Contempt

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 Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Purusha Hymn thus acknowledged the structural violence that lay at the heart of the new Aryan civilization. The new system may have limited fighting and raiding to one of the privileged classes, but it implied that the forcible subjugation of vaishya and shudra was part of the sacred order of the universe. For the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, the new Aryan aristocracy, productive work was not their dharma, so they had the leisure to explore the arts and sciences. While sacrifice was expected of everybody, the greatest sacrifice was demanded of the lower classes, condemned to a life of servitude and stigmatized as inferior, base, and impure.34 [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] The Aryan conversion to agriculture continued. By about 900 BCE, there were several rudimentary kingdoms in the Land of the Arya. Thanks to the switch from wheat cultivation to wet rice production, the kingdoms enjoyed a larger surplus. Our knowledge of life in these emerging states is limited, but again, mythology and ritual can throw some light on the developing political organization. In these embryonic kingdoms, the raja, though still elected by his Kshatriya peers like a tribal chieftain, was well on his way to becoming a powerful agrarian ruler and was now invested with divine attributes during his yearlong royal consecration, the rajasuya. During this ceremony, another Kshatriya challenged the new king, who had to win his realm back in a ritualized game of dice. If he lost, he was forced into exile but would return with an army to unseat his rival. If he won, he downed a draught of soma and led a raid into the neighboring territories, and when he returned laden with plunder, the Brahmins acknowledged his kingship: “Thou, O King, art Brahman.” The raja was now “The All,” the hub of the wheel that pulled his kingdom together and enabled it to prosper and expand. A king’s chief duty was to conquer new arable land, a duty sacralized by the horse sacrifice (ashvameda), in which a white stallion was consecrated, set free, and allowed to roam unmolested for a year, accompanied by the king’s army who were supposed to protect it. A stabled horse will always make straight for home, however, so the army was in fact driving the horse into territory that the king was intent on conquering.35 Thus in India, as in any agrarian civilization, violence was woven into the texture of aristocratic life.36 Nothing was nobler than death in battle. To die in his bed was a sin against the Kshatriya’s dharma, and if he felt that he was losing his strength, he was expected to seek out death in the field.37 A commoner had no right to fight, however, so if he died on the battlefield, his death was regarded as a monstrous departure from the norm—or even a joke.38

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  129 A large number of the royal inscriptions that have survived in the Persian heartland of the empire referred to the Zoroastrian creation myth. 130 They describe Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord who had appeared to Zoroaster, ordering the cosmos in four stages, creating successively earth, sky, humanity, and finally “happiness” (shiyati), which consisted of peace, security, truth, and abundant food. 131 At first there had been only one ruler, one people, and one language. 132 But after the assault of the Hostile Spirit (“the Lie”), humanity split into competing groups, governed by people who called themselves kings. There was war, bloodshed, and disorder for centuries. Then, on September 29, 522, Darius ascended the throne, and the Wise Lord inaugurated the fifth and final stage of creation: Darius would unite the world and restore the original happiness of mankind by creating a worldwide empire. 133 Here we see the difficulty of adapting a predominantly peaceful tradition to the realities of imperial rule. Darius shared Zoroaster’s horror of lawless violence. After Cambyses’s death, he had had to suppress rebellions all over the empire. Like any emperor, he had to quash ambitious aristocrats who sought to unseat him. In his inscriptions Darius associated these rebels with the illegitimate kings who had brought war and suffering to the world after the Lie’s assault. But to restore peace and happiness, the “fighting men” whom Zoroaster had wanted to exclude from society were indispensable. The apocalyptic restoration of the world that Zoroaster had predicted at the end of time had been transposed to the present, and Zoroastrian dualism was employed to divide the political world into warring camps. The empire’s structural and martial violence had become the final, absolute good, while everything beyond its borders was barbaric, chaotic, and immoral. 134 Darius’s mission was to subdue the rest of the world and purloin its resources in order to make other people “good.” Once all lands had been subjugated, there would be universal peace and an era of frasha, “wonder.” 135 Darius’s inscriptions remind us that a religious tradition is never a single, unchanging essence that impels people to act in a uniform way. It is a template that can be modified and altered radically to serve a variety of ends. For Darius, frasha was no longer spiritual harmony but material wealth; he described his palace in Susa as frasha, a foretaste of the redeemed, reunited world. 136 Inscriptions listed the gold, silver, precious woods, ivory, and marble brought in tribute from every region of the empire, explaining that after the Lie’s assault, these riches had been scattered all over the world but had now been reassembled in one place, as the Wise Lord had originally intended.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Aryans saw the warrior’s life as infinitely superior to the tedium and steady industry of agrarian existence. The Roman historian Tacitus (c. 55–120 CE) would later note that the German tribes he encountered far preferred “to challenge the enemy and earn the honour of wounds” to the drudgery of ploughing and the tedium of waiting for the crops to appear: “Nay, they actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood.”55 Like urban aristocrats, they too despised labor, saw it as a mark of inferiority, and incompatible with the “noble” life.56 Moreover, they knew that the cosmic order (rita) was possible only because chaos was kept in check by the great gods (devas)a —Mithra, Varuna, and Mazda—who compelled the seasons to rotate regularly, kept the heavenly bodies in their proper places, and made the earth habitable. Human beings too could live together in an orderly, productive way only if they were forced to sacrifice their own interests to those of the group. Violence and coercion therefore lay at the heart of social existence, and in most ancient cultures this truth was expressed in the ritualized bloodshed of animal sacrifice. Like the prehistoric hunters, Aryans had absorbed the tragic fact that life depends upon the destruction of other beings. They expressed this conviction in the mythical story of a king who altruistically allows himself to be slain by his brother, a priest, and thus brings the ordered world into being.57 A myth is never simply the story of an historical event; rather, it expresses a timeless truth underlying a people’s daily existence. A myth is always about now. The Aryans reenacted the tale of the sacrificed king every day by ritually slaying an animal to remind themselves of the sacrifice demanded of every single warrior, who daily put his life at risk for his people. It has been argued that Aryan society was originally peaceful and did not resort to aggressive raiding until the end of the second millennium.58 But other scholars note that weapons and warriors figure in the very earliest texts.59 The mythical stories of the Aryan war gods—Indra in India, Verethragna in Persia, Hercules in Greece, and Thor in Scandinavia—follow a similar pattern, so this martial ideal must have developed in the steppes before the tribes went their different ways. It was based on the hero Trito, who conducts the very first cattle raid against the three-headed Serpent, one of the indigenous inhabitants of a land recently conquered by the Aryans. Serpent had the temerity to steal the Aryans’ cattle. Not only does Trito kill him and recover the livestock, but this raid becomes a cosmic battle that, like the death of the sacrificed king, restores the cosmic order.60

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  A crucial figure in this development was Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), who was not only a philosopher but also a statesman committed to the state control of ecclesiastical affairs. His most important work, De Veritate, which influenced such important philosophers as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), René Descartes (1596–1650), and John Locke (1632–1704), argued that Christianity was neither an institution nor a way of life but a set of five truths that were innate in the human mind: (1) a supreme deity existed, (2) which should be worshipped (3) and served by ethical living and natural piety; (4) human beings were thus required to reject sin and (5) would be rewarded or punished by God after death. Because these notions were instinctive, self-evident, and accessible to the meanest intelligence, the rituals and guidance of a church were entirely unnecessary.111 These “truths” would, however, seem strange indeed to Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, or Daoists, and many Jews, Christians, and Muslims would also find them bleakly unrepresentative of their faith. Herbert was convinced that “all men will be unanimously eager for this austere worship of God,” and since everybody would agree on “these natural tokens of faith,” it was the key to peace; “insolent spirits” who refused to accept them must be punished by the secular magistracy.112 Emphasis on the “natural,” “normal,” and “innate” character of these core ideas implied that those who did not discover them in their minds were in some way unnatural and abnormal: a dark current was emerging in early modern thought. This extreme privatization of faith, therefore, had the potential to become as divisive, coercive, and intolerant as the so-called religious passions it was trying to abolish.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  A tightly knit and isolated community, however, can develop an exclusivity that ostracizes others. In Asia Minor a number of Jewish-Christian communities, who traced their origins to the ministry of Jesus’s apostle John, had developed a different view of Jesus. Paul and the Synoptics had never regarded Jesus as God; the very idea would have horrified Paul who, before his conversion, had been an exceptionally punctilious Pharisee. They all used the term “Son of God” in the conventional Jewish sense: Jesus had been an ordinary human being commissioned by God with a special task. Even in his exalted state, there was, for Paul, always a clear distinction between Jesus kyrios Christos and God, his Father. The author of the Fourth Gospel, however, depicted Jesus as a cosmic being, God’s eternal “Word” (logos) who had existed with God before the beginning of time.89 This high Christology seems to have separated this group from other Jewish-Christian communities. Their writings were composed for an “in-group” with a private symbolism that was incomprehensible to outsiders. In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus frequently baffles his audience by his enigmatic remarks. For these so-called Johannine Christians, having the correct view of Jesus seemed more important than working for the coming of the kingdom. They too had an ethic of love, but it was reserved only for loyal members of the group; they turned their backs on “the world,”90 condemning defectors as “anti-Christs” and “children of the devil.”91 Spurned and misunderstood, they had developed a dualistic vision of a world polarized into light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Their most extreme scripture was the book of Revelation, probably written while the Jews of Palestine were fighting a desperate war against the Roman Empire.92 The author, John of Patmos, was convinced that the days of the Beast, the evil empire, were numbered. Jesus was about to return, ride into battle, slay the Beast, fling him into a pit of fire, and establish his kingdom for a thousand years. Paul had taught his converts that Jesus, the victim of imperial violence, had achieved a spiritual and cosmic victory over sin and death. John, however, depicted Jesus, who had taught his followers not to retaliate violently, as a ruthless warrior who would defeat Rome with massive slaughter and bloodshed. Revelation was admitted to the Christian canon only with great difficulty, but it would be scanned eagerly in times of social unrest when people were yearning for a more just and equitable world.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Archaeologists have noted a growing contempt for ritual observance at that time: people were placing profane objects in their relatives’ tombs instead of the prescribed vessels. The spirit of moderation was also in decline. Many Chinese had developed a taste for luxury that put an unbearable strain on the economy, as demand outstripped resources, and some of the lower-ranking nobility tried to ape the lifestyle of the great families. As a result many of the shi at the bottom of the aristocratic hierarchy became impoverished and were forced to leave the cities to scrape a living as teachers among the min. [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] One shi, who held a minor administrative post in Lu, was horrified by the greed, pride, and ostentation of the usurping families. Kong Qiu (c. 551–479) was convinced that the li alone could curb this destructive violence. His disciples would call him Kongfuzi (“our Master Kong”), so in the West we call him Confucius. He never achieved the political career he hoped for and died believing that he was a failure, but he would define Chinese culture until the 1911 Revolution. With his little band of followers, most of them from the warrior aristocracy, Confucius traveled from one principality to another, hoping to find a ruler who would implement his ideas. In the West he is often regarded as a secular rather than a religious philosopher, but he would not have understood this distinction: in ancient China, as the philosopher Herbert Fingarette has reminded us, the secular was sacred.44 Confucius’s teachings were anthologized long after his death, but scholars believe that the Analects, a collection of short unconnected maxims, is a reasonably reliable source.45 His ideology, which sought to revive the virtues of Yao and Shun, was deeply traditional, but his ideal of equality based on a cultivated perception of our shared humanity was a radical challenge to the systemic violence of agrarian China. Like the Buddha, Confucius redefined the concept of nobility.46 The hero of the Analects is the junzi who is no longer a warrior but a profoundly humane scholar and somewhat deficient in the martial arts. For Confucius, a junzi’s chief quality was ren, a word that he consistently refused to define because its meaning transcended any of the concepts of his day, but later Confucians would describe it as “benevolence.”47 The junzi was required to treat all others at all times with reverence and compassion, a program of action that Confucius summed up in what is called the Golden Rule: “Do not impose upon others what you yourself do not desire.”48 It was, Confucius said, the “single thread” that ran through all his teaching and should be practiced “all day and every day.”49 A true junzi had to look into his heart, discover what gave him pain, and then refuse under any circumstances to inflict that pain on anybody else.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  By the tenth century, the Aryans had reached the Doab, between the Yamuna and the Ganges Rivers. There they established two small kingdoms, one founded by the confederation of the Kuru and Panchala clans, the other by the Yadava. Every year when the weather was cooler, the Kuru-Panchala dispatched warriors to establish a new Aryan outpost a little farther to the east, where they would subjugate the local populations, raid their farms, and seize their cattle.17 Before they could settle in this region, the dense tropical forests had to be cleared by fire, so Agni became the colonists’ divine alter ego in this incremental drive eastward and the inspiration of the Agnicayana, the ritualized battle that consecrated the new colony. First, the fully armed warriors processed to the riverbank to collect clay to build a brick fire-altar, a provocative assertion of their right to this territory, fighting any locals who stood in their way. The colony became a reality only when Agni leaped forth on the new altar.18 These blazing altars distinguished Aryan encampments from the darkness of the barbarian villages. The settlers also used Agni to lure away their neighbors’ cattle, which would follow the flames. “He should take brightly burning fire to the settlement of his rival,” says a later text. “He thereby takes his wealth, his property.”19 Agni symbolized the warrior’s courage and dominance, his most fundamental and divine “self” (atman).20 Yet like Indra, his other alter ego, the warrior was tainted. It was said that Indra had committed three sins that had fatally weakened him: he had killed a Brahmin priest, broken a pact of friendship with Vritra, and seduced another man’s wife by disguising himself as her husband; he had thus, progressively, forfeited his spiritual majesty (tejas), his physical strength (bala), and his beauty.21 This mythical disintegration now paralleled a profound change in Aryan society during which Indra and Agni would become inadequate expressions of divinity to some of the rishis. It was the first step in a long process that would undermine the Aryans’ addiction to violence.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  It was not a religious message but one that nevertheless resonated strongly as such with Bush’s base of 100 million American evangelical Christians, who still subscribed to the vision of America as a “city on a hill.” The first three months of the war against Afghanistan, where Taliban gave sanctuary to al-Qaeda, seemed remarkably successful. The Taliban were defeated, al-Qaeda personnel scattered, and the United States established two large military bases, at Bagram and Kandahar. But there were two ominous developments. Even though Bush had given instructions that prisoners be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, it seems that in practice troops were told that they could “deviate slightly from the rules” since terrorists were not covered by the laws relating to prisoners of war. Bush had been careful to insist that this was not a war against Islam, but that was not how it appeared on the ground, where there was little punctiliousness about religious sensibilities. On September 26, 2002, a convoy of mujahidin were captured in Takhar. According to one Muslim account, U.S. troops “hung one mujahid by his arms for six days, questioning him about Usama bin Laden.” Eventually they gave up and asked him about his faith: he replied that he trusted in Allah, the Prophet Muhammad and the holy Qur’an. Upon receiving this answer, the U.S. troops replied that “Your Allah and Muhammad are not here, but the Qur’an is, so let’s see what it will do to us.” After this, one U.S. soldier brought a Holy Qur’an and began urinating over it, only to be joined by other U.S. and Northern Alliance troops who did the same. 79 Despite their manifest contempt for Islam, this does not mean that U.S. troops saw themselves as fighting a war that was specifically directed against Islam. Rather, the unconventional nature of the campaign, defined as a “War on Terror,” a “different kind of war,” had changed the rules of engagement. With this terminology the United States had liberated itself from the rules of conventional conflict. 80 Ground troops seem to have absorbed the view that terrorists were not entitled to the same protection as regular combatants. Since 9/11, the United States, which still regards itself as a uniquely benign hegemon, has, with the support of its allies, indefinitely retained people who deny any involvement in any conflict, conducted violent and humiliating interrogations, or else sent prisoners to countries known to practice torture.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Locke assumed that the separation of politics and religion was written into the very nature of things. But this, of course, was a radical innovation that most of his contemporaries would find extraordinary and unacceptable. It would make modern “religion” entirely different from anything that had gone before. Yet because of the violent passions it supposedly unleashed, Locke insisted that the segregation of “religion” from government was “above all things necessary” for the creation of a peaceful society.117 In Locke we see the birth of the “myth of religious violence” that would become ingrained in the Western ethos. It is true that Western Christianity had become more internalized during the early modern period. This is evident in Luther’s conception of faith as an interior appropriation of Christ’s saving power, in the mysticism of Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), and in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). In the past the exploration of the inner world had compelled Buddhist monks to work “for the welfare and happiness of the people” and Confucians to engage in a political effort to reform society. After his solitary struggle with Satan in the wilderness, Jesus had embarked on a ministry of healing in the troubled villages of Galilee that led to his execution by the Roman authorities. Muhammad had left his cave on Mount Hira for a political struggle against the structural violence of Mecca. In the early modern period too, the Spiritual Exercises had propelled Ignatius’s Jesuits all over the world—to Japan, India, China, and the Americas. But modern “religion” would try to subvert this natural dynamic by turning the seeker in upon himself, and inevitably, many would rebel against this unnatural privatization of their faith. Unable to extend the natural human rights they were establishing to the indigenous peoples of the New World, the Renaissance humanists had already revealed the insidious underside of early modern ideas that still inform our political life. Locke, who was among the first to formulate the liberal ethos of modern politics, also revealed the darker aspect of the secularism he proposed. A pioneer of tolerance, he was adamant that the sovereign state could not accommodate either Catholicism or Islam;118 he endorsed a master’s “Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power” over a slave that included “the power to kill him at any time.” Himself directly involved in the colonization of the Carolinas, Locke argued that the native “kings” of America had no legal jurisdiction or right of ownership of their land. Like the urbane Thomas More, he found it intolerable that the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America be left to nature, without any improvement, tillage and husbandry,” when it could be used to support the “needy and wretched” of Europe.119 A new system of violent oppression was emerging that would privilege the liberal, secular West at the expense of the indigenous peoples of its colonies.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  I took my seat in the middle of the first row, pulled out my notebook and made ready. In a few minutes Whitman came on the platform from the left: he walked slowly, stiffly, which made me grin for I did not then know that he had had a stroke of paralysis and I thought his peculiar walk, a mere pose. Besides, his clothes were astonishingly ill-fitting and ill-suited to his figure. He must have been nearly six feet in height and strongly made, yet he wore a short jacket which cocked up behind in the perkiest way. Looked at from the front, his white collar was wide open and discovered a tuft of grey hairs, while his trousers that corkscrewed about his legs had parted company with his vest and disclosed a margin of dingy white shirt. His appearance filled me—poor little English snob that I was—with contempt: he recalled to my memory irresistibly an old Cochin-China rooster I had seen when a boy; it stalked across the farm-yard with the same slow, stiff gait and carried a stubby tail cocked up behind. Yet a second look showed me Whitman as a fine figure of a man with something arresting in the perfect simplicity and sincerity of voice and manner. He arranged his notes in complete silence and began to speak very slowly, often pausing for a better word or to consult his papers, sometimes hesitating and repeating himself—clearly an unpracticed speaker who disdained any semblance of oratory. He told us simply that in his youth he had met and got to know very well a certain Colonel in the army who had known Thomas Paine intimately. This Colonel had assured him more than once that all the accusations against Paine’s habits and character were false—a mere outcome of Christian bigotry. Paine would drink a glass or two of wine at dinner like all well-bred men of that day; but he was very moderate and in the last ten years of his life the Colonel asserted that Paine never once drank to excess. The Colonel cleared Paine, too, of looseness of morals in much the same decisive way and finally spoke of him as invariably well-conducted, of witty speech and a vast fund of information, a most interesting and agreeable companion. And the Colonel was an unimpeachable witness, Whitman assured us, a man of the highest honor and most scrupulous veracity. Whitman spoke with such uncommon slowness that I was easily able to take down the chief sentences in longhand: he was manifestly determined to say just what he had to say, neither more nor less—which made an impression of singular sincerity and truthfulness. When he had finished, I went up on the platform to see him near at hand; and draw him out if possible. I showed him my card of the “Press” and asked him if he would kindly sign and thus authenticate the sentences on Paine he had used in his address.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Some Western analysts have argued that suicide killing is deeply embedded in the Islamic tradition.85 But if that were so, why was “revolutionary suicide” unknown in Sunni Islam before the late twentieth century? Why have not more militant Islamist movements adopted this tactic? And why have both Hamas and Hizbollah abandoned it?86 It is certainly true that Hamas drew upon the Quran and ahadith to motivate the bombers with fantasies of paradise. But the suicide attack was in fact invented by the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a nationalist separatist group with no time for religion, who have claimed responsibility for over 260 suicide operations in two decades.87 Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has investigated every suicide attack worldwide between 1980 and 2004 and concluded that “there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any religion for that matter.” For instance, of 38 suicide attacks in Lebanon during the 1980s, 8 were committed by Muslims, 3 by Christians, and 27 by secularists and socialists.88 What all suicide operations do have in common, however, is a strategic goal: “to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.” Suicide bombing is therefore essentially a political response to military occupation.89 IDF statistics show that of all Hamas’s suicide attacks, only 4 percent targeted civilians in Israel proper, the rest being directed against West Bank settlers and the Israeli army.90 This is not to deny that Hamas is as much a religious as a national movement, only that the fusion of the two is a modern innovation. The exalted love of the fatherland, which has no roots in Islamic culture, is now suffused with Muslim fervor.91 Islamic and nationalist themes alternate seamlessly in the final videotaped messages of Hamas martyrs. Twenty-year-old Abu Surah, for example, began with a traditional Muslim invocation: “It is the day of meeting the Lord of the Worlds and bearing witness to the Messenger.” He then called upon “all the saints and all the mujahidin of Palestine and of every part of the world,” moving unselfconsciously from holy men to Palestinian nationalists before finally shifting to a global perspective. Martyrs shed their blood “for the sake of Allah and out of love for this homeland and for the sake and honor of this people in order that Palestine remain Islamic, and Hamas remain a torch lighting the road of all the perplexed and all the tormented and oppressed and that Palestine be liberated.”92 Like the Iranians, Palestinians regard their jihad against Israeli occupation as part of a Third World struggle against imperialism. Moreover, they may have fought the secular Palestinian Authority, but both share the same nationalist passions: both regard death for Palestine as a great privilege and hate the enemy with the virulence of any ultranationalist when his country is at war.93

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Why were they going to fight Muslims thousands of miles away when the people who had actually killed Jesus —or so the Crusaders mistakenly believed—were alive and well on their very doorsteps? “Look now,” a Jewish chronicler overheard the Crusaders saying to one another, “we are going to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites for our Messiah, when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him. Let us first avenge ourselves on them.” 43 Later some of the French Crusaders would also be puzzled: “Do we need to travel to distant lands in the East to attack the enemies of God, when there are Jews right before our eyes, a race that is the greatest enemy of God? We’ve got it all backward!” 44 The Crusades made anti-Semitic violence a chronic disease in Europe: every time a Crusade was summoned, Christians would first attack Jews at home. This persecution was certainly inspired by religious conviction, but social, political, and economic elements were also involved. The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations. After the demise of the Roman Empire, town life had declined, so there was virtually no commerce and no merchant class. 45 Toward the end of the eleventh century, however, increased productivity had given aristocrats a taste for luxury. To meet their demands, a class of specialists—masons, craftsmen, and merchants—had emerged from the peasantry, and the consequent exchanges of money and goods led to the rebirth of the towns. 46 The nobility’s resentment of the vilain (“upstart”) from the lower classes who was acquiring wealth that they regarded as theirs by right may also have fueled the violence of the German Crusaders, since Jews were particularly associated with this disturbing social change. 47 In the episcopally administered Rhineland cities, the townsfolk had been trying for decades to shake off feudal obligations that impeded commerce, but their bishop-rulers had particularly conservative views on trade. 48 There was also tension between rich merchants and poorer artisans, and when the bishops tried to protect the Jews, it appears these less affluent townsfolk joined the Crusaders in the killing. Crusaders would always be motivated by social and economic factors as well as by religious zeal. Crusading was especially appealing to the juventus, the knightly “youth,” who completed their military training by roaming freely around the countryside in search of adventure. Primed for violent action, these knights errant were free of the restraints of settled existence, and their lawlessness might account for some of the crusading atrocities.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  But in the Nicene age it advanced to a formal invocation of the saints as our patrons (patroni) and intercessors (intercessores, mediatores) before the throne of grace, and degenerated into a form of refined polytheism and idolatry. The saints came into the place of the demigods, Penates and Lares, the patrons of the domestic hearth and of the country. As once temples and altars to the heroes, so now churches and chapels819 came to be built over the graves of the martyrs, and consecrated to their names (or more precisely to God through them). People laid in them, as they used to do in the temple of Aesculapius, the sick that they might be healed, and hung in them, as in the temples of the gods, sacred gifts of silver and gold. Their graves were, as Chrysostom says, move splendidly adorned and more frequently visited than the palaces of kings. Banquets were held there in their honor, which recall the heathen sacrificial feasts for the welfare of the manes. Their relics were preserved with scrupulous care, and believed to possess miraculous virtue. Earlier, it was the custom to pray for the martyrs (as if they were not yet perfect) and to thank God for their fellowship and their pious example. Now such intercessions for them were considered unbecoming, and their intercession was invoked for the living.820 This invocation of the dead was accompanied with the presumption that they take the deepest interest in all the fortunes of the kingdom of God on earth, and express it in prayers and intercessions.821 This was supposed to be warranted by some passages of Scripture, like Luke xv. 10, which speaks of the angels (not the saints) rejoicing over the conversion of a sinner, and Rev. viii. 3, 4, which represents an angel as laying the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne of God. But the New Testament expressly rebukes the worship of the angels (Col. ii. 18; Rev. xix. 10; xxii. 8, 9), and furnishes not a single example of an actual invocation of dead men; and it nowhere directs us to address our prayers to any creature. Mere inferences from certain premises, however plausible, are, in such weighty matters, not enough. The intercession of the saints for us was drawn as a probable inference from the duty of all Christians to pray for others, and the invocation of the saints for their intercession was supported by the unquestioned right to apply to living saints for their prayers, of which even the apostles availed themselves in their epistles.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  70 So in their hearing David ordered his men to kill only “the blind and lame,” a ruthlessness designed to terrify the enemy. The biblical text here is fragmentary and obscure, however, and may have been edited by a redactor who was uncomfortable with this story. One later tradition even claimed that David was forbidden by Yahweh to build a temple in Jerusalem, “since you have shed so much blood on the earth in my presence.” That honor would be reserved for David’s son and successor Solomon, whose name was said to derive from the Hebrew shalom, “peace.” 71 But Solomon’s mother, Bathsheba, was a Jebusite, and his name could also have derived from Shalem, the ancient deity of Jerusalem. 72 Solomon’s temple was built on the regional model and its furniture showed how thoroughly the cult of Yahweh had accommodated itself to the pagan landscape of the Near East. There was clearly no sectarian intolerance in Israelite Jerusalem. At the temple’s entrance were two Canaanite standing stones (matzevoth) and a massive bronze basin, representing Yam, the sea monster fought by Baal, supported by twelve brazen oxen, common symbols of divinity and fertility. 73 The temple rituals too seem to have been influenced by Baal’s cult in neighboring Ugarit. 74 The temple was supposed to symbolize Yahweh’s approval of Solomon’s rule. 75 There is no reference to his short-lived empire in other sources, but the biblical authors tell us that it extended from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean and was achieved and maintained by force of arms. Solomon had replaced David’s infantry with a chariot army, engaged in lucrative arms deals with neighboring kings, and restored the ancient fortresses of Hazor, Megiddo, and Arad. 76 In purely material terms, everything seemed perfect: “Judah and Israel lived in security: each man under his vine and fig tree!” 77 Yet this kind of state, maintained by war and taxes, was exactly what Yahweh had always abhorred. Unlike David, Solomon even taxed his Israelite subjects, and his building projects required massive forced labor. 78 As well as farming their own plots to produce the surplus that supported the state, peasants also had to serve in the army or the corvée for one month in every three. 79 Some biblical redactors tried to argue that Solomon’s empire failed because he had built shrines for the pagan gods of his foreign wives. 80 But it is clear that the real problem was its structural violence, which offended deep-rooted Israelite principles. After Solomon’s death a delegation begged his son Rehoboam not to replicate his father’s “harsh tyranny.” 81 When Rehoboam contemptuously refused, a mob attacked the manager of the corvée, and ten of the twelve tribes broke away from the empire to form the independent Kingdom of Israel.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  To compare such a man with Jesus, is preposterous and even blasphemous. Jesus was the sinless Saviour of sinners; Mohammed was a sinner, and he knew and confessed it. He falls far below Moses, or Elijah, or any of the prophets and apostles in moral purity. But outside of the sphere of revelation, he ranks with Confucius, and Cakya Muni the Buddha, among the greatest founders of religions and lawgivers of nations. § 43. The Conquests of Islâm. "The sword," says Mohammed, "is the key of heaven and hell; a drop of blood shed in the cause of Allah, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting or prayer: whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven, and at the day of judgment his limbs shall be supplied by the wings of angels and cherubim." This is the secret of his success. Idolaters had to choose between Islâm, slavery, and death; Jews and Christians were allowed to purchase a limited toleration by the payment of tribute, but were otherwise kept in degrading bondage. History records no soldiers of greater bravery inspired by religion than the Moslem conquerors, except Cromwell’s Ironsides, and the Scotch Covenanters, who fought with purer motives for a nobler cause. The Califs, Mohammed’s successors, who like him united the priestly and kingly dignity, carried on his conquests with the battle-cry: "Before you is paradise, behind you are death and hell." Inspired by an intense fanaticism, and aided by the weakness of the Byzantine empire and the internal distractions of the Greek Church, the wild sons of the desert, who were content with the plainest food, and disciplined in the school of war, hardship and recklessness of life, subdued Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, embracing the classical soil of primitive Christianity. Thousands of Christian churches in the patriarchal dioceses of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, were ruthlessly destroyed, or converted into mosques. Twenty-one years after the death of Mohammed the Crescent ruled over a realm as large as the Roman Empire. Even Constantinople was besieged twice (668 and 717), although in vain. The terrible efficacy of the newly invented "Greek fire," and the unusual severity of a long winter defeated the enemy, and saved Eastern and Northern Europe from the blight of the Koran. A large number of nominal Christians who had so fiercely quarreled with each other about unfruitful subtleties of their creeds, surrendered their faith to the conqueror. In 707 the North African provinces, where once St. Augustin had directed the attention of the church to the highest problems of theology and religion, fell into the hands of the Arabs.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Comp., besides the literature already cited, H. Noris (R.C.): Historia Pelagiana et dissertatio de Synodo Quinta oecumen. in qua Origenis et Th. Mopsuesteni Pelagiani erroris auctorum justa damnatio, et Aquilejense schisma describitur, etc. Padua, 1673, fol., and Verona, 1729. John Garnier (R.C.): Dissert. de V. Synodo. Paris, 1675 (against Card. Noris). Hefele (R.C.): vol. ii. 775–899.—The Greek Acta of the 5th council, with the exception of the 14 anathemas and some fragments, have been lost; but there is extant an apparently contemporary Latin translation (in Mansi, tom. ix. 163 sqq.), respecting whose genuineness and completeness there has been much controversy (comp. Hefele, ii. p. 831 ff.). The further fortunes of Monophysitism are connected with the emperor Justinian I. (527–565). This learned and unweariedly active ruler, ecclesiastically devout, but vain and ostentatious, aspired, during his long and in some respects brilliant reign of nearly thirty years, to the united renown of a lawgiver and theologian, a conqueror and a champion of the true faith. He used to spend whole nights in prayer and fasting, and in theological studies and discussions; he placed his throne under the special protection of the Blessed Virgin and the archangel Michael; in his famous Code, and especially in the Novelles, he confirmed and enlarged the privileges of the clergy; he adorned the capital and the provinces with costly temples and institutions of charity; and he regarded it as his especial mission to reconcile heretics, to unite all parties of the church, and to establish the genuine orthodoxy for all time to come. In all these undertakings he fancied himself the chief actor, though very commonly he was but the instrument of the empress, or of the court theologians and eunuchs; and his efforts to compel a general uniformity only increased the divisions in church and state. Justinian was a great admirer of the decrees of Chalcedon, and ratified the four ecumenical councils in his Code of Roman law. But his famous wife Theodora, a beautiful, crafty, and unscrupulous woman, whom he—if we are to believe the report of Procopius1683—raised from low rank, and even from a dissolute life, to the partnership of his throne, and who, as empress, displayed the greatest zeal for the church and for ascetic piety, was secretly devoted to the Monophysite view, and frustrated all his plans. She brought him to favor the liturgical formula of the Monophysites: "God was crucified for us, so that he sanctioned it in an ecclesiastical decree (533).1684

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  II. The Copts,1696 in Egypt, are in nationality the genuine descendants of the ancient Egyptians, though with an admixture of Greek and Arab blood. Soon after the council of Chalcedon, they chose Timotheus Aelurus in opposition to the patriarch Proterius. After varying fortunes, they have, since 536, had their own patriarch of Alexandria, who, like most of the Egyptian dignitaries, commonly resides at Cairo. He accounts himself the true successor of the evangelist Mark, St. Athanasius, and Cyril. He is always chosen from among the monks, and, in rigid adherence to the traditionary nolo episcopari, he is elected against his will; he is obliged to lead a strict ascetic life, and at night is waked every quarter of an hour for a short prayer. He alone has the power to ordain, and he performs this function not by imposition of hands, but by breathing on and anointing the candidate. His jurisdiction extends over the churches of Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia, or Ethiopia. He chooses and anoints the Abuna (i.e., Our Father), or patriarch for Abyssinia. Under him are twelve bishops, some with real jurisdiction, some titular; and under these again other clergy, down to readers and exorcists. There are still extant two incomplete Coptic versions of the Scriptures, the Upper Egyptian or Thebaic, called also, after the Arabic name of the province, the Sahidic, i.e., Highland version; and the Lower Egyptian or Memphitic.1697 The Copts were much more numerous than the Catholics, whom they scoffingly nicknamed Melchites,1698 or Caesar-Christians. They lived with them on terms of deadly enmity, and facilitated the conquest of Egypt by the Saracens (641). But they were afterwards cruelly persecuted by these very Saracens,1699 and dwindled from some two millions of souls to a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand, of whom about ten thousand, or according to others from thirty to sixty thousand, live in Cairo, and the rest mostly in Upper Egypt. They now, in common with all other religious sects, enjoy toleration. They and the Abyssinians are distinguished from the other Monophysites by the Jewish and Mohammedan practice of circumcision, which is performed by lay persons (on both sexes), and in Egypt is grounded upon sanitary considerations. They still observe the Jewish law of meats. They are sunk in poverty, ignorance, and semi-barbarism. Even the clergy, who indeed are taken from the lowest class of the people, are a beggarly set, and understand nothing but how to read mass, and perform the various ceremonies. They do not even know the Coptic or old Egyptian, their own ancient ecclesiastical language. They live by farming, and their official fees. The literary treasures of their convents in the Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic languages, have been of late secured for the most part to the British Museum, by Tattam and other travellers. Missions have lately been undertaken among them, especially by the Church Missionary Society of England (commencing in 1825), and the United Presbyterians of America, but with little success so far.1700

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The eucharistic controversy kindled by Westphal and Klebitz was conducted in different parts of Germany with incredible bigotry, passion, and superstition. In Bremen, John Timann fought for the carnal presence, and insisted upon the ubiquity of Christ’s body as a settled dogma (1555); while Albert Hardenberg, a friend of Melanchthon, opposed it, and was banished (1560); but a reaction took place afterwards, and Bremen became a stronghold of the Reformed Confession in Northern Germany. § 135. Calvin and the Astrologers. Calvin: Advertissement contre l’astrologie qu’on appelle justiciaire: et autres curiosités qui régnent aujourdhuis dans le monde. Genève, 1549 (56 pp.). The French text is reprinted in Opera, vol. VII. 509–542. Admonitio adversus astrologiam quam judiciariam vocant; aliasque praeterea curiositates nonnullas, quae hodie in universam fere orbem grassantur, 1549. The Latin translation is by Fr. Hottman, sieur de Villiers, at that time secretary of Calvin, who dictated to him the work in French. The Latin text is reprinted in the Amsterdam ed., vol. IX. 500–509. An English translation: An Admonition against Astrology, Judiciall and other curiosities that reigne now in the world, by Goddred Gylby, appeared in London without date, and is mentioned by Henry, III. Beil. 212. Comp. Henry, II. 391 sq. Calvin’s clear, acute, and independent intellect was in advance of the crude superstitions of his age. He wrote a warning against judicial astrology980 or divination, which presumes to pronounce judgment upon a man’s character or destiny as written in the stars. This spurious science, which had wandered from Babylon981 to ancient Rome and from heathen Rome to the Christian Church, flourished especially in Italy and France at the very time when other superstitions were shaken to the base. Several popes of the Renaissance—Sixtus IV., Julius II., Leo X., Paul III. were addicted to it, but Pico della Mirandola wrote a book against it. King Francis I. dismissed his physician because he was not sufficiently skilled in this science. The Duchess Renata of Ferrara consulted, even in her later years, the astrologer Luc Guaric. The court of Catherine de Medici made extensive use of this and other black arts, so that the Church and the State had to interfere.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Still, as long as a message is being preached, you may be sure that the preacher has not yet mastered it himself. And such was the case with Freud. He showed a remarkable patience (inhibition?) in losing his own virginity (after he married at age thirty) and, as far as his biographers knew, ceased further sexual activity somewhat over ten years later. Freud’s ambivalent attitude about his own sexuality was naturally reflected both in his own life and theories and by his disciples. He paid homage to the immense motivating power of lust, yet seemingly blunted his own. He preached that the sexual appetite (Id) was natural, yet worked at fortifying the barrier (Ego) between lust and gratification. For he cautioned against abandoning oneself to one’s pleasurable impulses (“acting out,” as he called it) and preferred, instead, to analyze these forces. Why expect more? For a Viennese intellectual with a seductive mother, mind games might be more stimulating and less anxiety-producing than the mindless pleasures of the body. Among his followers the story is not much different. Few analysts live what they teach. How many openly sexy psychiatrists have you seen lately? How many Freudian analysts would even dare to give a patient a warm embrace? How can one truly teach that Eros is okay if one is afraid to be erotic? Still, analytic arguments (by sophisticated lay people as well as professionals) will be used to derogate and invalidate many of the fantasies expressed in this book. We will be told that it is unhealthy to fantasize. Or that fantasy is a substitute for reality; that if there is “real satisfaction,” there is no “need” for fantasy. Yet the term psychoanalysis means nothing more than an analysis of psychological material, as presented in word or deed. We can just as fairly psychoanalyze these analytically critical remarks. The question ought to be raised: Who are these arbiters of what constitutes “health” or “real satisfaction”? Are the analyst’s pleasures the only “healthy” ones? If he doesn’t fantasize and you do, does that make him healthy and you sick? I would prefer simply to say that you are just different. “Real satisfaction” for one person is not necessarily “real satisfaction” for another. It takes a person of overwhelming conceit and arrogance to determine what “true pleasure” or “right pleasure” ought to be for others. How can a critic state that fantasy is a substitute for reality? Isn’t a fantasy as real as anything else? It is as real a thought as are the thoughts and words that the critic uses to dismiss it. And if the critic tells you that he, with his “real” or “healthy” satisfactions, has no “need” to fantasize, who is to determine whether it is the critic’s inhibitions that prevent his adding pleasurable fantasy to his current pleasures or your “inferior” pleasures that cause you to fantasize?

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  III. Of the polemic doctrinal and ethical works2133 some relate to the Arian controversies, some to the Origenistic, some to the Pelagian. In the first class belongs the Dialogue against the schismatic Luciferians,2134 which Jerome wrote during his desert life in Syria (A.D. 379) on the occasion of the Meletian schism in Antioch; also his translation of the work of Didymus On the Holy Ghost, begun in Rome and finished in Bethlehem. His book Against Bishop John of Jerusalem (A.D. 399), and his Apology to his former friend Rufinus, in three books (A.D. 402–403), are directed against Origenism.2135 In the third class belongs the Dialogue against the Pelagians, in three books (A.D. 415). Other polemic works, Against Helvidius (written in 383), Against Jovinian (A.D. 393), and Against Vigilantius (dictated rapidly in one night in 406), are partly doctrinal, partly ethical in their nature, and mainly devoted to the advocacy of the immaculate virginity of Mary, celibacy, vigils, relic-worship, and the monastic life. These controversial writings, the contents of which we have already noted in the proper place, do the author, on the whole, little credit, and stand in striking contrast with his fame as one of the principal saints of the Roman church. They show an accurate acquaintance with all the arts of an advocate and all the pugilism of a dialectician, together with boundless vehemence and fanatical zealotism, which scruple over no weapons of wit, mockery, irony, suspicion, and calumny, to annihilate opponents, and which pursue them even after their death.2136 And their contents afford no sufficient compensation for these faults. For Jerome was not an original, profound, systematic, or consistent thinker, and therefore very little fitted for a didactic theologian. In the Arian controversy he would not enter into any discussion of the distinction between oujsiva and uJpovstasi", and left this important question to the decision of the Roman bishop Damasus; in the Origenistic controversy he must, in his violent condemnation of all Origenists, contradict his own former view and veneration of Origen as the greatest teacher after the Apostles; and in the Pelagian controversy he was influenced chiefly by personal considerations, and drawn half way to Augustine’s side; for while he was always convinced of the universality of sin,2137 in reference to the freedom of the will and predestination he adopted synergistic or Semi-Pelagian views, and afterwards continued in the highest consideration among the Semi-Pelagians down to Erasmus.2138