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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  was one of his foundation principles, since Jesus’s posthumous Apostle and interpreter Paul of Tarsus (see pp. 97–102) went out of his way to contradict the unconditional ‘commandment from the Lord’ on this matter, and one of the Gospel writers similarly nervously modified the ‘no divorce’ command to allow for the circumstance of adultery.42 CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION Certainly Jesus cared profoundly about the Temple in Jerusalem. His intense feelings about it made him predict its destruction, and apparently his own ability to rebuild it in three days. He provoked a disturbance in it, protesting at what he saw as its misuse for commerce and profit, and it was the goal of his last fatal public appearances. Then he was arrested in Jerusalem, put on trial and executed along with two common criminals on a hill outside the city, by the ghastly Roman custom of crucifixion. It is a sequence of events – the ‘Passion’, so called from the Latin verb to suffer, patior – which forms the dramatic culmination of the Gospels’ account of his public ministry. There is indeed more high drama in the Passion than in the accounts of Jesus’s subsequent resurrection and renewed appearances to his disciples. At the beginning of that story of humiliation, torture and death, on the night that he was betrayed to Temple and Roman authorities, is the account of his ‘last supper’ with the Twelve. On that occasion, not merely the Synoptic Gospels but also Paul of Tarsus, in a reminiscence of the actual earthly life of Jesus very rare in Paul’s writings, record that he took bread and wine, broke the bread, gave thanks and gave them to his disciples. It was a meal taken amid the Jewish festival of the Passover, the joyful season when the Jews remembered their liberation from Egypt (see pp. 51–2). Indeed, perhaps the group was celebrating the Passover meal itself. The death of Jesus became inextricably linked in the minds first of the witnesses, then of the later Church, with the lamb killed for a blood-soaked sacrifice in the Passover ceremonies. Jesus spoke of the bread of the supper as his body and the wine as his blood. A rich mixture of thought associations with death, sacrifice and thanksgiving for deliverance from disaster has flowed from that evening meal, into the supper drama which Christians have made the centre of their worship and have called the Eucharist. That is still the everyday Greek word for ‘thanks’. There is endless and probably irresolvable debate about how this ritual meal might have related to pre-Christian Jewish worship customs and ritual thanksgivings. What is clear is that there was nothing quite like it in previous tradition. From the earliest time of its institution, it involved a recital of

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

  Synoptics were creating.71 John has much information about Jesus which is not to be found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. He seems genuinely to supplement their picture of Jesus’s life; yet that is not John’s main purpose, and his information is put to uses other than those in the Synoptics. He portrays from the outset a Jesus who, in the Gospel’s great opening hymn, is already fully identified with the pre-existing Word which was with God: John’s Gospel narrative is a progressive glorification of this figure, to the Cross and beyond. John’s Jesus, in the course of his majestic discourses, sets himself up in great metaphoric statements prefixed by ‘I am’, mystically seven in number like the days of creation. He is Bread, Light, Door, Shepherd, Resurrection/Life, Way/Truth/Life, Vine.72 He repeatedly refers to himself as the Son of God, which he does only once (and then only by implication) in the Synoptics, though they frequently put this title into the mouth of others.73 This Johannine Christ says little about forgiving one’s enemies, which is such a strong theme in the Synoptics. His pronouncements about himself might seem arrogant, even insufferable, to those who could not accept them; they might be interpreted as a voice solemnly speaking through a man who is possessed. The Spirit of whom Paul speaks is also a constant presence in this Gospel, from the moment that John the Baptist sees it descending on Jesus in his baptism in the River Jordan.74 The tradition of John’s Gospel is reflected in a number of minor letters which have also taken the name of John as author, and it may be seen as evidence of another strand within the non-Jewish communities which in parallel to those chiefly influenced by Paul were spreading beyond the Jewish matrix of the Church. A strange poetic work known as Revelation now forms the last book of the New Testament, an open letter addressed to a number of named Church communities in what today is southern Turkey. It is likely to have been written in the time of the Emperor Domitian (81–96 CE) and to be the product of Christian fury at his brutal campaign to strengthen the cult of emperor worship. Like much inter-Testamental literature (see p. 68), it is an ‘apocalypse’ (the Greek for ‘revelation’): a vision of cosmic struggles in the End Time and of a triumphant judgement of God. Its author is also called John, and may be a contemporary of the Gospel writer (from whom he is distinguished by being called ‘the Divine’); his crude Greek style is very different, as are his preoccupations. Brooding on the Roman government’s maltreatment of Christians, John the Divine delighted in constructing a picture of the Roman Empire’s collapse which would have been familiar to pre-Christian Jewish writers in the apocalyptic tradition. He described Rome in a frequent Jewish shorthand for tyrannical power, ‘Babylon’. Significantly, John the Divine is the only New Testament

