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)

  By the 1880s, the tolerance of the Enlightenment was shown to be tragically skin-deep. In Russia, after the assassination of the liberal Tsar Alexander II in 1881, there were fresh restrictions on Jewish entry into the professions. In 1891, over ten thousand Jews were expelled from Moscow, and there were massive expulsions from other regions between 1893 and 1895. There were also pogroms, condoned or even orchestrated by the Ministry of the Interior, in which Jews were robbed and killed, and which culminated in the pogrom at Kishinev (1905) where fifty Jews died and five hundred were injured.34 Jews began to flee westward, at an average of fifty thousand a year, settling in western Europe, the United States, and Palestine. But the arrival in western Europe of these eastern Jews, with their strange clothes and outlandish customs, stirred old prejudices. In 1886, Germany elected its first parliamentary deputy on an officially anti-Semitic platform; by 1893, there were sixteen. In Austria, the Christian socialist Karl Lueger (1844–1910) built a powerful anti-Semitic movement, and by 1895 he was mayor of Vienna.35 The new anti-Semitism even struck France, the first modern European nation to emancipate its Jews. On January 5, 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer on the general staff, was convicted, on fabricated evidence, of transmitting secrets to the Germans, while an excited mob yelled, “Death to Dreyfus! Death to the Jews!” Some Jews continued to assimilate, either by converting to Christianity or by living entirely secular lives. Some turned to politics, becoming revolutionary socialists in Russia and other eastern European countries, or leading members of trade unions. Others decided that there was no place for Jews in gentile society; they must return to Zion, to the Holy Land, and build a Jewish state there. Others preferred a modernizing religious solution, such as Reform, Conservative, or Neo-Orthodox Judaism. Some continued to turn their backs on modern society and clung to traditional Orthodoxy. These Haredim (“the trembling ones”) were anxious about the future of Judaism in the new world and would try desperately to re-create the old. Even in western Europe or the United States, they continued to wear the fur hats, black knickers, and caftans that their fathers had worn in Russia or Poland. Most were striving to retain a Jewish identity in a hostile world, struggling to fend off annihilation, and to find some absolute security and certainty. Many felt embattled; some became more militant in their determination to survive.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Afghani, however, did not fall in love with the British as Tahtawi had fallen under the spell of the Parisians. His visit coincided with the Indian Mutiny against British rule (1857), which left a lasting bitterness in the subcontinent. Afghani traveled in Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and Europe, and became acutely anxious about the ubiquity and power of the West, which, he was convinced, was about to crush the Islamic world. When he arrived in Cairo in 1871, he was a man with a mission. He was determined to teach the Muslim world to unite under the banner of Islam and to use religion to counter the threat of Western imperialism. Afghani was passionate, eloquent, wild, and quick-tempered. He sometimes made a bad impression, but had undoubted charisma. In Cairo, he quickly gathered together a circle of disciples and encouraged them to spread his pan-Islamic ideas. There was much discussion about the form that modern Egypt should take at this time. Syrian journalists had promoted the idea of a secular state, and Tahtawi had believed that Egyptians should cultivate a Western-style nationalism. Afghani would have none of this. If religion was weak, in his view, Muslim society was bound to disintegrate. It was only by reforming Islam and remaining true to their own unique cultural and religious traditions that the Muslim countries would become strong again and build their own version of scientific modernity. He was convinced that unless the Muslims took strong action, the Islamic community (ummah) would soon cease to exist. Time was short. The European imperialists were becoming stronger every day, and in a very short space of time the Islamic world would be overrun by Western culture. Afghani’s religious vision was, therefore, fueled by the fear of annihilation that we have found to be a common response to the difficulties of modernity. He believed that it was not necessary to take on a European lifestyle in order to be modern. Muslims could do it their way. If they merely copied the British and French, superimposing Western values on their own traditions, they would lose themselves. They would simply be bad reproductions, neither one thing nor the other, and thus compound their weakness. 55 They needed modern science and would have to learn it from Europe; however, this was in itself proof, he argued, “of our inferiority and decadence. We civilize ourselves by imitating the Europeans.” 56 Afghani had put his finger on a major difficulty. Where Western modernity had succeeded in large part by pursuing innovation and originality, Muslims could only modernize their society by imitation. The modernizing program had an inherent and inescapable flaw. Afghani had, therefore, perceived a real problem, but his solution, which sounded attractive, was not feasible because it expected too much of religion. He was correct in his prediction that a loss of cultural identity would result in weakness, malaise, and anomie.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

