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 The Battle for God (2000)

  All our ideas were essentially subjective and interpretive. Where Descartes had seen the human mind as the sole, lonely denizen of a dead universe, Kant severed the link between humanity and the world altogether and shut us up within our own heads. 24 At the same time as he had liberated humanity from tutelage, he had enclosed it in a new prison. As so often, modernity took with one hand what it gave with the other. Reason was enlightening and emancipating, but it could also estrange men and women from the world they were learning to control so effectively. If there was no absolute truth, what became of God? Unlike the other deists, Kant believed that it was impossible to prove God’s existence, since the deity was beyond the reach of the senses and, therefore, inaccessible to the human mind. 25 Faced with the ultimate, reason alone had nothing to say. The only comfort that Kant could offer was that it was, by the same token, impossible to disprove God’s existence either. Kant was himself a devout man, and did not regard his ideas as hostile to religion. They would, he thought, liberate faith from a wholly inappropriate reliance upon reason. He was utterly convinced, he wrote at the end of his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), of the moral law inscribed within each human being, which, like the grandeur of the heavens, filled him with awe and wonder. But the only rational grounds he could find for the deist God was the quite dubious argument that without such a Deity and the possibility of an afterlife, it was hard to see why we should act morally. This again, as a proof, is highly unsatisfactory. 26 Kant’s God was simply an afterthought, tacked onto the human condition. Apart from innate conviction, there was no real reason why a rationalist should bother to believe. As a deist and a man of reason, Kant had no time for any of the traditional symbols or practices by means of which alone men and women of the past had evoked a sense of the sacred, independently of reason. Kant was deeply opposed to the idea of divine law, which, in his eyes, was a barbarous denial of human autonomy, and he could see no point in mysticism, prayer, or ritual. 27 Without a cult, any notion of religion and the divine would become tenuous, unnecessary, and untenable. Yet, paradoxically, the emergence of reason as the sole criterion of truth in the West coincided with an eruption of religious irrationality.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Kuchera knelt and said, “Kenny, you’ve got to turn the gas down sometime.” They were so beautiful at that moment it made me feel like I was pretty neat just because I was their friend. And then I had it again this fall watching Wide World of Sports . Pelé was playing his last soccer game. I don’t know anything about Pelé except what everybody else knows—that along with Muhammad Ali, Pelé is one of the world’s best-known human beings and greatest athletes. He’s supposed to be from humble beginnings and all that. I probably wouldn’t even have watched the program if it hadn’t come on right after football and if Balldozer, whose stepmother is Brazilian, hadn’t threatened to kill me if I switched the channel. So about a quarter into the game—right in the middle of the action—Pelé whips off his jersey and starts to jog around the stadium. All the players stop and the crowd wails and freaks out. The camera came up close on Pelé, and he was waving his jersey high and flashing his ivories wide and crying like a baby. Then they switched to the actual sound inside the stadium, and unless you understood Portuguese you couldn’t hear a thing but foreign and semi-insane screaming. They had a guy trying to translate, but you couldn’t hear him. It didn’t matter to me, anyway, because all I could think about was Pelé’s face. And my eyes filled up with tears for him and all his great days of playing. I wish every human being in the world sometime in his life could know the glory of tears like Pelé’s. And I hope I can, too. I walked home from the movie happy as a fish and about two feet off the ground, just psyched about being alive and aware of all the possibilities. I stayed about that high through the evening and finally came down on the way to the park when I began thinking about Mom and Dad and another year going by and all the possibilities. A person sure doesn’t have to be a great athlete or politician or doctor or artist or entrepreneur or performer of any type or degree of greatness to find challenge in life. About half the time I think it’s a great victory just to be able to smile semiregularly, to keep your head up, to keep from giving in and getting mean. I’m not ashamed to admit I need regular transfusions of confidence to keep me going. I need some examples that remind me, by God, it can be done. When I got home from the park I polished all Dad’s shoes and oiled Carla’s boots even though they didn’t really need it. I didn’t think I was sleepy, but I figured I should go to bed because I didn’t want to be tired the next night and fall asleep in the middle of seeing the deer.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Bulgakov, the author, shows Pilate suffering in the immortality he achieved through his part in Christ’s superstardom. I can’t figure out whether God meant Pilate’s immortality as a reward or a punishment. He must have meant it as a reward, or at least a compensation, because Pilate sure couldn’t be blamed for Jesus’s death. Pilate didn’t have any choice. He couldn’t have let Christ off. He got sucked in. He had to stay within the divine scope of events. If he’d let Jesus off, it would have spoiled everything. Pilate was duped. And so was Judas. Anyway, in The Master and Margarita , Pilate and his dog sit on this asteroid way out in space and Pilate wonders and wonders where he went wrong with that crazy Galilean. It’s beautiful the way Bulgakov frees Pilate from the asteroid so he and his dog can at least stretch their legs in eternity. And then aside from what the movie makes me think about, there’s what it makes me see and hear and feel. Everybody who had anything to do with the making of that film must be a genius. The singing and dancing and rock and roll are so wild and beautiful. It makes me weak—it truly does—that human folks can produce such sounds and movements. There are certain points in the movie—like when Jesus is yelling at God about why he has to die—that set me free from my normal consciousness, that