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The unification of Spain, which was completed by the conquest of Granada, was succeeded by an act of ethnic cleansing, and Jews and Muslims lost their homes. For some people, modernity was empowering, liberating, and enthralling. Others experienced it—and would continue to experience it—as coercive, invasive, and destructive. As Western modernity spread to other parts of the earth, this pattern would continue. The modernizing program was enlightening and would eventually promote humane values, but it was also aggressive. During the twentieth century, some of the people who experienced modernity primarily as an assault would become fundamentalists. But that was far in the future. In the late fifteenth century, the people of Europe could not have foreseen the enormity of the change they had initiated. In the course of the next three hundred years, Europe would not only transform its society politically and economically, but also achieve an intellectual revolution. Scientific rationalism would become the order of the day, and would gradually oust the older habits of mind and heart. We shall look at the Great Western Transformation, as this period has been called, in more detail in Chapter 3. Before we can appreciate its full implications, however, we must first look at the way that people in the premodern era experienced the world. In the universities of Spain, students and teachers excitedly discussed the new ideas of the Italian Renaissance. The voyage of Columbus would have been impossible without such scientific discoveries as the magnetic compass or the latest insights in astronomy. By 1492, Western scientific rationalism was becoming spectacularly efficient. People were discovering more fully than ever before the potential of what the Greeks had called logos, which was always reaching out for something fresh. Thanks to modern science, Europeans had discovered a wholly new world and were achieving unprecedented control over the environment. But they had not yet dismissed mythos. Columbus was conversant with science, but he was still at home in the old mythological universe. He seems to have come from a family of converted Jews and to have retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism, but he was a devout Christian, and wanted to win the world for Christ. He hoped that when he arrived in India, he would establish a Christian base there for the military conquest of Jerusalem. 2 The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but they were not yet fully modern in our sense. For them, the myths of Christianity still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations. Nevertheless, Christianity was changing.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Luther’s separation of religion and politics sprang from his disgust with the coercive methods of the Roman Catholic Church, which had used the state to impose its own rules and orthodoxy. Calvin did not share Luther’s vision of a Godless world. Like Zwingli, he believed that Christians should express their faith by taking part in political and social life rather than by retreating to a monastery. Calvin helped to baptize the emergent capitalist work ethic by declaring labor to be a sacred calling, not, as the medievals thought, a divine punishment for sin. Nor did Calvin subscribe to Luther’s disenchantment of the natural world. He believed that it was possible to see God in his creation, and commended the study of astronomy, geography, and biology. Calvinists of the early modern period would often be good scientists. Calvin saw no contradiction between science and scripture. The Bible, he believed, was not imparting literal information about geography or cosmology, but was trying to express ineffable truth in terms that limited human beings could understand. Biblical language was balbative (“baby talk”), a deliberate simplification of a truth that was too complex to be articulated in any other way.9 The great scientists of the early modern period shared Calvin’s confidence, and also saw their researches and discussions within a mythical, religious framework. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) believed that his science was “more divine than human.”10 Yet his theory of a heliocentric universe was a devastating blow to the old mythical perception. His astounding hypothesis was so radical that in his own day very few people could take it in. He suggested that instead of being located in the center of the universe, the earth and the other planets were actually in rapid motion around the sun. When we looked up at the heavens and thought that we saw the celestial bodies moving, this was simply a projection of the earth’s rotation in the opposite direction. Copernicus’s theory remained incomplete, but the German physicist Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was able to provide mathematical evidence in its support, while the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) tested the Copernican hypothesis empirically by observing the planets through the telescope, which he had himself perfected. When Galileo published his findings in 1612, he created a sensation. All over Europe, people made their own telescopes and scanned the heavens for themselves.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This place is also deeply sacred in the Jewish world, since the Dome is on the Temple Mount, thought to be the site of the Temple built by King Solomon. For centuries, however, there had been no tension between Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem; Jews had come to believe that their Temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE , could only be rebuilt by the Messiah, so they had no designs on the area, which Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif (the Most Noble Sanctuary). Since the sixteenth century, the single most sacred place in the Jewish world has been the Western Wall, just below the Dome of the Rock, the last relic of the Temple built by King Herod in the first century CE . The Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566) granted Jews permission to make this an official sanctuary and, it is said, his court architect, Sinan, designed the simple shrine there. The Arab-Israeli conflict ended this period of harmony between Muslims and Jews in the Holy City, and this sacred district had seen much violence since the 1920s. During the period of Jordan’s occupation of East Jerusalem and the Old City, between 1948 and 1967, Jews were not permitted to visit the Western Wall and ancient synagogues in the Jewish district of the Old City were destroyed. The Jews’ return to the Western Wall in 1967 was one of the most emotional moments of the Six Day War and was experienced, even by secular Israelis, as a profoundly spiritual event. When the Israelis annexed Jerusalem after the war, they promised that Christians and Muslims would have unrestricted access to their holy places. Muslims continued to control the Haram al-Sharif, even though this official government policy was deeply unpopular with both ultranationalist Israelis and the more extreme religious Zionists, who maintained that it should be returned to the Jewish people. However, the official Jewish position remained unchanged. The Temple could not be rebuilt until the Messiah had brought about the Redemption; it was a prohibition that over the centuries had acquired the force of a taboo. By the early 1980s, however, this was beginning to change. Livni and Etzion were not the only Jewish extremists who dreamed of rebuilding the Temple as a prelude to the Redemption. How could the Messiah return when the sacred site was “polluted” by the Dome of the Rock? Like other fundamentalists, they believed that they should take the initiative, cast caution to the winds, and clear the Temple Mount of this Muslim shrine in order to prepare the way for the Messiah. If they took the first step, God would certainly intervene and reward this act of faith by intervening in history, sending the long-awaited Messiah and redeeming the people of Israel.