Awe

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 A History of God (1993)

  It imitates the divine ecstasy, whereby God leaves his solitude and merges himself with his creatures. Perhaps the best way of viewing Denys’s theology is as that spiritual dance between what we can affirm about God and the appreciation that everything we can say about him can only be symbolic. As in Judaism, Denys’s God has two aspects: one is turned toward us and manifests himself in the world; the other is the far side of God as he is in himself, which remains entirely incomprehensible. He “stays within himself” in his eternal mystery, at the same time as he is totally immersed in creation. He is not another being, additional to the world. Denys’s method became normative in Greek theology. In the West, however, theologians would continue to talk and explain. Some imagined that when they said “God,” the divine reality actually coincided with the idea in their minds. Some would attribute their own thoughts and ideas to God—saying that God wanted this, forbade that and had planned the other—in a way that was dangerously idolatrous. The God of Greek Othodoxy, however, would remain mysterious, and the Trinity would continue to remind Eastern Christians of the provisional nature of their doctrines. Eventually, the Greeks decided that an authentic theology must meet Denys’s two criteria: it must be silent and paradoxical. Greeks and Latins also developed significantly different views of the divinity of Christ. The Greek concept of the incarnation was defined by Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580–662), who is known as the father of Byzantine theology. This approximates more closely to the Buddhist ideal than does the Western view. Maximus believed that human beings would only fulfill themselves when they had been united to God, just as Buddhists believed that enlightenment was humanity’s proper destiny. “God” was thus not an optional extra, an alien, external reality tacked on to the human condition. Men and women had a potential for the divine and would become fully human only if this was realized. The Logos had not become man to make reparation for the sin of Adam; indeed, the Incarnation would have occurred even if Adam had not sinned. Men and women had been created in the likeness of the Logos, and they would achieve their full potential only if this likeness was perfected. On Mount Tabor, Jesus’ glorified humanity showed us the deified human condition to which we could all aspire.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions. When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that “he” would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified, but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings, and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear—from eminent monotheists in all three faiths—that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was—in any sense—a reality “out there”; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary process of rational thought. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist—and yet that “he” was the most important reality in the world.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The apparition of Yahweh on Mount Sinai had emphasized the immense gulf that had suddenly yawned between man and the divine world. Now the seraphs were crying: “Yahweh is other! other! other!” Isaiah had experienced that sense of the numinous which has periodically descended upon men and women and filled them with fascination and dread. In his classic book The Idea of the Holy , Rudolf Otto described this fearful experience of transcendent reality as mysterium terribile et fascinans: it is terribile because it comes as a profound shock that severs us from the consolations of normality and fascinans because, paradoxically, it exerts an irresistible attraction. There is nothing rational about this overpowering experience, which Otto compares to that of music or the erotic: the emotions it engenders cannot adequately be expressed in words or concepts. Indeed, this sense of the Wholly Other cannot even be said to “exist” because it has no place in our normal scheme of reality. 2 The new Yahweh of the Axial Age was still “the god of the armies” ( sabaoth ) but was no longer a mere god of war. Nor was he simply a tribal deity, who was passionately biased in favor of Israel: his glory was no longer confined to the Promised Land but filled the whole earth. Isaiah was no Buddha experiencing an enlightenment that brought tranquillity and bliss. He had not become the perfected teacher of men. Instead he was filled with mortal terror, crying aloud: What a wretched state I am in! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have looked at the King, Yahweh Sabaoth. 3 Overcome by the transcendent holiness of Yahweh, he was conscious only of his own inadequacy and ritual impurity. Unlike the Buddha or a Yogi, he had not prepared himself for this experience by a series of spiritual exercises. It had come upon him out of the blue and he was completely shaken by its devastating impact. One of the seraphs flew toward him with a live coal and purified his lips, so that they could utter the word of God. Many of the prophets were either unwilling to speak on God’s behalf or unable to do so. When God had called Moses, prototype of all prophets, from the Burning Bush and commanded him to be his messenger to Pharaoh and the children of Israel, Moses had protested that he was “not able to speak well.” 4 God had made allowances for this impediment and permitted his brother, Aaron, to speak in Moses’ stead. This regular motif in the stories of prophetic vocations symbolizes the difficulty of speaking God’s word.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It is unknown to the learned and known to the simple. It is known in the ecstasy of an awakening that opens the door of life eternal. 