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.

Page 23 of 253 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther also almost violently takes issue with Erasmus’s contention that one’s stance on free will is not important. For Luther, there is no doctrine more important, because for him this was the doctrine that determined how one read all the rest of the Bible. And if this one thing is properly understood, then we can sweep away all of the contrary suggestions in the Old Testament Scriptures that Erasmus cited. To say the question of free will is open to various interpretations is no different to Luther from saying the question of the bodily resurrection and the Incarnation are open to differing interpretations. Not only are they not open to different interpretations, but how we stand on these supremely vital issues determines all else. Thus Luther had worked hard to establish the clarity of this single doctrine beyond all doubt. For him, it is a treasure for emperor and peasant alike, for Kaiser and Karsthans. It is not a theological side issue; on the contrary, it is the one thing everyone can and must understand: without Jesus to save us utterly, we are utterly lost. With Jesus, we are saved. For Luther, all the flailing and the winnowing of his exegeses had produced these vital kernels that were meant to nourish mankind unto eternal life, and whatever contrary arguments Erasmus had put forth must be blown away like chaff. The contrasting stances of Luther and Erasmus are fascinating. That their simmering feud finally boiled over in Luther’s greatest work ended their communication, but not their private feuding. And for all his efforts to distance himself from Luther, the one final grunting shove that was De libero arbitrio still did not sufficiently distance him in the eyes of his most Roman critics, who forever saw him as suspiciously pro-Lutheran. For them, Erasmus’s important work was nonetheless too little, too late. And in 1559, when Pope Paul IV published the Vatican’s first Index of Prohibited Books, one certainly expected to find Martin Luther’s books there, and did, but if one looked closely, one would have seen Desiderius Erasmus’s were there too.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In 1920, Britain and France carved up the Middle East between them into protectorates and mandates. This colonial project only made a more silent process of Westernization official, since Europeans had been establishing a cultural and economic hegemony during the nineteenth century in the name of modernization. Technicalized Europe had become the leading power and was taking over the world. Trading posts and consular missions had been established in Turkey and the Middle East which had undermined the traditional structure of these societies long before there was actual Western rule. This was an entirely new kind of colonization. When the Moghuls had conquered India, the Hindu population had absorbed many Muslim elements into its own culture, but eventually the indigenous culture had made a comeback. The new colonial order transformed the lives of the subject people permanently, establishing a polity of dependence. It was impossible for the colonized lands to catch up. Old institutions had been fatally undermined, and Muslim society was itself divided between those who had become “Westernized” and the “others.” Some Muslims came to accept the European assessment of them as “Orientals,” lumped indiscriminately with Hindus and Chinese. Some looked down on their more traditional countrymen. In Iran, Shah Nasiruddin (1848–96) insisted that he despised his subjects. What had been a living civilization with its own identity and integrity was gradually being transformed into a bloc of dependent states that were inadequate copies of an alien world. Innovation had been the essence of the modernizing process in Europe and the United States: it could not be achieved by imitation. Today anthropologists who study modernized countries or cities in the Arab world such as Cairo point out that the architecture and plan of the city reflects domination rather than progress. 23 On their side Europeans had come to believe that their culture was not only superior at the present time but had always been in the van of progress. They often displayed a superb ignorance of world history. Indians, Egyptians and Syrians had to be Westernized for their own good. The colonial attitude was expressed by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1007: Sir Alfred Lyall once said to me: “Accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind. Every Anglo-Indian should always remember that maxim.” Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental mind. The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  And unlike the insistence on the sinfulness of human works, or the attack on indulgences, this was not a theological argument but 142 MARTIN LUTHER a simple demand for practical reform that could be taken up by ordi- nary people and would lead to far-reaching changes in every parish. Although Luther was careful to concede that those who were given only the bread still received the whole sacrament, the genie could not be put back in the bottle.®° It was the call for Communion in both kinds that popularised the early Reformation as parish after parish demanded to be given the wine as well as the bread. It was also a frontal attack on the status of the clergy as a separate, priestly estate, who therefore merited receiving the whole sacrament and not just the bread. It would only be a matter of time before Luther launched his attack on the nature of the priesthood itself. His criticisms of indulgences had attacked papal authority and the Church hierarchy; now, he was questioning something basic to every parishioner’s experience. Not only that, but he went on to attack brotherhoods, the most important of lay religious organisations, which underpinned the whole system of indulgences with the practice of Christians praying for each other to ensure salvation. These brotherhoods, Luther wrote, were nothing more than excuses for ‘gluttony, drunkenness, useless squan- dering of money, howling, yelling, chattering, dancing, and wasting of time . . . If a sow were made the patron saint of such a brother- hood she would not consent.’