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  74 Yet, almost in spite of themselves, the Haredim had acquired unprecedented power in the state with which they felt at war. Ever since the Holocaust, the Haredim had striven to re-create the lost world of European Jewry. They saw the old life in Eastern Europe as a Golden Age and looked for inspiration to the great rabbis of the past. But by the late 1980s, they had surpassed them. Since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE , no religious Jew had been as powerful as Rabbi Schach, who by 1988 led two political parties and was courted by major politicians for his decisive vote. 7 5 This became dramatically evident on March 26, 1990. The Yad Eliahu basketball stadium in Tel Aviv is the symbolic temple of Israeli secular culture. In Israel, basketball is almost a national religion. The sport represents the Zionist dream of the new Jew, no longer bowed palely over a volume of Talmud in a musty yeshiva , no longer shrouded in the black robes of Orthodoxy, but stripped for action, tanned, fit, healthy, and able to compete internationally with the goyim and beat them at their own game. On that March evening in 1990, however, the stadium was crammed not with eager supporters of the Maccabees (the national basketball team) but with ten thousand bearded, caftaned Haredim. The ultra-Orthodox had invaded the heart of secular Israel and, for that evening at least, had taken over one of its chief citadels. Moreover, the event was televised and watched breathlessly by religious and secularist Israelis alike, throughout the country. The occasion? Rabbi Schach was about to address his followers and instruct them on how they should vote in the forthcoming election. The nation had awoken to the fact that the balance of power was held by an aged rabbi with a top hat and side curls, who spoke a strange mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish that most of his secular listeners could not understand. That evening Rabbi Schach would determine the fate of Labor and Likud. A peace process between Israel and the Palestinians was inching its way painfully forward, but it had split the National Coalition Government. Both Labor and Likud began to seek alliances with the smaller parties, of which the religious formed the largest single bloc. Labor had made informal agreements with Agudat and Shas, but Rabbi Yosef, one of the leaders of Shas, feared that a Labor alliance would split the party. The Sephardics tended to be ultranationalists, hated the Arabs, and were adamantly opposed to the territorial concessions envisaged by Labor.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  I’d had a bad experience of religion, and I was literally nauseated by it. It’s like a bad sexual experience at an early age that can skew you forever. My early books were written in a spirit of great skepticism. Then I made a trip to Jerusalem to make a documentary on St. Paul, and there I encountered Judaism and Islam as living faiths, vibrant and independent, and yet interconnected with my own. I was intrigued and enthralled, and I realized I had to look into it. The study of Judaism, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity showed me that there was a lot in the monotheistic tradition that I had never encountered and could really relate to, and it drew me back to a greater appreciation of what my own religion was trying to do. I always tried to present the monotheistic religions in a triple vision by trying to see them all as valid ways to God. JK: Do you still regard yourself as a Catholic? KA: No, I would call myself a freelance monotheist. My main source of spirituality is study. When I immerse myself in the sacred texts, whatever they happen to be, I live moments of awe and wonder and transcendence. This is one of the common experiences of the twentieth century. People don’t want to leave their own traditions, but they are reaching out instinctively to other faiths. Our society is becoming more and more global, and religious pluralism is one aspect of it. JK: And yet the fundamentalists you write about in The Battle for God would be aghast at the idea of religious pluralism, wouldn’t they? KA: Some people feel very threatened by pluralism, and they want to assert their identity more strongly than ever before, out of fear, by erecting new barriers. Fear is at the heart of fundamentalism—the fear of losing yourself. But you can’t escape modernity. Ironically, the very stance of choosing to be a fundamentalist is a modern stance, and most of the fundamentalist ideologies could not have taken root in a time other than our own. A Christian who reads the Bible from a fundamentalist point of view, for example, is reading it in a way that would have been impossible prior to the invention of printing and widespread literacy. The Ayatollah Khomeini, too, was a man of the twentieth century, innovative and revolutionary, and his politics were typical Third World politics—anti-imperialist and antiAmerican. Like any modern politician, he appealed directly to the people, and he overturned centuries of Shiite tradition. JK: The final chapter of The Battle for God is titled “Defeat?” What do you intend to say about the future of fundamentalism with that provocative question mark? KA: Fundamentalism cannot be defeated, and, in a sense, fundamentalists have won a great victory. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was generally assumed that religion would never again play a role in great events. Today, however, no government can ignore it.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The focus of the hajj is the cube-shaped shrine of the Kabah, situated in the heart of Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz. The Kabah was of extreme antiquity even in Muhammad’s day and may originally have been dedicated to Al-Lah, the High God of the Arabian pagan pantheon. Muhammad Islamized the ancient rites of the annual pilgrimage to the Kabah and gave them a monotheistic significance, and the hajj to this day gives Muslims a powerful experience of community. The structure of the Kabah conforms to the geometric pattern found by psychologist C. G. Jung (1875–1961) to have archetypal significance. At the heart of most ancient cities, a shrine established a link with the sacred which was regarded as essential to their survival. It brought the primal, more potent reality of the divine world into the fragile and insecure urban communities of mortal men and women. The shrine was described by such classical authors as Plutarch, Ovid, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus as either round or square, and was thought to reproduce the essential structure of the universe. It was a paradigm of the order that had brought the cosmos out of chaos and, by making it viable, had given it reality. Jung believed that it was not necessary to choose between the square and the circle; the geometric figure representing this cosmic order, the foundation of all reality, was, he believed, a square inserted into a circle.5 The rituals performed at this shrine reminded the worshippers of their duty to bring this divine order into their world of potential chaos and disaster, submitting themselves to the fundamental laws and principles of the universe in order to keep their civilization in being and prevent it from falling prey to illusion. The Kabah in Mecca conformed exactly to this archetype. Pilgrims run in seven ritual circles around the granite cube, whose four corners represent the corners of the world, following the course of the sun around the earth. Only by making an existential surrender (islam) of his or her whole being to the basic rhythms of life can a muslim (one who makes this submission) live as an authentic human being in the community.

