive. 77 T HE M USLIMS we are considering had not yet reached this stage. Modernization was far from complete in Egypt, and had not really begun in Iran. Muslims were still either trying to absorb the new ideas in an Islamic context or adopting a secularist ideology. Fundamentalism would not appear in the Islamic world until these early stratagems had, in the eyes of some Muslims, proved to be inadequate. They would see secularism as an attempt to destroy Islam, and, indeed, in the Middle East, where Western modernity was being implemented in a foreign context, it often appeared very aggressive indeed. This was obvious in the new secular state of Turkey. After the First World War, the Ottoman empire, which had fought on the side of Germany, was defeated by the European allies, who dismembered the empire and set up mandates and protectorates in the old Ottoman provinces. The Greeks invaded Anatolia and the old Ottoman heartland. From 1919 to 1922, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) had led Turkish nationalist forces in a war of independence, and had succeeded in keeping the Europeans out of Turkey and in setting up a sovereign state, run on modern European lines. This was an unprecedented step in the Islamic world. By 1947, Turkey had acquired an efficient bureaucracy and a capitalist economy, and had become the first multiparty secular democracy in the Middle East.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But just as characteristic were the isolation, ennui , and melancholy explored by Charles Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), the sickening doubt articulated by Alfred Tennyson in In Memoriam (1850), and the destructive lassitude and discontent of Flaubert’s eponymous heroine in Madame Bovary (1856). People felt obscurely afraid. Henceforth, at the same time as they celebrated the achievements of modern society, men and women would also experience an emptiness, a void, that rendered life meaningless; many would crave certainty amid the perplexities of modernity; some would project their fears onto imaginary enemies and dream of universal conspiracy. We shall find all these elements in the fundamentalist movements that developed in all three of the monotheistic faiths alongside modern culture. Human beings find it almost impossible to live without a sense that, despite the distressing evidence to the contrary, life has ultimate meaning and value. In the old world, mythology and ritual had helped people to evoke a sense of sacred significance that saved them from the void, in rather the same way as did great works of art. But scientific rationalism, the source of Western power and success, had discredited myth and declared that it alone could lead to truth. Yet reason could not address the ultimate questions; that had never been within the competence of logos . As a result, traditional faith was no longer possible for a growing number of Western men and women. The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) would discover that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by a desire for eros and procreation. Increasingly, an apparently perverse yearning for (and terror of) extinction would surface in modern culture. People were beginning to recoil from the civilization they had created, at the same time as they enjoyed the undoubted benefits it conferred. Thanks to modern science, most people in the West lived healthier, longer lives; their democratic institutions meant that, for the most part, life was more equitable. Americans and Europeans were rightly proud of their achievements. But the dream of universal brotherhood that had sustained Enlightenment thinkers was proving to be a chimera. The Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) had revealed the hideous effects of modern weaponry, and there was a dawning realization that science might also have a malignant dimension. There was a sense of anticlimax. 1 During the revolutionary period in the early years of the nineteenth century, a new and better world had seemed finally within the grasp of humanity. But this hope was never fulfilled. Instead, the industrial revolution brought new problems and fresh injustice and exploitation.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Chapter Ten MAMA FUMBLED THE KEY INTO THE LOCK WHILE MOTHS BEAT AGAINST the porch light overhead. Tomorrow, thin, dry wings would litter the stoop. Sometimes I cupped my hand and swept them out of the flow of traffic, but most days I ground their flimsy bodies under the heel of my shoe without a thought. I hopped from one foot to the other and hugged myself to stay warm. Mama pushed the door open, flicked on a lamp, and put her finger to her lips. “Go get in bed and don’t turn the bedroom light on, you’ll wake up Pam and Randall.” “But how will we know if Brother Terrell is okay?” “Lower your voice. Brother Cotton will let us know.” “But how will I see to undress?” “I don’t have the energy to explain everything to you. Put your gown on. Don’t turn on the light. And don’t wake up the other kids.” “But I’m scared of the dark.” “If you’ve been good, there’s no reason to be scared.” She popped me lightly on the bottom. “Now, go on!” She turned to pull out the couch and click it into a bed for her and Gary. I walked down the hall wondering how good I had been lately. Laverne startled me as she brushed past. Not good enough. I turned the handle on the bedroom door and stepped into the darkened bedroom I shared with Pam and Randall. My eyes found the window, then darted away from it. I didn’t want to see a demon peering in at me. Blood of Jesus. Blood of Jesus. Forgive me for peeking tonight. I felt my way over to the end of the bed, peeled off my church clothes, and left them in a pile on the floor. With my hands held out in front, I fumbled over the chest of drawers and counted down one, two, three to the third drawer, found what felt like my nightgown, and pulled it over my head and shoulders. Something in the corner caught my eye. What is that? I backed up until I hit the end of the bed and scrambled up between the Terrell kids. Randall sprawled along the outside edge of the bed. I threw his arm across his chest. He didn’t stir. Pam was hunched into a tight little ball with her face toward the wall, her arms wrapped tight around her abdomen, knees drawn in close, a cocoon of grief. I lay on my back and shut my eyes. Whatever I had seen a moment before, I did not