* Luther was beginning to develop a distinctive German prose style — vivid, energetic, bursting with repeated verbs, and as earthy as Bruegel’s pictures. There was a growing market for such writing. In the months after the Leipzig Debate, printing suddenly exploded. Between 1518 and 1525, publications by Luther in German exceeded those of the seven- teen next most prolific authors put together. Indeed, Luther alone was responsible for 20 per cent of all the works published in German presses between 1500 and 1530.* As a result of his efforts, printing became one of Wittenberg’s new industries, and it would eclipse Leipzig altogether: when Duke Georg decided against the Reforma- tion, and banned the printing of works by Luther, numbers of titles published there annually plummeted from an average of 140 to forty- three, to the consternation of Leipzig’s printers.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The political theory he had developed in 1523 in his tract On Secular Authority had distinguished between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God, which enabled him to argue that the Pope should not enjoy any temporal power. Because the power of princes belonged to this world, however, Christians should obey them, while it was the ruler’s duty to prevent the godless from attacking their fellow men. Luther clung to this neat apposition throughout his life. But it also left him without a positive account of what the state can do and how it might help its citizens, and it did not allow for a situation where a Christian or a Christian ruler would have to resist a superior authority. When the formation of the Schmalkaldic League finally forced him to consider that the emperor might have to be resisted, he abdicated responsibility, and left the matter for jurists to decide, eventually moving to a position that tacitly accepted the arguments for resistance. 46 At the same time, however, he was consistently disrespectful to princes himself, listing them in the same breath as beadles and hangmen, and mocking those he did not like at every opportunity, with brilliant insults. The man who railed against sedition and insisted on obedience to princes believed in his own authority as a prophet, and he thundered against the rulers from the sidelines. Perhaps Luther’s most lasting achievement was the German Bible. After the fevered translation of the New Testament in 1522, he worked with colleagues to produce the full Bible of 1534, illustrated with memorable images by Cranach. 47 It was not just that his prose shaped the German language, creating the modern vernacular as we know it. 48 Each book of the Bible was prefaced with a short and brilliantly clear introductory exegesis, so that the reader encountered the text through Luther’s understanding of it. And because his authorship was not clearly indicated, his explanation appeared indistinguishable from Scripture itself. Luther always maintained that the Word of God was absolutely plain and did not need interpretation, thus avoiding the question his very first opponents had raised: How do you decide between rival interpretations of biblical passages, and should not Church tradition therefore be the guide? His conviction that the Word of God was clear prompted ordinary people for centuries to come to read the Bible for themselves—even if Luther would not have always agreed with what they took from it. At the same time, his insistence on aligning his own authority with God’s Word helped give rise to a church of pastors who were theologically trained, academics whose authority rested on their intellectual command of religion, demonstrated in their sermons. At the heart of Luther’s theology lay his insistence that Christ was truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But another, more fundamental difference lay in the way the two men expressed themselves. Luther was as German as Germany itself, which is to say that there was a bluntness and a love of truth that sometimes came at the expense of comity. He cared about theological doctrine in a way that was sometimes ferocious and unyielding, and he obviously thought that it must be so, and that God would sort it all out in the end. But Erasmus was opposed to confrontation. He was more a wit than a theologian—in fact, he was not a theologian at all—and he was more an advocate of finesse and satire than blunt pronouncements or cutting japery. Erasmus’s indifference to theology per se is an important difference between them and would be the thing that led to their dramatic and public clash. His patron saint, for example, was the Thief on the Cross, who was saved without ever having heard about the Trinity or the Filioque clause—or even having heard that Jesus was fully man and fully divine. Erasmus would rather elide the details of many of these theological issues. They were simply not his focus. He endeavored to convey the basics of the faith to as wide an audience as possible. In fact, he was so intent on this that some of his writings were even translated into the Aztec language, as that society had been breached by the Europeans a few years earlier, in 1519. This is not to say that Luther did not wish to appeal to the common man, nor that he didn’t see this as a priority. On the contrary, what probably enabled him to succeed as he did was his almost uncanny ability to do this. His already remarkable talent at communicating directly with the average German in the pew was honed further yet in the years in which he preached often in Wittenberg. It is probably Luther’s astonishing intellectual wingspan—to be able to go from Greek and Latin translation and deep exegesis and scholarship to preaching candidly and clearly to the open-minded peasant—that marks him as a genius for the ages. He not only did not disdain the common man but positively hated those who did. He saw the obscurantism of Scholasticism and Aristotle as enemies of Christ and of those Christ loved and cared for. A comment on this subject is recorded from his Table Talk later in life. “Cursed are all the preachers that in the church aim at high and hard things,” he said, “and, neglecting the saving health of the poor unlearned people, seek their own honor and praise, and therewith to please one or two ambitious persons.” In a dedicatory preface to A Treatise on Good Works, Luther wrote,