disrupt my competitive relationship with life. I mean when Jesus lets blast at God with that shrieking falsetto of his, I get shudders and my eyes tear. I want to jump up and scream some primal sound. What I feel is that I’m a human being and one of my human being teammates has just done a wonderful, beautiful, transcendent fucking thing with our limited human ability. And I’m proud. It’s exactly the same feeling I had at a pep assembly last year when Otto was named Prep Lineman of the Year in Washington. I cried. I’m not ashamed, but I am glad I was sitting in the back row so I could turn my head. And I had it last summer at the motorcycle races down at Castle Rock. Kuch was leading the novice main until the last lap, when he highsided into the wall coming out of the last corner. His dad and I went running out there after the pack went by to see how he was. He was going sixty or seventy when he crashed, and I figured he at least broke his back. But when we got to the corner he had his helmet off and was just leaning back against the wall, shaking his head slowly and looking at the sky. When his dad saw Kuch was okay he slowed down and we walked across the track to where Kuch and the bike were. Mr.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  6 Hasidism’s innovations were rooted in the past, however, and presented as the recovery of an ancient truth. The Besht claimed that he had been instructed in the divine mysteries by Ahijah of Shiloh, the teacher of the Prophet Elijah, and that he himself embodied the spirit of Elijah. 7 The Besht and his followers were still reading scripture in the old mystical way. Instead of reading the Bible critically or to acquire information, Hasidim made their Torah study a spiritual discipline. “I will teach you the way Torah is best taught,” the Besht used to tell his disciples; “not to feel [conscious of] oneself at all, but to be like a listening ear that hears the world of sound speaking but does not speak itself.” 8 The Hasid had to open his heart to the text, and divest himself of ego. This transcendence of self was a form of ecstasy that demanded a disciplined reining in of a Hasid’s mental powers, very different from the wilder transports of the American revivalists. The Besht was not interested in a literal reading but looked beyond the words of the page to the divine, just as he taught his Hasidim to look through the surface of the external world and become aware of the indwelling Presence. There is a story that one day he was visited by Dov Ber (1710–72), a learned Kabbalist who would succeed the Besht as leader of the Hasidic movement. The two men discussed a Lurianic text about angels, and the Besht found Dov Ber’s literal exegesis correct but inadequate. He asked him to stand up, out of respect for the angels, and as soon as Dov Ber rose to his feet “the whole house was suffused with light, a fire burned all around, and they [both] sensed the presence of the angels who had been mentioned.” “The simple reading is as you say,” the Besht told Dov Ber, “but your manner of studying lacked soul.” 9 A wholly rational reading, without the attitudes and cultic gestures of prayer, would not bring a Hasid to a vision of the unseen reality to which the text pointed. In many ways, Hasidism was the antithesis of the spirit of the European Enlightenment that was just beginning to reach Eastern Europe at the end of the Besht’s life. Where the philosophes and scientists believed that reason alone could lead to truth, the Besht promoted mystical intuition alongside the rational. Hasidism denied the separations of modernity—of religion from politics, the sacred from the profane—and adopted a holistic vision that saw holiness everywhere. Where modern science had disenchanted the world and found the cosmos empty of the divine, Hasidim experienced a sacred immanence. Even though it was a movement of the people, there was nothing democratic about Hasidism.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Steve didn’t want to stop, but I didn’t want the ride to end too quickly. “Stick with me,” Steve said, motioning me along. “The best is up ahead.” We continued through the parking lot and past our resting comrades and arrived on the lakefront bike path, just north of Montrose Harbor. It was darker here and quiet enough to hear the lake whisper. The sounds of the slip sails hitting the tops of their bobbing boat masts played a delicate music. The moonlight cast a mystical haze over everything. Steve was riding ahead, but he slowed the pace and looked back from time to time to observe my reverie. “We’re almost to the clock tower,” Steve said. “It’s next to the Waveland golf course, in case you ever want to play.” He despised the game but knew I was trying to learn. He never missed a chance to point out different things in the city he thought might interest me. The week before, as we rode the L train south to see a movie in the Gold Coast, he stopped at the kiosk to point out the different routes. The diagram reminded me of the table of elements from high school science class, with all its circles and street names and colors weaving in and out. Knowing my new job would require me to travel, Steve pointed out where to transfer from the Brown Line to the Blue Line to access O’Hare. A breeze whipped up from the lake as we rode beyond the golf course. To the right, separated by four lanes of traffic on Lake Shore Drive, a hospital and several high-rise apartment buildings pulsed with life. Even in these wee hours, there were plenty of lights on, and I felt the life of hundreds of thousands of people beating around me. I was delirious with the contrast of nature and city so close together, so tolerant of each other. When we rolled under the bridge at Diversey Harbor, Steve said, “Let’s stop here” and pulled off the path, down toward the breakers of the lake, stopping just at the water’s edge. “Check out that view.” The water was endless. We might as well have been at the ocean, and the moon was so full and the sky so clear, it was impossible to escape into darkness. “Isn’t this better than a neon-bright sag stop?” Steve asked. I nodded and stared at the expanse. We got off our bikes and rested them on the ground. Steve put his hand on my shoulder, pulling me close. How did I manage to land here, to be so lucky to find this urban paradise? To find a job here that I like? To find such a generous and handsome guide? I must be doing something right. There must be a god somewhere who is smiling on me. My skin was dewy from the moist air.