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  paper and figured out that Brother Terrell had to appear in court the next week. Looking back, it’s clear no one understood what was going on. Dreams, visions, prophecy, and scripture, our primary tools for making sense of the world, offered no insight on how to deal with legal issues. Late one night while my mother was praying, she had a vision in which she saw the finger of God pointing toward an angel, a youngish man with dark, curly hair. “It means God is sending an angel to help us. We just have to hold on and believe.” Members of the congregation approached Brother Terrell a couple of nights later and told him an angel had been present while he preached. They described him as having dark, curly hair and a presence that glowed. Mama said it was her angel, it had to be; he had the same hair. The adults gathered in the middle of the tent after church on most nights and talked about the Persecution of the Saints into the early morning hours. It was upon us, they said. This was it. While Pam and I sat in our chairs and played here’s-the-church, here’s-the-steeple and bit our fingernails to the quick, they spoke of the government pressuring them to deny Christ, of having 666 carved into their foreheads, of being thrown into jails and insane asylums for refusing to give up their faith. They spoke of Christian women strung up naked in public. Of children turning their parents in to the authorities. No one mentioned turning the speaker volume down. What began as a misdemeanor charge had escalated into the apocalypse. But then, that’s what we expected. Our lives became the twenty-four-hour prayer channel. When the grown-ups were not pacing and praying all night and in between services for the courage to stand up for Jesus, they were laying hands on Randall. His stomach had been swelling for months and now it was so large, he had to wear a man’s shirt to keep it covered. During the evening services, Brother Terrell called him to the front and had the congregation put their hands up and pray for him. After these prayers, Randall examined the profile of his body in the dresser mirror. “Hey, y’all, I b’lieve it’s gone down a little. Look.” Everyone said yeah, maybe he did look smaller, at least a little, when it was plain he looked the same or larger. About a hundred of the faithful accompanied Brother Terrell to court. My mother and Betty Ann and key members of the evangelistic party like Brother Cotton stayed behind to organize an all-day prayer meeting under the tent. I was relieved. If they put Brother Terrell in jail, if they yanked his fingernails out with pliers and tortured him for his faith, someone would still be around to drive to

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Modern society had achieved a great deal, materially and morally. It had reason to believe in its righteousness. In Europe and the United States, at least, democracy, freedom, and toleration were liberating. But fundamentalists could not see this, not because they were perverse, but because they had experienced modernity as an assault that threatened their most sacred values and seemed to put their very existence in jeopardy. By the end of the 1970s, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditionalists were poised to fight back. 10. D efeat? ( 1979–99 ) T HE FUNDAMENTALIST reconquista had shown that religion was anything but a spent force. It was no longer possible to ask, as an exasperated United States government official had demanded after the Iranian Revolution: “Whoever took religion seriously?” 1 The fundamentalists had brought faith out of the shadows and demonstrated that it could appeal to a huge constituency in modern society. Their victories filled secularists with dismay; this was not the tamed, decorous, privatized faith of the Enlightenment era. It seemed to deny sacred values of modernity. The religious offensive of the late 1970s had shown that societies were polarized; by the end of the twentieth century, it was clear that religious and secularists were even more divided. They could not speak each other’s language, nor share one another’s vision. From a purely rational perspective, fundamentalism was a disaster, but, since it amounted to a rebellion against what fundamentalists regarded as the illegitimate hegemony of scientific rationalism, this was not surprising. How should we assess these fundamentalisms as religious movements? What can they tell us about the peculiar challenges that religion faces in the modern and postmodern world? Did the fundamentalist triumphs amount, in fact, to a defeat for religion, and has the fundamentalist threat subsided? The Islamic Revolution in Iran was particularly troubling to those who still adhered to the principles of the Enlightenment. Revolutions were supposed to be strictly secularist. They were thought usually to occur at a time when the mundane realm had acquired new dignity, and was about to declare its independence of the mythical realm of religion. As Hannah Arendt explained in her celebrated study On Revolution (1 963): “it may ultimately turn out that what we call revolution is precisely that transitory phase which brings about the birth of a new secular realm.” 2 The idea of a popular uprising ushering in a theocratic state seemed an utterly fantastic notion, almost embarrassing in its apparently naive rejection of accepted Western wisdom. In the immediate aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, nobody expected Khomeini’s regime to survive.