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

  Diocletian made it his life’s work to restore the glory of the old Rome, and although the oppressive bureaucracy and relentless quest for uniformity which emerged from his efforts were very different from the early empire, he was determined to honour the old gods: he distrusted all religious novelty, not just Christianity. Only gradually did his undemonstrative religious conservatism turn into active persecution of Christians. In the last decade of the third century Diocletian became increasingly influenced by a clique of army officers from Rome’s Adriatic provinces in the Balkans, headed by Galerius, one of the colleagues whom Diocletian had chosen to help him govern the empire. Gradually this rabidly anti-Christian group, some of them enthusiasts for Neoplatonism, persuaded Diocletian to follow his inclinations and from 303 a full-scale attack was launched on the Christians, beginning with clergy. Churches were torn down, sacrifices ordered and Christian sacred texts confiscated. Persecution was not so intense in the West, where Diocletian’s colleague Constantius had some sympathy with Christianity, but elsewhere pressure intensified after Diocletian retired from public life in 305. Although this ‘Great Persecution’ proved to be the last in the history of the Roman Empire and ended two decades later with an extraordinary turnaround in the Church’s fortunes, it was far more savage than most previous assaults on Christianity; nearly half all recorded martyrdoms in the early Church period are datable to this period.47 Moreover, as we will see in Chapter 6, the eventual end of persecution left in its wake the same welter of internal quarrels as the mid- century persecutions by Decius and his successors. KINGS AND CHRISTIANS: SYRIA, ARMENIA This was a moment of dire danger for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Anyone capable of taking a wide view over the Mediterranean world in 303 would have been justified in concluding that it represented a final set-piece conflict between the traditional alliance of Graeco-Roman religion and politics and an organization which had made an unsuccessful bid to transform the empire and was now suffering the consequences. But Christianity was not merely a prisoner of the Roman world. Eastwards of Rome’s Mediterranean provinces, something remarkable had happened a century before: the religion of the carpenter’s son and the tent-maker Roman citizen had entered an alliance with a monarch. So, for the first time, it experienced what it was like to be established and promoted by the powerful. In cultures beyond the empire, Christianity expressed itself in other languages than Greek or Latin. These Christians might

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

  had changed; at least he was not beheaded like Laud). Altogether, the Non- Jurors were a distinguished and conscientious grouping who were now free to think new thoughts about why they were still Anglicans when not part of an established Church. The long-term consequences of those musings were considerable (see pp. 840–41), even though the Non-Juring Church itself eventually faded away along with the Stuarts’ chances of retaking the throne. It was not surprising that the leadership of the Church now shifted to those whom their more partisan colleagues had already angrily christened ‘Latitudinarians’ (see p. 654): those willing to allow a wide latitude of religious belief within a broadly tolerant Church, and to accommodate their allegiance to the new political realities. The triumphant Whigs also needed to justify the change of regime which now brought them to power in the state alongside Latitudinarians in the Church. The most clear-sighted Whig spokesman, although not at the time the most popular precisely because of his clear-sightedness, was John Locke. Locke had first plunged into political controversy in order to formulate a Whig case for James, Duke of York’s exclusion from the succession in 1679–81, and his arguments could equally well justify the 1688 revolution. He appealed to the Bible to demolish the idea that it provided a case for the divine right of kings. If seventeenth-century divine-right theorists like the Englishman Sir Robert Filmer turned to Genesis and claimed a hereditary succession from Adam, granted by God, to justify the divine character of royal succession in their own day, Locke denied that the idea of hereditary succession could be found in Genesis, and he used its stories to construct a different myth. Although Adam’s fall had brought about the punishment that humans would have to labour in order to survive, this burden had engendered a natural right in all people to labour and to possess the land for labour. This preceded any authority to govern, which resulted from contracts freely made by humans in order to live more easily with each other. So the Bible provided the basis of Locke’s distinctive ideology of a social contract, and justified his scheme of rights and duties. Locke’s programme was not immediately attractive to the new Whig establishment, which did not want to endanger its fragile alliance with Anglican Tories, and which was therefore inclined to prefer providentialist arguments to defend King William’s rule: Whigs saw him as God’s agent in defending the English Church.36 Nevertheless, over the next century, Locke’s language of rights and contract fermented in the political arguments of the anglophone world and then spread into Europe generally, decisively undermining the concept of sacred monarchy. After William III’s death in 1702, English-led armies continued to fight the French under his British successor and sister-in-law, Queen Anne, decisively blocking Louis’s seemingly inexorable advance. Before John Churchill’s victory

