Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 8 of 69 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial, sacred time of myth. When monotheists turned to mysticism, however, mythology reasserted itself as the chief vehicle of religious experience. There is a linguistic connection between the three words “myth,” “mysticism” and “mystery.” All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence.1 They are not popular words in the West today. The word “myth,” for example, is often used as a synonym for a lie: in popular parlance, a myth is something that is not true. A politician or a film star will dismiss scurrilous reports of their activities by saying that they are “myths” and scholars will refer to mistaken views of the past as “mythical.” Since the Enlightenment, a “mystery” has been seen as something that needs to be cleared up. It is frequently associated with muddled thinking. In the United States, a detective story is called a “mystery” and it is of the essence of this genre that the problem be solved satisfactorily. We shall see that even religious people came to regard “mystery” as a bad word during the Enlightenment. Similarly “mysticism” is frequently associated with cranks, charlatans or indulgent hippies. Since the West has never been very enthusiastic about mysticism, even during its heyday in other parts of the world, there is little understanding of the intelligence and discipline that are essential to this type of spirituality. Yet there are signs that the tide may be turning. Since the 1960s Western people have been discovering the benefits of certain types of Yoga, and religions such as Buddhism, which have the advantage of being uncontaminated by an inadequate theism, have enjoyed a great flowering in Europe and the United States. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell on mythology has enjoyed a recent vogue. The current enthusiasm for psychoanalysis in the West can be seen as a desire for some kind of mysticism, for we shall find arresting similarities between the two disciplines. Mythology has often been an attempt to explain the inner world of the psyche, and both Freud and Jung turned instinctively to ancient myths, such as the Greek story of Oedipus, to explain their new science. It may be that people in the West are feeling the need for an alternative to a purely scientific view of the world.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Though we wondered greatly, we believed none the less implicitly and, kissing the table, we besought the night-hags to attend to their own affairs while we were returning home from dinner. As far as I was concerned, the lamps already seemed to burn double and the whole dining-room was going round, when “See here, Plocamus,” Trimalchio spoke up, “haven’t you anything to tell us? You haven’t entertained us at all, have you? And you used to be fine company, always ready to oblige with a recitation or a song. The gods bless us, how the green figs have fallen!” “True for you,” the fellow answered, “since I’ve got the gout my sporting days are over; but in the good old times when I was a young spark, I nearly sang myself into a consumption. How I used to dance! And take my part in a farce, or hold up my end in the barber shops! Who could hold a candle to me except, of course, the one and only Apelles?” He then put his hand to his mouth and hissed out some foul gibberish or other, and said afterwards that it was Greek. Trimalchio himself then favored us with an impersonation of a man blowing a trumpet, and when he had finished, he looked around for his minion, whom he called Croesus, a blear-eyed slave whose teeth were very disagreeably discolored. He was playing with a little black bitch, disgustingly fat, wrapping her up in a leek-green scarf and teasing her with a half-loaf of bread which he had put on the couch; and when from sheer nausea, she refused it, he crammed it down her throat. This sight put Trimalchio in mind of his own dog and he ordered Scylax, “the guardian of his house and home,” to be brought in. An enormous dog was immediately led in upon a chain and, obeying a kick from the porter, it lay down beside the table. Thereupon Trimalchio remarked, as he threw it a piece of white bread, “No one in all my house loves me better than Scylax.” Enraged at Trimalchio’s praising Scylax so warmly, the slave put the bitch down upon the floor and sicked her on to fight. Scylax, as might have been expected from such a dog, made the whole room ring with his hideous barking and nearly shook the life out of the little bitch which the slave called Pearl. Nor did the uproar end in a dog fight, a candelabrum was upset upon the table, breaking the glasses and spattering some of the guests with hot oil. As Trimalchio did not wish to seem concerned at the loss, he kissed the boy and ordered him to climb upon his own back. The slave did not hesitate but, mounting his rocking-horse, he beat Trimalchio’s shoulders with his open palms, yelling with laughter, “Buck! Buck! How many fingers do I hold up!” When Trimalchio had, in a measure, regained his composure, which took but a little while, he ordered that a huge vessel be filled with mixed wine, and that drinks be served to all the slaves sitting around our feet, adding as an afterthought, “If anyone refuses to drink, pour it on his head: business is business, but now’s the time for fun.”

• From Satyricon (1)