30 Like the gods, reason is not denied but transcended. The experience of Brahman or Atman cannot be explained rationally any more than a piece of music or a poem. Intelligence is necessary for the making of such a work of art and its appreciation, but it offers an experience that goes beyond the purely logical or cerebral faculty. This will also be a constant theme in the history of God. The ideal of personal transcendence was embodied in the Yogi, who would leave his family and abandon all social ties and responsibilities to seek enlightenment, putting himself in another realm of being. In about 538 BCE , a young man named Siddhartha Gautama also left his beautiful wife, his son, his luxurious home in Kapilavashtu, about 100 miles north of Benares, and became a mendicant ascetic. He had been appalled by the spectacle of suffering and wanted to discover the secret to end the pain of existence that he could see in everything around him. For six years, he sat at the feet of various Hindu gurus and undertook fearful penances, but made no headway. The doctrines of the sages did not appeal to him, and his mortifications had simply made him despair. It was not until he abandoned these methods completely and put himself into a trance one night that he gained enlightenment. The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced. Yet again, as in the pagan vision, the gods, nature and mankind were bound together in sympathy. There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One. At first, the demon Mara tempted him to stay where he was and enjoy his newfound bliss: it was no use trying to spread the word because nobody would believe him. But two of the gods of the traditional pantheon—Maha Brahma and Sakra, Lord of the devas —came to the Buddha and begged him to explain his method to the world. The Buddha agreed and for the next forty-five years he tramped all over India, preaching his message: in this world of suffering, only one thing was stable and firm. This was Dharma, the truth about right living, which alone could free us from pain.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Man, who in the Neoplatonic scheme sums up the whole of creation in himself, is the most complete of these theophanies, and, like Augustine, Erigena taught that we can discover a trinity within ourselves, albeit in a glass darkly. In Erigena’s paradoxical theology, God is both Everything and Nothing; the two terms balance one another and are held in a creative tension to suggest the mystery which our word “God” can only symbolize. Thus when a student asks him what Denys meant when he called God Nothing, Erigena replies that the divine Goodness is incomprehensible because it is “superessential”—that is, more than Goodness itself—and “supernatural.” So while it is contemplated in itself [it] neither is, nor was, nor shall be, for it is understood to be none of the things that exist because it surpasses all things but when by a certain ineffable descent into the things that are, it is beheld by the mind’s eye, it alone is found to be in all things, and it is and was and shall be. 25 When, therefore, we consider the divine reality in itself, “it is not unreasonably called ‘Nothing,’ ” but when this divine Void decides to proceed “out of Nothing into Something,” every single creature it informs “can be called a theophany, that is, a divine apparition.” 26 We cannot see God as he is in himself since this God to all intents and purposes does not exist. We only see the God which animates the created world and reveals himself in flowers, birds, trees and other human beings. There are problems in this approach. What about evil? Is this, as Hindus maintain, also a manifestation of God in the world? Erigena does not attempt to deal with the problem of evil in sufficient depth, but Jewish Kabbalists would later attempt to locate evil within God: they also developed a theology that described God proceeding from Nothingness to become Something in a way that is remarkably similar to Erigena’s account, though it is highly unlikely that any of the Kabbalists had read him. Erigena showed that the Latins had much to learn from the Greeks, but in 1054 Eastern and Western Churches broke off relations in a schism which has turned out to be permanent—though at the time nobody intended this. The conflict had a political dimension, which I shall not discuss, but it also centered on a dispute about the Trinity. In 796 a synod of Western bishops had met at Fréjus in Southern France and had inserted an extra clause into the Nicene Creed. This stated that the Holy Spirit proceeded not only from the Father but also from the Son ( filioque ). The Latin bishops wanted to emphasize the equality of the Father and the Son, since some of their flock harbored Arian views.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Plato’s divine forms were not realities “out there” but could be discovered within the self. In his dramatic dialogue the Symposium , Plato showed how love of a beautiful body could be purified and transformed into an ecstatic contemplation ( theoria ) of ideal Beauty. He makes Diotima, Socrates’ mentor, explain that this Beauty is unique, eternal and absolute, quite unlike anything that we experience in this world: This Beauty is first of all eternal; it neither comes into being nor passes away; neither waxes nor wanes; next it is not beautiful in part and ugly in part, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in this relation and ugly in that, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as varying according to its beholders; nor again will this beauty appear to the imagination like the beauty of a face or hands or anything else corporeal, or like the beauty of a thought or science, or like beauty which has its seat in something other than itself, be it in a living thing or the earth or the sky or anything else whatsoever; he will see it as absolute, existing alone within itself, unique, eternal. 