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

  the destitute. There were good reasons to cherish indulgences and their sale: they were very useful for fund-raising for good causes, such as the rebuilding of churches or the support of the charitable homes for the elderly and infirm called hospitals (themselves a part of the Purgatory industry, since their grateful inmates were expected to pass their time praying for the welfare of the souls of their benefactors). Indulgences were as ubiquitous as the modern lottery ticket, and indeed the earliest dated piece of English printing is a template indulgence from 1476.11 That same year, unknown to the printer in Westminster, a very considerable extension of the system’s potential had occurred when the theologian Raimund Peraudi argued that indulgences were available to help souls of people already dead and presumed to be in Purgatory, as well as living people who sought and received an indulgence; a papal bull followed to implement this suggestion. With that the system was complete, and ready to have its disastrous effect on Martin Luther’s volcanic temper (see pp. 608–10). Perhaps significantly for the Reformation, the development of an obsession with Purgatory was not uniform within Europe. It seems to have been the north rather than the Mediterranean area, perhaps most intensively the Atlantic fringe from Galicia on the Spanish Atlantic seaboard round as far as Denmark and north Germany, which became most concerned with prayer as a ticket out of Purgatory. Dante Alighieri’s detailed descriptions of Purgatory in his fourteenth- century masterwork the Divina Commedia might suggest that southerners were indeed concerned with Purgatory, but his Italian readers do not seem to have transformed their delight in his great poem into practical action or hard cash. This action can be monitored through the contents of late medieval wills – one of the rare ways in which we meet thousands of individuals facing death across the centuries. In the north, will-makers put big investment into such components of the Purgatory industry as Masses for the dead. In Germany there was a phenomenal surge in endowment of Masses from around 1450, with no signs of slackening until the whole system imploded under the impact of Luther’s message in the 1520s.12 Samplings from Spain and Italy do not reveal the same concern. Several studies of localities in southern Europe suggest that such activity was imported by reforming ‘Counter-Reformation’ Catholic clergy in the late sixteenth century, and only then created a piety reminiscent of that which the Protestants were destroying in much of northern Europe. A similar process of transfer southwards occurred at the same time with the devotion of the rosary, originally German.13 Another important symptom of a north–south difference on salvation occurs in the many books published to provide clergy with models for sermons about penitence. These books were widely bought throughout Europe in the fifteenth