  In October, 1690, Francois Nodot, a French soldier of fortune, a commissary officer who combined belles lettres and philosophy with his official duties, wrote to Charpentier, President of the Academy of France, calling, his attention to a copy of a manuscript which he (Nodot) possessed, and which came into his hands in the following manner: one Du Pin, a French officer detailed to service with Austria, had been present at the sack of Belgrade in 1688. That this Du Pin had, while there, made the acquaintance of a certain Greek renegade, having, as a matter of fact, stayed in the house of this renegade. The Greek’s father, a man of some learning, had by some means come into possession of the MS., and Du Pin, in going through some of the books in the house, had come across it. He had experienced the utmost difficulty in deciphering the letters, and finally, driven by curiosity, had retained a copyist and had it copied out. That this Du Pin had this copy in his house at Frankfort, and that he had given Nodot to understand that if he (Nodot) came to Frankfort, he would be permitted to see this copy. Owing to the exigencies of military service, Nodot had been unable to go in person to Frankfort, and that he had therefore availed himself of the friendly interest and services of a certain merchant of Frankfort, who had volunteered to find an amanuensis, have a copy made, and send it to Nodot. This was done, and Nodot concludes his letter to Charpentier by requesting the latter to lay the result before the Academy and ask for their blessing and approval. These Nodotian Supplements were accepted as authentic by the Academics of Arles and Nimes, as well as by Charpentier. In a short time, however, the voices of scholarly skeptics began to be heard in the land, and accurate and unbiased criticism laid bare the fraud. The Latinity was attacked and exception taken to Silver Age prose in which was found a French police regulation which required newly arrived travellers to register their names in the book of a police officer of an Italian village of the first century. Although they are still retained in the text by some editors, this is done to give some measure of continuity to an otherwise interrupted narrative, but they can only serve to distort the author and obscure whatever view of him the reader might otherwise have reached. They are generally printed between brackets or in different type.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Karlstadt took the reader through different kinds of detachment, including “yieldedness of intellect” and finally even “letting go of Scripture” itself: Understanding its spirit was more important than the letter of the Word of God. The term he used for this process of detachment was to have a “circumcised heart,” as if true believers must be set apart in tribal fashion. 17 For Luther, it was the conviction that all our works are sinful and that we are saved by God’s grace alone that led to a sense of freedom. If everything we do is tainted with sin, then asceticism has no point; instead we should enjoy God’s creation. His position was both different from medieval Catholicism, which valued renouncing the flesh, or from what would become Calvinism, which was obsessed with disciplining pleasure. For Karlstadt, on the other hand, the aim of Gelassenheit was to arrive at a complete surrender of the self and a merging with God so that the believer becomes “immersed in God’s will.” It is a state of mystical receptivity and openness where the boundaries between oneself and God disappear—as if one were to return to the womb where there is no separation between mother and child. Thus Karlstadt’s striving for Gelassenheit— his tract outlining the different stages for its achievement—came pretty close to the kind of willed state of perfection that Luther rejected. Indeed, Luther would later charge Karlstadt with setting up, just like the monks, “a new kind of mortification, that is, a self-chosen putting to death of the flesh.” 18 — T HIS was the man who, just before Christmas 1521, openly defied the Elector and announced that he would administer Communion in both kinds at New Year in the Castle Church. Cautious and even punctilious by nature, and slow to change, once convinced, he had all the passion of the convert. He believed he was witnessing the triumph of the gospel, and he committed himself utterly to what he termed “the Christian City of Wittenberg.” The academic was becoming a bold popular leader. Whereas earlier he had avoided preaching, now Karlstadt preached frequently and with passion. People remarked that he had become a new man, “such exquisite things did he now preach.” 19 When it became clear that the Elector would be hostile to any “innovations,” Karlstadt ignored him and, on Christmas Day, he invited those present who wished to take Communion to do so, whether or not they had made confession.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Though we wondered greatly, we believed none the less implicitly and, kissing the table, we besought the night-hags to attend to their own affairs while we were returning home from dinner. As far as I was concerned, the lamps already seemed to burn double and the whole dining-room was going round, when “See here, Plocamus,” Trimalchio spoke up, “haven’t you anything to tell us? You haven’t entertained us at all, have you? And you used to be fine company, always ready to oblige with a recitation or a song. The gods bless us, how the green figs have fallen!” “True for you,” the fellow answered, “since I’ve got the gout my sporting days are over; but in the good old times when I was a young spark, I nearly sang myself into a consumption. How I used to dance! And take my part in a farce, or hold up my end in the barber shops! Who could hold a candle to me except, of course, the one and only Apelles?” He then put his hand to his mouth and hissed out some foul gibberish or other, and said afterwards that it was Greek. Trimalchio himself then favored us with an impersonation of a man blowing a trumpet, and when he had finished, he looked around for his minion, whom he called Croesus, a blear-eyed slave whose teeth were very disagreeably discolored. He was playing with a little black bitch, disgustingly fat, wrapping her up in a leek-green scarf and teasing her with a half-loaf of bread which he had put on the couch; and when from sheer nausea, she refused it, he crammed it down her throat. This sight put Trimalchio in mind of his own dog and he ordered Scylax, “the guardian of his house and home,” to be brought in. An enormous dog was immediately led in upon a chain and, obeying a kick from the porter, it lay down beside the table. Thereupon Trimalchio remarked, as he threw it a piece of white bread, “No one in all my house loves me better than Scylax.” Enraged at Trimalchio’s praising Scylax so warmly, the slave put the bitch down upon the floor and sicked her on to fight. Scylax, as might have been expected from such a dog, made the whole room ring with his hideous barking and nearly shook the life out of the little bitch which the slave called Pearl. Nor did the uproar end in a dog fight, a candelabrum was upset upon the table, breaking the glasses and spattering some of the guests with hot oil. As Trimalchio did not wish to seem concerned at the loss, he kissed the boy and ordered him to climb upon his own back. The slave did not hesitate but, mounting his rocking-horse, he beat Trimalchio’s shoulders with his open palms, yelling with laughter, “Buck! Buck! How many fingers do I hold up!” When Trimalchio had, in a measure, regained his composure, which took but a little while, he ordered that a huge vessel be filled with mixed wine, and that drinks be served to all the slaves sitting around our feet, adding as an afterthought, “If anyone refuses to drink, pour it on his head: business is business, but now’s the time for fun.”

