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)

  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

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

  Europe. They seem to have sailed there mainly from Sweden; among a variety of new settlements, they set up their headquarters far inland at a hilltop strategically sited beside a wide river. It was named in the local Slavic language Gorodishche, though to them it was Holmgardr; later the settlement which grew up nearby would be called the new city, or Novgorod.3 In 860 the Rus’ streamed southwards and laid siege to Constantinople itself. That imaginative ninth- century Patriarch of Constantinople, Photios, has left vivid descriptions of the horror sparked in the capital by their unexpected arrival, their plundering of the suburbs, their wild appearance and unknown language. Photios’s reaction was characteristically far-sighted: he proposed a religious solution for a political problem. He laid plans for a Christian mission to the Rus’, just as he did for the troublesome Khazars or the Bulgars and Slavs. In 869 his missionary bishop to the Rus’ found time to attend the first of two councils of Orthodox bishops in Constantinople which (to the fury of papal delegates present) pressed the case for the Bulgarian Church’s links to the Byzantine Church (see p. 460).4 Photios would have known that he was following a Western precedent. Earlier in the century, the English had also reached out to their Viking tormentors and tried to tame them by conversion; so did the Carolingian monarch Louis the Pious in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. Of all these missions, the English were the most successful. Neither the Carolingians nor Photios’s delegates achieved lasting results, although the discovery of contemporary Byzantine coins in excavations at Gorodishche does show that money passed hands by some means, peaceful or otherwise.5 Nothing significant was heard of Christian activity in the lands of the Rus’ for nearly another century, but the contacts between these remote regions and Byzantium grew and stabilized. Norse power now spread hundreds of miles south from Gorodishche to the river system of the Dnieper, and in the mid-tenth century Norse leaders seized a settlement on the borders of the Khazar territories. It was at a confluence of rivers, and its easily defended hills were useful storage places for weapons and goods in transit: its name was Kiev or Ky’iv.6 Its rulers, a clan group known in later histories as Rurikids from their supposed ancestor Rurik, were by now losing their Norse identity and taking Slav names; they established a brisk trade with the Byzantine Empire, and their fascination with the riches which they could steal or barter from Byzantium began to familiarize them with the culture of the imperial world. The Macedonian emperors began including warriors from Rus’ among the mercenaries whom they gathered to fight on their frontiers: the first recorded instance is from 935, even before Kiev was in Norse hands.7 Some objects recovered from Russian excavation layers datable to the tenth century are

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Emma Hart came from a prosaic background, her father a country blacksmith in eighteenth-century England. Emma was beautiful, but had no other talents to her credit. Yet she rose to become one of the greatest seductresses in history, seducing first Sir William Hamilton, the English ambassador to the court of Naples, and then (as Lady Hamilton, Sir William's wife) Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson. What was strangest when you met her was an uncanny sense that she was a figure from the past, a woman out of Greek myth or ancient history. Sir William was a collector of Greek and Roman antiquities; to seduce him, Emma cleverly made herself resemble a Greek statue, and mythical figures in paintings of the time. It was not just the way she wore her hair, or dressed, but her poses, the way she carried herself. It was as if one of the paintings he collected had come to life. Soon Sir William began to host parties in his home in Naples at which Emma would wear costumes and pose, re-creating images from mythology and history. Dozens of men fell in love with her, for she embodied an image from their childhood, an image of beauty and perfection. The key to this fantasy creation was some shared cultural association—mythology, historical seductresses like Cleopatra. Every culture has a pool of such figures from the distant and not-so-distant past. You hint at a similarity, in spirit and in appearance—but you are flesh and blood. What could be more thrilling than the sense of being in the presence of some fantasy figure going back to your earliest memories? One night Pauline Bonaparte, the sister of Napoleon, held a gala affair Confuse Desire and Reality— The Perfect Illusion • 305 in her house. Afterward, a handsome German officer approached her in the garden and asked for her help in passing along a request to the emperor. Pauline said she would do her best, and then, with a rather mysterious look in her eye, asked him to come back to the same spot the next night. The officer returned, and was greeted by a young woman who led him to some rooms near the garden and then to a magnificent salon, complete with an extravagant bath. Moments later, another young woman entered through a side door, dressed in the sheerest garments. It was Pauline. Bells were rung, ropes were pulled, and maids appeared, preparing the bath, giving the officer a dressing gown, then disappearing. The officer later described the evening as something out of a fairy tale, and he had the feeling that Pauline was deliberately acting the part of some mythical seductress. Pauline was beautiful and powerful enough to get almost any man she wanted, and she wasn't interested simply in luring a man into bed; she wanted to envelop him in romantic adventure, seduce his mind. Part of the adventure was the feeling that she was playing a role, and was inviting her target along into this shared fantasy.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like New Light Protestantism, Hasidism became a mass movement in opposition to the religious establishment; Hasidim formed their own congregations, just as the New Lights had established their own churches. Both were popular movements with folk elements. Just as the radical Protestants castigated the elite for relying on their learning and theological expertise, the Hasidim reviled the arid Torah scholarship of the rabbis. The Besht declared that prayer must take precedence over the study of Torah, a revolutionary step. For centuries, Jews had accepted the authority of a rabbi based on his Torah learning, but because the rabbis seemed to have retreated from the urgent social problems of the community into the sacred texts, the Hasidim denounced this trivializing scholarship, even though they studied sacred texts themselves in their own way. New Light Protestantism had been a modernizing spirituality, however, while Hasidism was a typically conservative reform movement. Its spirituality was mythical, based on the Lurianic symbol of divine sparks that had been trapped in matter during the primal catastrophe, but the Besht transformed this tragic vision into a positive appreciation of the omnipresence of God. A spark of the divine could be found in absolutely everything. There was no place where God was not: the most accomplished Hasidim became aware of this hidden divine dimension by means of the practices of concentration and attachment (devekut) to God at all times. No activity, however worldly or carnal, was profane. God was always present and available and could be experienced while Hasidim were eating, drinking, making love, or conducting business. Hasidim must show their awareness of this divine presence. From the very first, Hasidic prayer was noisy and ecstatic; Hasidim would combine their worship with strange, violent gestures, designed to help them to put their whole selves into their prayer. They used to clap, throw their heads backward and forward, beat on the walls with their hands, and sway their bodies to and fro. The Hasid was to learn, at a level deeper than the cerebral, that his whole being must be pliable to the divine forces in his immediate environment, as a candle flame responds to every fluctuation of the wind. Some Hasidim would even turn somersaults in the synagogues, to express the overturning of the ego in its total surrender to God.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. 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.