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther likened those who trusted in works, like the Jews, to the sow that ‘is washed only to wallow in the mire’.® The Jews, he alleges, look for biblical truth ‘under the sow’s tail’, that is, their interpretation of the Bible comes from looking in a pig’s anus; they accuse Christians of stupidity which could not even be assigned to a sow, which ‘covers itself with mire from head to foot and does not eat anything much cleaner’; they defame Christian belief, ‘impelled by the Devil, to fall into this like filthy sows fall into the trough’. If they see a Jew, Christians should ‘throw sow dung at him . . . and chase him away’.* Luther calls for the secular authorities to burn down all the syna- gogues and schools, and ‘what won't burn should be covered over with earth, so that not a stone or piece of slag of it should be seen for all eternity’. The Jews’ houses should be destroyed and they should be put under one roof, like the gypsies. The Talmud and prayer books should be destroyed and Jewish teachers banned. They should be prevented from using the roads, usury banned, and the Jews forced to undertake physical labour instead. Assets from money- lending should be confiscated and used to support Jews who converted. This was a programme of complete cultural eradication.” And Luther meant it. When Melanchthon sent Philip of Hesse a copy of the text, he told him that it ‘truly’ contained ‘much useful teaching’. An electoral Saxon mandate of 1543 referred to Luther's ‘recent book’ as it ordered that anyone who encountered Jews should seize them and all their goods and report them to the authorities; they would be entitled to receive half of the confiscated goods as their reward.” Indeed, Luther’s violence was sometimes too much even for his contemporaries. Just a few weeks later, in early 1543 he produced Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of Christ), which the Swiss theologian Heinrich Bull- inger condemned, while Andreas Osiander in Nuremberg wrote privately to a Jewish friend of his in Venice to express his revulsion. But it was not repudiated by Lutherans and was reprinted in 1577, with Nikolaus Selnecker, an early biographer of Luther's, adding a preface that included scurrilous stories such as one about the Jews in HATREDS 393 Magdeburg who refused to come to the aid of a Jew who had fallen into a privy because it was the Sabbath. Vom Schem Hamphoras appeared again in 1617, the centenary year of the Reformation, alongside On the Jews and their Lies, as the headline work in this vicious potpourri.” This was Luther off the leash, and the text reads like a revelation of his inner fantasies. Luther again assaulted the rabbinic tradition of interpreting Scripture, arguing that the Jews were led by the Devil who is behind any invocation of magic.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On the way back, the two Augustinians stopped at Augsburg, where, Luther recalled, he was taken to meet the holy Anna “Laminit,” or “leave me not.” The daughter of simple craftspeople, she was believed to live miraculously without eating. This kind of religiosity—or what modern writers have termed “holy anorexia”—was a powerful streak in late medieval devotion, encouraged by an extreme asceticism that regarded bodily appetites as inimical to religious perfection. Female saints in particular might fast to extremes and undergo mystical experiences. In a church that was deeply distrustful of women, asceticism offered them an avenue of expression and authority. Laminit reported visions of St. Anna, her name saint and the saint to whom we know Luther himself was attached. Not only did she go without food, but she was famed as passing neither water nor stools. She had drawn people since 1498, and her following included rich Augsburg patricians. [image "11. Anna Laminit by Hans Holbein, 1511. On the left, the sketch is labeled “lamanätly”; on the right, in another sixteenth-century hand, “dz nit ist,” meaning “who is not”—in other words, who is a fraud." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_015_r1.jpg] [image "11. Anna Laminit by Hans Holbein, 1511. On the left, the sketch is labeled “lamanätly”; on the right, in another sixteenth-century hand, “dz nit ist,” meaning “who is not”—in other words, who is a fraud." file=images/Rope_9780812996203_epub3_015_r1.jpg] 11. Anna Laminit by Hans Holbein, 1511. On the left, the sketch is labeled “lamanätly”; on the right, in another sixteenth-century hand, “dz nit ist,” meaning “who is not”—in other words, who is a fraud. Luther shrewdly asked her whether she wanted to die, a question to which it would have been difficult to give a correct answer. As he remembered it, she replied, “No! There I don’t know how things work; here I do.” She was unmasked soon after by the duchess of Bavaria, who discovered her secret stash of luxury food, such as pepper cakes and pears; it turned out that she emptied her stools out of the window. It was also rumored that she had a child by a leading patrician and merchant. Laminit was consequently drummed out of town. For the later Luther, Laminit was a fraud, a “whore” and schemer, but whether he saw through her or not at the time we cannot know. It may be that he, like others, was already beginning to have doubts about this extreme and exhibitionistic mortification of the flesh, a skepticism that would color his later theology and that was fostered by his relationship with his confessor, Johann von Staupitz.46