• From Shunned (2018)

  We thought of ourselves as spiritual seekers. Carol and our other good friend in the group, Kathy, were both lapsed Catholics trying to make peace with a religion that had not kept pace with their values. When Carol and I heard about Paulette’s twelve-week workshop, using principles from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, we signed up right away. Kathy’s work schedule did not allow her to join us, but she enjoyed listening to our updates over scrambled eggs on Sunday. “My mom will be thrilled to hear I’m attending weekly services at the church,” Carol said, her eyes gleaming with mischief. “She doesn’t need to know the priests aren’t involved.” I saw it as my chance to have spiritual communion in a group without participating in organized religion. We used written and experiential exercises inside and outside class and were asked to journal every morning. As the weeks passed, I experienced a deepening sense of safety and saw new possibilities for expressing my creativity. We identified many of our outdated, negative beliefs and made a list of our “crazy- makers” and creative “monsters.” I began to see how all humans express creative flair in the smallest acts, including how we dress or arrange a bouquet of flowers, even through the innovation I brought to problems at work. That led to my thinking about my job as not just a secular endeavor but also a conduit for making a spiritual contribution, not through preaching or imposing my beliefs on others, but through the quality of my interactions and the choices I made in business. Every part of my life could be an expression of my creativity, and I started living in the question of “what do I want to create here, right now, in this moment?” That night in the church meeting room, to lay the groundwork for a class exercise, Paulette asked me to read out loud a paragraph from The Artist’s Way. I cleared my throat and started reading. Points were made about synchronicity, and how much seen and unseen support is available for artistic expression, once we accept the idea that it is natural to create. “Learn to accept the possibility that the universe is helping you with what you are doing. Become willing to see the hand of God and accept it as a friend’s offer to help with what you are doing. Try to remember that God is the Great Artist. Artists like other artists.” Paulette thanked me and carried on with the class, but her voice receded into the background. At my core was the welcome bell tone of truth, and my mind was turning over a simple yet profound connection. God is the Great Artist.

• From Shunned (2018)

  —Kurt Vonnegut I t was a muggy summer night, and I stood alone at the edge of Lake Michigan, near the north end of Oak Street Beach, gazing at the bright lights of my sparkling city. I saw the gallant lines of the Hancock Building, its two spires saluting the heavens, top lights blinking green, and, beyond it, the twin Sears Tower. All the buildings, large and small, seemed to dance in the sudorific night. Several months earlier, I had begun to immerse myself in the study of spirit and inspiration and was seeing the world with fresh eyes. It occurred to me all of this was a gigantic creative expression, a living testament to the collective dream of hundreds of people, architects, designers, government officials, laborers, and craftsmen. The reflection of these buildings sparkled across the still waters of the lake, right up to my toes. I felt a familiar yearning to be a contributor to this scene, to belong. What was my creative expression to be? What could I offer this world, a place I had been taught to keep at arm’s length? I was told as a young girl that the ancient Greek word “inspired” translates to “God breathed.” He breathed the essence of his message through the beings of each Bible writer and onto those ancient scrolls. I’d just begun to accept the idea that he’d done the same with Buddha and Muhammad. It was not hard to imagine his hot whisper in the muggy breeze of this night. How would God breathe through me? I had been greedily turning the pages of many books on spirituality and personal growth and had found myself riveted by a new world of ideas. Without reservation, I swung open the mental doors to my private sacristy and kept them open. I allowed the dusty old relics of monotheism to sit next to shiny new metaphysical concepts that required no god at all. The juxtaposition was awkward at times, with old and new thoughts eyeing one another suspiciously. The more I studied, the less I feared I was jousting with death. Concerns about the black hooded riders diminished. As I turned away and began to stroll home, I knew that just below my pristine exhilaration was a longing to find my place in the grand scheme of things. The night after these beach ponderings, I walked through the side entrance of Old St. Patrick’s Catholic Church and rode the elevator to the second floor. It was the third gathering of my Artist’s Way group, which I’d joined after reading the book by Julia Cameron. I rounded a corner to the airy meeting room. One side was lined with windows level to the street-lights. Twenty chairs were set in a circle, and several women had already arrived and taken their seats. Paulette, our facilitator, was sitting at the far end of the circle and waved me in with a smile. Her delicate frame could barely contain her fierce and fiery energy.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The pigheaded Luther was forced to change to a wagon about three miles out of Augsburg, because a stomach complaint had made him so weak that he could walk no farther. But he quickly recovered, ready to meet with the papal legate four days after arriving in the city. 31 Augsburg was one of the largest cities of the empire, and would soon surpass Nuremberg as the leading center of culture and wealth. It was home to the Fugger family, the richest merchants of the day, whose interests stretched from Europe to the New World. The Fuggerhäuser, their palace located in the center of town, was an opulent set of buildings that took up a whole block, rather like the palaces of the Italian nobles with whom they traded. Yet, around the same time as their own residence, the Fuggers also constructed the first modern social housing. The “Fuggerei,” an equally impressive set of housing for the poor built in the St. Jakob’s suburb, was a gated estate of tiny one-up, one-down dwellings, each with its own doorway; it had its own chapel and over the entrance the Fuggers inscribed their motto: “Don’t waste time.” The Fuggerhäuser, by contrast, consisted of three interlinked courtyards, their design featuring distinctive Renaissance circle motifs and garlands; they were decorated with frescoes by leading artists, including scenes from the Triumph of the Emperor Maximilian, proclaiming the close links between the ruler and the Fugger family. Befitting his standing as papal emissary, Cajetan lodged in the luxury of the palace, and it was here that the discussions were held. 32 Since, unusually, there was no Augustinian monastery in town, Luther was housed in a simple cell on the first floor of the Carmelite monastery of St. Anna, where the prior, Johannes Frosch, was a friend from student days in Erfurt. 