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

  Byzantine tradition: Maximus or Maximos (c. 580–662), known as ‘the Confessor’ from the sufferings he endured at the end of his long life in defence of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy.23 His writings could guide a monk in almost every aspect of his life – doctrine, ascetic practice, worship and the understanding of scripture – and all is suffused with Maximus’s constant return to the theme of union with the divine. Like Climacus, Maximus did not seek to be original: he restated and enriched the message of the past, but his choices set directions for the future. One of his sources was Cyril of Alexandria – whom he chose to see as a firm defender of the theology on the natures of Christ which the Council of Chalcedon had later affirmed – and, once more, Origen and Evagrius rather more discreetly than was necessary in a previous generation. But Maximus also looked to a writer who went under the name of one of the few converts whom Paul of Tarsus is said to have made in Athens, Dionysius the Areopagite.24 The books of this ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ were in fact probably compiled in Syria around eighty years before Maximus’s time, by a Christian steeped in Neoplatonist philosophy, and moreover a sympathizer with the Miaphysites – an irony in view of Maximus’s strong Chalcedonianism.25 In fact the career of Pseudo-Dionysius is remarkable: he is a constant presence behind the mystical writings of Orthodox Christianity, and from the ninth century, when his writings were translated into Latin by the Irish philosopher John Scotus Erigena, he became a powerful voice in a Western Latin mystical tradition as well. Dionysius the Areopagite drew on the thought of Neoplatonists (see pp. 169–70) in his exploration of how divinity could intimately combine with humanity through a progress in purging, illumination and union. These stages are to be found in many subsequent treatments of mystical Christianity long after Maximus, and their origins in such a dubiously provenanced work are a testimony to the way in which Christian mysticism reaches beyond the careful boundaries drawn by the councils of the Church.26 Dionysian theology was also Neoplatonic in its view of the cosmos as a series of hierarchies; it viewed these hierarchies not as an obstacle to God, but as the means of uniting the remoteness and unknowableness of God with the knowable particularity of lower creation, just as courtiers might be intermediaries for humble people to approach a monarch. God could be known in precisely opposite ways: by what could not be said about him (the ‘apophatic’ view of God) and what could be affirmed about him (the ‘kataphatic’ view). Pseudo-Dionysius, like so many writers in mystical traditions, loved expressing in terms of light the relationship between unknowable transcendence and the tiers of being which represented knowable divinity:

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

  Church was convulsed by a dispute about the validity of a style of mystical prayer known as Hesychasm. The principal combatants were Gregory Palamas, a monk of a community on Mount Athos who championed Hesychast spirituality, and Barlaam, an Orthodox monk from Calabria, the religious frontier land in Italy where Byzantine and Latin monasticism existed side by side. Hesychasm was only one of the issues which brought them into contention, but its results were the most far-reaching. The word ‘Hesychasm’ probably seems one of the more intimidating fragments of theological jargon to those first encountering it, but it simply comes from the Greek verb hēsychazö, ‘to keep stillness’ (or silence). Linked with the idea of stillness was the characteristic mystical idea of light as the vehicle of knowing God, or as a metaphor for the knowledge of God. Gregory Palamas maintained that in such practice of prayer, it is possible to reach a vision of divine light which reveals God’s uncreated energy, which is the Holy Spirit. He pointed to the episode of transfiguration described in the Synoptic Gospels, where Jesus was with his disciples on Mount Tabor, and they could see that his face ‘shone like the sun’.37 The Transfiguration, already commemorated with greater elaboration in Orthodoxy than in the Latin West, therefore became a favourite Hesychast choice of subject for icons (see Plate 56). Mystical themes have a habit of emerging in unpredictable circumstances as a counterpoint to various structured versions of Christian belief, so the Hesychast emphasis on silence and light is curiously reminiscent of a Christian movement remote in time and space from fourteenth-century Byzantium: the Quakerism which emerged in England during its seventeenth-century civil wars (see p. 653). The sharp contrast with the Quakers is in the way in which Hesychasm is rooted in specified devotional practices. Apart from contemplation of the icon, there are practical ways to structure still or silent prayer: appropriate physical posture and correct breathing are important, and one characteristic practice is to repeat a single devotional phrase, the most common of which came to be ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me’. This phrase or variants on it became known as the ‘Jesus Prayer’. Such set techniques are reminiscent of systematic Eastern approaches to prayer, from Buddhism to the S f s of Islam, who themselves may have drawn on Indian spirituality. There may indeed be a direct relationship between the Hesychast approach and Sufism, though there remains controversy as to which way the influence travelled.38 Both the Hesychasts and their opponents appealed to the Orthodox past; in fact both were looking back to Maximus the Confessor, and beyond Maximus to that unknown writer who had borrowed the identity of Dionysius the Areopagite to lend respectability to his ideas (see p. 439). Barlaam wanted to defend his own