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

  the monastic life and also shown the qualities of a soldier. Geneviève the counsellor of a king would in the fifteenth century provide a role model for an equally strange model of female sanctity, Joan of Arc, peasant visionary, intimidating presence at the French Court and formidable military leader against the English. The alliance between these saints and a Christian Catholic monarchy of France remained one of the great political facts about Christianity in western Europe down to the nineteenth century, and later French monarchs came to glory in their title of ‘the Most Christian King’. That title stood alongside another potent title which sprang from the eventual downfall of the Merovingians: the ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ (see pp. 349–50). Over centuries, the rivalry of these two sacred Christian monarchies repeatedly disturbed the peace of Europe. Until within living memory, French politics were still affected and embittered by an intense consciousness of the ancient French alliance between Church and Crown. The reputation of the Merovingians still enthrals many who prefer to construct the past through cloudy esoteric conspiracy theories rather than pay attention to the exciting realities of Christian history. Another monarchy was also taking shape, in Rome. The end of the Acacian schism in 519 produced renewed assertions of the pope’s spiritual authority. It was a moment when the devout and Western-born Emperor Justin was especially eager to conciliate Rome, with the encouragement of his nephew and heir Justinian, who was himself already contemplating the restoration of a single united empire of East and West based on Constantinople. The then pope, Hormisdas (514–23), was determined to drive a hard bargain for restoring the two halves of the imperial Church to communion together. He demanded that the bishops of the Eastern Church should subscribe to a formula of agreement which would leave Rome in an unchallengeable position: Christ built his Church on St Peter, and so in the apostolic see the Catholic faith has always been kept without stain. There is one communion defined by the Roman see, and in that I hope to be, following the apostolic see in everything and affirming everything decided thereby.9 The Patriarch of Constantinople managed to sidestep a full commitment to this statement of total surrender, but it was destined to have a long future in the armoury of the Bishops of Rome, both in later efforts to force reunion on a weakened Byzantine Church and in their own general self-image: the pronouncement of Papal Infallibility at the first Vatican Council of 1870 (see pp. 824–5) is inconceivable without this foundation. It was clear to Catholic leaders in the West that Easterners were cold towards Hormisdas’s formula and that the Emperor Justinian was still seeking to modify Chalcedon. Given that there was now so much cooperation between Catholic

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  It smelled like plastic and blue glass and beer and lots of good-looking young women. Muriel ordered her inevitable bottle of beer so I did, too, pretending to drink it for the rest of the evening. Neither Muriel nor I danced, and the tiny dance floor at the rear of the club was already crowded. We stood in the archway between the tables and the dancers, talking to each other, and drinking in the feeling of the other women around us, some of whom, like us, were no doubt coming to love. I soon adapted to Muriel’s fascination with gay bars. Whenever she came to the city, she explained to me, she came to go barring. She never felt truly alive except in gay bars, she said, and needed them like a shot in the arm. What we both needed was the atmosphere of other lesbians, and in 1954, gay bars were the only meeting places we knew. When Muriel and I weren’t talking, we stood feeling a little out of place, trying to look cool and a bit debonair. Every other woman in the Bag, it seemed, had a right to be there except us; we were pretenders, only appearing to be cool and hip and tough like all gay-girls were supposed to be. Totally unapproachable in our shyness, we were never approached, and besides, in those days gay-girls were usually not very sociable outside of their own little group. You never could tell who was who, and the protective paranoia of the McCarthy years was still everywhere outside of the mainstream of blissed-out suburban middle america. Besides, there were always rumors of plainclothes women circulating among us, looking for gay-girls with fewer than three pieces of female attire. That was enough to get you arrested for transvestism, which was illegal. Or so the rumors went. Most of the women we knew were always careful to have on a bra, underpants, and some other feminine article. No sense playing with fire. The evening ended all too quickly, and Muriel returned to her part-time job in a denture lab in Stamford, promising more of her ribald and creative letters. I was still looking for work, any work, and the bleakness of prospects was discouraging. I had survived McCarthy and the Korean War, and the Supreme Court had declared desegregated schools illegal. But racism and recession were still realities between me and a job, as I crisscrossed the city day after day, answering ads. Wherever I went, I was told that I was either overqualified—who wants to hire a Black girl with one year of college?—or underexperienced—what do you mean, dear, you don’t type? Jobs were scarce for everyone in New York that autumn, and for Black women, they were scarcer still. I knew I could not afford the luxury of hating to work in another factory or at a typewriter.