• From Shunned (2018)

  I wished I’d heard about Grandma T.’s condition sooner. Perhaps I could have helped Mom navigate the chores. Would she have accepted my help? If I’d known she was going to rearrange her schedule, I would have consulted her about the best time for my arrival, the way normal families who are talking to each other do. “I didn’t expect you to rearrange your whole day for this,” I said. “I know you have a lot going on.” Not to mention the shunning . “That’s okay, Lindy,” she said, still hugging me. She pulled away and looked me over. Her chin-length hair had filled with even more soft strands of gray. She looked up at me with tired, red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t want you to be alone when you see Grandma. She’s very weak and depleted. I hope you’ve prepared yourself for that.” “I have,” I said. “At least I think I have.” I realized I’d spent more time thinking about seeing my parents than preparing myself for the impact of Grandma’s frailty. I took off my shoes and followed Mom and Dad into the kitchen. “Would you like some coffee?” Mom asked. “I thought I’d make us some breakfast—fresh fruit and cereal—while we wait for Lory to arrive. She’ll be here in about an hour.” There I was, standing in the surreal reality of my parents’ kitchen, chatting about life like any ordinary group of relatives. Maybe I’d dropped into some parallel universe. Dad went into more detail about his virus, how he struggled to sleep. While he spoke, I noticed his white head of hair, unfamiliar creases around his eyes, poignant reminders of time slipping by. Mom sliced apples and pineapple for the fruit salad, refusing any assistance from me. Through the kitchen window I could see the patio and expansive backyard, also barren from the long winter, the only color coming from the green lawn. Beyond their garden stood the house Lory and Ove had built five or so years earlier, where they still lived. It was a home I would never be inside, because I would never be invited there. All of the other houses weren’t much different than I remembered, but a new log cabin had been erected between two of the established homes. “What an odd style choice,” I said. “A log cabin in the suburbs, twenty feet from the next house, no forest for miles.” “It’s just awful,” Mom said. “This neighborhood has been sliced and diced so many ways.” There was an unmistakable tension in the room—or maybe it was inside me. I sensed I was being watched, observed, for signs of who I was now, my level of happiness, what I believed, what motivated me, how I lived my life. Cupping my coffee mug, I wandered around the corner to the living room. Mom had completely redecorated, with a new couch, wingback chairs, and billowing window coverings—objects unfamiliar to me. But the paneling remained on one wall, and Dad’s leather recliner.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In the third century, when armed guards were organizing the defense of one of the Jewish urban communities in Roman Palestine, two Jewish sages told them: “You are not the city’s guardians but its destroyers. The scholars who study the Torah are the true guardians of the city.” 14 The new group formed by Blau and Katzenellenbogen gave itself the Aramaic title Neturei Karta (“The Guardians of the City”): Jews would not be protected by the militant activities of the Zionists but by the devout and punctilious religious observance of the Orthodox. They challenged the perspective of the Zionists. In their view, when Jews had been given the Torah, they had entered a different realm from other nations. They were not supposed to get involved in politics or armed struggle, but to devote themselves to the affairs of the spirit. By summoning Jews back to the world of history, Zionists had in fact abandoned the Kingdom of God and entered a state which, for Jews, could make no existential sense. They had denied their very nature and set the Jewish people on a doomed course. 15 The more successful the Zionists became, the more the Neturei Karta were baffled. Why had the wicked prospered? When the State of Israel was established in 1948, so soon after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum and Blau could only conclude that Satan had intervened directly in history to lead Jews into a realm of meaningless evil and sacrilege. 16 Most of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox were able to accommodate the new state. They declared that it had no religious value and that Jews who lived in Israel were still in exile, just as they had been in the Diaspora. Nothing had changed. Agudat Israel was prepared to engage in shtadlanut— dialogue and negotiations—with the Israeli government to safeguard the religious interests of Jews, just as they had with the gentile governments in Europe. But Neturei Karta would have none of this. Immediately after the proclamation of statehood on May 14, 1948, they imposed a ban on any participation in the elections, refused to accept government funding for their yeshivot , and vowed never to set foot in government institutions. They also redoubled their attacks on Agudat, whose pragmatic acceptance of the state they regarded as the thin end of the wedge. “If [we] let up even to the slightest degree, God forbid, from our hatred of evil, of seducers and corrupters,” Blau insisted, “[if we breach] the separateness to which our holy Torah obliges us … then the way is open to every forbidden thing, for we will have left the straight and narrow path for a crooked one.” 17 The Zionist venture, which had enticed almost the entire Jewish people away from God, was plunging into a nihilistic denial of all decent and sacred values. The more rooted Zionism became in the Jewish world and the more successful the new state, the deeper and more principled was Neturei Karta’s repudiation of both.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  To Luther’s surprise the debate did not focus on indulgences: It turned out that Eck shared much of Luther’s critique. Instead the proceedings began with a discussion between Karlstadt and Eck about the role of free will, and what part human agency might play in saving one’s soul. It went on tediously for a week. Eck sometimes insisted that there was a part of the will that could cooperate with grace, while at others he admitted that good works were wholly dependent on grace. Karlstadt stuck to his line that the human will was wholly evil, but he was unable to catch Eck out on his inconsistencies. It looked like a technicality, but the topic was a central plank of the new theology: Human beings do not have free will, the evangelicals argued, because they are unable to choose the good and have to rely on God’s grace. The matter would come under much more powerful scrutiny in the following years, when Erasmus picked this as the issue on which to attack Luther. The exchange with Karlstadt concluded for the moment, Eck then turned to face his real opponent. The debate with Luther moved on to other issues, in particular the nature and authority of the papacy. Luther interpreted “rock” in the biblical phrase “on this rock I shall build my church” as referring to Christ, not to Peter. Since this text was adduced to legitimate the papal succession from St. Peter, whose authority derived from Christ’s statement, this was a major assault on the papacy; and he twinned this with a rather abstruse account of Church history designed to prove that not all the Christian churches, the Greek Church in particular, had originally been subject to the authority of the Pope. Hence, Luther concluded, papal power was a historical accretion, not biblically sanctioned. None of this argument had featured in the original Ninety-five Theses: Luther had worked it out piece by piece in correspondence with Spalatin over the preceding months. Yet paradoxically it made Eck look like the one who stuck to the clarity of Scripture, while Luther drew on a range of little-known authorities, such as the papal historian and humanist Bartolomeo Platina.25