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

  relationship to God and Mary the Theotokos, were a constant assurance to the congregations who viewed them that God in his mercy allowed such intimacy to human beings. Interestingly, the ordering of saints in Byzantine church interiors does not much reflect the passing of the seasons of Christian worship; they tend instead to be grouped in categories, such as martyrs or virgins.10 The Church’s year – Christmas, Easter, Ascension – tells a story which progresses in linear fashion through the months, centring on the life of Christ, and it is also punctuated by days commemorating particular historic events in the lives of saints. The Eucharist, by contrast, is timeless, reflecting the eternity of Heaven. It is that timelessness that the artistic schemes of the Orthodox Churches characteristically invoke – the only moment to which they point above the altar is the end of time, when Christ reigns in glory, the moment in which every Eucharist participates. Eastern congregations did not develop the attitude of the Carolingian West that the Eucharist was something to privatize, directing its power to particular ends and intentions, and therefore capable of being shortened into a said form (see pp. 356–7). In the East, the celebration was done because it needed to be done – at the worst times in Orthodox history, it has been just about all that the Church has been able to do. Moreover, from an early date, Eastern Christians seem to have concluded that it was enough for worshippers to be present at the Eucharist without receiving bread and wine. This seems to have been a measure of the awe which attached to the experience of eating the body and blood of Christ, which is how the Eucharist was now perceived. Laypeople’s reception of these elements became a very occasional, perhaps once-yearly, experience, much earlier than the same development in the West. Indeed, in the late fourth century, Ambrose of Milan recorded his disapproval of this Eastern custom.11 The ordered worship of God was the means by which holiness could enfold everyone, under the protection of the great helmet of the dome above. The singing of the liturgy imitated the music of Heaven, with angels in the same choir alongside the worshippers, and much of that music was intended for processions, for all to sing. The tradition allowed for voices alone, without instruments, in contrast to the gradual medieval acceptance in the Latin West of musical instruments, as also far away in the Church of Ethiopia. The singing congregations were travelling towards holiness, protected in the fixed shape of the liturgy, bound into the processions which dominated not merely the drama of the Church but everyday life in the streets of Constantinople. Moments of entry and reception into the sacred precincts were of especial importance, not least to the emperor himself, and the goal was the drama of the Eucharist at God’s altar.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  One of the most innovative and daring Jewish attempts to spiritualize the secular was developed by Rabbi Abraham Yitzak Kook (1865–1935), who also migrated to Palestine in 1904 to become the rabbi of the new settler communities. It was an odd appointment. Unlike most of the Orthodox, Kook had been deeply stirred by the Zionist movement, but he had been horrified to hear that the delegates to the Second Zionist Congress in Basel in 1898 had issued the statement: “Zionism has nothing to do with religion.”57 He condemned this remark in the strongest terms. It “spreads the terrible, black wings of death over our tender, lovely young national movement, by cutting it off from the source of its very life and the light of its splendor.” It was an “abomination and perverse;” a “poison” that was corrupting Zionism, causing it to “putrify and be covered in worms.” It could only turn Zionism “into an empty vessel … filled with a spirit of destructiveness and strife.”58 Kook often spoke like one of the ancient prophets, but many elements in his thought were modern. He was one of the first religious people who perceived, long before the First World War, that nationalism could become lethal and that, without a sense of the sacred, politics could become demonic. He pointed to the example of the French Revolution, which had begun with such high ideals but had degenerated into an orgy of bloodshed and cruelty. A purely secularist ideology could trample on the divine image in men and women; if it made the state its supreme value, there was nothing to stop a ruler from exterminating subjects who, in his view, obstructed the good of the nation. “When nationalism alone takes root among the people,” he warned, “it is as likely to debase and dehumanize their spirit as elevate it.”59