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In both theology and temperaments the two men were fundamentally different. Luther came to insist on the primacy of Scripture as the source of all authority. Although Staupitz draws, like Luther, on Paul, he did not make such a radical claim and repeat- edly cited St Augustine and other Church Fathers.” Like Luther, he emphasised the sinful nature of human beings and argued that our works can never earn us salvation; he too criticised indulgences. But he did not have much to say about faith as a gift from God: his emphasis is more on the sinfulness of human beings than it is on God’s gift of grace or on the Bible. He focused on the emotional disposition of the believer, who has to be encouraged to leave attach- ments to this world behind. Luther, although highly attuned to his own religious emotions, did not believe that attaining a particular emotional state was spiritually important. Staupitz liked to talk about the ‘sweetness’ of God, the ‘sweet Saviour’, the ‘sweet bliss-maker’, the ‘sweet word’ and the ‘continuous sweetness’ of the mystical union of the soul with Christ.* This had its darker side. A brilliant preacher, his sermons were also laced with the anti-Semitism which was common currency at the time, and which Luther could also share, exploiting feeling against the Jews as persecu- tors to intensify emotional identification with Christ and Mary. So Staupitz describes Jews as ‘dogs’, who ‘spat at him [Christ] with all the filth that they could muster’, and believed that ‘the Jews sinned much more seriously than Pilate’ in killing Jesus because they did it out of ‘envy’. ‘All the world testifies to the envy of the Jews’, Staupitz wrote. ‘O you evil Jew! Pilate shows you that your nature is harsher than a pig, for it has mercy with its own kind.’ Staupitz’s German writing, different in literary quality from Luther's, draws on a long medieval tradition of devotional works written for laypeople by Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and the so-called ‘German Theology’. It often uses repetition to inculcate a state of meditative calm, and visual metaphors in order to grasp a spiritual truth. In Staupitz’s hands language is less an intellectual vehicle than a form of meditation, a means to mystical contemplation and dissolution of individuality. Luther never wrote in this manner. Once he had finally rejected the obligation to pray his ‘hours’, he also opposed what he described as ‘mummery’ — the simple and repeated mouthing of prayers.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  27 Court books from the period give some rare insight into what life was like in the world of mining. There were constant thefts of wood, ladders, and equipment from the shafts, and violence was never far away. 28 A man killed a prostitute in a brothel in nearby Hettstedt and was executed for it. Another slew a man and threw the body down a mine shaft—he too paid with his life—while a third attacked his own father, damaging his fist so seriously that he was unable to work. 29 Criminal law at the time mixed Roman law with older traditions that placed the emphasis on mediation. Thus murder could still be settled by paying the victim’s family compensation, though even so, between 1507 and 1509, at least three criminals were executed for murder. 30 There were constant quarrels between different groups of miners. The Haspeler, who wound the winches, hated the Sinker, who sank the shafts. The Sinker were mostly from Silesia and, scorning marriage, lived with girlfriends in houses near the mines where they also kept chickens and other livestock. 31 Mining was dangerous work. The tunnels that led off from the shafts were narrow, and miners had to work lying down on their bellies. There was little light. If the weather turned bad, the lamps would suddenly go out as sulfur gas accumulated in the mine shaft, poisoning any miners still below. It was believed that the gas was a product of the evil airs drawn from the brimstone and metals, rising in the tunnels and chilling men to death. 32 Mining was thirsty work, and as water was not drinkable, brewing was the town’s other major industry. Alcohol fueled quarrels, and since just about all men carried knives, fights tended to become bloody. Most brawls took place in taverns or drinking shops. 33 Luther’s own uncle, “Little Hans,” a wastrel who went from one pub brawl to another, would meet his death in a fracas at a drinking house in 1536. 34 People used whatever was to hand, grabbing the tavern lamps to bash an opponent, or hoisting the beer jugs to buffet an opponent about the head. Representing comradeship, these jugs also had symbolic significance: One man would insult another as not worthy to share a jug with a respectable man. 35 Drinking was surrounded with bonding rituals and there were competitive drinking games where a man had to stand his ground. One favorite required the use of the “pass glass,” ridged with bands separated by different widths, from which the drinker had to down his tipple exactly to the next ridge; the Luder family owned at least one of these. In such a pugilistic culture, insults were routine. One man might taunt another: “If you were born of a pious [that is, chaste] woman, come out and fight, but if you were born of a rogue, stay indoors.”

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  7 Even Lutheran loyalists were not immune to the attractions of such quasi-magical practice. Luther had to write a long letter to Jonas’s wife telling her that while it might seem like a good idea to read a gospel passage aloud as a cure, the fact that it had to be done at a certain place and time suggested that it was not pious but superstitious. One pastor refused to allow warm water for baptism because, he argued, it was a mixture of the elements of fire and water and therefore was not pure water—Luther made short shrift of this, telling him he should consult those who knew their philosophy. 8 The new pastors were meant to be theologically trained, but there were not enough of them, and in rural Saxony, local tradition and magical belief would not simply melt away in the face of university knowledge. Luther’s influence spread through his personal connections and was limited by them as well. They are thus highly important for understanding his achievements; not only friendships but also the many bitter fights with allies and enemies alike were integral to the nature and development of the Reform movement. Georg Witzel is a good example—a former acolyte, he turned on Luther and published a stinging attack in 1532, which tried to outdo his former mentor’s style. Luther, he wrote, “maintains, furthers and drives it all alone, and according to his brain, makes and unmakes, turns and reverses, says and lies, appoints and sacks everything according to his inclination and pleasure.” He was driven by his “raging, stormy, inconstant proud head, [and] bloodthirsty heart.” 