34 In short, an idea like Beauty has much in common with what many theists would call “God.” Yet despite its transcendence, the ideas were to be found within the mind of man. We moderns experience thinking as an activity, as something that we do . Plato envisaged it as something which happens to the mind: the objects of thought were realities that were active in the intellect of the man who contemplated them. Like Socrates, he saw thought as a process of recollection, an apprehension of something that we had always known but had forgotten. Because human beings were fallen divinities, the forms of the divine world were within them and could be “touched” by reason, which was not simply a rational or cerebral activity but an intuitive grasp of the eternal reality within us. This notion would greatly influence mystics in all three of the religions of historical monotheism. Plato believed that the universe was essentially rational. This was another myth or imaginary conception of reality. Aristotle (384–322 BCE ) took it a step further. He was the first to appreciate the importance of logical reasoning, the basis of all science , and was convinced that it was possible to arrive at an understanding of the universe by applying this method. As well as attempting a theoretical understanding of the truth in the fourteen treatises known as the Metaphysics (the term was coined by his editor, who put these treatises “after the Physics ”: meta ta physika ), he also studied theoretical physics and empirical biology. Yet he possessed profound intellectual humility, insisting that nobody was able to attain an adequate conception of truth but that everybody could make a small contribution to our collective understanding.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The prophets were not eager to proclaim the divine message and were reluctant to undertake a mission of great strain and anguish. The transformation of Israel’s God into a symbol of transcendent power would not be a calm, serene process but attended with pain and struggle. Hindus would never have described Brahman as a great king because their God could not be described in such human terms. We must be careful not to interpret the story of Isaiah’s vision too literally: it is an attempt to describe the indescribable, and Isaiah reverts instinctively to the mythological traditions of his people to give his audience some idea of what had happened to him. The psalms often describe Yahweh enthroned in his temple as king, just as Baal, Marduk and Dagon, 5 the gods of their neighbors, presided as monarchs in their rather similar temples. Beneath the mythological imagery, however, a quite distinctive conception of the ultimate reality was beginning to emerge in Israel: the experience with this God is an encounter with a person. Despite his terrifying otherness, Yahweh can speak and Isaiah can answer. Again, this would have been inconceivable to the sages of the Upanishads , since the idea of having a dialogue or meeting with Brahman-Atman would be inappropriately anthropomorphic. Yahweh asked: “Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?” and, like Moses before him, Isaiah immediately replied: “Here I am! ( hineni! ) send me!” The point of this vision was not to enlighten the prophet but to give him a practical job to do. Primarily the prophet is one who stands in God’s presence, but this experience of transcendence results not in the imparting of knowledge—as in Buddhism—but in action. The prophet will not be characterized by mystical illumination but by obedience. As one might expect, the message is never easy. With typical Semitic paradox, Yahweh told Isaiah that the people would not accept it: he must not be dismayed when they reject God’s words: “Go and say to this people: ‘Hear and hear again, but do not understand; see and see again, but do not perceive.’ ” 6 Seven hundred years later, Jesus would quote these words when people refused to hear his equally tough message. 7 Humankind cannot bear very much reality. The Israelites of Isaiah’s day were on the brink of war and extinction, and Yahweh had no cheerful message for them: their cities would be devastated, the countryside ravaged and the houses emptied of their inhabitants. Isaiah would live to see the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722 and the deportation of the ten tribes. In 701 Sennacherib would invade Judah with a vast Assyrian army, lay siege to forty-six of its cities and fortresses, impale the defending officers on poles, deport about 2000 people and imprison the Jewish king in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  It is not surprising that Muhammad found the revelations such an immense strain: not only was he working through to an entirely new political solution for his people, but he was composing one of the great spiritual and literary classics of all time. He believed that he was putting the ineffable Word of God into Arabic, for the Koran is as central to the spirituality of Islam as Jesus, the Logos, is to Christianity. We know more about Muhammad than about the founder of any other major religion, and in the Koran, whose various suras or chapters can be dated with reasonable accuracy, we can see how his vision gradually evolved and developed, becoming ever more universal in scope. He did not see at the outset all that he had to accomplish, but this was revealed to him little by little, as he responded to the inner logic of events. In the Koran we have, as it were, a contemporaneous commentary on the beginnings of Islam that is unique in the history of religion. In this sacred book, God seems to comment on the developing situation: he answers some of Muhammad’s critics, explains the significance of a battle or a conflict within the early Muslim community and points to the divine dimension of human life. It did not come to Muhammad in the order we read today but in a more random manner, as events dictated and as he listened to their deeper meaning. As each new segment was revealed, Muhammad, who could neither read nor write, recited it aloud, the Muslims learned it by heart and those few who were literate wrote it down. Some twenty years after Muhammad’s death, the first official compilation of the revelations was made. The editors put the longest suras at the beginning and the shortest at the end. This arrangement is not as arbitrary as it might appear, because the Koran is neither a narrative nor an argument that needs a sequential order. Instead, it reflects on various themes: God’s presence in the natural world, the lives of the prophets or the Last Judgment. To a Westerner, who cannot appreciate the extraordinary beauty of the Arabic, the Koran seems boring and repetitive. It seems to go over the same ground again and again. But the Koran was not meant for private perusal but for liturgical recitation. When Muslims hear a sura chanted in the mosque, they are reminded of all the central tenets of their faith.