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There have always been people, in every age and in each tradition, who have fought the modernity of their day. But the fundamentalism that we shall be considering is an essentially twentieth-century movement. It is a reaction against the scientific and secular culture that first appeared in the West, but which has since taken root in other parts of the world. The West has developed an entirely unprecedented and wholly different type of civilization, so the religious response to it has been unique. The fundamentalist movements that have evolved in our own day have a symbiotic relationship with modernity. They may reject the scientific rationalism of the West, but they cannot escape it. Western civilization has changed the world. Nothing—including religion—can ever be the same again. All over the globe, people have been struggling with these new conditions and have been forced to reassess their religious traditions, which were designed for an entirely different type of society. There was a similar transitional period in the ancient world, lasting roughly from 700 to 200 BCE, which historians have called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. This age was itself the product and fruition of thousands of years of economic, and therefore social and cultural, evolution, beginning in Sumer in what is now Iraq, and in ancient Egypt. People in the fourth and third millennia BCE, instead of simply growing enough crops to satisfy their immediate needs, became capable of producing an agricultural surplus with which they could trade and thereby acquire additional income. This enabled them to build the first civilizations, develop the arts, and create increasingly powerful polities: cities, city-states, and, eventually, empires. In agrarian society, power no longer lay exclusively with the local king or priest; its locus shifted at least partly to the marketplace, the source of each culture’s wealth. In these altered circumstances, people ultimately began to find that the old paganism, which had served their ancestors well, no longer spoke fully to their condition.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  By antagonizing the West, Iran had forfeited essential equipment, spare parts, and technical advice. By 1982, inflation was high, there was a severe shortage of consumer goods, and unemployment had risen to 30 percent of the general population (50 percent in the cities). 21 The hardships suffered by the people were embarrassing to a regime that, for religious reasons, had put social welfare at the top of its original agenda on coming to power. Khomeini did his best for the poor. He set up the Foundation for the Downtrodden to relieve the distress of those who had suffered most under the Pahlavis. Islamic associations in the factories and workshops provided workers with interest-free loans. In the rural areas, Construction Jihad employed young people in building new houses for the peasants, and in agricultural, public health, and welfare projects, especially in the war zones. But these efforts were offset by the war with Iraq, which had not been of Khomeini’s making. Khomeini was aware of the tension between the mystical and the practical. He understood that a modern state needed popular participation and a fully representative government. As the West had discovered in the course of its own modernization, this was the only type of polity that worked in an industrialized, technicalized society. His theory of Velayat-e Faqih had been an attempt to provide modern political institutions with an Islamic context that would give them meaning to the people. The Supreme Faqih and the Council of Guardians would give the elected Majlis a mystical, religious significance that a Muslim people, who could not relate to the Western secularist ideal, needed: Velayat-e Faqih was thus an attempt to provide a mythical foundation for the practical activities of parliament, and contain the modern within a traditional vision. But Khomeini had evolved the theory of Velayat-e Faqih in a madrasah in Najaf. What sounded good on paper, as it were, proved to be problematic when put into practice in Iran. This became apparent as early as 1981, and the difficulty continued to exercise Khomeini for the rest of his life. 22 In 1981, the Majlis proposed some important land reforms, which would ensure a fairer distribution of resources. Khomeini sympathized with this move, which would be beneficial to the people, even though it contradicted the letter of the Shariah. He could also see that unless Iran was able to achieve this type of basic reform, it would remain feudal and agrarian, and any modernization would be superficial. But the Land Reform Bill ran into difficulties.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Kook died in 1935, thirteen years before the establishment of the State of Israel. He did not live to see the terrible expedients to which Jews would feel driven in order to create a state for themselves in Arab Palestine. He never witnessed the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948, nor the Arab and Jewish blood spilled in the course of the Arab-Israeli wars. Nor did he have to face the fact that, fifty years after the creation of the State of Israel, most of the Jews in the Holy Land would still be secularists. His son, Zvi Yehuda, would see these things, and, in his old age, would make his father’s mythos a program for practical, political action and create a fundamentalist movement. But in these terrible times, was it possible for Jews to keep out of political life? Not only was modern society becoming increasingly anti-Semitic, but secularism was making great inroads into Jewish communities and undermining the traditional way of life. In eastern Europe, modernization was only just beginning. Some of the rabbis of Russia and Poland continued to turn their backs on the new world and held aloof from politics. How could any Jew worthy of the name soil his integrity by taking part in the bargaining and compromise that were an essential part of modern political life in a democratic state? How could they square this with the absolute demands of the Torah? By making deals with gentiles and getting involved in their political institutions, Jews would bring the profane world into the community, and this would inevitably corrupt it. But the principals of the great Misnagdic yeshivot and the Hasidim of the Polish town of Ger disagreed. They could see that the various Zionist parties and the Jewish socialist parties were enticing Jews into a godless way of life. They wanted to stop the drift toward secularism and assimilation, and believed that these essentially modern dangers must be met on their own terms in modern ways. Religious Jews must fight the secularists with their own weapons. That meant the creation of a modern political party to protect Orthodox interests. This was not a wholly new idea, they contended. For a long time, the Jews of Russia and Poland had engaged in shtadlanut (political dialogue or negotiations) with the government to safeguard the welfare of the Jewish communities. The new Orthodox party would continue this work, but in a more efficient and organized manner.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  More strictly Orthodox, Reines did not agree: the political activities of the Zionists had no religious significance whatsoever, but the creation of a Jewish homeland was a practical solution for a persecuted people, and therefore deserved the support of the Orthodox. If a homeland was established in Palestine one day, this might well, in the view of Mizrachi, lead to a spiritual renewal and to devout Torah observance there. In 1911, however, the Mizrachi delegates had walked out of the Tenth Zionist Congress at Basel, when the Congress failed to grant them equal funding for their religious schools in Palestine. Since they could no longer cooperate with mainstream Zionism, which seemed committed to radical secularism, they were prepared to throw in their lot with Agudat Israel, which soon had branches in both eastern and western Europe. But the members of Agudat in the West saw the movement in a very different light from the Russian and Polish Jews, who still felt very cautious about direct activism. 74 The Jews of Russia and Poland saw Agudat as a defensive organization only; its task was simply to safeguard Jewish interests at this crucial time when the governments of eastern Europe were trying to modernize. They kept their activism to a minimum, worked to improve the lot of Jews within a modern political framework, abjured Zionism, and professed loyalty to the Polish state. But in the West, where modernization was far advanced, Jews were ready for something different. Most Agudat members in the West were Neo-Orthodox, which was itself a modernized form of Judaism. They were now accustomed to the modern world, and no longer sought simply to contain the shock of the new but wanted to change it. Instead of seeing their party as a defensive organization, some wanted Agudat to go on the offensive and were developing an incipient fundamentalism. For Jacob Rosenheim (1870–1965), the founding of Agudat was not simply a slightly regrettable necessity, as it was for the eastern Jews, but a cosmic event. For the first time since 70 CE , Jews had “a unified and will-determining centre.” 75 Agudat symbolized God’s rule over Israel and should become the central organization of the Jewish world. Nevertheless, Rosenheim still felt slightly queasy about politics, and wanted Agudat to confine its activities to maintaining Jewish schools and protecting Jews’ economic rights. Younger members were more radical, and were closer in spirit to Protestant fundamentalists. Isaac Breuer (1883–1946) wanted Agudat to take the initiative and start a campaign for the reform and sacralization of Jewish society. Like the premillennialists, he could see “signs” of God’s activity in the world. The Great War and the Balfour Declaration were the “footsteps of the Messiah.” Jews must reject the corrupt values of bourgeois society, cease to cooperate with the governments of Europe, and create their own sacred enclave in the Holy Land, where they would build a theocratic, Torah-based state.