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

  A terrifying image in his notes underlines the plight of human beings after the Fall in the Garden of Eden: so trapped in sin that both body and spirit are twisted up claustrophobically without any escape from their agony – incurvatus in se – ‘turned in on themselves’.5 Whenever the Turmerlebnis occurred (in fact almost certainly after 1517), Luther remembered or reinterpreted this moment of agony resolved as a turning point forcing on him the realization that faith was central to salvation.6 Predictably the trigger was a text from Romans, 1.17, itself sheltering a Tanakh quotation from Habbakuk 2.4: ‘the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written “he who through faith is righteous shall live”’. In this sentence, the words ‘righteousness/righteous’ were in the Vulgate’s Latin ‘justitia/justus’: hence the word justification.7 In Latin that literally means making someone righteous, but in Luther’s understanding – in a literally crucial difference – it rather meant declaring someone to be righteous. To use the technical language of theologians, God through his grace ‘imputes’ the merits of the crucified and risen Christ to a fallen human being who remains without inherent merit, and who without this ‘imputation’ would not be ‘made’ righteous at all. That is the essential contrast with the via moderna notion of a covenant in which a merciful God allows human merit ‘to do that which is in oneself’. Since the word justitia is linked so closely with faith, as in Romans 1.17, we see how Luther constructed his evangelical notion of justification by faith from Paul’s closely woven text. That was the core of his liberating good news, his Gospel. Later Luther told this story of a theological revolution as autobiography, portraying his years in the Wittenberg Augustinian monastery as tortured and unprofitable. Partly this was hindsight, given all that happened afterwards, and partly it can be accounted for by his generous efforts in later years to cheer up a long-term house guest, Jerome Weller, who suffered repeated bouts of depression, and who needed to hear about someone else who had successfully endured similar troubles.8 Luther also freely admitted that he had been a good and conscientious monk, one of the best products of the healthiest parts of the monastic system. Indeed, that was the trouble. After all his frequent anxious visits to the confessional to seek forgiveness for his (in worldly terms trivial) sins, he still felt a righteous God’s fury against his sinfulness. Reminiscing later, he said that he had come to hate this God who had given laws in the Old Testament which could not be kept and which thus held humankind back from salvation. The opposition of Law and Gospel, an opposition set up by God himself, remained a fundamental theme of his theology. Luther needed to reconstruct his own story in the light of later events because the drastic implications of his personal struggle only gradually became clear.

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

  popes were alert for any signs of fresh doctrinal deviance in the East, and the eighth century soon brought them new alarms as the growing hostility to the devotional use of images – iconophobia and then iconoclasm – were promoted by successive Byzantine emperors from Leo III onwards (see pp. 442–56). It was not merely the issue itself which worried Rome, but the way in which these iconoclast emperors were prepared to order major changes in the everyday life of the Church, including in the Byzantine sphere of influence in Italy. That had implications for the authority of Peter’s successor. By contrast to the high-handed Easterners, with their fitful regard for Roman sensibilities, popes were well aware of the fund of goodwill towards the see of Peter in northern Europe, exemplified by no fewer than four Anglo-Saxon reigning monarchs who, between the seventh and ninth centuries, successively undertook the long journey to Rome. The pioneer less than a century after Augustine’s arrival in England was Caedwalla, king of the predecessor kingdom of Wessex called Gewisse (c. 659–89), and he was followed later by Ine, King of Wessex (d. 726), and Coenred (d. c. 709) and Burgred (d. c. 874), both kings of Mercia in the English Midlands. All died there, and three of them, Caedwalla, Coenred and Ine, are known to have decided to abdicate and retire to the city permanently; the long love affair between English wealth and Italian sunshine had begun. But the English were too distant to be of much political use to the popes against Lombardy or Constantinople. They looked instead directly across the Alps to the powerful Franks. Frankish rulers in the second half of the seventh century had their own reasons for finding this a very convenient alliance. CHARLEMAGNE, CAROLINGIANS AND A NEW ROMAN EMPIRE (800–1000) In Francia, two and a half centuries of Merovingian Christian monarchy sputtered to an ignominious close in 751, when the titular and already powerless Merovingian King Childeric III was informed that he and his son had discovered a religious vocation, after which his hair was given a monastic tonsure and he spent the rest of his days confined in a monastery. A pioneering example of what proved to be a frequent Christian technique for disposing of inconvenient monarchs or politicians, both male and female (often inconvenient spouses too), this was the brainchild of a ruthless nobleman called Pippin and maybe also his elder brother, Carloman. Between them they had been the real rulers of Francia for some time, as the Court officials known as the ‘Mayors of the Palace’; they were the sons of the great former mayor Charles Martel who had won the crucial