33 Humble though the cell was, he was staying in a remarkable place. The Church of St. Anna, attached to the monastery and dominating the view from Luther’s cell, was popular among Augsburg’s leading patricians and merchants and contained the Fugger chapel, separated from the rest of the church by a grille. Neither Erfurt nor Wittenberg had anything to rival this masterpiece, begun in 1508 and consecrated in January 1518. Famed as the first work of the Renaissance on German soil, the chapel breathed an entirely different aesthetic from the Elector’s Castle Church. Costing 15,000 guilders to build, it deliberately eschewed the Gothic; rather, its design contains the same circles and arches that can also be found in the Fuggerhäuser courtyards, picked out in red marble, in Italianate Renaissance style. Light floods in from a circular window above the organ. There is no ostentatious display of relics, nor are there altars to saints.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I was thinking of old David Thompson back when he was the first white man to set eyes on the Columbia River. And I wondered to myself how, how could he ever have imagined when he named that river that there would ever be enough power on earth to turn it into a fucking lake. “Our taking away,” added Reilly. “I don’t think quite that,” Gene replied. “Not just that. Let’s look at everything Agee says. Everything.” Then he went up to the board and wrote “Every Single Word.” Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is only four pages long, but we read it for the next three days. Each of us read a few lines over and over aloud until we could say what they meant literally and how they fit in with the whole thing. We agreed it was a piece worth reading and that we couldn’t make a fair judgment on it at first because we couldn’t understand it. Reading it over so much is how I came up with the title of my thesis. It comes from this line: These sweet pale streamings in the light lift out their pallors and their voices all together, mothers hushing their children, the hushing unnaturally prolonged, the men gentle and silent and each snail-like withdrawn into the quietude of what he singly is doing, the urination of huge children stood loosely military against an invisible wall, and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths. Dinner is over and all the families in the neighborhood are out on their lawns. The fathers are watering the grass with hoses, the kids are playing, and the mothers are feeling the men’s tranquility at being home from work, I guess, because Agee says the way they hush the children is “unnaturally prolonged.” Just a bunch of middle- or lower-middle-class people enjoying their tiny pieces of the universe. The lots these guys live on might only be fifty feet wide, but they water the lawn with as much pride as they’d take in watering the lawn of a mansion. More, probably, because if they owned mansions they’d have gardeners or sprinkling systems. Agee describes the men as huge children peeing because that’s probably how he remembers thinking of men with hoses. That’s how I still think of a guy with a hose. He describes them as “loosely military against an invisible wall” maybe because he thinks living is like being sentenced to a firing squad without knowing where or when you’re going to be lined up against the wall. This makes sense to me. I mean, we’re born and the guns cock. Once the guns are cocked they can go off any time. I’m not sure why the men are “gentle happy and peaceful.” Maybe they feel the beauty of being with their families, watering a patch of grass on a beautiful evening, is as much beauty as life offers condemned men.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The pigheaded Luther was forced to change to a wagon about three miles out of Augsburg, because a stomach complaint had made him so weak that he could walk no farther. But he quickly recovered, ready to meet with the papal legate four days after arriving in the city. 31 Augsburg was one of the largest cities of the empire, and would soon surpass Nuremberg as the leading center of culture and wealth. It was home to the Fugger family, the richest merchants of the day, whose interests stretched from Europe to the New World. The Fuggerhäuser, their palace located in the center of town, was an opulent set of buildings that took up a whole block, rather like the palaces of the Italian nobles with whom they traded. Yet, around the same time as their own residence, the Fuggers also constructed the first modern social housing. The “Fuggerei,” an equally impressive set of housing for the poor built in the St. Jakob’s suburb, was a gated estate of tiny one-up, one-down dwellings, each with its own doorway; it had its own chapel and over the entrance the Fuggers inscribed their motto: “Don’t waste time.” The Fuggerhäuser, by contrast, consisted of three interlinked courtyards, their design featuring distinctive Renaissance circle motifs and garlands; they were decorated with frescoes by leading artists, including scenes from the Triumph of the Emperor Maximilian, proclaiming the close links between the ruler and the Fugger family. Befitting his standing as papal emissary, Cajetan lodged in the luxury of the palace, and it was here that the discussions were held. 32 Since, unusually, there was no Augustinian monastery in town, Luther was housed in a simple cell on the first floor of the Carmelite monastery of St. Anna, where the prior, Johannes Frosch, was a friend from student days in Erfurt. 33 Humble though the cell was, he was staying in a remarkable place. The Church of St. Anna, attached to the monastery and dominating the view from Luther’s cell, was popular among Augsburg’s leading patricians and merchants and contained the Fugger chapel, separated from the rest of the church by a grille. Neither Erfurt nor Wittenberg had anything to rival this masterpiece, begun in 1508 and consecrated in January 1518. Famed as the first work of the Renaissance on German soil, the chapel breathed an entirely different aesthetic from the Elector’s Castle Church. Costing 15,000 guilders to build, it deliberately eschewed the Gothic; rather, its design contains the same circles and arches that can also be found in the Fuggerhäuser courtyards, picked out in red marble, in Italianate Renaissance style. Light floods in from a circular window above the organ. There is no ostentatious display of relics, nor are there altars to saints.