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

  place reveals and refracts the vision of Heaven, the iconostasis becomes not so much a visual obstruction in the fashion of the Western rood screen, but is actually transparent, a gateway to Heaven, like the altar beyond it. It aids the spiritual eye to see something more real than that which it conceals from the human eye. Moreover, in developed form, the iconostasis is the culmination of a set of steps which symbolize the ascent of the soul towards heavenly joy. Those steps lead to a shallow platform before the iconostasis, on which much of the liturgy takes place, but it is also available for the congregation, excluded from physical entrance to the sanctuary, to venerate the icons of the iconostasis. A gateway needs doors. The doors of the iconostasis are important: basic to the structure is a central entrance – the ‘Beautiful Gates’ – which, when open, affords the sight of the altar, and which is flanked by smaller doors – again, of course, all appropriately bearing their icons. Outside the time of worship, the doors are closed. Open or closed, they mark punctuation points in the liturgy which retains the processional quality so important in Byzantine worship from the earliest days of New Rome. The Beautiful Gates are principally reserved for the bishop, the side doors used liturgically by deacons (and therefore they often bear the images of sainted deacons such as the first martyr of the Christian faith, Stephen). Around the doors stand the other saints, prophets and festal scenes. These are dominated by images of Christ and his Mother, which may have their counterparts in different positions in the screen. The greatest development of the iconostasis and its structured decoration was to come in Russian Orthodoxy, but the overall concept and use were achieved in the empire before the fall of Constantinople. It was a paradox of this age that despite all the wretchedness of the relationship between Latin and Greek Christianity in the wake of 1204, Latin and Orthodox cultures were now closer and more regularly in contact than they had been for half a millennium. Influences went in both directions, with Venice and its newly acquired colonies as one of the main conduits – literally in the case of a large number of art objects, which in Venice included not merely the famous four antique bronze horses stolen from Constantinople during the sack of the city, but a huge number of marble blocks and carvings which were shipped around the Greek coast and up the Adriatic to transform the exterior and interior of St Mark’s Cathedral. Surprisingly in view of the distinctiveness of Orthodox worship, with its distinct liturgical models drawing on Eastern traditions attributed to St John Chrysostom, St Basil and St James, one of the greatest aspects of similarity remained in the liturgical chant which both Churches employed. In the charged atmosphere of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, a Greek canon lawyer, John, Bishop of Kytros, could still say that the

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

  Book of Acts, in which Christianity’s Jewish heritage already lies at the heart of the story of Philip and the eunuch. Meditation on this during the passing of centuries in the isolation of Africa has made that seed grow into a major theme in a Church which honours the Jewish Sabbath, practises circumcision (female as well as male, unlike the Jews), and makes its members obey Jewish dietary laws. External sources as early as the thirteenth century record the Church as treasuring an object which was claimed to be the Ark of the Covenant once housed in the Temple in Jerusalem. The report that the Ark was decorated with crosses does present problems for this provenance, given that, if genuine, it had been constructed a millennium before the Crucifixion.31 At its extreme, the preoccupation with the Hebrew past in Ethiopian Christianity has produced a grouping of peoples first attested in Ethiopia in the fourteenth century, who have been styled by other Ethiopians Falasha, ‘Strangers’, but who call themselves Beta Israel (‘House of Israel’) because they claim full Jewish identity. In recent years, most of the Beta Israel have emigrated to the State of Israel.32 Central to the complex of associations with Israel and Judaism is a foundational work of Ethiopian literature, the Kebra Nagast, the ‘Book of the Glory of Kings’. It is this work, difficult to date and composite in character, which sets out the origins of the Ethiopian monarchy in the union of King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba, that legendary ruler of a Yemeni kingdom whom the Tanakh had recorded as visiting Jerusalem in great splendour. What is now considered to be a late addition to the accounts in the Kebra Nagast is the story that their son Menelik, the first Ethiopian king, brought the Ark, or tabot, back to Ethiopia, where it is kept to this day in a chapel in Aksum. Every Ethiopian church has a much-venerated representation of the tabot in its sanctuary. Quite when the tabot at Aksum became so important in Ethiopian devotion is controversial. The latest historian to consider the confused and partial evidence places it as late as the end of the sixteenth century, when recent Islamic destruction and bruising contacts with the wider Christian world made the Ethiopian Church particularly concerned to assert its special character and enrich its existing Jewish traditions (see pp. 711–12).33 The original form of the Kebra Nagast is certainly much older, and it may relate to a period in the sixth century when Aksum was at one of its peaks of power. This formidable Christian empire under King Kaleb then had an intimate concern with the land of the Queen of Sheba, the Yemen. The active role which Ethiopia now seized in the politics of Yemen and Arabia was one of the great might-have-beens of history, and would certainly explain the later fascination in Ethiopia with Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In the early years of the sixth century, Miaphysite Christian refugees from the Byzantine Empire gathered in

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

  7 Defying Chalcedon: Asia and Africa (451–622) MIAPHYSITE CHRISTIANITY AND ITS MISSIONS Modern globalization has produced a dialogue between world religious faiths which in the last century or so has become something of an international industry. But this is a rediscovery for Christians and not a novelty: there were once Christianities which had little choice but to talk to believers in other world religions, because they were surrounded on all sides by them and often at their mercy. These Christians nevertheless travelled thousands of miles east of Jerusalem and brought a Christian message at least as far as the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. One of those encounters produced a tale which went on to unite Christians everywhere in enjoyment of it for something like a millennium, though now it has almost been forgotten in the form which those Christians knew. It is nothing less than the story of Gautama Buddha, turned into a Christian novel about a hermit and a young prince, Barlaam and Josaphat. Barlaam converts the prince to the true faith, but that true faith is no longer Buddha’s revelation, but Christianity – while the Buddha has become a Christian hermit in the desert of Sinai, though his prince is still from a royal house of India.1 How can this extraordinary cultural chameleon have been conceived? What seems to have happened is that a version of the Sanskrit original life of Buddha, probably translated into Arabic in Baghdad, fell into the hands of a Georgian monk some time in the ninth century. He was so charmed by the story that he rewrote it in Georgian in Christian form as Balavariani, and fellow monks who spoke different languages also loved it and moved it into their own tongues. When it made its way into Greek, it took on a spurious authorship and plenty of pious quotations from the safely Orthodox giant of theology and philosophy John of Damascus to lend it respectability and increase its selling power, and now it was The Life of Barlaam and Joasaph. The two heroes became saints, with their own feast days, hymns and anthems. Small bony fragments of St Josaphat acquired in the East by Venetian merchants can be seen in a church in