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Those of us—myself included—who relish the freedoms and achievements of modernity find it hard to comprehend the distress these cause religious fundamentalists. Yet modernization is often experienced not as a liberation but as an aggressive assault. Few have suffered more in the modern world than the Jewish people, so it is fitting to begin with their bruising encounter with the modernizing society of Western Christendom in the late fifteenth century, which led some Jews to anticipate many of the stratagems, postures, and principles that would later become common in the new world. A fterword W E 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.

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

  12 A Church for All People? (1100-1300) THEOLOGY, HERESY, UNIVERSITIES (1100-1300) We have now met various expressions of the ways in which Western Europeans were searching for salvation in the anxious, busy Gregorian age: pilgrimages, crusades, new monastic initiatives (many more than are here described). A problem remained: the clerically dominated structure of Latin Western Christianity had not exhausted the yearning of layfolk to show that they were active participants in the Body of Christ which was his Church. Throughout Europe a growth of industry, particularly in manufacturing clothing, created a network of new towns, and the Church found it difficult to cope; its developing parish system and the finance on which the parish was based operated best in the more stable life of the countryside. Now many people found themselves faced with the excitement and terror of new situations, new structures of life; their uncertainties, hopes and fears were ready prey for clergy who might have their own emotional difficulties and quarrels with the clerical hierarchy. This has been a repeated problem for institutional Christianity in times of social upheaval. Religious dissent had developed throughout Europe, particularly its most prosperous and disturbed parts, from the early eleventh century. The Church gave much of it the label heresy and in 1022 King Robert II of France set a precedent by returning to the Roman imperial custom of burning heretics at the stake. Modern examination of this case suggests that the unfortunate victims were not heretics even in the contemporary Church’s sense, but were caught up in the King’s struggle with a local magnate.1 Others expressed opinions which had not previously been declared unorthodox, but which were now defined as outside acceptability. Such was the case with the theologian from Chartres Berengar of Tours (c. 999–1088), who expressed his unease with the increasing precision with which his contemporaries asserted that eucharistic bread and wine could become the body and blood of Christ (Berengar escaped the flames by a sequence of humiliating forced recantations and died in mutinous silence). Even the Cathars, to whose suppression the Church devoted so much energy, may

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

  and understand it for themselves. In 1407 all existing versions of the Bible in English were officially banned by the English Church hierarchy, and no replacement was sanctioned until Henry VIII’s Reformation in the 1530s. In the intervening period, only the most obviously ultra-respectable could get away with open possession of a vernacular Bible, and indeed, their respectability seems itself to have made their copy of the text respectable.30 No other part of Europe went to such lengths, even though that great activist and reformer Jean Gerson did propose a general ban on Bible translations to the Council of Konstanz; he was worried that the laity would spend too much time reading for themselves and not listen to the clergy’s increasingly generous supply of preaching. In most of Europe, when printing technology arrived in the early fifteenth century, the supply of vernacular Bibles hugely increased: the printers sensed a ready market and hastened to supply it in languages which would command large sales. Between 1466 and 1522 there were twenty-two editions of the Bible in High or Low German; the Bible reached Italian in 1471, Dutch in 1477, Spanish in 1478, Czech around the same time and Catalan in 1492. In 1473–4 French publishers opened up a market in abridged Bibles, concentrating on the exciting stories and leaving out the more knotty doctrinal passages, and this remained a profitable enterprise until the mid-sixteenth century. Bernard Cottret, Calvin’s biographer, has suggested that this huge increase in Bibles created the Reformation rather than being created by it.31 The suppression of Lollardy by no means ended talk of reforming the Church in England. Since at least the eleventh century, it had been one of the best- regulated parts of the Western Church, and accordingly had bred many clergy with ultra-rigorous standards, who were not going to cease lamenting clerical faults just because Wyclif had been part of the stream of lamentation. Yet to do so brought new risks: the English Church authorities were so traumatized by the Wyclif episode that they were liable to regard any criticism as heretical. Even a well-meaning and conscientious Bishop of Chichester, Reginald Pecock, was accused of heresy in 1457–8. He was forced to resign and recant because he chose to defend the Church against Lollardy by privileging reason over the authority of scripture and the Fathers of the early Church; moreover, contrary to Gerson, he questioned the value of preaching without the laity doing their own reading to reinforce the message from the pulpit.32 English Lollardy survived through personal networks, often involving quite prosperous people but rarely gentry or clergy, who kept in touch over wide areas, treasuring their manuscripts of vernacular Bibles and increasingly tattered copies of Wyclifite tracts right down to the sixteenth-century Reformation. Significantly they did not produce much fresh literature after the first decades of