• From Shunned (2018)

  And there I was, helping to clear the table, stack plates, scoop dollops of whipped cream onto slices of apple pie. Next we were gathering in the room with the Christmas tree, where PFQ and Bernie scanned the gift labels, then set boxes in front of each of their children. I felt like I was in the middle of something that wasn’t my business—another family’s routines and no place for me. My hosts were kind and hospitable, but just how had I ended up in this living room, especially when I knew Steve and I, though fond of each other, were not meant to last as a couple? Things went on like this for some time. The next thing I knew, completely out of the blue, Bernie was handing me a medium-size wrapped box. I thought she meant for me to pass it over to PFQ. “Here you are, dear,” she said to me, her eyes sparkling. “Merry Christmas.” All eyes were on me, and inside my head I heard glass shattering as my brain tried to compute what was happening. I hadn’t seen this coming. The full force of their unexpected generosity hit me in a wave of astonishment. I held the box on my lap for a long moment, becoming painfully aware that I hadn’t brought them anything, except the wine for dinner. I should have given them the candlesticks. I lacked the life experience to understand the nuances and etiquette of this holiday. Collecting myself, I peeled away the smiling Santa paper and found the perfect present, under the circumstances: a pound of dark-roast coffee and a handheld coffee grinder. “Thank you,” I said, bewildered and near tears. One glance at Steve and I knew he was in on this. “Steve told us you love your morning coffee,” Bernie said, beaming at the obvious success of her choice. “Last week, when you were getting dressed I snuck around your kitchen and realized you didn’t have a grinder,” Steve said, smiling a little. In that moment, I forgave him for the underwear, though I could still anticipate the groans of my girlfriends. I was deeply moved by the thought and collaborative effort that had gone into this gift. The gesture both warmed my heart and made me feel very alone in the strangest way. It was the kind of thing my own family would have done for me, and I couldn’t help but wonder what each of them was doing that day, back home. It was Sunday, so I guessed they had gone to the Kingdom Hall for services, a sermon followed by a discussion of a Watchtower article, like any other Sunday.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Perhaps I could have helped Mom navigate the chores. Would she have accepted my help? If I’d known she was going to rearrange her schedule, I would have consulted her about the best time for my arrival, the way normal families who are talking to each other do. “I didn’t expect you to rearrange your whole day for this,” I said. “I know you have a lot going on.” Not to mention the shunning. “That’s okay, Lindy,” she said, still hugging me. She pulled away and looked me over. Her chin-length hair had filled with even more soft strands of gray. She looked up at me with tired, red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t want you to be alone when you see Grandma. She’s very weak and depleted. I hope you’ve prepared yourself for that.” “I have,” I said. “At least I think I have.” I realized I’d spent more time thinking about seeing my parents than preparing myself for the impact of Grandma’s frailty. I took off my shoes and followed Mom and Dad into the kitchen. “Would you like some coffee?” Mom asked. “I thought I’d make us some breakfast—fresh fruit and cereal—while we wait for Lory to arrive. She’ll be here in about an hour.” There I was, standing in the surreal reality of my parents’ kitchen, chatting about life like any ordinary group of relatives. Maybe I’d dropped into some parallel universe. Dad went into more detail about his virus, how he struggled to sleep. While he spoke, I noticed his white head of hair, unfamiliar creases around his eyes, poignant reminders of time slipping by. Mom sliced apples and pineapple for the fruit salad, refusing any assistance from me. Through the kitchen window I could see the patio and expansive backyard, also barren from the long winter, the only color coming from the green lawn. Beyond their garden stood the house Lory and Ove had built five or so years earlier, where they still lived. It was a home I would never be inside, because I would never be invited there. All of the other houses weren’t much different than I remembered, but a new log cabin had been erected between two of the established homes. “What an odd style choice,” I said. “A log cabin in the suburbs, twenty feet from the next house, no forest for miles.” “It’s just awful,” Mom said. “This neighborhood has been sliced and diced so many ways.” There was an unmistakable tension in the room—or maybe it was inside me. I sensed I was being watched, observed, for signs of who I was now, my level of happiness, what I believed, what motivated me, how I lived my life. Cupping my coffee mug, I wandered around the corner to the living room. Mom had completely redecorated, with a new couch, wingback chairs, and billowing window coverings—objects unfamiliar to me. But the paneling remained on one wall, and Dad’s leather recliner. The TV cabinet and bookshelf were there, too.