• From A History of God (1993)

  However we choose to interpret it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have had this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the climactic insight a “vision of God”; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is that this is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind—often called the imagination—rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares. Augustine seems to have imagined that privileged human beings were sometimes able to see God in this life: he cited Moses and St. Paul as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540–604), who was an acknowledged master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He was not an intellectual and, as a typical Roman, had a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of the divine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced by such Greek Christians as Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. God was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that God was difficult of access. There was certainly no way we could talk about him familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing at all about God. We could make no predictions about his behavior on the basis of our knowledge of people: “Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot fully know anything about him.” 14 Frequently Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach to God. The joy and peace of contemplation could only be attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle. Before tasting God’s sweetness, the soul has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element: It cannot fix its mind’s eyes on that which it has with hasty glance seen within itself, because it is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards.

• From A History of God (1993)

  13 He had instinctively expressed himself in the religious language of his time and culture: Babylon itself, the abode of the gods, was called “Gate of the gods” ( Bab-ili ). Jacob decided to consecrate this holy ground in the traditional pagan manner of the country. He took the stone he had used as a pillow, upended it and sanctified it with a libation of oil. Henceforth the place would no longer be called Luz but Beth-El, the House of El. Standing stones were a common feature of Canaanite fertility cults, which, we shall see, flourished at Beth-El until the eighth century BCE . Although later Israelites vigorously condemned this type of religion, the pagan sanctuary of Beth-El was associated in early legend with Jacob and his God. Before he left Beth-El, Jacob had decided to make the god he had encountered there his elohim: this was a technical term, signifying everything that the gods could mean for men and women. Jacob had decided that if El (or Yahweh, as J calls him) could really look after him in Haran, he was particularly effective. He struck a bargain: in return for El’s special protection, Jacob would make him his elohim , the only god who counted. Israelite belief in God was deeply pragmatic. Abraham and Jacob both put their faith in El because he worked for them: they did not sit down and prove that he existed; El was not a philosophical abstraction. In the ancient world, mana was a self-evident fact of life, and a god proved his worth if he could transmit this effectively. This pragmatism would always be a factor in the history of God. People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound. Years later Jacob returned from Haran with his wives and family. As he reentered the land of Canaan, he experienced another strange epiphany. At the ford of Jabbok on the West Bank, he met a stranger who wrestled with him all night. At daybreak, like most spiritual beings, his opponent said that he had to leave, but Jacob held on to him: he would not let him go until he had revealed his name. In the ancient world, knowing somebody’s name gave you a certain power over him, and the stranger seemed reluctant to reveal this piece of information. As the strange encounter developed, Jacob became aware that his opponent had been none other than El himself: Jacob then made this request, “I beg you, tell me your name.”