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Emotional excess became a feature of American religious life during the eighteenth century. It was especially evident in the First Great Awakening, which erupted in Northampton, Connecticut, in 1734 and was chronicled by the learned Calvinist minister Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Before the Awakening, Edwards explained, the people of Northampton had not been particularly religious, but in 1734 two young people died suddenly, and the shock (backed up by Edwards’s own emotive preaching) plunged the town into a frenzied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. People stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible. Within six months, three hundred people in the town had experienced a wrenching “born-again” conversion. They alternated between soaring highs and devastating lows; sometimes they were quite broken and “sank into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God.” At other times they would “break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping.” 38 The revival was just burning itself out when George Whitefield (1714–70), an English Methodist preacher, toured the colonies and sparked a second wave. During his sermons, people fainted, wept, and shrieked; the churches shook with the cries of those who imagined themselves saved and the groans of the unfortunate who were convinced that they were damned. It was not only the simple and unlearned who were so affected. Whitefield had an ecstatic reception at Harvard and Yale, and finished his tour in 1740 with a mass rally where he preached to 30,000 people on Boston Common. Edwards showed the dangers of this type of emotionalism in his account of the Awakening. When the revival died down in Northampton, one man was so cast down that he committed suicide, convinced that this loss of ecstatic joy could only mean that he was predestined to Hell. In other towns too, “multitudes … seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, as if somebody had spoken to them, ‘Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!’ ” Two people went mad with “strange enthusiastic delusions.” 39 Edwards insisted that most people were calmer and more peaceful than before the Awakening, but his apologia shows how perilous it could be to imagine that religion is purely an affair of the heart.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Crucial is the conviction that some groups will never be able to understand the ideology, because they have been infected by a “false consciousness.” The ideology is often a closed system that cannot afford to take alternative views seriously. Marxists, who see capitalists as the source of the world’s ills, cannot understand the values of capitalism, and vice versa. Colonialists are impervious to the truths of emerging nationalisms. Zionists and Arabs are unable to appreciate one another’s point of view. All ideologies imagine an unrealistic and, some would say, unrealizable utopia. They are by their very nature highly selective, but ideas, passions, and enthusiasms that are in the air at any given time, such as nationalism, personal autonomy, or equality, are likely to be picked up by a number of competing ideologies, which will often, therefore, appeal to the same ideals, since all derive from the same zeitgeist. The historian Edmund Burke (1729–97) was one of the first people to realize that if a group of people wished to challenge the ideology of the establishment (which may itself once have been revolutionary), they will have to develop a counterrevolutionary ideology of their own. This was the position of some of the most discontented Jews, Christians, and Muslims by the 1960s and 1970s. In order to counter what they regarded as the rational fantasies of the modern establishment, they would have to challenge ideas which had once been radical and revolutionary but had now become so authoritative and pervasive that they seemed self-evident. They were all in a weak position and all convinced, sometimes with reason, that the secularists and liberals wanted to annihilate them. In order to create a religious ideology, they would have to reshape the myths and symbols of their tradition in such a way that they became a persuasive blueprint for action that would compel the people to rise up and save their faith from extinction. Some of these religious ideologues were deeply imbued with the spirituality of the conservative age. They were mystics and had a deep appreciation of myth and ritual, which made them acutely aware of the reality of the unseen. But there was a difficulty. In the premodern period, myth had never been intended to have a practical application. It was not meant to provide a concrete plan of action; on occasions when people had used myth as a springboard for political activity, the results had been disastrous. Now, as they planned their counterattack on the secular world, these religious radicals would have to turn their myths into ideology.