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

  elites, Arian Western monarchs and moreover a Merovingian royal house committed to Catholic Christianity, there was modified rapture among Westerners when in 533 Justinian began his programme of reconquest in Italy, and in 536 publicly proclaimed his programme of reuniting the Mediterranean under Byzantine rule. Silverius, son to Pope Hormisdas, became pope in 536 with the backing of successive Ostrogoth monarchs in Ravenna, and so the papacy became irresistibly drawn into the military confrontation between Ravenna and Constantinople. When Justinian humiliated the Ostrogoths and made Ravenna his western capital, there was an eager potential successor, Vigilius, archdeacon to the Pope, waiting to supplant Silverius. As a result the new pope was a creature of the Emperor – soon, indeed, after an imperial invitation to Constantinople, his virtual prisoner. Vigilius found that his new dignity had not brought him a free holiday on the Bosphorus, but had led him into a trap in which Justinian was still pursuing a formula to please Miaphysites and needed the pope’s approval to the deal. Between 547 and 548 the hapless pope reluctantly added his agreement to imperial edicts (‘Three Chapters’) which included condemnations of three deceased theologians whose views were undoubtedly Dyophysite, but whom Chalcedon had specifically declared orthodox – among them was no less a figure than the great Theodore of Mopsuestia (see pp. 223–4). A Church council sitting in Constantinople in 553 endorsed the condemnations laid out in the Three Chapters, while blandly reaffirming Chalcedon and making the best of Vigilius’s determined absence from its deliberations. Now Vigilius was caught between Western fury and the real prospect of being beaten up by the Emperor’s thugs. After miserable wavering, in 554 he returned to his affirmation of the Three Chapters with their condemnations. He was spared from dire consequences in Rome only by dying on the journey home from Byzantium. So much for Gelasius’s affirmation of clerical power, or for Hormisdas’s stainless faith maintained by the apostolic see: a pope had committed himself to a major statement of heresy, coerced by an emperor.10 So, for the first time since the days of Constantine I, there was now a division in the Church leadership’s attitude to the emperor. It was particularly difficult further west in Gaul and Spain to relish any contact with Byzantium: increasingly the survivors of the Classical world in the West would feel that if anything was to remain from the old culture, it would be dependent on those they had once dismissed as ‘barbarians’. Arianism was weakening: the Byzantine conquests in Italy had dealt it a severe blow. Yet Justinian’s military successes in Italy and North Africa in turn melted away through the ruinous wars of the later sixth century, leaving more scope for papal assertions of Rome’s

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At first this new, rough, and democratic Christianity was confined to the poorer and more uneducated classes. but during the 1840s, Charles Finney (1792–1875), a pivotal figure in American religion, brought it to the middle classes. He thus helped to make this “evangelical” Christianity, based on a literal reading of the Gospels and intent on converting the secular nation to Christ, the dominant faith of the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century.80 Finney used the uncouth, wild methods of the older prophets, but addressed lawyers, doctors, and merchants, urging them to experience Christ directly, without the mediation of the establishment, to think for themselves and rebel against the hegemony of the learned theologians in the denominations. He also urged his middle-class audiences to join other evangelicals in the social reform of society.81 After the Revolution, the state had declared its independence of religion and, at the same time, Christians in all the denominations began to withdraw from the state. There was disillusion and disenchantment with the Revolution, which had not managed to usher in the millennium after all. Protestants began to insist on preserving their own religious “space,” apart from the deist republican government. They were God’s community and did not belong to the federal establishment. Protestants still believed that America should be a godly nation, and public virtue was increasingly seen as nonpolitical82; it was better to work for the redemption of society independently of the state, in churches, schools, and the numerous reform associations which sprang up in the northern states during the 1820s, after the Second Great Awakening. Christians started to work for a better world. They campaigned against slavery and liquor, and to end the oppression of marginalized groups. Many of the Millerites had been involved in temperance, abolitionist, and feminist organizations.83 There was certainly an element of social control in all this. There was also an unpleasantly nativist motivation in the emphasis on the Protestant virtues of thrift, sobriety, and clean living. Protestants were greatly disturbed by the massive flood of Catholic immigrants into the United States. At the time of the Revolution, America had been a Protestant country, with Catholics comprising only about one percent of the total population. But by the 1840s, there were over 2.5 million Catholics in America, and Roman Catholicism was the largest Christian denomination in the United States.84 This was an alarming development in a nation that had long regarded the Pope as Antichrist. Some of the evangelical reform effort was an obvious attempt to counter this Catholic influence. Temperance, for example, was promoted to oppose the drinking habits of the new Polish, Irish, and Italian Americans.85