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  “I’m gonna run up to Davis Lake an’ fish.” “We could see the old homestead.” “That place is just a dirty old ditch to me,” Harry said. “Goin’ fishin’.” Just then Carla came in holding a dusty yellow cat and sat in the chair. “Gonna have some fleas in all them red curls,” Grandpa Harry said. “That’s okay,” Carla replied, scratching the cat’s head and sending it into ecstasy. “Couldn’t be more than I get sitting next to him.” And she pointed at me. Harry loved that. He laughed and spit again, but just tobacco this time. Carla didn’t bat an eyelash. Harry told her she oughta know better than pet deer like they was dogs and cats, and Carla said she’d remember. We sat for a few minutes talking about which creeks were fished out and who had been snakebit and how sparse the deer would be come fall. We refused several coffee offers and finally I said we’d better get moving so we could see the falls and take Aunt Lola to Colville to do her grocery shopping. I asked Grandpa Harry if he needed anything. I don’t know what I could do for him, but Dad always asks, so I do, too. “Shit,” he said, getting up and walking us out the door. “I don’t need nothin’. Got these inhalers and I’ll prob’ly be dead before I know it and then I won’t even need them no more.” Carla set the cat down by the porch and we walked across the little bit of grass to the truck. I ground the gears and Harry laughed and pointed and said something I couldn’t hear. We waved and I honked and Grandpa Harry waved his hand back at us. The cat rubbed his boot top and he gave it a gentle shove off the porch. Then he laughed some more and touched two fingers to the brim of his straw fishing hat and stuck out his arm and waved again before he went to work chaining his door. “What will he do?” Carla asked as we turned onto the highway. “He’ll drive up to Davis Lake and fish and shoot snakes,” I said. And I honked a few final times and looked up the bank to see if he was standing there. Carla and I drove back to Barney’s, crossed the bridge, and turned onto the dirt road that leads to the public access. The sun was high by then and the cheatgrass was dry. Grasshoppers zinged through the air and banged into the sides of the pickup. A dull roar like the rumble of heavy trucks rose ahead of us. It grew into a real thunder as we crested the last hill before the road dropped down to the riverbank. We stopped a minute and looked out. The scene was about the same as I remembered it from ten or so years before and about the same as I dream it now.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  PART ONE The Old World and the New 1. Jews: The Precursors (1492–1700) IN 1492, three very important things happened in Spain. The events were experienced as extraordinary at the time, but with hindsight we can see that they were characteristic of the new society that was, slowly and painfully, coming to birth in Western Europe during the late-fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. These years saw the development of our modern Western culture, so 1492 also throws light on some of our own preoccupations and dilemmas. The first of these events occurred on January 2, when the armies of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs whose marriage had recently united the old Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, conquered the city-state of Granada. With deep emotion, the crowd watched the Christian banner raised ceremonially upon the city walls and, as the news broke, bells pealed triumphantly all over Europe, for Granada was the last Muslim stronghold in Christendom. The Crusades against Islam in the Middle East had failed, but at least the Muslims had been flushed out of Europe. In 1499, the Muslim inhabitants of Spain were given the option of conversion to Christianity or deportation, after which, for a few centuries, Europe would become Muslim-free. The second event of this momentous year happened on March 31, when Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Edict of Expulsion, designed to rid Spain of its Jews, who were given the choice of baptism or deportation. Many Jews were so attached to “al-Andalus” (as the old Muslim kingdom had been called) that they converted to Christianity and remained in Spain, but about 80,000 Jews crossed the border into Portugal, while 50,000 fled to the new Muslim Ottoman empire, where they were given a warm welcome. 1 The third event concerned one of the people who had been present at the Christian occupation of Granada. In August, Christopher Columbus, a protégé of Ferdinand and Isabella, sailed from Spain to find a new trade route to India but discovered the Americas instead. These events reflect both the glory and the devastation of the early modern period. As the voyage of Columbus showed so powerfully, the people of Europe were on the brink of a new world. Their horizons were broadening, they were entering hitherto uncharted realms, geographically, intellectually, socially, economically, and politically. Their achievements would make them masters of the globe. But modernity had a darker side. Christian Spain was one of the most powerful and advanced kingdoms in Europe. Ferdinand and Isabella were in the process of creating one of the modern centralized states that were also appearing in other parts of Christendom. Such a kingdom could not tolerate the old autonomous, self-governing institutions, such as the guild, the corporation, or the Jewish community, which had characterized the medieval period.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The two men discussed a Lurianic text about angels, and the Besht found Dov Ber’s literal exegesis correct but inadequate. He asked him to stand up, out of respect for the angels, and as soon as Dov Ber rose to his feet “the whole house was suffused with light, a fire burned all around, and they [both] sensed the presence of the angels who had been mentioned.” “The simple reading is as you say,” the Besht told Dov Ber, “but your manner of studying lacked soul.” 9 A wholly rational reading, without the attitudes and cultic gestures of prayer, would not bring a Hasid to a vision of the unseen reality to which the text pointed. In many ways, Hasidism was the antithesis of the spirit of the European Enlightenment that was just beginning to reach Eastern Europe at the end of the Besht’s life. Where the philosophes and scientists believed that reason alone could lead to truth, the Besht promoted mystical intuition alongside the rational. Hasidism denied the separations of modernity—of religion from politics, the sacred from the profane—and adopted a holistic vision that saw holiness everywhere. Where modern science had disenchanted the world and found the cosmos empty of the divine, Hasidim experienced a sacred immanence. Even though it was a movement of the people, there was nothing democratic about Hasidism. The Besht believed that the ordinary Hasid could not achieve union with God directly. He would find the divine only in the person of a Zaddik (“a righteous man”) who had mastered devekut, a constant mystical consciousness of God which was beyond the reach of most people. 