• From Shunned (2018)

  We gathered in the ballroom of a suburban hotel not far from the office and had a buffet dinner, followed by a much-anticipated annual talent show, at which various groups of employees traditionally put on small skits or dressed in costume and lip-synched a pop song. People from all areas of the hierarchy participated, from Richard on down, and I marveled at the spectacle, unable to decide if these people were courageous or fools or both. I can’t say I had the time of my life, but I enjoyed being a part of the mix. I didn’t have to spend the next workday explaining away my absence or telling people why I didn’t celebrate Christmas, because I guess I sort of did now. It was nice to blend in and understand the inside jokes and stories that later became part of the group’s shared history—my history. Steve invited me to spend Christmas Day with his family, and I gladly accepted; I’d met his clan at a summer barbecue and liked them. We decided to exchange gifts in private, before making the one-hour drive to his parents’ home in the western suburbs. I’d heard Steve make a passing comment about wanting something to decorate his fireplace mantel. My gift was a rustic pair of bronze candlestick holders, and he seemed pleased with my choice. When he handed me a gift wrapped in tissue, I could tell right away that it held some sort of fabric. Tearing it open, I found a wool muffler, then gray long underwear. I didn’t know what to say. “Just doing my part to keep you warm through the winter,” Steve said. The underwear was made of fine silk, but still. The long pause between us said it all: our romance was waning. Welcome to the minefield of the Christmas gift exchange. Another first. We left our gifts and wrapping paper on the floor and went to the car. We walked through his parents’ front door and were engulfed in the succulent scent of prime rib. Steve’s mother, Bernie, was a great cook, and we knew we would dine like royalty. Steve brought flowers, and I came with a worthy Bordeaux. Steve’s father, PFQ, noticed us standing in the foyer removing our coats, and came to greet us. “Merry Christmas, kids.” He shook Steve’s hand and gave me a hug. We waved to his brothers, who were sitting on the couch, and they smiled and waved back. When PFQ receded to the couch himself, Steve and I went to the kitchen to say hello to Bernie and deposit our offerings. Then Steve joined the men in the other room. I stayed behind, happy to help Bernie. Throughout the afternoon and evening, I found myself detaching as if hovering, watching myself from a distance. It was like I’d stepped into a Martha Stewart photo shoot, sitting around a beautifully decorated table, eating a gourmet meal, using the silver and crystal, occasionally laughing, sometimes joining the conversation.

• From Shunned (2018)

  I’d spent the morning at home, and my bed was still unmade. She was wearing a skirt; I had on shorts for bike riding. “Really, Lindy, who is this person who does whatever she wants?” I sensed by the way she blew on her tea before sipping it that she thought I was selfish. Whenever we break away from long-established habits others create for us, those others must label us as selfish to preserve their sense of order. In this way, they assure themselves it’s not the system that’s flawed— it’s you! I didn’t know the answer to her question and shrugged it aside. I had no idea who I was or who I was becoming. I felt like I was living someone else’s life, floating through a dream. The only thing I knew for sure was that I had everything I needed to live well that day, and that had to be enough. Out of the courtesy she ingrained in me, I offered to make her a sandwich. To my relief, she declined, hugged me goodbye, and left. Word of my defection traveled through the community, and as it did, people called Mom or Lory. They passed along my new home number and encouraged people to express their concern to me directly. After a full day at the office, I’d return home every night to many phone messages, all from people I shared a history of service with and considered my friends. Most were well intended and supportive. “Linda, my heart goes out to you, and I hope you will call me if there is anything I can do,” said one sister I’d pioneered with a decade earlier. “Don’t forget Jehovah,” said another. The elder who’d said the opening prayer at our wedding called to say he and his wife were heartbroken to hear Ross and I had split. “We’re here if you need us.” As I listened to each message, I wrote the name and number of the caller down on a tablet by the phone. One night there were eight messages from concerned Witnesses. Soon there were pages filled with names and phone numbers. There were too many calls to return. Just the idea of it made me feel bone-tired and defeated. It was a good time to focus my energy on my career, especially since it was funding my new adventures and was my only source of income. In just two years, our work team had grown to ten people. A familial bond, born of mutual respect and shared success, had developed among us.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  113 Since the late nineteenth century, American fundamentalists had responded to the challenge of modernity by trying to make their faith wholly rational. They had emphasized the virtues of reason and plain sense; they had embraced a sober literalism that eschewed imagination and fantasy; they had organized the world into watertight compartments in which right was utterly and obviously distinct from wrong, and true believers in an entirely different category from secularists and liberal Christians. Theirs had been an ethic of separation; fundamentalists had created a counterculture that was supposed to be everything that the Godless mainstream was not: it was a faith that offered cast-iron certainty and hierarchy to challenge the doubts, open questions, and shifting roles of the modern world. Heritage USA, however, like other forms of postmodern culture, was characterized by a mixing of genres, play, indulgence, and vivid spectacle. By trying to make their faith scientific and rational, the fundamentalists had pushed religion into an unnatural mode. As fundamentalists had rebelled against the scientific rationalism of Darwin, based on hypothesis and free inquiry, by clinging to the Baconian ideal, so now the Bakkers revolted against the rationalism of the old-style fundamentalists like Falwell. As Harding points out, in its depiction of American Christian history, Heritage USA was an ensemble of categories in a wild mélange. Instead of insisting that truth was factual, the exhibits in Heritage USA drew attention to their artificial and unnatural assemblage in the park. The shopping mall was a hodgepodge of Victorian and colonial architecture, an eclectic mix of styles and periods that did not attempt verisimilitude. At the entrance, Billy Graham’s “actual” home was displayed, but there were photographs on the walls showing its dismantling and rebuilding in the theme park, its displacement from the original site being part of the point. There was an “exact replica” of the Upper Room in Jerusalem (where Jesus was believed to have eaten the Last Supper and instituted the Eucharist), but it was deliberately made to look like a reproduction. Church services were held in a television studio, and, unlike Falwell, the Bakkers never televised a regular communion service or a sermon. The emphasis was always on performance, spectacle, and fantasy rather than on the literal fundamentalist Word. Harding suggests that the Bakkers, who emphasized the endless love of God, were also evolving a folk theology of infinite forgiveness, which almost seemed to sanction sin, since it promised divine pardon beforehand. 114 We have seen that in the past, an antinomian rebellion has sometimes erupted during a time of transition. The old rules and lifestyle no longer suit the changing circumstances of some of the faithful, who feel restricted and reach out for something new.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  It is only a small minority of fundamentalists who commit such acts of terror, but even the most peaceful and law-abiding are perplexing, because they seem so adamantly opposed to many of the most positive values of modern society. Fundamentalists have no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech, or the separation of church and state. Christian fundamentalists reject the discoveries of biology and physics about the origins of life and insist that the Book of Genesis is scientifically sound in every detail. At a time when many are throwing off the shackles of the past, Jewish fundamentalists observe their revealed Law more stringently than ever before, and Muslim women, repudiating the freedoms of Western women, shroud themselves in veils and chadors. Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists both interpret the Arab-Israeli conflict, which began as defiantly secularist, in an exclusively religious way. Fundamentalism, moreover, is not confined to the great monotheisms. There are Buddhist, Hindu, and even Confucian fundamentalisms, which also cast aside many of the painfully acquired insights of liberal culture, which fight and kill in the name of religion and strive to bring the sacred into the realm of politics and national struggle. This religious resurgence has taken many observers by surprise. In the middle years of the twentieth century, it was generally taken for granted that secularism was an irreversible trend and that faith would never again play a major part in world events. It was assumed that as human beings became more rational, they either would have no further need for religion or would be content to confine it to the immediately personal and private areas of their lives. But in the late 1970s, fundamentalists began to rebel against this secularist hegemony and started to wrest religion out of its marginal position and back to center stage. In this, at least, they have enjoyed remarkable success. Religion has once again become a force that no government can safely ignore. Fundamentalism has suffered defeats, but it is by no means quiescent. It is now an essential part of the modern scene and will certainly play an important role in the domestic and international affairs of the future. It is crucial, therefore, that we try to understand what this type of religiosity means, how and for what reasons it has developed, what it can tell us about our culture, and how best we should deal with it. But before we proceed, we must look briefly at the term “fundamentalism” itself, which has been much criticized. American Protestants were the first to use it. In the early decades of the twentieth century, some of them started to call themselves “fundamentalists” to distinguish themselves from the more “liberal” Protestants, who were, in their opinion, entirely distorting the Christian faith. The fundamentalists wanted to go back to basics and reemphasize the “fundamentals” of the Christian tradition, which they identified with a literal interpretation of Scripture and the acceptance of certain core doctrines.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  When the people of Israel had been deported to Babylon in the sixth century BCE, their Temple destroyed and their religious life in ruins, the text of the Law had become a new “shrine” in which the displaced people cultivated a sense of the Divine Presence. The codification of the world into clean and unclean, sacred and profane objects, had been an imaginative reordering of a shattered world. In exile, Jews had found that the study of the Law gave them a profound religious experience. Jews did not peruse the text like moderns, simply for information: it was the process of study—the question and answer, the heated arguments, and immersion in minutiae—that gave them intimations of the divine. The Torah was God’s Word; by becoming deeply absorbed in it, committing to memory the words that God himself had spoken to Moses and speaking them aloud, they were bringing the divine into their own beings and entering a sacred realm. The Law had become a symbol, where they found the Shekhinah. The practice of the commandments brought a divine imperative into the smallest details of their lives, when they were eating, washing, praying, or simply relaxing with their families on the Sabbath. None of this could be immediately perceived by the rational understanding upon which the Marranos had perforce relied all their lives. This type of mythical and cultic observance was alien and unknown. Some of the New Jews, Orobio complained, had become “unspeakable atheists.” 33 They were, to be sure, not atheists in our twentieth-century sense, because they still believed in a transcendent deity; but this was not the God of the Bible. The Marranos had developed a wholly rational faith, similar to the deism later fashioned by Enlightenment philosophes. 34 This God was the First Cause of all being, whose existence had been logically demonstrated by Aristotle. It always behaved in an entirely rational way. It did not intervene in human history erratically, subvert the laws of nature by working bizarre miracles, or dictate obscure laws on mountaintops. It did not need to reveal a special law code, because the laws of nature were accessible to everybody. This was the sort of God that human reason naturally tends to envisage, and in the past Jewish and Muslim philosophers had in fact produced a very similar deity. But it never went down well with believers generally. It was not religiously useful, since it was doubtful that the First Cause even knew that human beings existed, as it could contemplate nothing short of perfection. Such a God had nothing to say to human pain or sorrow.

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

  raise questions about Jewish insistence that God’s creation is good: if that is so, why is there so much suffering and misery in the world? Why is the human body such a decaying vessel, so vulnerable even amid the beauty of youth to disease and petty lusts? Platonic assumptions about the unreality of human life, or prevailing Stoic platitudes about the need to rise above everyday suffering, could conspire with dualism from the East to produce a plausible answer: what we experience with our physical senses is mere illusion, a pale reflection of spiritual reality. If the world of senses is such an inferior state of being, then it could not possibly have been created by a supreme God. Yet the Tanakh said that it had been.From such questions and answers, there could follow a train of thought perceptible in various forms in many gnostic documents. First, if the God of the Jews who created the material world said that he was the true and only God, he was either a fool or a liar. At best he can be described in Plato’s term as a ‘demiurge’ (see pp. 32–33), and beyond him there must be a First Cause of all that is real, the true God. Jesus Christ revealed the true God to humanity, so he can have nothing to do with the Creator God of the Jews. Knowledge of the true God is a way to contemplate the original harmony of the cosmos before the disaster represented by the creation of the physical world. That harmony is so distant and distinct from physical creation that it involves a complicated hierarchy of beings or realities (lovingly described in mind-numbing detail and variety in different gnostic systems). Those capable of perceiving this harmony and hierarchy are often said to have been granted that privilege by a fate external to themselves: a predestination. It is these people – gnostics – whom Jesus Christ has come to save. And who is Jesus? If there can be no true union between the world of spirit and the world of matter, then the cosmic Christ of the gnostics can never truly have taken flesh by a human woman, and he can never have felt what fleshly people feel – particularly human suffering. His Passion and Resurrection in history were therefore not fleshly events, even if they seemed so; they were heavenly play-acting (the doctrine known as Docetism, from the Greek verb dokein, ‘to seem’).

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  These Jews, living for decades in religious isolation, had been forced to rely on their own rational powers. They had had no liturgy, no communal religious life, and no experience of the ritual observance of the “sacred laws” of the Torah. When they finally arrived in Amsterdam and, for the first time, found themselves in a fully functioning Jewish community, they were not unnaturally bewildered. To an outsider, the 613 commandments of the Pentateuch seemed arbitrary and arcane. Some of the commandments had become obsolete, because they related to the farming of the Holy Land or the Temple liturgy and were not applicable in the Diaspora. Other injunctions, such as the abstruse dietary rules and the laws of purification, must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the sophisticated Portuguese Marranos, who found it difficult to accept the explanations of the rabbis because they had become accustomed to thinking things out rationally for themselves. The Halakhah, the codified oral law that had been compiled in the first centuries of the Common Era, seemed even more irrational and arbitrary, because it did not even have biblical sanction. But the Torah, the Law of Moses, has a mythos of its own. Like Lurianic Kabbalah, it had been a response to the dislocation of exile. When the people of Israel had been deported to Babylon in the sixth century BCE, their Temple destroyed and their religious life in ruins, the text of the Law had become a new “shrine” in which the displaced people cultivated a sense of the Divine Presence. The codification of the world into clean and unclean, sacred and profane objects, had been an imaginative reordering of a shattered world. In exile, Jews had found that the study of the Law gave them a profound religious experience. Jews did not peruse the text like moderns, simply for information: it was the process of study—the question and answer, the heated arguments, and immersion in minutiae—that gave them intimations of the divine. The Torah was God’s Word; by becoming deeply absorbed in it, committing to memory the words that God himself had spoken to Moses and speaking them aloud, they were bringing the divine into their own beings and entering a sacred realm. The Law had become a symbol, where they found the Shekhinah. The practice of the commandments brought a divine imperative into the smallest details of their lives, when they were eating, washing, praying, or simply relaxing with their families on the Sabbath.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. 75 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. Rabbi Schach, cofounder of Shas, came to the rescue. He would address his disciples in Shas and Degel ha-Torah and advise them about the imminent coalition talks. The rabbi’s ten-minute speech was not only bewildering, but obscurely disturbing to the Israelis who watched him on their television sets. He did not mention the coalition talks directly and addressed none of the issues that obsessed the rest of the nation. He was clearly quite indifferent to such issues as Palestinian rights, national defense, or the feasibility of exchanging territory for peace. He had not a single good word to say about the State of Israel.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This was not easy, however. The “New Jews,” who had come from Iberia, had to be reeducated in a faith about which they were largely ignorant. The rabbis had the challenging task of guiding them back, making allowances for their real difficulties without compromising the tradition. It is a tribute to them that most Jews were able to make the transition; despite some initial tension, they found that they enjoyed their return to the ancestral faith. 30 A notable example was Orobio de Castro, a doctor and professor of metaphysics, who had lived in Spain as a secret Judaizer for years. He had been arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, had recanted, and taught medicine in Toulouse as a fake Christian. Finally, weary of deception and a double life, he had arrived in Amsterdam in the 1650s to become a forceful apologist for Judaism and an instructor of other returning Marranos. 31 Orobio, however, described a whole class of people who found it very difficult to adjust to the laws and customs of traditional Judaism, which seemed senseless and burdensome to them. They had studied modern sciences in Iberia, such as logic, physics, mathematics, and medicine, as Orobio himself had done. But, Orobio reported impatiently, “they are full of vanity, pride and arrogance, confident that they are thoroughly learned in all subjects.” They think they will lose credit as erudite men if they consent to learn from those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws, and so they feign great science by contradicting what they do not understand. 32 These Jews, living for decades in religious isolation, had been forced to rely on their own rational powers. They had had no liturgy, no communal religious life, and no experience of the ritual observance of the “sacred laws” of the Torah. When they finally arrived in Amsterdam and, for the first time, found themselves in a fully functioning Jewish community, they were not unnaturally bewildered. To an outsider, the 613 commandments of the Pentateuch seemed arbitrary and arcane. Some of the commandments had become obsolete, because they related to the farming of the Holy Land or the Temple liturgy and were not applicable in the Diaspora. Other injunctions, such as the abstruse dietary rules and the laws of purification, must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the sophisticated Portuguese Marranos, who found it difficult to accept the explanations of the rabbis because they had become accustomed to thinking things out rationally for themselves. The Halakhah, the codified oral law that had been compiled in the first centuries of the Common Era, seemed even more irrational and arbitrary, because it did not even have biblical sanction. But the Torah, the Law of Moses, has a mythos of its own. Like Lurianic Kabbalah, it had been a response to the dislocation of exile.

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

  Alexandrian theologians, following Origen’s line, tended to stress the distinctness of the three persons of the Trinity, so they were reluctant to stress a further distinctness within the person of Christ. Diodore and Theodore, familiar with an Antiochene literal and historical reading of the Gospel lives of Jesus, were ready to emphasize the real humanity of Christ; they also tended to stress the oneness of the whole trinitarian Godhead, so they were much more prepared to talk of two natures in Christ, truly human and truly divine, in a way which Alexandrians were inclined to think blasphemous. As an image to explain these different positions, the Alexandrian view of Christ’s humanity and divinity contained in a single Person has been likened (although not by Alexandrians themselves) to a vessel which contains wine and water, perfectly and inextricably mixed, in contrast to the view of Theodore and his associates, where the vessel of Christ’s person could be said to contain two natures as it might oil and water, mingling but not mixing. Diodore and Theodore were particularly galvanized to defend their point of view by their horror at Apollinaris’s assertion that Christ was indwelled by the Logos, which replaced a human mind in him. They determinedly affirmed Christ’s real human nature alongside his divinity. For Theodore, it was vital to remember that Christ was the Second Adam, who had effected human redemption by offering himself as a true human being – that emphasis lay behind the frenetically self-destructive attitudes of contemporary Syrian monks towards their bodies, determined to get as close as was possible to the self-denial of the human Jesus. God had become a particular man, not humanity in general, Theodore insisted: ‘to say that God indwells everything has been agreed to be the height of absurdity, and to circumscribe his essence is out of the question. So it would be naïve in the extreme to say that the indwelling [of God in Jesus] was a matter of essence.’ It was therefore vital to keep the distinction between the man Jesus, despite his ‘outstanding inclination to the good’, and the eternal Word, which partook of the essence of the Godhead.82 The real flashpoint came in 428, when an energetic and tactless priest called Nestorius was chosen as Bishop of Constantinople. Nestorius was a devoted admirer of Theodore, having been his pupil in Antioch. His promotion did not please Bishop Cyril, successor to Athanasius in a line of resourceful and power- conscious politician-bishops of Alexandria, a prelate whom we have already met in connection with the lynching of the philosopher Hypatia (see pp. 220–21). Cyril, though unlikely to have been a pleasant man to know, was more than simply an unscrupulous party boss.83 When he contemplated his Saviour Jesus, he could see only God, mercifully offering his presence to sinful humanity, especially every time the Church offered Christ’s flesh and blood in the bread