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The shah had begun his White Revolution by closing the Majlis, believing that he could only push his reforms forward by dictatorial rule and by silencing all opposition. He was supported by the SAVAK, his secret police, formed in 1957 with the help of the American CIA and the Israeli Mossad. SAVAK’s brutal methods, its regime of torture and intimidation, made people feel that they were held prisoner in their own country, with the connivance of Israel and the United States.36 During the 1960S and 1970S, two paramilitary organizations were formed, similar to other guerrilla groups that were emerging in the developing world at this time: the Fedayin-e Khalq, a Marxist group founded by members of the now suppressed Tudeh and National Front parties, and an Islamic corps, the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Force seemed the only way to fight a regime which blocked all normal opposition and which was based on coercion rather than consent. 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 1960S, 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 (1962) 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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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.26 His instinctive response, in sum, was to retreat. But other traditionalists felt it necessary to take a more creative stand against the danger of secularizing, rationalizing influences. In 1803, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner, a disciple of the Gaon of Vilna, took a decisive step that would transform traditional Jewish spirituality, when he founded the Etz Hayyim yeshiva in Volozhin, Lithuania. Other new yeshivot were founded in the course of the century in other parts of eastern Europe: in Mir, Telz, Slobodka, Lomza, and Novogrudok. In the past, a yeshiva (a word that derives from the Hebrew for “to sit”) had simply been a series of small rooms behind the synagogue where students studied Torah and Talmud. It had usually been administered by the local community. Volozhin, however, was something entirely different. Here, hundreds of gifted students came from all over Europe to study with internationally famous experts. The curriculum was demanding, the hours were long, and admission to the yeshiva far from easy. Rabbi Hayyim taught Talmud according to the method he had learned from the Gaon, analyzing the text and stressing the importance of logical consistency, but in a way that yielded a spiritual encounter with the divine. It was not simply a matter of learning about the Talmud; the process of rote learning, preparation, and lively discussion was just as important as any final conclusion reached in class, because it was a form of prayer, a ritual that gave the students a sense of the sacred. It was an intense existence. The young men were isolated in a quasi-monastic community, their spiritual and intellectual lives entirely shaped by the yeshiva. They were separated from their families and friends and immersed wholly in the world of Jewish scholarship. Some of the students were permitted to spend a little time on modern philosophy or mathematics, but such secular subjects were secondary, regarded as stealing time from the Torah.27

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1979, the year that fundamentalists staged their comeback, George Gallup’s national poll showed that one out of every three of the American adults questioned had experienced a religious (“born-again”) conversion; nearly 50 percent believed that the Bible was inerrant, and over 80 percent saw Jesus as a divine figure. The poll also revealed that there were about 1300 evangelical Christian radio and television stations, which had an audience of about 130 million and made profits estimated from $500 million to “billions” of dollars. As a leading fundamentalist, Pat Robertson, proclaimed during the 1980 election: “We have enough votes to run this country!” 96 There were three factors that contributed to this new growth and confidence during the 1960s and 1970s. First was the development of the South. Hitherto, fundamentalism had been a product of the big northern cities. The South was still predominantly agrarian. Liberal Christianity had made little progress in the churches, and there had, therefore, been no need for “fundamentalists” to fight against the new ideas and the Social Gospel. But during the 1960s, the South began to modernize. There was an influx of people from the North. They were looking for employment in the oil industry and the new technical and aerospace projects located there. The South had begun to experience the same kind of rapid industrialization and urbanization as the North had a century earlier. During the 1930s, two-thirds of southerners had lived in the country. By 1960, less than half lived there. The South was beginning to acquire a higher national profile. In 1976, Jimmy Carter became the first southerner since the Civil War to be elected to the presidency; he was succeeded in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, the governor of California. But though southerners welcomed their new preeminence, they found their world completely changed. The immigrants from the North brought modern and liberal ideas with them. Not all were Protestants or even Christians. Values and beliefs that had hitherto been taken for granted now had to be defended. In the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations especially, conservative Protestants were as ripe for a fundamentalist movement as their northern co-religionists had been at the turn of the century, and for all the same reasons. 97 The people of the new South, who felt uprooted and alienated from the society in which they lived, were often newcomers from the rural districts to the rapidly expanding cities. Many country people started to send their children to college and on the campus they had to encounter the new sixties liberalism. They also witnessed the loss of faith suffered by many of their fellow students. 98 Parents felt alienated and alarmed by children who were adopting apparently Godless ideas. In the churches, they encountered even more shocking notions, brought from the North by the new arrivals. Increasingly, people turned to the fundamentalist churches, and especially to the “electric” churches of the airwaves. Powerful new televangelists built empires during this period.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was not a doctrine for the masses, who might interpret it crudely, so Shiis must keep their spiritual as well as their political views to themselves. The mythology of the Imamate, as developed by Jafar as-Sadiq, was an imaginative vision that looked beyond the literal and factual meaning of scripture and history to the constant, primordial reality of the unseen (al-ghayb) . Where the uninitiated could see only a man, the contemplative Shii could discern a trace of the divine in Jafar as-Sadiq. 29 The Imamate also symbolized the extreme difficulty of incarnating God’s will in the flawed and tragic conditions of daily life. Jafar as-Sadiq effectively separated religion from politics, privatizing faith and confining it to the personal realm. He did this to protect religion and enable it to survive in a world that seemed essentially hostile to it. This secularization policy sprang from a profoundly spiritual impulse. Shiis knew that it could be dangerous to mix religion and politics. A century later, this became tragically evident. In 836, the Abbasid caliphs moved their capital to Samarra, some sixty miles south of Baghdad. By this date, Abbasid power was disintegrating, and though the caliph remained the nominal ruler of the whole Muslim world, real authority lay with the local amirs and chieftains throughout the far-flung empire. The caliphs felt that in these disturbed times they could not permit the Imams, the descendants of the Prophet, to remain at large, and in 848, Caliph al-Mutawakkil summoned the Tenth Imam, Ali al-Hadi, from Medina to Samarra, where he was placed under house arrest. He and his son, the Eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari, could only maintain contact with the Shiah by means of an agent (wakil) who lived in al-Karkh, the mercantile quarter of Baghdad, practicing a trade to deflect the attention of the Abbasid authorities. 30 In 874, the Eleventh Imam died, probably poisoned at the behest of the caliph. He had been kept in such strict seclusion that Shiis knew very little about him. Did he have a son? If not, what would happen to the succession? Had the line died out, and, if so, did this mean that the Shiah was deprived of mystical guidance? Speculation ran rife, but the most popular theory insisted that Hasan al-Askari indeed had a son, Abu al-Qasim Muhammad, the Twelfth Imam, who had gone into hiding to save his life. It was an attractive solution, because it suggested that nothing had changed. The last two Imams had been virtually inaccessible. Now the Hidden Imam would continue to make contact with the people through his wakil , Uthman al-Amri, who would dispense spiritual advice, collect the zakat alms, interpret the scriptures, and deliver legal judgments. But this solution had a limited life span. As time passed beyond the point where the Twelfth Imam seemed likely to be still alive, Shiis became anxious once again, until, in 934, the current agent, Ali ibn Muhammad as-Samarri, brought the Shiah a message from the Hidden Imam.