10 The Hasid was, therefore, wholly dependent upon his Zaddik, an attitude which Kant would have condemned as unworthy tutelage. Hasidism was thus deeply at odds with the Enlightenment, and many Hasidim would reject it when it began to penetrate Eastern Europe. While the Besht was alive, the rabbinic establishment did not take him seriously, but Dov Ber, the new leader, a learned man, was a very different proposition, and the movement spread under his leadership. When it reached Lithuania, it came to the attention of a powerful figure: Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–97), head (gaon) of the Academy of Vilna. The Gaon was appalled by the Hasidic movement, especially its denigration of Torah study, which was his chief passion. His scholarship, however, was very different from the casuistic studies of the corrupt Polish rabbis, and had a deeply mystical cast. His sons tell us that he used to study all night with his feet in icy water to keep himself awake. For the Gaon, Torah study was a more aggressive exercise than it was for the Hasidim. He relished what he called the “effort” of study, and it seems as though this intense mental activity tipped him into a new level of awareness. When he did allow himself to sleep, the Torah penetrated his dreams and he would experience a mystical ascent to the divine.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Where Kook the Elder had seen a divine purpose in secular Zionism, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda believed that the secular State of Israel was the Kingdom of God tout court; every clod of its earth was holy: Every Jew who comes to Eretz Yisrael, every tree that is planted in the soil of Israel, every soldier added to the army of Israel, constitutes another spiritual stage, literally; another stage in the process of redemption. 82 Where the Haredim forbade their students to watch the army parade on Independence Day, Kook the Younger insisted that, because the army was sacred, it was a religious duty to watch it. The soldiers were as righteous as Torah scholars, and their weapons as holy as a prayer shawl or phylacteries. “Zionism is a heavenly matter,” Rabbi Zvi Yehuda insisted. “The State of Israel is a divine entity, our holy and exalted state.” 83 Where Kook the Elder had believed that Jews should take no part in politics, because in the unredeemed world, all politics was tainted, Kook the Younger believed that the messianic age had begun and that political involvement was, like the mystical journey of the Kabbalist, an ascent to the pinnacles of holiness. 84 His vision was literalistically holistic. The Land, the People, and the Torah formed an indivisible triad. To abandon one was to abandon all three. Unless Jews settled in the whole Land of Israel, as this was defined in the Bible, there could be no Redemption: the annexation of the whole land, including territory at this time belonging to the Arabs, had become a supreme religious duty. 85 But when the Gahelet met Kook in the late 1950s, there seemed little hope of achieving this. The borders of the State of Israel, established in 1948, included only Galilee, the Negev, and the coastal plain. The biblical land on the West Bank of the Jordan currently belonged to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. But Kook was confident. Everything was proceeding in accordance with a preordained pattern. Even the Holocaust had pushed Redemption forward, since it had forced Jews to leave the Diaspora and return to the Land. Jews had “clung so determinedly to the impurity of foreign lands, that, when the End Time arrived, they had to be cut away with a great shedding of blood,” Kook explained in a Holocaust Day sermon in 1973. These historical facts revealed God’s divine hand, and had brought about “the rebirth of the Torah and all that was holy.” History thus provided an encounter, “an encounter with the Master of the Universe.” 86 The transposition of myth into fact had finally occurred. In the premodern world, mythology and politics had been distinct. State-building, military campaigns, agriculture, and the economy had all been the preserves of the rational disciplines of logos.

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

  Intelligence and of the Soul. The first represented absolute perfection, the second was an image of the first but was capable of being known by our inferior senses, and the third was a spirit which infused the world and was therefore capable of being diverse, in contrast to the perfection of the One and of Intelligence. In this scheme, there was no Christ figure to be incarnate; it was the task of the individual soul by ecstatic contemplation of the divine to restore the harmony lost in the world, an ecstasy so rare that Plotinus himself admitted to achieving it only four times in his life. Neoplatonism was largely independent of the old religious forms, though it could coexist perfectly happily with traditional gods, by enrolling them as manifestations of Intelligence. Porphyry’s writings encouraged this tendency, which was yet another force uniting the religions of the Mediterranean. Christian thinkers over many centuries were not exempt from the fascination of Neoplatonism, and we will repeatedly encounter its effects. Christianity faced an equally powerful challenge from a new religion with the same Semitic background from which it had itself emerged, in the teachings of a new prophet called Mani. He was born around 216 near Seleucia-Ctesiphon, capital of the increasingly troubled and feeble Parthian Empire, of whose ruling house he was a minor relative. As a boy he witnessed the Parthians fall to the Persians, but he managed initially to gain favour from the new rulers before they turned against him and threw him in prison, where he died in 276 or 277. His travels, meanwhile, had taken him as far as India, at much the same time as Syriac Christianity was also gaining a foothold in the East; he encountered Buddhism and Hinduism to range alongside his previous knowledge of Christianity in both its gnostic and its Catholic varieties. Maybe it was his consciousness of the collapse of his family’s world which prompted Mani to create a new synthesis of all the religions which bordered his homeland. Clearly there was a demand for such syntheses in societies full of myriad cross-cultural encounters, because his efforts attracted huge success. Mani combined all the religions which he respected with his own experience of revelation into a new ‘Manichaean’ cult. Like gnostic dualism before it, this provided a convincingly stark account of the world’s suffering, portraying it as the symptom of an unending struggle between matched forces of good and evil. Jesus occupied a very important place in Mani’s scheme of divinity: indeed, he habitually referred to himself as the ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’, as Paul of Tarsus had done before him. For him Jesus was judge at the last, and a divine healer and teacher, who, as in so many gnostic cosmic constructions of his role in salvation, had no real human body: physical matter was a prison for individual spirits which sought their home in Heaven. So Mani’s Jesus spoke in strong paradoxes: ‘Amen, I was seized; Amen again, I was not seized … Amen, I suffered; Amen

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It was easier for Spinoza to survive in the gentile world than it had been for Prado or Da Costa. He was a genius, able to articulate his position clearly, and, as a genuinely independent man, could sustain the inevitable loneliness it entailed. He was at home in the Netherlands, and had powerful patrons who gave him a reasonable allowance, so that he did not have to live in abject poverty. Spinoza was not, as is often supposed, forced to grind lenses to earn a living; he did it to further his interest in optics. He was able to form friendships with some of the leading gentile scientists, philosophers, and politicians of the day. Yet he remained an isolated figure. Jews and gentiles alike found his irreligion either shocking or disconcerting. 37 Yet there was spirituality in Spinoza’s atheism, since he experienced the world as divine. It was a vision of God immanent within mundane reality which filled Spinoza with awe and wonder. He experienced philosophical study and thought as a form of prayer; as he explained in his Short Treatise on God (1661), the deity was not an object to be known but the principle of our thought. It followed that the joy we experience when we attain knowledge was the intellectual love of God. A true philosopher, Spinoza believed, would cultivate what he called intuitive knowledge, a flash of insight that fused all the information he had acquired discursively and which was an experience of what Spinoza believed to be God. He called this experience “beatitude”: in this state, the philosopher realized that he was inseparable from God, and that God exists through human beings. This was a mystical philosophy, which could be seen as a rational version of the kind of spirituality cultivated by John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, but Spinoza had no patience with this type of religious insight. He believed that yearning for a transcendent God would alienate human beings from their own nature. Later philosophers would find Spinoza’s quest for the ecstasy of beatitude embarrassing, and would dispense with his God altogether. Nevertheless, in his concentration on this world and in his denial of the supernatural, Spinoza became one of the first secularists in Europe. Like many modern people, Spinoza regarded all formal religion with distaste. Given his experience of excommunication, this was hardly surprising. He dismissed the revealed faiths as a “compound of credulity and prejudices,” and “a tissue of meaningless mysteries.” 38 He had found ecstasy in the untrammeled use of reason, not by immersing himself in the biblical text, and as a result, he viewed Scripture in an entirely objective way. Instead of experiencing it as a revelation of the divine, Spinoza insisted that the Bible be read like any other text. He was one of the first to study the Bible scientifically, examining the historical background, the literary genres, and the question of authorship. 39 He also used the Bible to explore his political ideas.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Newton became almost obsessed with the desire to purge Christianity of its mythical doctrines. He became convinced that the a-rational dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation were the result of conspiracy, forgery, and chicanery. While working on his great book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia (1687), Newton began work on a bizarre treatise entitled The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology, which argued that Noah had founded a superstition-free religion in which there were no revealed scriptures, no mysteries, but only a Deity which could be known through the rational contemplation of the natural world. Later generations had corrupted this pure faith; the spurious doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity had been added to the creed by unscrupulous theologians in the fourth century. Indeed, the Book of Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism—“this strange religion of ye West,” “the cult of three equal Gods”—as the abomination of desolation.14 Newton was still a religious man and still, to an extent, in thrall to the conservative spirit in his quest for a rational primordial religion. But he could not express his faith in the same way as previous generations. He was unable to appreciate that the doctrine of the Trinity had been devised by the Greek Orthodox theologians of the fourth century precisely as mythos, similar to that later created by the Jewish Kabbalists. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained, the three hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit were not objective facts but simply “terms that we use” to express the way in which the “unnameable and unspeakable” divine nature (ousia) adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds.15 It made no sense outside the cultic context of prayer, contemplation, and liturgy. But Newton could only see the Trinity in rational terms, had no understanding of the role of myth, and was therefore obliged to jettison the doctrine. The difficulty that many Western Christians today experience with trinitarian theology shows that they share Newton’s bias in favor of reason. Newton’s position was entirely understandable. He was one of the very first people in the West to master fully the methods and disciplines of scientific rationalism. His was a towering achievement and the result was as intoxicating as any religious experience. He used to cry out in the course of his studies: “O God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee!”16 He had literally no time for the intuitive mystical consciousness, which might actually have impeded his progress. Reason and myth were, for the first time in human history, becoming incompatible because of the intensity and dazzling success of this Western experiment.

