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.

Page 252 of 501 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Lover (1984)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

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

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

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

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

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

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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