• From Action (2014)

  2. It introduces aspects of what you’re attracted to in others, which your partner’s brain may translate as, “What I’m not giving you.” The qualities you admire in Dan and so callously brought up, like a jerk, I would never think like that—lithe hands, Travolta-level fur-pecs—are a fun path for your person to follow straight to spiraltown: Oh, God, is she saying she thinks my hands look so stumpy they’re practically feet and also that male-pattern baldness, chest edition, is now a thing I’m nervous about re: my body??? How come I never knew how hideous I was? In actuality, you would never be this wrongheaded in your thinking, but specifying any characteristic of someone you might like to give a tour of your shared bedroom should be vague, outside of—and maybe even including—their gender. 3. It frames what you’re proposing as something you (and Dan) will be doing ALONE. It’s important to specify that it’s about the two of you, rather than an exclusionary party zone you and Matt get to share as a part of your affection for each other. Though threesomes… wait for this mind-blowing revelation… involve someone outside your relationship, they’re (mostly) all about the two of you in the long-term. Matt is agreeing to try something you’ve expressed will make you happy, and you’re rewarding Matt by showing him why that was a good idea, via incredibly hot sex, rather than a grave misjudgment. “I want to get fucked by another person” makes no mention of the fact that your partner is in the picture. The two predominant fears when it comes to group sex are jealousy and exclusion. Once you’ve worked out that each party is willing, take care of the following and you’ve got very little to be afraid of: • In couples, the suggester lets the suggestee pick the third—and, without a couple’s encouragement, a third probably shouldn’t ask at all. If you’re asking for a threesome, your main collaborator gets to pick the featured guest. This is the rule even if your girlfriend is giving you one “for your birthday,” which is kind of a harsh toke from the outset—does she want to do it, or is she feeling pressured into making you happy “this one time” by wincing through something she’s uncomfortable with? It could easily be the opposite: She wants to do it, but is self-conscious about that fact, so she’s got to wrap it in a bow—much like when I get loved ones expensive caramels as gifts because I know they’ll open and eat them WITH me.

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

  festivals which became longer and more elaborate in direct proportion to the elaboration of the festivals themselves. From early days, the time of anxiety and tragedy which led up to the Resurrection was marked out by abstinence and vigil. By a natural progression of ideas, this was linked to the story in the Synoptic Gospels that Christ had retreated from his active life and ministry into the desert for forty days and nights. It was the perfect time of the liturgical year for catechumens to spend a last rigorous preparation before their triumphal reception into the Church during the celebration of Easter. This forty-day period, first explicitly mentioned without much fanfare in the Canons of the Council of Nicaea and therefore probably of long standing, was the season which in English is known as Lent.27 Christ’s birth and the celebration of the Christ Child’s adoration by non-Jewish astrologers (his ‘showing forth’ or ‘Epiphany’) came over the next centuries also to be observed with a similar introductory period of fasting and austerity, during which the faithful could act out their longing for the Saviour’s arrival or ‘Advent’. That forty-day season would make all the more joyful the Christmas and Epiphany festivals at the darkest time of the calendar, when the days were at their shortest, as the release came at last from the time of preparation. THE BEGINNINGS OF MONASTICISM It seemed that episcopal authority had now triumphed in the Church. But worshippers at the Eucharist, seeing the bishop seated before them with his presbyters, might be aware that there was an alternative source of power and spirituality in the Church: an institution which had only gradually emerged during the third century. The closer the Church came to society, the more obvious were the tensions with some of its founder’s messages about the rejection of convention and the abandonment of worldly wealth. Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death. It is not surprising that many have sought a radical alternative, a mode of life which is in itself a criticism of ordinary society. Worldly goods, cravings and self-centred personal priorities are to be avoided, so that their accompanying frustrations and failures can be transcended. The assumption is that such transcendence has a goal beyond the human lifespan, the goal which some term God. The movement known as monasticism is a way of structuring this impulse.