9 Luther’s world was primarily focused on the university. He was at once part of Wittenberg society and yet he did not think of himself as an ordinary citizen, in the way that Zwingli, for example, had done in Zurich. His exemption from the Türkensteuer in 1542, a levy on every inhabitant of the Reich to finance the campaign against the Turks, was an evident demonstration of this. 10 Every other Wittenberg clergyman paid up without demur, but Luther was permitted to estimate the value of his properties himself, and the Elector paid the tax he owed. It is significant that in his letters from Coburg, Luther envisaged his son playing with Melanchthon’s and Jonas’s sons, or with the other children in the monastery—but not with those of the Wittenberg citizens. 11 His milieu consisted of those lodging with him, his acolytes and dependents, and the guests he invited to dinner. He called the members of the household—who would have numbered between forty and fifty people at any given time, including servants, lodgers, and visitors—his “Quirites,” a classical Latin term for Roman citizens.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Behind these two was the figure of Luther’s old antagonist Cochlaeus, now ensconced at Leipzig as Duke Georg’s chaplain. Taking the idea of mocking Luther’s marriage in drama to a whole new level, he wrote a vicious satirical play about the marriages of evangelical reformers, in which their wives reminisce about the wonderful times they enjoyed while their menfolk were away at the Imperial Diet. Luther appears as the stud whom all the other wives want to bed. Mrs. “Bishop of Altenburg,” Spalatin’s wife and a frightful snob, complains that no child will come of “kissing and cuddling,” and wants to borrow Luther for the night—in line with the reformer’s own advice that a woman who cannot conceive a child with her husband should lie with another, as Cochlaeus is not slow to point out.39 In the play’s final scene, Katharina tries to get Luther to go to bed with her, insisting that, as Paul says, she is the owner of his body and so he must be subject to her. Luther, impressed by her biblical knowledge, fears that she may have had recourse to another teacher—Cochlaeus insinuating that she had not been a virgin when she married Luther. —LUTHER’S remarkably uninhibited views about sexuality—and consequently marriage—were the result of his radical Augustinianism. If we can never do anything good, as all human acts are sinful, then sexual acts are no different or worse in kind than other types of sin. This gloomy anthropology paradoxically freed Luther to take a relaxed view of sexuality. Lust was part of human nature—it was how God had created mankind. Moreover, despite his decades of monastic observance, Luther believed that chastity could never be willed; indeed, we have no free will because we are always in bondage to the Devil. This was where Luther parted company with Karlstadt. Rooted in the tradition of the mythical theology of the Theologia deutsch, Karlstadt wanted his will to conform to that of the divine, leaving the flesh behind, escaping the body and ascending to a more spiritual plane of existence. Luther was moving away from any such ideas of self-perfection, and it was this rejection and his denial of a free will that led to his conflict with Erasmus.40

• From A History of God (1993)

  Coercing people to believe in orthodox doctrines seemed particularly appalling to an age increasingly enamored of liberty and freedom of conscience. The bloodbath unleashed by the Reformation and its aftermath seemed the final straw. Reason seemed the answer. Yet could a God drained of the mystery that had for centuries made him an effective religious value in other traditions appeal to the more imaginative and intuitive Christians? The Puritan poet John Milton (1608–74) was particularly disturbed by the Church’s record of intolerance. A true man of his age, he had attempted, in his unpublished treatise On Christian Doctrine , to reform the Reformation and to work out a religious creed for himself that did not rely upon the beliefs and judgments of others. He was also doubtful about such traditional doctrines as the Trinity, Yet it is significant that the true hero of his masterpiece Paradise Lost is Satan rather than the God whose actions he intended to justify to man. Satan has many of the qualities of the new men of Europe: he defies authority, pits himself against the unknown, and in his intrepid journeys from Hell, through Chaos to the newly created earth, he becomes the first explorer. Milton’s God, however, seems to bring out the inherent absurdity of Western literalism. Without the mystical understanding of the Trinity, the position of the Son is highly ambiguous in the poem. It is by no means clear whether he is a second divine being or a creature similar to, though of higher status than, the angels. At all events, he and the Father are two entirely separate beings who must engage in lengthy conversations of deep tedium to learn each other’s intentions, even though the Son is the acknowledged Word and Wisdom of the Father. It is, however, Milton’s treatment of God’s foreknowledge of events on earth that makes his deity incredible. Since of necessity God already knows that Adam and Eve will fall—even before Satan has reached the earth—he must engage in some pretty specious justification of his actions before the event. He would have no pleasure in enforced obedience, he explains to the Son, and he had given Adam and Eve the ability to withstand Satan. Therefore they could not, God argues defensively, justly accuse Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate; As if Predestination over-rul’d Thir will, dispos’d by absolute Decree Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed Thir own revolt; not I: if I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on thir fault, Which had no less prov’d certain unforeknown … I formed them free, and free they must remain, Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordaind Thir freedom; they themselves ordaind thir fall.