• From A History of God (1993)

  Commenting on this experience, the twentieth-century historian Arnold Toynbee described it as a “communion”: “he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of a vast tide.” Such a moment of inspiration, Toynbee concludes, is akin to the “experience that has been described as the Beatific Vision by souls to whom it has been vouchsafed.” 62 Albert Einstein also claimed that mysticism was “the sower of all true art and science”: To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men. 63 In this sense, the religious enlightenment discovered by such mystics as the Besht can be seen as akin to some other achievements of the Age of Reason: it was enabling simpler men and women to make the imaginative transition to the New World of modernity. During the 1780s, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyaday (1745–1813) had not found the emotional exuberance of Hasidism alien to the intellectual quest. He founded a new form of Hasidism which attempted to blend mysticism with rational contemplation. It became known as the Habad, an acrostic of the three attributes of God: Hokhmah (Wisdom), Binah (Intelligence) and Da’at (Knowledge). Like earlier mystics who had amalgamated philosophy with spirituality, Zalman believed that metaphysical speculation was an essential preliminary to prayer because it revealed the limitations of the intellect. His technique started from the fundamental Hasidic vision of God present in all things and led the mystic, by a dialectical process, to realize that God was the only reality. Zalman explained: “From the standpoint of the Infinite, blessed be He, all the worlds are as if literally nothing and nihility.” 64 The created world has no existence apart from God, its vital force. It is only because of our limited perceptions that it appears to exist separately, but this is an illusion. God, therefore, is not really a transcendent being who occupies an alternative sphere of reality: he is not external to the world. Indeed, the doctrine of God’s transcendence is another illusion of our minds, which find it almost impossible to get beyond sense impressions. The mystical disciplines of Habad would help Jews to get beyond sensory perception to see things from God’s point of view.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There we find a multitude of gods, expressing many of the same values as the deities of the Middle East and presenting the forces of nature as instinct with power, life and personality. Yet there were signs that people were beginning to see that the various gods might simply be manifestations of one divine Absolute that transcended them all. Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody—not even the gods—could understand the mystery of existence: Who then knows whence it has arisen, Whence this emanation hath arisen, Whether God disposed it, or whether he did not,— Only he who is its overseer in highest heaven knows. Or perhaps he does not know! 27 The religion of the Vedas did not attempt to explain the origins of life or to give privileged answers to philosophical questions. Instead, it was designed to help people to come to terms with the wonder and terror of existence. It asked more questions than it answered, designed to hold the people in an attitude of reverent wonder. By the eighth century BCE , when J and E were writing their chronicles, changes in the social and economic conditions of the Indian subcontinent meant that the old Vedic religion was no longer relevant. The ideas of the indigenous population that had been suppressed in the centuries following the Aryan invasions surfaced and led to a new religious hunger. The revived interest in karma, the notion that one’s destiny is determined by one’s own actions, made people unwilling to blame the gods for the irresponsible behavior of human beings. Increasingly the gods were seen as symbols of a single transcendent Reality. Vedic religion had become preoccupied with the rituals of sacrifice, but the revived interest in the old Indian practice of Yoga (the “yoking” of the powers of the mind by special disciplines of concentration) meant that people became dissatisfied with a religion that concentrated on externals. Sacrifice and liturgy were not enough: they wanted to discover the inner meaning of these rites. We shall note that the prophets of Israel felt the same dissatisfaction. In India, the gods were no longer seen as other beings who were external to their worshippers; instead men and women sought to achieve an inward realization of truth. The gods were no longer very important in India. Henceforth they would be superseded by the religious teacher, who would be considered higher than the gods. It was a remarkable assertion of the value of humanity and the desire to take control of destiny: it would be the great religious insight of the subcontinent. The new religions of Hinduism and Buddhism did not deny the existence of the gods, nor did they forbid the people to worship them.

• From Satyricon (1)

  To go into details would take too long. We entered the bath, finally, and after sweating for a minute or two in the warm room, we passed through into the cold water. But short as was the time, Trimalchio had already been sprinkled with perfume and was being rubbed down, not with linen towels, however, but with cloths made from the finest wool. Meanwhile, three masseurs were guzzling Falernian under his eyes, and when they spilled a great deal of it in their brawling, Trimalchio declared they were pouring a libation to his Genius. He was then wrapped in a coarse scarlet wrap-rascal, and placed in a litter. Four runners, whose liveries were decorated with metal plates, preceded him, as also did a wheel-chair in which rode his favorite, a withered, blear eyed slave, even more repulsive looking than his master. A singing boy approached the head of his litter, as he was being carried along, and played upon small pipes the whole way, just as if he were communicating some secret to his master’s ear. Marveling greatly, we followed, and met Agamemnon at the outer door, to the post of which was fastened a small tablet bearing this inscription: NO SLAVE TO LEAVE THE PREMISES WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE MASTER. PENALTY ONE HUNDRED LASHES. In the vestibule stood the porter, clad in green and girded with a cherry-colored belt, shelling peas into a silver dish. Above the threshold was suspended a golden cage, from which a black and white magpie greeted the visitors. CHAPTER THE TWENTY-NINTH. I almost fell backwards and broke my legs while staring at all this, for to the left, as we entered, not far from the porter’s alcove, an enormous dog upon a chain was painted upon the wall, and above him this inscription, in capitals: BEWARE THE DOG.