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  After years of feeling inferior to both the secular pioneers and the scholarly Haredim, Kookists suddenly felt that they were at the center of things and on the front line of a cosmic war. By hastening the advent of Redemption, they felt at one with the fundamental rhythms of the universe. Observers noted that when they prayed, they swayed backward and forward, with their eyes tightly shut, their faces contorted and pained, and wailed aloud. These were all signs of what the Kabbalists called kawwanah , an effort of intensive concentration during the performance of one of the commandments that enables the Jew to see through its symbolic form to the essential significance of the rite. 12 An act performed with kawwanah not only brings the worshipper closer to God but helps to rectify the imbalance that separates the mundane world from the divine. Gush activists not only experienced this ecstasy when they prayed; they saw their political activities in the same light. The spectacle of Rabbi Kook preaching and weeping before a huge crowd at the inauguration of a new settlement was a “revelation.” So was the occasion when squatters wrapped themselves, screaming, in their prayer shawls, clinging with bleeding fingers to the sacred land, while the army pried them away from a hill near Ramallah. 13 These were not simply political moments. Activists believed that they had looked through the earthly shell of these events to the divine drama at the core of reality. Politics had thus become an act of worship (avodah) . Before a Jew attends a synagogue service, he bathes in the mikveh , a ritual bath. In the same way, Gush rabbis have declared: “Before we sink into the gutter of politics, we should purify ourselves in the mikveh , as it is like delving into the secrets of the Torah.” 14 This is a revealing remark, because it shows the dualism at the heart of Gush piety. Politics is as holy as the Torah, but—as Kook the Elder had pointed out so long ago—it is also a gutter. Since 1967, Kookists had often experienced the shock of historical events as a “burst of light,” a favorite image of Kook the Elder, but they were also acutely aware of the darkness of political failure, setbacks, and obstacles. Israeli victories were hailed as great miracles, but they were also recognized to have been brought about by modern technology and military expertise. Kookists, therefore, were actually strongly aware of the profane as well as the sacred. Their yearning for the divine was balanced by an experience of the opacity and intransigence of recalcitrant mundane reality. Hence the extremity and anguish of their prayer and activism.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But these were also years of unparalleled creativity and astonishing achievements in the arts and sciences, revealing the full flowering of the modern spirit. In all fields, the most creative thinkers seemed possessed by the desire to create the world anew, throw away the forms of the past, and break free. Modern people had evolved an entirely different mentality and could no longer look at the world in the same way. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel had developed narratives that expressed an ordered progress of cause and effect; modern narratives splintered, leaving the reader uncertain about what had happened or what to think. Painters such as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) dismembered their subjects or viewed them from two different perspectives at the same time; they seemed deliberately to flout the expectation of the viewer, and announced that a new vision was necessary. In both the arts and the sciences, there was a desire to go back to first principles, to irreducible fundamentals, and from this zero base to start again. Scientists now searched for the atom or the particle; sociologists and anthropologists reverted to primeval societies or primitive artifacts. This was not like the conservative return ad fontes, because the aim was not to re-create the past but to break it asunder, to split the atom, and bring forth something entirely new. Some of these endeavors were an attempt to create a spirituality, without God or the supernatural. The painting, sculpture, poetry, and drama of the early twentieth century were all quests for meaning in a disordered, changing world; they were trying to create novel modes of perception and modern myths. The psychoanalytical science of Sigmund Freud, which strove to uncover the most fundamental layers of the unconscious, was also a search for new insight and an attempt to access a hidden source of spiritual strength. Freud had no time for conventional religion, which he regarded as the most serious enemy of the logos of science.2 But he tried to revive a modern sense of the old myths of the Greeks and even made up mythical fictions of his own. The horror and fear of much of the modern experience lent new urgency to the search for some intangible significance which could save human beings from despair, but which could not be attained by the normal processes of logical, discursive thought. Freud, indeed, for all his devotion to scientific rationalism, showed that reason represented only the outermost rind of the mind, overlaying a seething cauldron of unconscious, irrational, and primitive impulses that profoundly affect our behavior but over which we have little control.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  added digit that you hear, reaches an almost intolerable peak as you rush to produce a transformed string during and immediately after the pause, and relaxes gradually as you “unload” your short-term memory. The pupil data corresponded precisely to subjective experience: longer strings reliably caused larger dilations, the transformation task compounded the effort, and the peak of pupil size coincided with maximum effort. Add-1 with four digits caused a larger dilation than the task of holding seven digits for immediate recall. Add-3, which is much more difficult, is the most demanding that I ever observed. In the first 5 seconds, the pupil dilates by about 50% of its original area and heart rate increases by about 7 beats per minute. This is as hard as people can work—they give up if more is asked of them. When we exposed our subjects to more digits than they could remember, their pupils stopped dilating or actually shrank. We worked for some months in a spacious basement suite in which we had set up a closed-circuit system that projected an image of the subject’s pupil on a screen in the corridor; we also could hear what was happening in the laboratory. The diameter of the projected pupil was about a foot; watching it dilate and contract when the participant was at work was a fascinating sight, quite an attraction for visitors in our lab. We amused ourselves and impressed our guests by our ability to divine when the participant gave up on a task. During a mental multiplication, the pupil normally dilated to a large size within a few seconds and stayed large as long as the individual kept working on the problem; it contracted immediately when she found a solution or gave up. As we watched from the corridor, we would sometimes surprise both the owner of the pupil and our guests by asking, “Why did you stop working just now?” The answer from inside the lab was often, “How did you know?” to which we would reply, “We have a window to your soul.” The casual observations we made from the corridor were sometimes as informative as the formal experiments. I made a significant discovery as I was idly watching a woman’s pupil during a break between two tasks. She had kept her position on the chin rest, so I could see the image of her eye while she engaged in routine conversation with the experimenter. I was surprised to see that the pupil remained small and did not noticeably dilate as she talked and listened. Unlike the tasks that we were studying, the mundane conversation apparently demanded little or no effort—no more than retaining two or three digits. This was a eureka moment: I realized that the tasks we had chosen for study were exceptionally effortful. An image came to mind: mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Zionists were, above all else, pragmatists, and this made them men of the modern era. Yet they were all profoundly aware of the explosive “charge” of the symbol of the Land. In the mythical world of Judaism, the Land was inseparable from the two most sacred realities, God and the Torah. In the mystical journey of the Kabbalah, the Land was linked symbolically to the last stage of the interior descent into the self, and was identical with the divine Presence the Kabbalist discovered in the ground of his being. The Land was thus fundamental to Jewish identity. However practical their approach, Zionists recognized that no other land could really “save” the Jews and bring them psychic healing. Peretz Smolenskin (1842–95), who was bitterly opposed to the rabbinic establishment, was convinced that Palestine was the only possible location for a Jewish state. Leo Pinsker (1821–91) was only converted to this idea slowly, and against his better judgment, but he finally had to admit that the Jewish state had to be in Palestine. Theodor Herzl had nearly lost the leadership of the Zionist movement at the Second Zionist Conference in Basel (1898) when he had suggested a state in Uganda. He was forced to stand before the delegates, raise his hand, and quote the words of the Psalmist: “Jerusalem, if I forget you, may my right hand wither!” Zionists were ready to exploit the power of this mythos to make their wholly secular and even Godless campaign a viable reality in the real world. That they succeeded was their triumph. But their endorsement of this mythical, sacred geography would be as problematic as ever when they tried to translate it into hard fact. The first Zionists had very little understanding of the terrestrial history of Palestine during the previous two thousand years; their slogan: “A land without a people for a people without a land!” showed a complete disregard for the fact that the land was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs who had their own aspirations for the country. If Zionism succeeded in its limited, pragmatic, and modern objective of establishing a secular Jewish state, it also embroiled the people of Israel in a conflict which, at this writing, shows little sign of abating.