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But because by the end of the nineteenth century science and rationalism were the watchwords of the day, religion had to be rational too if it was to be taken seriously. Some Protestants were determined to make their faith logical and scientifically sound. It must be as clear, demonstrable, and objective as any other logos. Yet much modern science was too slippery for those in need of total certainty. The discoveries of Darwin and Freud came from unproven hypotheses, which seemed “unscientific” to the more traditional Protestants. Instead, they looked back to the early scientific vision of Francis Bacon, who had had no time for such guesswork. Bacon had believed that we could trust our senses absolutely, because they alone could provide us with sound information. He had been convinced that the world was organized on rational principles by an all-knowing God, and that the task of science was not to make wild conjectures but to catalog phenomena and to organize its findings into theories based on facts that were obvious to everyone. Protestants were also drawn to the philosophy of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, which had opposed the subjectivist epistemology of Kant, and claimed that truth was objective and available to any sincere human being of sound “common sense.”12 This lust for certainty was an attempt to fill the void that lurked at the heart of the modern experience, the God-shaped hole in the consciousness of wholly rational human beings. The American Protestant Arthur Pierson wanted the Bible explained in “a truly impartial and scientific spirit.” The very title of his book, Many Infallible Proofs (1895), shows the type of certainty that he required from religion: I like Biblical theology that … does not begin with an hypothesis and then wraps the facts and the philosophy to fit the crook of our dogma, but a Baconian system, which first gathers the teachings of the word of God, and then seeks to deduce some general law upon which the facts can be arranged.13 It was an understandable desire, but the mythoi of the Bible had never pretended to be factual in the way that Pierson expected. Mythical language could not satisfactorily be translated into rational language without losing its raison d’être. Like poetry, it contained meanings that were too elusive to be expressed in any other way. Once theology tried to turn itself into science, it could only produce a caricature of rational discourse, because these truths are not amenable to scientific demonstration.14 This spurious religious logos would inevitably bring religion into further disrepute.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Just as revealing, but more successful and enduring, were the jamaat al-islamiyyah, the Islamist student associations which dominated the university campuses during the presidency of Sadat. Like Shukri’s Society, the jamaat saw themselves as Qutb’s vanguard; however, they did not practice a radical withdrawal from the mainstream, but tried to create an Islamic space for themselves in a society that seemed oblivious to their needs. Egyptian universities were not like Oxford, Harvard, or the Sorbonne. They were huge, heartless, mass institutions with lamentably poor facilities. Between 1970 and 1977, the number of students rose from about 200,000 to half a million. As a result, there was appalling overcrowding. Two or three students would have to share a seat, and the lecture halls and laboratories were so packed that it was virtually impossible to hear the teacher’s voice, especially since the microphones were often broken. The overcrowding was especially difficult for women students, many of whom had come from a traditional background and found it intolerable to be crammed up against young men on the benches or in the buses that conveyed the students back to their equally crowded halls of residence. Learning was by rote and success in the examinations required the mechanical regurgitation of the lecture notes and manuals issued by the professors. The humanities, law, and the social sciences were known as “garbage faculties,” and virtually written off. Whatever their personal inclinations, able students would be forced to study medicine, pharmacology, odontology, engineering, or economics, or else resign themselves to being taught by the worst professors and to having even less chance of a reasonable job after graduation. In this setting, the students were not trained to think creatively about the problems of humanity or of society. Instead, they were required to absorb information passively and soullessly. Their introduction to modern culture was chronically superficial, therefore, and left their religious beliefs and practices entirely untouched.37

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Despite the denunciation of America as the Great Satan, relations between the United States government and the new Islamic regime in Tehran after the Revolution had been cautious but correct. On February 14, 1979, shortly after Khomeini’s return to Iran, students had stormed the American Embassy in the capital and attempted to occupy it, but Khomeini and Bazargan had moved quickly to expel the intruders. Nonetheless, Khomeini remained mistrustful of the Great Satan and could not believe that America would forgo its interests in Iran without a struggle. With the paranoia that we have seen to haunt most fundamentalist leaders, Khomeini was convinced that the United States was simply biding its time and would eventually threaten the new Islamic Republic with a coup similar to that which had overthrown Musaddiq in 1953. When, on October 22, 1979, the former shah flew into New York City to receive medical treatment for the cancer which was killing him, Khomeini’s suspicions seemed to be confirmed. The United States government had been warned by its own experts and by Tehran not to admit the former shah, but Carter believed that he could not deny his erstwhile loyal ally this humanitarian service.

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

  Besides the massive granite walls of the monastery, the dry conditions have preserved extraordinary woodwork; there are monumental doors in the church from Justinian’s time, and behind later panelling there lurk roof timbers preserved in their original setting, inscribed with memorials to the generosity of the Emperor and his covertly Miaphysite empress, Theodora, in refounding and fortifying this key Orthodox monastery.In the wretchedly anxious era which followed Justinian, certain key monastic writers not greatly known or appreciated in the West until modern times created a spirituality distinctive to the Orthodox world. St Catherine’s was home to one of the most important shapers of Byzantine monasticism: its abbot John of the Ladder (tis Klimakos, Climacus), so called from the work of spirituality which he created, the Ladder of Divine Ascent. Climacus is as shadowy a figure as the Western St Benedict, who (since so little is certain about either of them) may have been a near-contemporary of his in the sixth century. Likewise Climacus is known only through his written work, which is not a monastic rule like Benedict’s, but a collection of sayings conceived as a guide for monks. Its metaphor of progress in the ascetic life through the steps of a ladder is a characteristic feature of Christian mysticism in both East and West. Many mystics through the centuries have spoken and written about the impulse to move towards a goal, to travel onwards, even though frequently to the worldly eye they are people steeped in stillness and immobility. Stillness may be the goal; on the way, there is much labour. The Ladder distils much from the past. That is another feature of mystical writing, which repeatedly sets up echoes of past works, many of which the author is most unlikely to have known directly (while on occasion, the same mystical themes emerge quite independently in very varied settings). Climacus’s texts resonate with pronouncements of Egyptian ascetics, including Evagrius of Pontus (see pp. 209–10), at that stage not yet condemned as heretical, from whom Climacus takes the concept of apatheia, passionlessness or serenity, as one of the main ladder steps into the union with the divine in theosis. There is a sharp perceptiveness and even humour in Climacus’s writings which is very personal. One of the most original of his themes, much repeated later, is his paradoxical insistence that mourning is the beginning of a Christian’s divine joy: ‘I am amazed at how that which is called penthos [mourning] and grief should contain joy and gladness interwoven within it, like honey in the comb’.22 Orthodox monasteries still customarily have the Ladder read through during their meals in Lent. In the next generation, another monk gave further lasting shape to Orthodox spirituality, and is indeed often regarded as the greatest theologian in the

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

  treatise on the Resurrection (now mostly lost) either to her or to another prominent imperial lady.40 The young Severus Alexander is said, admittedly by a patchily reliable source, to have commissioned statues of Christ and Abraham for his private place of prayer alongside statues of Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander and deceased and deified imperial ancestors. This is the first recorded figure-sculpture of the Saviour in Christian history, although given its eclectic setting, with Christ reduced to a semi-divine celebrity, it forms a rather dubious precedent for the later flowering of Christian sculptural art.41 On both sides there is a sense of ambiguity. Christians were torn between their traditional exclusivity and a strong desire to please the powerful (even when the powerful offended Christian prejudices against graven images by sculpting Christ), while prominent Romans were caught between interest in and suspicion of Christian intentions.The situation was bound to produce extremes of fortune. An edict of Septimius Severus in 202 had forbidden conversions to either Christianity or Judaism, and that had been significant in promoting persecution during his reign and those of his sons. When the usurper Maximinus Thrax murdered Severus Alexander and seized his throne in 235, the brief interval of favour for Christians came to a sudden end.42 Then, in the mid-third century, Christian subjects of the Roman emperor found themselves persecuted for the first time on an empire- wide scale on imperial initiative. The new earnestness and personal commitment to religion among non-Christian elites spelled trouble in any case for Christians, but the situation came to a head in the 240s, which historically aware Romans would realize marked a thousand years from the foundation of the city of Rome. It was a time for citizens to contemplate the history of their beloved empire, a depressing prospect for the conservative-minded succession of army officers who fought their way to the imperial throne. Trajan Decius, an energetic senator and provincial governor who seized power as emperor in 249, felt this keenly. He attributed the empire’s troubles on the morrow of its thousandth year squarely to the anger of the old gods that their sacrifices were being neglected – as we have seen (see pp. 167–8), he was right. For Decius the solution was simple: enforce sacrifices on every citizen, man, woman and child, or at least the head of a household in the name of all its members – a radical intensification of a traditional practice whereby emperors ordered every community to offer sacrifices on their accession. It was obvious that the group which had most systematically avoided sacrifices in the empire was the Christians, and the confrontation which now took place turned a pitiless spotlight on an intransigence which had often previously been unobtrusive. In 250 the new imperial policy was implemented with bureaucratic efficiency. Those who sacrificed were issued with certificates of proof, some of which have