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  His friend- ship with the latter had by now clearly cooled; it is significant that 206 MARTIN LUTHER Karlstadt had not been among those whom Luther took with him to Worms. So far as we know Luther did not write a single letter from the Wartburg to the man who had stood shoulder to shoulder with him in Leipzig, and he never asked to pass on his greetings in any of the letters he wrote to the other Wittenbergers.” The relationship between Luther and Karlstadt had always been one between equals; Luther’s friendship with Melanchthon, by contrast, was founded on the older man’s patronage of the scholar he had worked so hard to lure to Wittenberg. Indeed, in finding Melanchthon a wife who would further tie him to Wittenberg, Luther had bound the younger man every bit as much as Luther’s own father had tried to trap him. Although there is warmth and engagement in his letters to Melanchthon, Luther also maintained a certain distance. As he tried to force Melanchthon to take charge of the Reformation in Wittenberg, he cajoled and bullied him, by turns flattering his intellectual gifts, fretting about his delicate constitution, and castigating him for giving in ‘too much to your emotions’, when he ought to be building up the ‘walls and towers’ of Jerusalem.* This was a very different kind of friendship from that with Karlstadt, who could not be bullied. By publishing this extra- ordinary Preface, however, which established the narrative of his divine election, Luther strengthened his charismatic authority as the leader of the movement. According to Freud, Oedipal struggles are universal because the path to sexual identity lies through experiencing murderous hatred and passionate love for our own parental figures. Whether one agrees with him or not, it is remarkable how Luther put his struggles — of which he was unusually aware — to the service of his theology. His relentless sense of the drama of his relations with his own father led him to the most profound understanding of God. In his theology, Luther contrasts God’s absolute power with human beings’ childlike inability to do anything to earn salvation — as well as the believer's frustration at his or her childlike helplessness. Luther's theology made God's paternal relationship to the Christian the pattern of theological truth. If he is less able to transmit a sense of God’s fatherly care for the believer, he certainly conveys the awesome distance that lies between God and human beings. It is the distance, rather than the personal closeness, of God, that lies at the centre of Luther's theology. IN THE WARTBURG 207 Luther would not boast of a direct line to Jesus. Ever mistrustful of those who claimed that God talked to them, he spoke instead of his conversations with the Devil.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The one place where he seems to have felt at home in Rome was the German church of Santa Maria delle Anime, where he thought that religious devotion was being properly carried out. In THE MONASTERY 63 1540 he gave a damning verdict: ‘By miraculous advice I came to Rome, so that I saw the head of all wickedness and the seat of the Devil.’” His initial excitement can be sensed from his recollection of arriving in the Eternal City: Luther flung himself on the ground, hailing the city hallowed by the blood of martyrs.* Rome in 1510 would have been a strange place, much of it a ghost town, with building having barely commenced on what would become the largest church in Christendom, St Peter’s. Even the existing church, Luther later judged, was too big to preach in.” Rome’s medieval population was only a fraction of what it would have been in Roman times. Luther mentioned the catacombs and the hills but, for someone formed by the classics, he made surprisingly little reference to the classical heritage. He would have seen, however, just what ancient Rome had accomplished — and how far the sixteenth century was from equalling it. Buildings like the Colosseum and other antique ruins lay unused, their stone being carted off for St Peter’s. Years later Luther still remembered that the Colosseum could accommodate 200,000 spectators, but only its foun- dations and some of its crumbling walls had been visible.*° He recalled the oppressive Italian nights and the resulting nightmares. Desperately thirsty, and knowing that the water was polluted, the monks were advised to eat pomegranates to cure their headaches, and by this fruit ‘God saved our lives’. For the young Luther, a papal loyalist, Rome was a treasure trove of religious benefits. “We ran to Rome .. .” he wrote in 1535, ‘and the Pope gave indulgence for it, this is all forgotten now, but those who were stuck in it will not forget it.’ His month-long visit to the ‘seat of the Devil’ became the source for many later anecdotes over dinner. Two in particular stand out. Luther was astonished how fast the priests would say Mass, reciting six or seven Masses for payment before he had even got to the end of his first. One cleric shoved him out of the way, telling him to hurry up and ‘send her son back home to Our Lady’ — that is, to clear things up ready for the next Mass. To Luther, who worried endlessly about whether he had said the words with true feeling, the insouciance was profoundly shocking. They even joked about it over their supper, boasting how at the elevation they had said ‘Bread you are and bread you will remain.’

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  It’s pin or get pinned for the Big Konig at 123. The ref signals for Mash and Sausage. Sausage trots out like a little pony. Mash takes his time. They meet in the inner gold circle, shake hands, and turn to face each other. The ref blows his whistle. Down goes Sausage after a single leg. Mash counters with a cross-face that bends Sausage’s nose about 180 degrees, then shoves him away. Sausage’s headgear is pushed over his eyes, so the ref calls time. Down goes Sausage to sweep a leg. Mash is too fast and Sausage sweeps air. Sausage locks up like the pro wrestlers on TV. He stands forehead to forehead with Mash and tries to muscle. Each has a hand behind the other’s neck and a hand on the other’s elbow. Our bench goes wild. “You can’t muscle him, turd head!” Schmoozler yells. Coach Morgan talks into the tape recorder. Sausage is pushing Mash around the mat. Mash, of course, is letting him, inviting Sausage to precipitate his own demise. Balance again. Our crowd loves Sausage’s aggressiveness and cheers like crazy. Kuch taps my knee. “Look,” he says. I was watching Mr. and Mrs. Mashamura. They sit as calm as can be. Smiling intently is the furthest they seem to go emotionally. Mash has hooked both of Sausage’s arms. Sausage is hopelessly off balance but pumps his legs hard and drives his head into Mash’s navel just the same. Mash suddenly kicks out both legs. Sausage is smashed flat. His nose is taking quite a beating. Sausage barks and wheezes a little and tries to get up, but Mash has spun behind him for two points. Sausage is right to his knees like a shot, crawling around the mat in a burst of energy. Mash can’t find anything to grab. The buzzer sounds and the Sausage Man has survived round one. Sausage gets his choice of positions and chooses top. The ref is down on one knee looking Mash in the eye. Sausage sights along Mash’s spine and stares into the barrel of the ref’s whistle. It blows. Mash kicks into a beautiful long sitout. Sausage grabs for him, but he’s long gone with his escape point. Mash is more aggressive on his feet this round. He acts like he wants to lock up, but when Sausage reaches for him, Mash drops to one knee and takes Sausage to his back with a fireman’s carry. Immediately he gets the half nelson, then the crotch. Sausage has had it. Mash lifts a little on the crotch and the leverage pushes both Sausage’s shoulders deep into the mat. He’s pinned. We don’t even have time to yell for him to bridge before the ref slaps the mat. The L.C. fans jump up cheering. All of a sudden Sausage’s dad is out of the bleachers and onto the mat, yelling at the ref. Coach is off the bench and between them fast. Mr.

• From Satyricon (1)

  After a little more teasing, I requested the maid to conduct her mistress to a clump of plane trees. Pleased with this plan, the girl picked up the skirt of her garment and turned into a laurel grove that bordered the path. After a short delay she brought her mistress from her hiding-place and conducted her to my side; a woman more perfect than any statue. There are no words with which to describe her form and anything I could say would fall far short. Her hair, naturally wavy, flowed completely over her shoulders; her forehead was low and the roots of her hair were brushed back from it; her eyebrows, running from the very springs of her cheeks, almost met at the boundary line between a pair of eyes brighter than stars shining in a moonless night; her nose was slightly aquiline and her mouth was such an one as Praxiteles dreamed Diana had. Her chin, her neck, her hands, the gleaming whiteness of her feet under a slender band of gold; she turned Parian marble dull! Then, for the first time, Doris’ tried lover thought lightly of Doris! Oh Jove, what’s come to pass that thou, thine armor cast away Art mute in heaven; and but an idle tale? At such a time the horns should sprout, the raging bull hold sway, Or they white hair beneath swan’s down conceal Here’s Dana’s self! But touch that lovely form Thy limbs will melt beneath thy passions’ storm! CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SEVENTH.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In 1521 Luther crossed the Rhine at Frankfurt to continue on to Worms. He and his disciples assembled for the evening meal where they broke bread together. Luther warned them that one of their number would betray him, and they all denied that they would. But the very next day, Saxo,70 who had been firmest in his protestations, denied him three times. The Romanists howled for Luther’s blood, worst amongst them, the bishops of Mainz and Merseburg. Luther, in the house of Caiaphas, remained calm. The bishop of Trier considered what to do: Luther was a pious Christian and he could see no reason to condemn him. But the priests yelled “Burn him!” So they took Luther’s writings and put them on a pyre with the image of his face on top of the books. To the left of him they put Hutten’s writings and to the right, Karlstadt’s. Yet although the fires burnt the books to ashes, the portrait of Luther refused to burn. The author of The Passion of the Blessed Martin Luther, or His Sufferings was the humanist Hermann Busche, who named himself Marcellus after the man who had buried the martyred St. Peter.71