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

  the heart of Christian faith, to gain a clearer picture of the society and thought- world in which the Qur’an was created.2 Muhammad’s revelations of words from God only began for him in middle age, in 610, while he was on one of his regular expeditions to a cave outside Mecca, to retreat from his daily cares into meditation. As revelations continued, he would dictate the words he had heard to an ever-growing body of disciples, through years of struggle in which he and his followers (Muslims) saw their fortunes transformed. At first they were a beleaguered group suffering oppression and expulsion – their moment of withdrawal (‘Hijra’) from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) in 622 CE has become the basis of Islamic dating. Within Muhammad’s lifetime – he is generally said to have died in 632 CE – Muslims in Mecca had become a victorious and self-confident community which now needed regulation for its life. Both these experiences are reflected in pronouncements which, during the next century and a half, came to be a fixed and written text – still known despite its written form as ‘that which is to be recited’, or Qur’an. In contrast to the similar transition in fortunes for the followers of Christ witnessed in the Gospels, Acts and Epistles of the New Testament, the Muslims from their earliest days won their survival at least partly by physical force of arms, another phase in the struggles which had convulsed the peninsula over the past century, and their subsequent extraordinary expansion was inseparable from military conquest. Little more than half a century after the first convulsions in Mecca, the Dyophysite Patriarch Henanisho I had the courage to point this out to ‘Abd al-Malik, then Islamic caliph (that is, the leader who claimed to be successor to Muhammad). The Caliph asked him to give his opinion of Islam. The Patriarch replied, ‘It is a power that was established by the sword and not a faith confirmed by divine miracles, like Christianity and like the old law of Moses.’3 This is not the whole story – in fact forced conversions were not at all the rule in early Islam, even while it was extending its reach by military campaigns. At the centre of Muhammad’s achievement was the extraordinary poetry which enshrined his revelations. Muslim sources have often ascribed the Qur’an’s power to its exceptional beauty in the Arabic language, and the Qur’an does not translate well, particularly into English. Conversion to Islam can therefore be a deeply felt aesthetic experience that rarely occurs in Christian accounts of conversion, which are generally the source rather than the result of a Christian experience of beauty. It is perhaps for that reason that from the beginning Islam has set its face against any further representation of the divine in pictures, since the divine beauty is already represented in the words of the Qur’an. It has often been said that the Qur’an plays the role in Islam which the incarnate Son has

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

  Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to be clear and spotless mirrors reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed of God himself. It ensures that when its members have received this full and divine splendour, they can then pass on this light generously.27 Maximus eagerly absorbed these themes and applied them in much greater detail to many different aspects of spirituality and worship. For him, theosis or deification was the destination for human salvation, whose attainment Adam’s sin in Eden had imperilled but not rendered impossible; in fact all the cosmos was created to arrive at deification. A ground-bass of Maximus’s meditation on theosis is Logos, the word that is Word and echoes through so much ancient philosophy to re-echo in John’s Gospel prologue and the writings of the first Apologists (see pp. 1 and 142–3). For Maximus, the central moment in the whole story of the cosmos was the coming of the Word in Flesh, a union of uncreated and created, and that was why the latter half of his career was devoted to a bitter public struggle to assert his own Chalcedonian understanding of what that meant. But there were so many depths to the meaning of Logos beyond this event of incarnation. God’s creation contained multiple ‘words’, logoi, which were God’s intentions for his creation, and the source of differentiation behind all created things: God the One and Simple designed his creation in multiplicity and complexity, so ‘it is said that God knows all beings according to these logoi before their creation, since they are in him and with him; they are in God who is the truth of all’. Rational created beings were destined and commanded to move back to meet their God through their logoi.28 The Logos was thus to be met both in Jesus and in all creation; it was also to be met in scripture. In a remarkably physical picture of the ‘Word’, Maximus said, ‘The Word is said to become “thick” … because he for our sakes, who are coarse in respect to our mentality, accepted to become incarnate and to be expressed in letters, syllables and words, so that from all these he might draw us to himself.’29 Maximus relished the approach to scripture that Origen had pioneered, seeing behind the veil of the literal meaning of the text a great sea of spiritual truths. Among their other gifts to the faithful, they could explain and give positive value to the literal discrepancies and oddities to be found throughout the sacred books. To seek after these meanings was yet another pathway back to the Creator, and it was a path directed by love. Love ‘is the producer par excellence of deification’. By whatever route, the goal was ‘to become living images of Christ, or rather to become identical with him or a copy, or even, perhaps, to become the Lord himself, unless this seems blasphemous to some’.30 Repeatedly, Maximus referred to Christians as gods through grace.31