• From A History of God (1993)

  It would, above all, be as simple as possible. Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? that which tended to make men just without making them absurd? that which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism?… which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance and humanity? 21 The churches had only themselves to blame for this defiance, since for centuries they had burdened the faithful with a crippling number of doctrines. The reaction was inevitable and could even be positive. The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of God, however. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire. They rejected mysterious doctrines about him that were abhorrent to reason. But their belief in a Supreme Being remained intact. Voltaire built a chapel at Ferney with the inscription “Deo Erexit Voltaire” inscribed on the lintel and went so far as to suggest that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him. In the Philosophical Dictionary , he had argued that faith in one god was more rational and natural to humanity than belief in numerous deities. Originally people living in isolated hamlets and communities had acknowledged that a single god had control of their destinies: polytheism was a later development. Science and rational philosophy both pointed to the existence of a Supreme Being: “What conclusion can we draw from all this?” Voltaire asks at the end of his essay on “Atheism” in the Dictionary . He replies: That atheism is a monstrous evil in those who govern; and also in learned men even if their lives are innocent, because from their studies they can affect those who hold office; and that, even if it is not as baleful as fanaticism, it is nearly always fatal to virtue. Above all, let me add that there are fewer atheists today than there have ever been, since philosophers have perceived that there is no vegetative being without germ, no germ without design etc. 22 Voltaire equated atheism with the superstition and fanaticism that the philosophers were so anxious to eradicate. His problem was not God but the doctrines about him which offended against the sacred standard of reason. The Jews of Europe had also been affected by the new ideas. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), a Dutch Jew of Spanish descent, had become discontented with the study of Torah and had joined a philosophical circle of Gentile freethinkers.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Religion was a device used by the rich to oppress the poor and render them powerless. Christianity was distinguished by its particularly ludicrous doctrines, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation. His denial of God was meat too strong even for the philosophes . Voltaire removed the specifically atheistic passages and transformed the abbé into a Deist. By the end of the century, however, there were a few philosophers who were proud to call themselves atheists, though they remained a tiny minority. This was an entirely new development. Hitherto “atheist” had been a term of abuse, a particularly nasty slur to hurl at your enemies. Now it was just beginning to be worn as a badge of pride. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) had taken the new empiricism to its logical conclusion. There was no need to go beyond a scientific explanation of reality and no philosophical reason for believing anything that lay beyond our sense experience. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion , Hume disposed of the argument that purported to prove God’s existence from the design of the universe, arguing that it rested on analogical arguments that were inconclusive. One might be able to argue that the order we discern in the natural world pointed to an intelligent Overseer, but how, then, to account for evil and the manifest disorder? There was no logical answer to this, and Hume, who had written the Dialogues in 1750, wisely left them unpublished. Some twelve months earlier, the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–84) had been imprisoned for asking the same question in A Letter to the Blind for the Use of Those Who See , which introduced a full-blown atheism to the general public. Diderot himself denied that he was an atheist. He simply said that he did not care whether God existed or not. When Voltaire objected to his book, he replied: “I believe in God, although I live very well with the atheists.… It is … very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but to believe or not to believe in God is not important at all.” With unerring accuracy, Diderot had put his finger on the essential point. Once “God” has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, “he” does not exist. As Diderot pointed out in the same letter, it was pointless to believe in the God of the philosophers who never interferes with the affairs of the world. The Hidden God had become Deus Otiosus: “Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.” 66 He had come to the opposite conclusion to Pascal, who had seen the wager as of supreme importance and utterly impossible to ignore. In his Pensées Philosophiques , published in 1746, Diderot had dismissed Pascal’s religious experience as too subjective: he and the Jesuits had both been passionately concerned with God but had very different ideas about him. How to choose between them?

• From A History of God (1993)

  When they attributed their own human feelings and experiences to Yahweh, the prophets were in an important sense creating a god in their own image. Isaiah, a member of the royal family, had seen Yahweh as a king. Amos had ascribed his own empathy with the suffering poor to Yahweh; Hosea saw Yahweh as a jilted husband, who still continued to feel a yearning tenderness for his wife. All religion must begin with some anthropomorphism. A deity which is utterly remote from humanity, such as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, cannot inspire a spiritual quest. As long as this projection does not become an end in itself, it can be useful and beneficial. It has to be said that this imaginative portrayal of God in human terms has inspired a social concern that has not been present in Hinduism. All three of the God-religions have shared the egalitarian and socialist ethic of Amos and Isaiah. The Jews would be the first people in the ancient world to establish a welfare system that was the admiration of their pagan neighbors. Like all the other prophets, Hosea was haunted by the horror of idolatry. He contemplated the divine vengeance that the northern tribes would bring upon themselves by worshipping gods that they had actually made themselves: And now they add sin to sin, they smelt images from their silver, idols of their own manufacture, smith’s work, all of it. “Sacrifice to them,” they say. Men blow kisses to calves! 27 This was, of course, a most unfair and reductive description of Canaanite religion. The people of Canaan and Babylon had never believed that their effigies of the gods were themselves divine; they had never bowed down to worship a statue tout court . The effigy had been a symbol of divinity. Like their myths about the unimaginable primordial events, it had been devised to direct the attention of the worshipper beyond itself. The statue of Marduk in the Temple of Esagila and the standing stones of Asherah in Canaan had never been seen as identical with the gods but had been a focus that had helped people to concentrate on the transcendent element of human life. Yet the prophets frequently jeered at the deities of their pagan neighbors with a most unattractive contempt. These homemade gods, in their view, were nothing but gold and silver; they had been knocked together by a craftsman in a couple of hours; they had eyes that did not see, ears that did not hear; they could not walk and had to be carted about by their worshippers; they were brutish and stupid subhuman beings that were no better than scarecrows in a melon patch. Compared with Yahweh, the Elohim of Israel, they were elilim , Nothings.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In his treatise Why God Became Man , which we considered in Chapter 4 , he relies on logic and rational thought more than revelation—his quotations from the Bible and the Fathers seem purely incidental to the thrust of his argument, which, as we saw, ascribed essentially human motivation to God. He was not the only Western Christian to try to explain the mystery of God in rational terms. His contemporary Peter Abelard (1079–1147), the charismatic philosopher of Paris, had also evolved an explanation of the Trinity which emphasized the divine unity somewhat at the expense of the distinction of the Three Persons. He also developed a sophisticated and moving rationale for the mystery of the atonement: Christ had been crucified to awaken compassion in us and by doing so he became our Savior. Abelard was primarily a philosopher, however, and his theology was usually rather conventional. He had become a leading figure in the intellectual revival in Europe during the twelfth century and had acquired a huge following. This had brought him into conflict with Bernard, the charismatic abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Clairvaux in Burgundy, who was arguably the most powerful man in Europe. Pope Eugene II and King Louis VII of France were both in Bernard’s pocket, and his eloquence had inspired a monastic revolution in Europe: scores of young men had left their homes to follow him into the Cistercian order, which sought to reform the old Cluniac form of Benedictine religious life. When Bernard preached the Second Crusade in 1146, the people of France and Germany—who had previously been somewhat apathetic about the expedition—almost tore him to pieces in their enthusiasm, flocking to join the army in such numbers that, Bernard complacently wrote to the Pope, the countryside seemed deserted. Bernard was an intelligent man, who had given the rather external piety of Western Europe a new interior dimension. Cistercian piety seems to have influenced the legend of the Holy Grail, which describes a spiritual journey to a symbolic city that is not of this world but which represents the vision of God. Bernard heartily distrusted the intellectualism of scholars like Abelard, however, and vowed to silence him. He accused Abelard of “attempting to bring the merit of the Christian faith to naught because he supposes that by human reason he can comprehend all that is God.” 32 Referring to St. Paul’s hymn to charity, Bernard claimed that the philosopher was lacking in Christian love: “He sees nothing as an enigma, nothing as in a mirror, but looks on everything face to face.” 33 Love and the exercise of reason, therefore, were incompatible.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Such a “God” was nothing but tempérament . At this point, three years before the publication of A Letter to the Blind , Diderot did believe that science—and science alone—could refute atheism. He evolved an impressive new interpretation of the argument from design. Instead of examining the vast motion of the universe, he urged people to examine the underlying structure of nature. The organization of a seed, a butterfly or an insect was too intricate to have happened by accident. In the Pensées Diderot still believed that reason could prove the existence of God. Newton had got rid of all the superstition and foolishness of religion: a God who worked miracles was on a par with the goblins with which we frighten our children. Three years later, however, Diderot had come to question Newton and was no longer convinced that the external world provided any evidence for God. He saw clearly that God had nothing whatever to do with the new science. But he could only express this revolutionary and inflammatory thought in fictional terms. In A Letter to the Blind , Diderot imagined an argument between a Newtonian, whom he called “Mr. Holmes,” and Nicholas Saunderson (1682–1739), the late Cambridge mathematician who had lost his sight as a baby. Diderot makes Saunderson ask Holmes how the argument from design could be reconciled with such “monsters” and accidents as himself, who demonstrated anything but intelligent and benevolent planning: What is this world, Mr. Holmes, but a complex, subject to cycles of change, all of which show a continual tendency to destruction: a rapid succession of beings that appear one by one, flourish and disappear; a merely transitory symmetry and a momentary appearance of order. 67 The God of Newton, and indeed of many conventional Christians, who was supposed to be literally responsible for everything that happens, was not only an absurdity but a horrible idea. To introduce “God” to explain things that we cannot explain at present was a failure of humility. “My good friend, Mr. Holmes,” Diderot’s Saunderson concludes, “admit your ignorance.” In Diderot’s view there was no need of a Creator. Matter was not the passive, ignoble stuff that Newton and the Protestants imagined, but had its own dynamic which obeys its own laws. It is this law of matter—not a Divine Mechanick—which is responsible for the apparent design we think we see. Nothing but matter existed. Diderot had taken Spinoza one step further. Instead of saying that there was no God but nature, Diderot had claimed that there was only nature and no God at all. He was not alone in his belief: scientists such as Abraham Trembley and John Turbeville Needham had discovered the principle of generative matter, which was now surfacing as an hypothesis in biology, microscopy, zoology, natural history and geology.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Educated pagans looked to philosophy, not religion, for enlightenment. Their saints and luminaries were such philosophers of antiquity as Plato, Pythagoras and Epictetus. They even saw them as “sons of God”: Plato, for example, was held to have been the son of Apollo. The philosophers had maintained a cool respect for religion but saw it as essentially different from what they were doing. They were not dried-up academics in ivory towers but men with a mission, anxious to save the souls of their contemporaries by attracting them to the disciplines of their particular school. Both Socrates and Plato had been “religious” about their philosophy, finding that their scientific and metaphysical studies had inspired them with a vision of the glory of the universe. By the first century CE, therefore, intelligent and thoughtful people turned to them for an explanation of the meaning of life, for an inspiring ideology and for ethical motivation. Christianity seemed a barbaric creed. The Christian God seemed a ferocious, primitive deity, who kept intervening irrationally in human affairs: he had nothing in common with the remote, changeless God of a philosopher like Aristotle. It was one thing to suggest that men of the caliber of Plato or Alexander the Great had been sons of a god, but a Jew who had died a disgraceful death in an obscure corner of the Roman empire was quite another matter. Platonism was one of the most popular philosophies of late antiquity. The new Platonists of the first and second century were not attracted to Plato the ethical and political thinker but to Plato the mystic. His teachings would help the philosopher to realize his true self, by liberating his soul from the prison of the body and enabling him to ascend to the divine world. It was a noble system, which used cosmology as an image of continuity and harmony. The One existed in serene contemplation of itself beyond the ravages of time and change at the pinnacle of the great chain of being. All existence derived from the One as a necessary consequence of its pure being: the eternal forms had emanated from the One and had in their turn animated the sun, stars and moon, each in their respective sphere. Finally the gods, who were now seen as the angelic ministers of the One, transmitted the divine influence to the sublunary world of men. The Platonist needed no barbaric tales of a deity who suddenly decided to create the world or who ignored the established hierarchy to communicate directly with a small group of human beings. He needed no grotesque salvation by means of a crucified Messiah. Since he was akin to the God who had given life to all things, a philosopher could ascend to the divine world by means of his own efforts in a rational, ordered way.

• From A History of God (1993)

  To avoid this danger, the Traditionists came up with the time-honored distinction, used by both Jews and Christians, between God’s essence and his activities. They claimed that some of those attributes which enabled the transcendent God to relate to the world—such as power, knowledge, will, hearing, sight and speech, which are all attributed to al-Lah in the Koran—had existed with him from all eternity in much the same way as the uncreated Koran. They were distinct from God’s unknowable essence, which would always elude our understanding. Just as Jews had imagined that God’s Wisdom or the Torah had existed with God from before the beginning of time, Muslims were now developing a similar idea to account for the personality of God and to remind Muslims that he could not be wholly contained by the human mind. Had not the Caliph al-Mamum (813–832) sided with the Mutazilis and attempted to make their ideas official Muslim doctrine, this abstruse argument would probably have affected a mere handful of people. But when the caliph began to torture the Traditionists in order to impose the Mutazili belief, the ordinary folk were horrified by this un-Islamic behavior. Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855), a leading Traditionist who narrowly escaped death in al-Mamun’s inquisition, became a popular hero. His sanctity and charisma—he had prayed for his torturers—challenged the caliphate, and his belief in the uncreated Koran became the watchword of a populist revolt against the rationalism of the Mutazilah. Ibn Hanbal refused to countenance any kind of rational discussion about God. Thus when the moderate Mutazili al-Huayan al-Karabisi (d. 859) put forward a compromise solution—that the Koran considered as God’s speech was indeed uncreated but that when it was put into human words it became a created thing—Ibn Hanbal condemned the doctrine. Al-Karabisi was quite ready to modify his view again, and declared that the written and spoken Arabic of the Koran was uncreated in so far as it partook of God’s eternal speech. Ibn Hanbal, however, declared that this was unlawful too because it was useless and dangerous to speculate about the origin of the Koran in this rationalistic way. Reason was not an appropriate tool for exploring the unutterable God. He accused the Mutazilis of draining God of all mystery and making him an abstract formula that had no religious value. When the Koran used anthropomorphic terms to describe God’s activity in the world or when it said that God “speaks” and “sees” and “sits upon his throne,” Ibn Hanbal insisted that it be interpreted literally but “without asking how” (bila kayf). He can perhaps be compared to radical Christians like Athanasius, who insisted on an extreme interpretation of the doctrine of Incarnation against the more rational heretics. Ibn Hanbal was stressing the essential ineffability of the divine, which lay beyond the reach of all logic and conceptual analysis.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Somehow, that same month, Müntzer agreed to preach to Frederick’s brother Duke John and his son Duke John Frederick. They were passing through Allstedt and on July 13 summoned Müntzer to the castle there. His goal was to pull them into helping fulfill his supremely wiggy plans. Indeed, what Müntzer preached that day would have set anyone’s hair on fire. He invited the princes to whom he spoke to “step up boldly onto the cornerstone (Christ)”7 and use the swords they had been given to do God’s work. But what, precisely, was this work? Only wait, and Müntzer will tell you. It was to help him lead a revolution of the “elect,” and these elect must of course wipe out those who were not elect. And who would determine who was the elect? Müntzer thought he might take a crack at doing so. He would reveal his thinking by taking the book of Daniel as his preaching text. He declared to the seated nobles that Daniel was the prophet who interpreted the dreams of the king, and then he put himself forward as the Daniel of their own day, as the one chosen by God to do all the interpreting that needed doing. So if they only knew what was good for them and the universe, the Saxon princes should install him as their “Daniel.” Then he could boldly lead them into the conflagration at the End of All Time. Who could fail to be interested? And to seal the deal, he punctuated his message by howling that “the godless have no right to live except as the elect are willing to grant it to them.”8 But where did he come by this interpretation of the divine will? He twisted the Scriptures, which by definition can only be twisted away from God. In referring to the parable of the ten minas, which Jesus tells in Luke 19, Müntzer misread the context of the final line—“But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”9 In Müntzer’s self-aggrandizing version, these words are spoken not by the character in the story invented by Jesus but by Jesus himself. Thus Müntzer believed he had a biblical mandate to call for the slaughtering of all those who were not the elect. And then he threatened the Saxon princes, saying that if they would not step up and seize this moment, God would take their swords from them.