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

  and made it part of the empire in the 240s, but before that its kings had let Christianity flourish. Later Syrian Christians celebrated this in the legend of King Abgar V of Osrhoene, who back in the first century was supposed to have received a portrait of Jesus Christ from the Saviour himself and to have corresponded with him. The fourth-century Greek historian Eusebius took a great interest in Abgar, preserving the supposed correspondence, although apparently as yet unaware of the portrait, and the elaborated legend gained an extraordinary popularity westwards far beyond Syria. Partly this was because it remedied an embarrassing deficiency in the story of early Christianity, a lack of an intimate connection with any monarchy. That was probably why Eusebius discussed Abgar, exultant chronicler as he was of the Emperor Constantine I’s new alliance with the Church, and in general a writer little excited by the Church on the eastern fringe of the empire.56 Equally, as the cult of relics gathered pace in the fourth and fifth centuries, there was sheer fascination for many devout Christians in the idea of a relic provided by Christ himself. In an elaborated version of the story, this portrait became the first of many Christian displays of a miraculous imprint of an image on cloth, which naturally possessed impressive powers as a result. Later, in 944, now known as the Mandylion (towel) of Edessa, the healing cloth was taken to Constantinople. Later still, taking the story even further west, it was linked to another mysterious expanse of cloth now preserved in Turin Cathedral as the shroud of Christ, despite the likelihood that this admittedly remarkable object was created in medieval Europe.57 The most bizarre outcrop of the Abgar legend was its redeployment in the interest of medieval and Tudor monarchs far away in England. Under his Latin name Lucius, King in Britium, the Latin name for the fortress-hill looming over the city of Edessa, Abgar became by creative misunderstanding King Lucius of Britannia, welcoming early Christian missionaries to what would become England’s green and pleasant land. Although the heroic error seems in the beginning to have been the fault of an author in the entourage of a sixth-century pope in Rome, the story became much beloved by early English Protestants when they were looking for an origin for the English Church which did not involve the annoying intervention of Augustine of Canterbury’s mission from Pope Gregory I (see pp. 334–9), but the Abgar legend was more generally pressed into polemical service by a remarkable variety of combative clergy in the English Reformation.58 This was a far cry from its original purpose as a self- serving story for the Syriac Church, designed to testify to its early and royal origins. That story probably reached its full elaboration at a time when Syriac bishops and local leaders were hoping to curry favour with or impress late Roman emperors in Constantinople. The legend’s back-dating to the first century

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

  have a special destiny in Christian history, as we will discover. So Christian life in Constantinople straight away became based on a rhythm of ‘stational’ visits to individual churches at special times, the clergy linking them by processions which became a characteristic feature of worship in the city. To live in Constantinople was to be in the middle of a perpetual pilgrimage.14 Constantine’s vigorous annexation of the Christian past for imperial purposes in Rome and Byzantium also bore fruit in a remarkable enterprise which was a huge boost to the growing Christian urge to visit sacred places: the recreation of a Christian Holy Land centred on Jerusalem.15 Palestine had been a backwater of the empire since its miserable century of rebellion and destruction from 66 CE. The former Jerusalem was a small city with a Roman name, Aelia Capitolina, some evocative ruins on the former Temple site, and a modest number of Christians who had unobtrusively returned to live around the area. In the middle years of Constantine’s reign its provincial tranquillity began to be interrupted, much to the delight of its ambitious bishop, Macarius, who was pressing for appropriate honour to be done to the true home of Christianity. The bishop clearly attracted the Emperor’s attention by some skilled self-promotion at the great Council of Nicaea in 325. He returned home armed with instructions to start an expensive programme of church-building, the preparations for which revealed a sensational double find beneath the stately imperial Capitoline temple built by Hadrian (see p. 107). What emerged was the exact site of Christ’s crucifixion and the tomb in which the Saviour had been laid. It is possible that there had been a continuous Christian tradition as to the whereabouts of these sites and that therefore there was not much revealing to be done.16 Less plausibly, it was not long before the Jerusalem Church was announcing that the actual wood of the Cross had also been rediscovered, and within a quarter- century another enterprising Bishop of Jerusalem, named Cyril, was linking that discovery to an undoubted historic event: a state visit to the Holy City in 327 by Constantine’s mother, the dowager Empress Helena. Helena may not have found the wood of the Cross (certainly no one at the time said that she did), but her presence was important enough – important from the imperial family’s point of view, in demonstrating their Christian piety in the wake of the unfortunate and unexplained recent sudden deaths of the Emperor’s wife and eldest son, and vital to the Church in Jerusalem as a direct imperial endorsement of a new centre of world pilgrimage. It took nearly a century for pilgrimage to Jerusalem to gather momentum, partly because of the expense, but partly because not everyone was enthusiastic either for pilgrimage or for this particular destination. Eusebius’s comments on developments in Jerusalem are reserved, including the lofty remark in his later years that ‘to think that the

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

  respective languages of Western Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy. Rome owes its exceptional historic position in the Church to the Roman Empire – not merely the simple fact of the city’s status as the imperial capital, resonant throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond, but the actions of first-century emperors: the sack of Jerusalem and two executions of key early Christian figures, the Apostles Peter and Paul, in Rome itself. When Jerusalem was wrecked by the Roman expeditionary force in 70 CE and the oldest and most prominent community of Christians was permanently dispersed, Peter and Paul had probably been dead for around half a decade, apparently victims of a persecution whipped up in Rome by the Emperor Nero. The Book of Acts says much about Paul’s journey to Rome under arrest, and previously one of his most important letters had been written to Christians already living there. Scripture says nothing to link Peter and his death to Rome, and the suspicion does linger that the story of Peter’s martyrdom there was a fiction based retrospectively on the undoubted death of Paul in the city. Nevertheless there are strong witnesses in tradition and archaeology that at least as early as the mid-second century the Christians of Rome were confidently asserting that Peter was buried among their dead, in a cemetery across the Tiber beyond the western suburbs of Rome.91 The leadership of the Western Church went on to build on that memory or claimed memory over a thousand years, to create one of Christianity’s most noble and dangerous visions, the Roman papacy. Their building was literal, in the massive shape of the Basilica of St Peter above Peter’s supposed grave site, a building which we will repeatedly encounter in Christian history. The city of Rome is now the centre of the largest branch of Christian faith, which styles itself the Catholic Church, but we should remember that this is an oddity: Rome was, after all, the capital of the empire which killed Christ. Without the tragedy of the destruction of Jerusalem, Rome might never have taken the unique place which it has held in the story of Western Christian faith. But no one would have realized this even two centuries after the death of Jesus Christ; and for centuries more there was as much likelihood of Christianity spreading as strongly east as west from the ruins of Jerusalem, to become the religion of Baghdad rather than of Rome. That is why the next stage of this story will take us east, rather than in the westward and northward directions so often chosen by the historians of Christianity.