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  31 Talking to his companions at table years later, he remembered his own emotional state with some surprise: He had felt, he said, “unshocked,” and recalled that “I was not frightened,” commenting, “God can make you that crazy—I don’t know if I would be so crazy now.” 32 When he arrived at Worms on April 16, two thousand people thronged the streets trying to get a look at him. The papal nuncio Aleander noted that as Luther climbed down from the wagon, a monk stepped forward to embrace him and then touched his cassock three times as if he were a saint. 33 He was lodged in a house of the Knights of the Order of St. John where Ulrich von Pappenheim, the imperial marshal, and the knights Friedrich von Thun and Philipp von Feilitzsch were also staying. 34 Accommodation worthy of nobles, it was situated close by the hall where the Diet was meeting. It was a reversal of the situation at Augsburg: Now it was the papal nuncio Aleander who had to make do with a tiny room without heating, so unpopular was his cause. 35 When the time came for Luther to appear at the Diet in the late afternoon of April 17, the press of people was so great that he had to be taken through a garden and then into the meeting room through a side entrance. “Many climbed to the rooftops in their eagerness to see,” one observer reported in a conscious echo of the crowds who greeted Christ on Palm Sunday. 36 Luther walked past the ranks of German princes, some of whom shouted encouragement. The very splendor of the event must have been intimidating for the monk in his simple black cassock. The princes and nobles crowded into the room were all dressed in their finery, sumptuous cloaks, golden chains, jewelry, and dazzling headwear; and then there was the emperor himself in his magnificent robes. Luther, by contrast, wore a simple black belted cassock. As one delegate described it, “a man was let in who they said was Martin Luther, about forty years old or thereabouts, coarsely built and with a coarse face with not especially good eyes, his countenance restive, which he carelessly changed. He wore a cassock of the Augustinian order with its leather belt, his tonsure large and freshly shorn, his hair badly clipped.” 37 Luther had received only the barest briefing from the imperial marshal, who told him what he would be asked and instructed him simply to answer the questions. They were read aloud first in Latin and then in German, for the proceedings had to be understood by both the scholars and the German princes and nobility.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Do the brothers “eat together in the refectory at a long table, as is customary in reformed monasteries? Do they eat in silence? Do any of them get food or drink for themselves alone at times other than common meal times?” 3 In observant institutions the monks were ordered to turn up punctually for matins, and attend a general confession every Friday. The hours were to be strictly observed, and all property, even clothing, was held in common. 4 Obedience, poverty, and chastity were the foundation of the religious life and they were to be strictly adhered to. Thus Luther chose an institution with a strong academic mission, close ties to the university where he had been a student, and a strong commitment to the Augustinian rule. Moreover, by remaining in Erfurt, he chose a different environment from the small town where he had been raised. A large and bustling urban community with 24,000 inhabitants, Erfurt was far bigger than Eisenach or Mansfeld, and something of the impression it made on Luther can be gauged in his gross overestimation of its size—he believed that it had “18,000 hearths,” which would have made it at least three times bigger than it really was. 5 Erfurt possessed grand ecclesiastical buildings. The cathedral still dominates the town, rising out of the vast arena of the town square and perched atop a grand series of steps like an Italian basilica. No urban structure could possibly rival it. This was a prosperous town—Luther guessed its income at a fabulous 80,000 guilders a year. 6 As he would put it later, “Erfurt is in the best place, it’s a gold mine, a city simply would have to be there, even if it burned down.” 7 The city’s powerful merchant elite had become prosperous on the profits of trade in woad, the dye that was used to color cloth blue and the fashionable black favored by richer townsfolk. With a large rural hinterland, it had impressive stores of grain, enough to tide its citizenry through difficult times. 8 Even so, Erfurt was not what it had once been. The city had never gained the civic freedoms it longed for. It wanted to be an imperial free city, like the fabled cities in the south—Nuremberg, Ulm, Augsburg, Strasbourg—that were subject to no lord but the emperor and were able to make their own laws. But it was caught between two rival powers, Saxony and the archbishopric of Mainz, both of which wanted to exploit its wealth.