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

  beginning of a successful effort to install the most flamboyant variety of Counter-Reformation Catholicism as an almost monopoly religion in the Habsburg heartlands, a remarkable achievement considering that in 1619 around 90 per cent of the population of Bohemia were not Catholic. While Friedrich fled from his briefly held second throne into lifelong exile, European powers both Protestant and Catholic were deeply worried by the Habsburg triumph. Not only Protestants were alarmed at the intransigent terms of Ferdinand’s Edict of Restitution in 1629, which restored lands to the old Church lost even before the Peace of Augsburg, and virtually outlawed Reformed Christianity in the empire: the alarm was enough to provoke many more to take up arms. Catholic France and Lutheran Sweden both intervened in wars which proved so destructive and prolonged that it was only in 1648 that the exhausted powers were able to agree on the Treaty of Westphalia to end the Thirty Years War. The boundaries between Catholic and Protestant territory chosen represented some rough parity of misfortune in terms of the territories which Catholics and Protestants had held at the stage that warfare had reached in the year 1624. Those religious boundaries still survive in European society at the present day. At the end of it all, Western Christianity would have to face new realities. On the outbreak of war, many believed strongly in the sacred reality and God-given destiny of the Holy Roman Empire: these were principles which for a serious- minded prince like the Lutheran Elector Johann Georg of Saxony even now outweighed his suspicion of the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand, and made him support the Emperor against fellow Protestants during the war. After 1648, there was no prospect that this foundational institution of medieval Western Christendom would ever become a coherent, bureaucratic and centralized state, not even on the open model of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (itself now in deep crisis: see pp. 536–9). Imperial institutions continued to operate, and provided a framework for German life, but Christian rulers would have to devise other ways of understanding how and why they ruled. Having seen the results of religious war through the years of the Reformation up to 1648, fewer of these rulers would be inclined to embark on crusades for the faith, especially against fellow Christians. Crusades simply had not worked. Alongside this struggle in mainland Europe was a conflict which took place over more than twenty years from 1638 in the Atlantic Isles, the three British kingdoms of Ireland, Scotland and England ruled over by the Stuart dynasty. Once more, the main issue was religion.69 When dynastic quirks delivered Ireland and England into the impatient hands of James VI of Scotland in 1603 on the death of the unmarried Queen Elizabeth, he found himself presiding in his

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Rida was a typical Muslim reformer in the tradition of Ibn Taymiyyah and Abd al-Wahhab. He wanted to counter a foreign threat by returning ad fontes.83 Modern Muslims could create a new and vibrant Islam only by returning to the ideals of the salaf, the first generation of Muslims. But Rida’s salafiyyah movement was not a slavish return to the past. Like other reformers at an early stage of the modernization process, he was trying to absorb the learning and values of the modern West by placing them within an Islamic context. He wanted to establish a seminary where students could be introduced to the principles of international law, sociology, world history, the organization of religious institutions, and Western science, at the same time as they studied Islamic jurisprudence. In this way, a new class of ulema would emerge, who, unlike the scholars at the Azhar (whom Rida considered to be hopelessly behind the times), would truly be men of their time, able to exercise an innovative ijtihad that was faithful to tradition. One day, one of these new ulema might become the modern caliph.84 Rida was no fundamentalist; he was still trying to effect a marriage between Islam and modern Western culture instead of creating a counterdiscourse, but his work would influence the fundamentalists of the future. Increasingly, toward the end of his life, Rida drew away from the Egyptian nationalists. He did not think that secularism was the answer. He was appalled by Atatürk’s atrocities. Was this what happened when the state became the supreme value and there was nothing to restrain a ruler from pragmatic but cruel policies to further the interests of the nation? Rida believed that in the Middle East—if not in the Christian West—persecution and intolerance were due to the decline of religion.85 At a time when many of the leading thinkers of Egypt were turning away from Islam, Rida came to believe that the modern Muslim states needed the restraints of religion as much as, if not more than, they had ever done before. If in Egypt, people had come to believe that the “secret” of Europe’s success was nationalism, Iranians in the early years of the twentieth century believed that this “secret” was constitutional government. At this point, like many Egyptians, Iranians wanted to be like the West. In 1904, Japan, which had recently adopted constitutional rule, inflicted a stunning defeat upon Russia. It was not long since Japan had been as ignorant and backward as Iran, the reformers argued, but now, thanks to its constitution, it was on the same level as the Europeans and could beat them at their own game. Even some of the ulema had become convinced of the need for representational government to curb the despotic rule of the shahs. As Sayyed Muhammad Tabatabai, a liberal mujtahid, explained: