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 Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  Although much remains disputed about Tertullian’s life and background, his writings reveal a man who had received a first-class Latin education. He showed his debt to the Classical tradition in the brilliance of his Latin literary style, which sparkles through his numerous theological and controversial works with all the verve and energy of a very talented and very bad-tempered high-class journalist. Unlike Justin, he affected to despise the Classical tradition, coining the rhetorical question which sums up the preoccupation of second-century Catholic theologians, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’76 But he could never escape it: he was a maverick Roman intellectual who spent his life in rebellion, in the end, even against the Catholic Church itself, because he became a champion of the Montanists in their schism. Despite the break, his memory was treasured in the North African Church, which repeatedly demonstrated the chafing against settled authority which the Montanists had already exhibited. This paradoxical rebel could in one work bitterly abuse the Bishop of Rome for his laxity in enforcing what Tertullian saw as proper Christian rigour in moral standards, yet elsewhere write movingly of the honour which attached to the role of bishops in apostolic succession, including Rome itself.77 Supporters of Marcion, advocates of infant baptism, collaborators with imperial power, opponents of Montanism, all came under the lash of his pen. Tertullian suggested that the human soul is transmitted by parents to their children and is therefore inescapably associated with continuing human sin: this doctrine of ‘traducianism’ underlay the pessimistic view of the human condition and its imprisonment in original sin which was presented in an extreme form by that later theological giant from North Africa, Augustine of Hippo (see pp. 306–9). Amid all that controversy, Tertullian fashioned much of the language which Latin Christians were destined to use to discuss the perplexities of their faith. He dealt combatively with a most perplexing problem which had evolved out of the Church’s sense, perceptible already in the writings of Paul, that the one God is experienced in three aspects, as Father, Son and Spirit – creator, redeemer and strengthener. But what was the relationship between them? Oneness in divinity was somehow reflected in threeness – indeed, one would need a word to express that idea of threeness. It is to be found for the first time in Tertullian’s writings, although probably he did not invent it: Trinitas. His discussion comes mainly in a typically abusive pamphlet which he wrote against a Christian from Asia Minor called Praxeas.78 Praxeas represented an important school of thought within second-century Christianity called Monarchianism, which was a reaction against the ‘Logos’ language used by theologians like Justin. Justin was so concerned to stress the difference in the role of Father and Son that he had gone as far as to talk of the Logos as ‘other than the God who made all’, although he

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  While the Besht was alive, the rabbinic establishment did not take him seriously, but Dov Ber, the new leader, a learned man, was a very different proposition, and the movement spread under his leadership. When it reached Lithuania, it came to the attention of a powerful figure: Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–97), head (gaon) of the Academy of Vilna. The Gaon was appalled by the Hasidic movement, especially its denigration of Torah study, which was his chief passion. His scholarship, however, was very different from the casuistic studies of the corrupt Polish rabbis, and had a deeply mystical cast. His sons tell us that he used to study all night with his feet in icy water to keep himself awake. For the Gaon, Torah study was a more aggressive exercise than it was for the Hasidim. He relished what he called the “effort” of study, and it seems as though this intense mental activity tipped him into a new level of awareness. When he did allow himself to sleep, the Torah penetrated his dreams and he would experience a mystical ascent to the divine. Torah study was thus an encounter with God. As his disciple, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner (1749–1821), whom we shall meet later, explained: “he who studies Torah communes with God, for God and the Torah are one.”11 But the Gaon also made time for modern studies; he was proficient in astronomy, anatomy, mathematics, and foreign languages. He found the Hasidim heretical and obscurantist. The conflict became acrimonious. The Gaon’s supporters, whom the Hasidim called Misnagdim (“opponents”), would sometimes observe the rites of mourning when one of their number became a Hasid, as though he had died; the Hasidim, for their part, did not regard the Misnagdim as proper Jews. Eventually, in 1772, the Gaon excommunicated the Hasidim of Vilna and Brody; the shock of this expulsion is said to have killed Dov Ber.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At this writing, twenty years after the Moral Majority initiated this type of political activism, it is not easy to assess its long-term effectiveness. There is evidence that more committed Christians vote than before, especially in the South, but this type of negative campaigning can sometimes backfire. When Christian Right supporter Linda Chavez called her liberal opponent in the Maryland mid-term elections in 1986 a communist and a child-murdering lesbian, for example, this may have contributed to her defeat.102 The efforts of fundamentalists and other conservatives in 1998–99 to impeach President Bill Clinton because of his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent alleged perjury also proved counterproductive. The spectacle of the President having to answer intimate questions about his sexual behavior and the inevitable trivialization of political discourse that this involved caused widespread revulsion, and possibly resulted in a liberal backlash in Clinton’s favor. Nevertheless, the fact that at the height of the scandal the President felt it necessary to address a breakfast meeting of the religious leaders of the United States and tearfully confess that he had sinned showed that politicians could no longer treat the conservative views of the faithful with secularist disdain. By the end of the twentieth century, religion was a force to be reckoned with in North America. The United States had come a long way since the Founding Fathers had promoted the secular humanism of the Enlightenment. Since the Revolution, the Protestants of America had used religion as a way of protesting against the policies and conduct of the liberal establishment; the fundamentalist campaigning of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other members of the Christian Right was simply a late-twentieth-century manifestation of this tendency. As a result of all these Christian efforts, the sacred plays a far greater role in the political life of the United States than in such countries as Britain and France, where a politician would be damaged by the display of overt and emotional religiosity.

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

  Muscovy – the rest of the Ukraine followed a century later. From 1686, an extremely reluctant Oecumenical Patriarch had little choice but to accept the transfer of allegiance by the Metropolitan of Kiev to the Patriarch of Moscow. This in turn stimulated the Orthodox in Polish lands who could not stomach the link with Muscovy to declare a renewed allegiance to the Union of Brest: a move much encouraged by the authorities in Warsaw. With the important exception of this rejuvenated Greek Catholic Church, the Church of the Third Rome now dominated all Orthodoxy in northern Europe.72 The Ruthenian Orthodox people of Kiev who did not join the Greek Catholics still came from a very different cultural background to the Orthodox faithful of Moscow. They needed to adapt to a regime which abhorred the religious pluralism of the Commonwealth, and it must be said that they did so with some speed. The intellectual resources of the Mohyla Academy and other schools in the Ukraine were now at the service of the Tsar, and the academy was virtually the only long-term institute of higher education then available in Russia. Its scholars creatively rewrote history, so that now the standard accounts of Russian origins talked of the ‘transfer’ of Kievan rule to Moscow, and the Ukraine could be seen as ‘Little Russia’, alongside the ‘Great Russia’ of Muscovy and the ‘White Russia’ of Belarus.73 At the same time, within Muscovy itself, the situation was far from static. A contest was taking place which was to deliver the Church into the hands of the Tsar, as well as causing lasting schism within Russian Orthodoxy. The source of the conflict lay in a tsar and patriarch who both sought reform in the Church and initially cooperated in it: Tsar Aleksei (reigned 1645–76) and Nikon (Patriarch 1652–8). Even before Muscovy’s military successes against Poland-Lithuania, Nikon was promoting a vision of Moscow as leader of Orthodox Christians throughout the world, a vision which would inevitably involve Church reform. Much of this was the type of tightened discipline for both clergy and laity that one might expect from a man who combined great energy with a thoroughly authoritarian temperament, but two other elements in his programme made for trouble. First, Nikon built on the clerical vision implicit in the ‘Third Rome’ ideology and extended it in a way that would have drawn sympathy from that eleventh-century bishop of the First Rome, Gregory VII. Indeed Nikon constructed his claims round that venerable Western forgery the Donation of Constantine (see p. 351): he proposed that the patriarch and not the tsar should be the chief power in the state, assuming the title Veliki Gosudar (Great Lord), which previously only tsars had used. It is not surprising that this near-suicidal self-assertion brought Nikon’s patriarchate to a premature close and eventually led to his long-term imprisonment.74 His defeat showed where

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

  One might have expected gnostic contempt for the flesh to lead gnostics to sacrifice it in martyrdom as did other Christians, but evidently they did not think the body worth sacrificing. Not only is there a total absence of stories of gnostic martyrs, but there is positive evidence that gnostics opposed martyrdom as a regrettable self-indulgence and were angry that some Christian leaders encouraged it. A text discovered at Nag Hammadi, The Testimony of Truth, sneers at ‘foolish people, thinking in their heart that if only they confess in words, “We are Christians” … while giving themselves over to a human death’, they will achieve salvation. The Apocalypse of Peter, also recovered from Nag Hammadi, says that bishops and deacons who send little ones to their death will be punished. And the recently rediscovered Gospel of Judas, which probably assumed Judas’s name to shock followers of the bishops, condemns the Apostles as leading the Christian crowds astray to be sacrifices upon an altar. Small wonder that the Church whose leaders came to regard themselves as successors to the Apostles, and which increasingly celebrated martyrs for Christ, loathed gnostics so much.41 Gnostic contempt for the flesh ran against the whole tendency of Jewish religion, with its earthy affirmation of created things and its insistence on God’s personal relationship with his chosen people. Because of this distancing from Judaism, it was extremely easy for Christians to see the logic of pursuing gnostic solutions to the problem which had exercised Paul so much: how much of the Jewish heritage to jettison from the new faith. The gnostics included people of sophistication and learning – the complexity and frequent obscurity of their literature impressively demonstrated that – and arguably they had a more intellectually satisfying solution to the problem of evil in the world than the mainstream Christian Church has ever been able to provide. Evil simply exists; life is a battle between good and evil, in a material world wholly beyond the concern of the true God. Rather distinct from gnostic concerns was the contemporary approach to Christian identity adopted by a Christian thinker of the early second century named Marcion. Son of the Bishop of Sinope on the Black Sea, he was successful in the shipping business and used this wealth to pursue a career of theological exploration. After he had come to Rome about 140, he was eventually expelled by the Church there when the full radicalism of his approach to the faith became apparent. Like gnostics, with whom he has often been wrongly identified, he was determined to pull Christianity away from its Jewish roots. He saw the writings of Paul as his chief weapon, but moving on from Paul’s own conflicted relationship with Judaism, he came to the same conclusion as gnostics in saying that the created world must be a worthless sham and Jesus’s

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

  hadīth that Muhammad himself had granted protection to the community – this was duly backed up by a document in the monastery archives of St Catherine, autographed with the Prophet’s own hand (literally, a picture of his hand).21 In the era of the tolerant Egyptian Islamic dynasty of the Fatimids, St Catherine’s showed further prudence by actually constructing a mosque within its precincts, which still exists complete with minaret, although it is sealed up and is in any case not properly oriented towards Mecca, as a mosque should be. One of the most influential theologians for Byzantine Orthodoxy in the years around 700 (see pp. 447–8) spent all his life as a subject of the Umayyad caliph in Damascus, and he was indeed ethnically an Arab, as his family name, Mansūr, revealed; he has come to be known as John of Damascus. John enjoyed the privileges of a traditional elite which had made a smooth transition from the old regime to the new: his grandfather, Mansūr ibn Sargūn, a Chalcedonian Christian, had been the last governor of the city on behalf of the Byzantine emperor, while John’s father was a high-ranking official in Umayyad administration. John grew up alongside the future Caliph Al-Yazīd, and assumed the hereditary family place in public office as chief councillor, though later in life, after political disgrace, he withdrew into the celebrated monastery of St Sabas near Jerusalem. His intimacy with the elite of the new dispensation did not prevent him from writing combatively against Islam and even calling it ‘forerunner of the Antichrist’.22 Chalcedonian Orthodoxy like John’s was obviously going to be at a long-term disadvantage once the protection of the Byzantine armies had been removed. Jerusalem and its shrine of the Holy Sepulchre remained one stronghold of Melchite Orthodoxy amid the Miaphysite and Dyophysite majority. It would not be too cynical to suggest that this was understandable, given the continuing flow of Chalcedonian pilgrims into Palestine from the empire and even further west; they would not appreciate being received at the holy places of Bethlehem and Jerusalem by Christians whom they regarded as heretics. The same applied to the great monastery in Sinai, hugely popular in the Byzantine world despite the difficulty of getting there, long before St Catherine’s bones were found on Mount Sinai above it. The Burning Bush flourishing within its walls, said to be the same in which God had appeared to Moses (see p. 54), recalled the Virgin who had likewise in Chalcedonian eyes sheltered the Godhead, and the monastery always remained loyal to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy, looking to the Melchite patriarch in Jerusalem rather than the Miaphysite Copts to its west. Elsewhere, neither Miaphysites nor Dyophysites had much reason to look back with regret on the disappearance of the imperial power and its Church. When the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads in 750, they moved the

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Most of the miracles described in the Bible were simply literary tropes and could not be understood literally; many of the biblical events were almost certainly not historical. In Essays and Reviews , the British clerics argued that the Bible must not have special treatment, but should be subjected to the same critical rigor as any other text. 91 The new “Higher Criticism” represented the triumph of the rational discourse of logos over myth. Rational science had subjected the mythoi of the Bible to radical scrutiny and found that some of its claims were “false.” The biblical tales were simply “myths,” which, in popular parlance, now meant that they were not true. The Higher Criticism would become a bogey of Christian fundamentalists, because it seemed a major assault upon religion, but this was only because Western people had lost the original sense of the mythical, and thought that doctrines and scriptural narratives were logoi , narratives that purported to be factually accurate and phenomena that could be investigated scientifically. But in revealing how impossible it was to read the Bible in an entirely literal manner, the Higher Criticism could also have provided a healthy counterbalance to the growing tendency to make modern Christian faith “scientific.” Noting the discrepancy between Darwin’s hypothesis and the first chapter of Genesis, some Christians, such as Darwin’s American friend and fellow scientist Asa Gray (1810–88), tried to harmonize natural selection with a literal reading of Genesis. Later the project known as Creation Science would go to even greater lengths to make Genesis scientifically respectable. But this was to miss the point, because, as a myth, the biblical creation story was not an historical account of the origins of life but a more spiritual reflection upon the ultimate significance of life itself, about which scientific logos has nothing to say. Even though Darwin had not intended it, the publication of the Origin did cause a preliminary skirmish between religion and science, but the first shots were fired not by the religious but by the more aggressive secularists. In England, Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95), and on the Continent, Karl Vogt (1817–95), Ludwig Buchner (1824–99), Jakob Moleschott (1822–93), and Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), popularized Darwin’s theory, touring and lecturing to large audiences to prove that science and religion were incompatible. They were, in fact, preaching a crusade against religion. 92 Huxley clearly felt that he had a fight on his hands. Reason, he insisted, must be the sole criterion of truth.

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

  Antwerp. The tale’s travels had by no means ended. It spread from the Byzantine Empire through western Europe and south via Egypt: one could pick up copies of it in Latin, Hebrew, Old Norse, Old Russian, Ethiopic, medieval Catalan, Portuguese, Icelandic, Italian, French and English. The pioneering English printer William Caxton showed his usual commercial good sense when, in 1483, he chose to print it in his new translation of the great collection of saints’ lives known as The Golden Legend, and Shakespeare used an episode from it in The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps we can appreciate just how far the Eastern Christian legacy eventually reached if we join the cultured English Roundhead military commander Thomas Fairfax, third Lord Fairfax of Cameron, in his Yorkshire study in the 1650s. Smarting from the end of his military career after a principled quarrel with Oliver Cromwell, Fairfax pulled his Latin or Greek Barlaam from his bookshelves and whiled away his retirement with his own English translation, some 204 folio pages long. Puritan (and Chalcedonian) Yorkshire was a long way from the home of the Buddha, and Fairfax would have had no idea of his debt to that long-dead Georgian monk.2 All this was thanks to the large number of Eastern Christians who hated the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon and decided to ignore or oppose them. It took a long time for those who felt like this to make a formal break with the Church authorities who had accepted the council’s pronouncements. Of the two opposite points of view excluded by Chalcedon, Miaphysitism and Dyophysite ‘Nestorianism’, it was the Miaphysites who most worried the emperors in Constantinople. The Miaphysites’ power base, Alexandria, was one of the most important cities in the Eastern Empire, essential to the grain supply which kept the population of Constantinople in compliant mood, and Miaphysites continued to have support in the capital itself. Already at the Council of Chalcedon, the Egyptian bishops present insisted that if they signed its Definition, they faced death back home, and it soon became clear that they were not exaggerating. Alexandria was, after all, the city which had lynched Hypatia forty years before. The council had infuriated opinion in Alexandria by deposing its bishop, Dioscorus, a punishment for his prominence in the group who had disruptively proclaimed ‘one-nature’ theology as orthodoxy at the previous Council of Ephesus in 449 (see pp. 225–6). The Emperor Marcian and his wife, Pulcheria, were determined to find a pliable successor for Dioscorus. They brought pressure to bear on the Alexandrian clergy, which led to the election of one of Dioscorus’s assistant clergy, Proterius, but the new bishop found his position steadily eroded. On Marcian’s death in 457, he was left defenceless. A mob who regarded him as a traitor to Dioscorus pursued him into the baptistery of a city

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

  again, I did not suffer.’35 Mani’s teachings equalled the spread of Eastern Christianity in time and geography, taking Manichaean faith as far as the shores of China as well as into the Roman Empire.36 Christians in the eastern Mediterranean in particular found his teachings as fascinating as previously they had the ideas of gnostic teachers, while the traditionalist Emperor Diocletian (reigned 284–305) loathed Manichees as much as he did the Christians, initiating a policy of burning them alive, even before he and his colleagues had yielded to the impulse to begin brutal persecution of Christianity.37 Discoveries of Greek, Syriac and Coptic papyri from the 1990s onwards at an Egyptian oasis, now called Ismant el- Kharab but anciently containing the small town of Kellis, have suddenly revealed fourth-century Manichees in a new light. There they had the appearance of a variant on Christianity, regarding themselves as a Church within the town, with a community life, officers and almost certainly a monastery around which their religious life probably revolved. Among the documents are two boards bearing word lists of key Manichaean phrases in Syriac with Coptic translations, revealing the sense of a commonality in this Coptic- and Greek-speaking community with Manichees a thousand miles away in Syria, rather reminiscent of Catholic Christianity’s own worldwide vision.38 No wonder the episcopal Christian Church loathed the Manichees so much and sought to eliminate them as competitors once it got the chance. It never challenged Diocletian’s provision for burning Manichees alive; indeed, centuries later the Western Latin Church imitated and extended Diocletian’s policy to apply it to other Christian ‘heretics’. FROM PERSECUTION TO PERSECUTION (250–300) Celsus had made it clear that it was now impossible for the Roman authorities to ignore Christianity. By the end of the second century, this religion from an obscure eastern province was beginning to find a presence even in the imperial palace. Marcia, the Emperor Commodus’s mistress and instigator of his murder, might seem a rather disconcerting pioneer patroness of Christians at Court, but it is noticeable that the first identifiably Christian gravestones for members of the imperial household date from only just after Commodus’s death.39 In their wake come rather less lurid connections to the imperial family: Julia Mamaea, mother to the Emperor Severus Alexander (great-nephew of Septimius Severus), was clearly interested in Christianity, inviting Origen to talk with her about the faith, and the aggressive Roman priest Hippolytus was courtly enough to dedicate a

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The transposition of myth into fact had finally occurred. In the premodern world, mythology and politics had been distinct. State-building, military campaigns, agriculture, and the economy had all been the preserves of the rational disciplines of logos. The myth contained these pragmatic activities and gave them meaning; myth could also serve as a corrective, and remind men and women of values, such as compassion, that transcended the pragmatic considerations of reason. An earthly reality could become a symbol of the divine, but was never itself holy; it pointed beyond itself to where reason could not go. But Kook had overridden these distinctions and created what some might call idolatry. Can an army be “holy” when it is often obliged to do terrible things, such as killing the innocent with the guilty? Traditionally, messianism had inspired people to criticize the status quo, but Kook would use it to give absolute sanction to Israeli policy. Such a vision could lead to a nihilism that denies crucial values. In making the State of Israel holy and its territorial integrity supreme, Kook had succumbed to the very temptation responsible for some of the worst nationalist atrocities of the twentieth century. Rabbi Kook the Elder’s inclusive vision, which had reached out to other faiths and to the secular world, had been lost. Kook the Younger was filled with burning hatred of Christians, of the goyim who interfered with Israeli ambitions, and of the Arabs.87 There had been wisdom in the older vision, which had seen reason and myth as complementary though separate. There was great danger in Kook the Younger’s yoking of the two together. The Gahelet did not take this view, however. Rabbi Kook’s holistic ideology made Zionism a religion, and was just what they had been looking for. They became full-time students at Merkaz Harav, and put this obscure yeshiva on the map of Israel. They also made Kook a sort of Jewish pope, whose decrees were binding and infallible. These young men became Kook’s cadre and would become the leaders of the new fundamentalist Zionism: Moshe Levinger, Yaakov Ariel, Shlomo Aviner, Haim Drukman, Dov Lior, Zalman Melamed, Avraham Shapira, and Eliezar Waldman. In Merkaz Harav during the 1960s, they planned an offensive designed to win the nation back to God and to make the secular state realize its religious potential. Instead of the dialectical synthesis of secular and religious envisaged by Kook the Elder, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda expected an imminent takeover of the secular by the divine. For all their enthusiasm, however, the Gahelet could do no more than plan. There was nothing they could effectively do to settle the whole land or to change the heart of the nation. But in 1967, history took a hand.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  A moral nihilism also characterized the movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who, to the distress of most Israelis, was elected to a seat in the 1984 Knesset with 1.2 percent of the vote.93 His career had begun in New York City, where he had organized the Jewish Defense League to avenge attacks on Jews made by black youths. In 1974, he had arrived in Israel, and eventually settled in Kiryat Arba, where he changed the name of his organization to Kach (“Thus!”). His objective now was to harass the Arabs and force them to leave Eretz Israel. Kahane’s fundamentalism was almost archetypal. His Judaism was so reductionist and ruthlessly selective that it become a deadly caricature of the faith. “There are not several messages in Judaism,” he explained to an interviewer. “There is only one. And this message is to do what God wants.” The message was simply this: “God wanted us to come to this country and create a Jewish state.”94 The Jewish doctrine of holiness (kodesh: “separateness” “a setting apart”), which had symbolically celebrated the distinction of things by means of ritual, now had, in Kahane’s interpretation, a uniquely political meaning: “God wants us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.”95 That meant that the Arabs must go. The promise to Abraham was as valid today as in the patriarchal period, so the Arabs were usurpers.96 The mythos of Genesis thus became the rationale for a political program of ethnic cleansing. This reductive vision led logically to a messianic vision of utter horror. After the victory of the Six Day War, Jews had stood “on the brink of redemption.” Because of the single directive of Judaism, their mission was clear. They should have occupied the territories, expelled the Arabs, and expunged “the gentiles’ abomination from the Temple Mount.” If they had done all this, redemption would have come effortlessly and joyously. Because Israel failed, the Messiah would still come, but in a huge anti-Semitic catastrophe, far worse than the Holocaust, which would finally force all Jews to obey God’s one commandment and settle in Israel.97 This dark vision of destruction and death is profoundly nihilistic. It is also suffused with hatred and a desire for revenge. Kahane’s horribly distorted version of the faith shows the effects of long persecution and suppression, which can, if permitted to do so, enter deeply into the soul and warp it. Kahane’s theology sees enemies everywhere, enemies that are ultimately one and the same, whether they are Christians, Nazis, blacks, Russians, or Arabs. Everything is seen from the perspective of Jewish suffering, and vengeance for that suffering. The State of Israel was not a blessing for Jews but God’s revenge on the gentiles:

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

  intelligent and sensitive Roman observers. There arose reports of incest from their talk of love-feasts, of cannibalism from the language of eating and drinking body and blood. As they attracted converts, many unsympathetic outsiders became convinced that Christian success must be the result of erotic magic, strong enough to tear wives away from non-Christian husbands; after all, a number of Christian accounts of martyrdom did indeed describe women leaving their husbands or fiancés for Christian life or death. The second-century African comic novelist Apuleius, who clearly detested Christianity, described an adulterous Christian wife as turning to an old witch to regain the love of her wronged and furious husband – but the scheme went wrong and a murderous ghost goaded the poor man into suicide.11 It was a small step from such suspicion and righteous indignation to violence and riots. It was equally understandable that the Roman authorities, paranoid about any secret organizations, sought to suppress troublemakers who wasted taxpayers’ money by provoking disturbances of the peace. In the early days of the spread of Christianity, the first Christians in cities had usually begun proclaiming their ‘good news’ within the Jewish communities, and when they did so, they often provoked violence from angry Jews. One of the first mentions of a Christian presence in Rome, for instance, is a remark by the second-century historian Suetonius that the Emperor Claudius (reigned 41–54 CE) expelled the Roman Jews for rioting ‘at the instigation of Chrestus’ – probably a garbled reference to Christian preaching within synagogue communities, a decade or more after the crucifixion of Christ.12 Yet the separateness and dogmatism of the early Christians were as much strengths as weaknesses; they produced a continuing stream of converts. This inward-looking community could attract people seeking certainty and comfort, not least in a physical sense. Christians looked after their poor – that was after all one of the main duties of one of their three orders of ministry, the deacons – and they provided a decent burial for their members, a matter of great significance in the ancient world. It may be that the first official status for a Christian Church community was registration as a burial club: a considerable irony in view of Jesus’s dismissive remark, ‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead.’ Outside the periods of persecution, which, however brutal while they lasted, were extremely episodic until the last savagery under Diocletian (see pp. 175–6), the normal interaction between a Roman official and a Christian leader would have been to transact bureaucracy around cemeteries. Burial remained an important function within any Christian community: when seventeen staff of the Christian Church in the city of Cirta (now Constantine in Algeria) were arrested and interrogated during the last great persecution of Christians in 303–4, six of those listed were

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  So there were Iranians who welcomed the arrival of nineteen-year-old Shah Ismail, head of the Safavid order of Sufis, who conquered Tabriz in 1501, subdued the rest of Iran within the next decade, and announced that Shiism would become the official religion of the new Safavid empire. Ismail claimed descent from the Seventh Imam, which, he believed, gave him a legitimacy not enjoyed by other Muslim rulers. 37 But this was obviously a break with Shii tradition. Most Shiis, known as “Twelvers” (because of their veneration of the twelve Imams), believed that no government could be legitimate in the absence of the Hidden Imam. 38 How, then, could there be a “state Shiism”? This did not trouble Ismail, who knew very little about Twelver orthodoxy. The Safavid order, a mystical fraternity which had been founded in the wake of the Mongol invasions, had originally been Sufi but had absorbed many of the “extreme” (ghuluww) ideas of the old Shiah. Ismail believed that Imam Ali had been divine, and that the Shii messiah would return very soon to inaugurate the Golden Age. He may even have told his disciples that he was the Hidden Imam, returned from concealment. The Safavid order was a marginal, populist, revolutionary group, far removed from the sophisticated circles of Shii esotericism. 39 Ismail had no qualms about setting up a Shii state, and, instead of trying to find a civilized modus vivendi with the Sunni majority, as Shiis had done since the time of Jafar as-Sadiq, he was fanatically opposed to the Sunnah. There was a new sectarian intolerance in both the Ottoman and the Safavid empires that was not dissimilar to the feuds between Catholics and Protestants that were developing in Europe at about this time. In recent centuries, there had been a détente between Sunnis and Shiis. But during the early sixteenth century, the Ottomans were determined to marginalize the Shiah in their domains, and, when Ismail emerged in Iran, he was equally determined to wipe out the Sunnah there. 40 It did not take the Safavids long, however, to discover that the messianic, “extremist” ideology that had served them well in opposition was no longer suitable once they had become the establishment. Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) was determined to eliminate the old ghuluww theology, dismissed “extremists” from his bureaucracy, and imported Arab Shii ulema to promote Twelver orthodoxy. He built madrasahs for them in Isfahan, his new capital, and Hilla, endowed property (awqaf) on their behalf, and gave them generous gifts. This patronage was essential in the early days, since the ulema were new immigrants entirely dependent upon the shahs. But it inevitably changed the nature of the Shiah. Shii scholars had always been a minority group.

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

  humanity retained free will to respond to God’s offer of grace? He set out his attack in September 1524: A Diatribe on Free Will. Fully aware that he must play by Augustinian rules, Erasmus emphasized that the initiative in grace was with God. After that, however, he sought to avoid a dogmatic single formula on grace; for him this was Luther’s chief fault. His attack was as much on Luther’s way of doing theology as on the resulting theology: Luther was exposing controversial questions to public excitement when there was no need to do so. Erasmus preferred to seek consensus, put forward an opinion which seemed most probable – that process is actually the technical meaning of the word diatribe. Erasmus was a humanist pleading for people to be reasonable – and also saying bluntly that unreasonable people should not be brought into technical discussions of theology. Moreover, he believed that human beings could indeed be reasonable, because when Adam and Eve fell in the Garden of Eden, their God-given capacity to reason had not been fully corrupted, only damaged. Luther by contrast was a prophet proclaiming an inescapable message to all fallen humanity. In his response, uncompromisingly entitled On the Slavery of the Will (De servo arbitrio, published in December 1525), Luther set out a pitiless message that human beings could expect nothing but condemnation, and had nothing to offer God to merit salvation: If we believe that Christ redeemed men by his blood, we are forced to confess that all of man was lost; otherwise, we make Christ either wholly superfluous, or else the redeemer of the least valuable part of man only; which is blasphemy, and sacrilege.16 This parting blow in his book was the very heart of the Reformation’s reassertion of Augustine, proclaiming that the humanist project of reasonable reform was redundant. It was not surprising that Erasmus went on fighting, in two bulky and bitter volumes published in 1526 and 1527, in which he showed how Luther had forced him back to reaffirm his loyalty to the imperfect structures of the old Church: ‘Therefore I will put up with this Church until I see a better one; and it will have to put up with me, until I become better.’17 Wearily he was confronting not only Luther, but also his own humanist sympathizers like Luther’s brilliant young university colleague Philipp Melanchthon, who had likewise determined to favour Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.18 THE FARMERS’ WAR AND ZWINGLI What degree of change was Luther proclaiming, and what needed changing? Many ordinary people, especially those defending their livelihoods against new

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  IF MODERNIZATION was difficult for the Christians of Europe and America, it was even more problematic for Jews and Muslims. Muslims experienced modernity as an alien, invasive force, inextricably associated with colonization and foreign domination. They would have to adapt to a civilization whose watchword was independence, while themselves suffering political subjugation. The modern ethos was markedly hostile toward Judaism. For all their talk of toleration, Enlightenment thinkers still regarded Jews with contempt. François-Marie Voltaire (1694–1778) had called them “a totally ignorant nation,” in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1756); they combined “contemptible miserliness and the most revolting superstition with a violent hatred of all the nations which have tolerated them.” Baron d’Holbach (1723–89), one of the first avowed atheists of Europe, had called Jews “the enemies of the human race.”1 Kant and Hegel both saw Judaism as a servile, degraded faith, utterly opposed to the rational,2 while Karl Marx, himself of Jewish descent, argued that the Jews were responsible for capitalism, which, in his view, was the source of all the world’s ills.3 Jews would, therefore, have to adapt to modernity in an atmosphere of hatred.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  People would have to choose between mythology and rational science. There could be no compromise: “one or the other would have to succumb after a struggle of unknown duration.” 93 Scientific rationalism was, for Huxley, a new secular religion; it demanded conversion and total commitment. “In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration,” he urged his audience. “And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated and demonstrable.” 94 Huxley was supported by the whole thrust of modern, progressive culture, which had achieved such spectacular results that it could now claim aggressively to be the sole arbiter of truth. But truth had been narrowed to what is “demonstrated and demonstrable,” which, religion aside, would exclude the truth told by art or music. For Huxley, there was no other possible path. Reason alone was truthful, and the myths of religion truthless. It was a final declaration of independence from the mythical constraints of the conservative period. Reason no longer had to submit to a higher court. It was not to be restricted by morality but must be pushed to the end “without regard to any other consideration.” The continental crusaders went further in their war against religion. Buchner’s best-seller, Force and Matter , a crude book which Huxley himself despised, argued that the universe had no purpose, that everything in the world had derived from a simple cell, and that only an idiot could believe in God. But the large numbers of people who read this book and the huge crowds who flocked to Haeckel’s lectures showed that in Europe a significant number of people wanted to hear that science had disproved religion once and for all. This was because by treating religious truths as though they were rational logoi , modern scientists, critics, and philosophers had made them incredible. In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) would proclaim that God was dead. In The Gay Science , he told the story of a madman running one morning into the marketplace crying “I seek God!” When the amused and supercilious bystanders asked him if he imagined that God had emigrated or run away, the madman glared. “Where has God gone?” he demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!” 95 In an important sense, Nietzsche was right. Without myth, cult, ritual, and prayer, the sense of the sacred inevitably dies.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Americans were shocked to hear their nation described as satanic during and after the Revolution. Even those who were aware of the resentment that so many of the Iranian people had felt for the United States since the 1953 CIA coup, were repelled by this demonic imagery. However mistaken American policy may have been, it did not deserve to be condemned in this way. It confirmed the prevailing belief that the Iranian revolutionaries were all fanatical, hysterical, and unbalanced. But most Western people misunderstood the image of the Great Satan. In Christianity, Satan is a figure of overpowering evil, but in Islam he is a much more manageable figure. The Koran even hints that Satan will be forgiven on the Last Day,57 such is its confidence in the all-conquering goodness of God. Those Iranians who called America “the Great Satan” were not saying that the United States was diabolically wicked but something more precise. In popular Shiism, the Shaitan, the Tempter, is a rather ludicrous creature, chronically incapable of appreciating the spiritual values of the unseen world. In one story, he is said to have complained to God about the privileges given to humans, but was easily fobbed off with inferior gifts. Instead of prophets, the Shaitan was quite happy with fortune-tellers, his mosque was the bazaar, he was most at home in the public baths, and instead of seeking God, his quest was for wine and women.58 He was, in fact, incurably trivial, trapped forever in the realm of the exterior (zahir) world and unable to see that there was a deeper and more important dimension of existence. For many Iranians, America, the Great Shaitan, was “the Great Trivializer.” The bars, casinos, and secularist ethos of West-toxicated North Tehran typified the American ethos, which seemed deliberately to ignore the hidden (batin) realities that alone gave life meaning. Furthermore, America, the Shaitan, had tempted the shah away from the true values of Islam to a life of superficial secularism.59

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

  by Khan Boris-Michael, who is likely to have seen the value of these innovative alphabets and the vernacular literature which they embodied as a way of keeping a convenient distance from both the Franks and also his eventual patrons in the Church of Constantinople. Both alphabets were specifically intended to promote the Christian faith. They and the Christianized Slavonic language which they represented were to be used not simply to produce translations of the Bible and of theologians from the earlier centuries of the Church, but with a much more innovative and controversial purpose. They made it possible to create a liturgy in the Slavonic language, translating it from the Greek rite of St John Chrysostom with which the brothers Constantine and Methodios were familiar. This was a direct challenge to the Frankish priests working in Moravia, who were leading their congregations in worship as they would do in their own territories, in Latin. Although there was clearly East-West confrontation in the Moravian mission, there was a significant contrast with the Bulgarian situation, thanks to the diplomatic abilities of Constantine and Methodios. They were not themselves priests, and they deliberately set out to integrate their mission (albeit on their own terms) with the Church in Rome, seeking ordination for some of their followers from the Pope. While journeying to Rome, they attempted in Venice to defend their construction of a vernacular Slavonic liturgy, in a debate of which a rather partisan version survives in the Life of Constantine. Opponents objected that there were ‘only three tongues worthy of praising God in the Scriptures, Hebrew, Greek and Latin’, on the grounds that these were the three languages affixed to Christ’s cross. ‘Falls not God’s rain upon all equally? And shines not the sun also upon all?’ retorted Constantine.80 Constantine’s reception in Rome was much eased because he brought Pope Hadrian II a gift of fragments from the skeleton of Clement, one of the earliest of Hadrian’s papal predecessors. With great foresight, Constantine had uncovered this lucky find during his otherwise unsuccessful time among the Khazars in the Black Sea region. Modern historians might spoil Constantine’s pleasure by pointing out that the story of Pope Clement’s exile to the Black Sea was actually a fifth-century confusion with the fate of another St Clement who probably really did die in the Black Sea region, but at the time Pope Hadrian was duly impressed and charmed into providing the necessary ordinations. A turning point in Church history was thus dependent on some wishful thinking and some misidentified bones.81 Constantine spent his last months as the monk Cyril in Rome and when he died, in 869, he was buried appropriately in the already ancient Church of San Clemente – while equally appropriately and graciously, the last fragment of his body, otherwise destroyed during the Napoleonic occupation of Italy, was in the twentieth century given by Pope Paul VI for

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

  understanding of monastic spirituality as being true to Orthodox tradition. For him, the assertions of Palamas ran counter to the apophatic insistence in Pseudo- Dionysius that God was unknowable in his essence. If so, it was foolish to suppose that, simply by concentrating in prayer, an individual could perceive something which was part of God’s essence, the Holy Spirit itself. To expect to achieve this was to confuse creator and creation. There was a real risk that Hesychasts would forget all the dangers to which Maximus had pointed long before, allowing mystical experience to run out of control, and even wholly rejecting the control of reason in their search for God. Such excesses would jettison a tradition of purposeful meditation which ran back all the way to Evagrius of Pontus in the fourth century, and which Orthodox mystics had treasured ever since, even when the memory of Evagrius himself had been blackened. Barlaam raised the name of various heresies, Bogimilism among them, and implied, not without some justification, that the Hesychasts were in danger of falling into the same excessive rigour and rejection of Christianity’s setting in a fallen world. In retaliation, Palamas and his admirers said that Barlaam was a mere rationalist who was reducing any talk of God to the human capacity to grasp only what God was not. Palamas sneered at Barlaam’s assertion that the great theologians of the early Church had used ‘light’ as a metaphor for knowledge and, echoing Symeon the New Theologian’s dismissal of philosophy, he went so far as to praise a lack of instructed knowledge as something good in the spiritual life – close, indeed, to a condition for salvation, a bizarre position for one who wrote at intricate length on his chosen theological themes.39 Yet amid the various debates between Palamas and Barlaam about their own tradition, the recent emergence of Western theology in Byzantium fuelled their debate in unexpected ways. Palamas plundered Planudes’s Greek translation of Augustine to expound his own ideas of the Holy Spirit as the mutual love between Father and Son, a concept which he would not have otherwise found in Orthodox theology, and he also quoted Augustine (unacknowledged) in arguing that the Spirit was the energy of God, the way in which the God unknown in essence still makes himself known in his creation.40 These were tendentious borrowings for Palamas’s own purposes. Augustine would have found bizarre the Palamite idea that an individual with bodily eyes can see the divine light on Mount Tabor. Augustine’s own experience of the divine is witnessed by a famous description in his Confessions of the moment when, in conversation with his mother in a garden in Rome’s port of Ostia, they had together reached out ‘in thought’ and ‘touched the eternal wisdom’ – but for one moment only, and emphatically as the end result of loving thought and discussion.41

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

  Augustinian Canons Regular (see p. 392): Og. She has the greatest fame throughout England, and you would not readily find anyone in that island who hoped for prosperity unless he greeted her annually with a small gift according to his means. Men. Where does she live? Og. By the north-west [sic] coast of England, only about three miles from the sea. The village has scarcely any means of support apart from the tourist trade. There’s a college of canons, to whom, however, the Latin title of regulars is added: an order midway between monks and the canons called secular. Men. You tell me of amphibians, such as the beaver. Og. Yes, and the crocodile. But details aside, I’ll try to satisfy you in a few words. In unfavourable matters, they’re canons; in favourable ones, monks. Men. So far you’re telling me a riddle. Og. But I’ll add a precise demonstration. If the Roman pontiff assailed all monks with a thunderbolt, then they’d be canons, not monks. Yet if he permitted all monks to take wives, then they’d be monks. In reflecting on Becket’s shrine, Eusebius observes to his friend Timothy: it’s robbery to lavish upon those who will make bad use of it that which was owed to the immediate needs of our neighbour. Hence those who build or adorn monasteries or churches at excessive cost, when meanwhile so many of Christ’s living temples are in danger of starvation, shiver in their nakedness, and are tormented by want of the necessities of life, seem to me almost guilty of a capital crime. When I was in Britain I saw Saint Thomas’s tomb, laden with innumerable precious jewels in addition to other incredible riches. I’d rather have this superfluous wealth spent on the poor than kept for the use of officials who will plunder it all sooner or later. I’d decorate the tomb with branches and flowers; this, I think, would be more pleasing to the saint.70 Such thrusts by Erasmus proved handy for officials who only a decade or two later did indeed zestfully plunder the wealth of shrines, in various Reformations enacted throughout Europe. Erasmus’s moral indignation concealed a very personal agenda in his religion. When he published his New Testament, he wrote movingly and sincerely in his Prologue about his wish to see the countryman chant the Bible at his plough, the weaver at his loom, the traveller on his journey – even women should read the text. His zeal for Church reform was the opposite of the high clericalism of the likes of Jean Gerson, so enthusiastic for Dionysius the Areopagite. Erasmus wanted to end the excesses of clerical privilege, particularly the clergy’s pretensions to special knowledge, and he was always ready to show contempt both for incompetent and unlearned clergy and for what he saw as the pompous obscurity of professional theologians. But lay piety was to be reconstructed on Erasmus’s own terms. After Steyn, he had grimly disciplined himself never again to lose control of his emotions: his passions were to remain as abstractions of the intellect. Erasmus was profoundly repelled by the everyday reality of layfolk grasping at the sacred, the physicality and tactility of late medieval popular piety. For him this was fleshly religion, ignoring the inner work of the Spirit which comes to the faithful through the mind and through pure use of the emotions: ‘The Spirit