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 A History of God (1993)

  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. Few were prepared to make a final break with God, however. Even the philosophers who frequented the salon of Paul Heinrich, Baron of Holbach (1723–89), did not publicly espouse atheism, though they enjoyed open and frank discussion. From these debates came Holbach’s book The System of Nature: or Laws of the Moral and Physical World (1770), which became known as the bible of atheistic materialism. There was no supernatural alternative to nature, which, Holbach argued, was “but an immense chain of causes and effects which unceasingly flow from one another.” 68 To believe in a God was dishonest and a denial of our true experience. It was also an act of despair. Religion created gods because people could not find any other explanation to console them for the tragedy of life in this world.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Across the art table from me sits Pam, a strapping blond psychopath—a diagnosis she stays volubly pissed off about. Pam claims her broke-dick husband has slam-dunked her for partying with truckers at roadhouses, which is preferable to folding his effing socks and stuffing the faces of her five mouthy kids. In group therapy that day, Pam got called out for wearing a Please Kill Me T-shirt. This message terrorized the only guy on the ward, a schizophrenic kid named Willy. Willy has scarlet acne emblazoning both cheeks, as if he’s being continuously slapped from the inside. He’s at the next table hunched over watercolor paper, meticulously painting a Greek keyhole pattern using black ink and a brush made up of only a few hairs. Two seats down from him is beautiful Flora, whose raving red hair hangs a torch in any room she enters. Often screaming in psychosis, Flora spends a lot of time in a padded room, tied down by leather four-point restraints. Medicated into a stupor, Flora is that day, and a nurse helps her odd crafts projects of gluing together hunks of foam into a kind of arctic-looking city. Pam says, You know what we should call this? The Maniacs’ Art Club? Tina says. Crafts for Cunts, Pam says. Please don’t use that word, says skinny Betty. Lovely Betty with the swan neck and the shiny black hair. St. Betty of the Perpetually Ducked Head. Age about thirty, looks sixty. As a child, Betty was consistently raped by her famous professor father, which kept her ever after starving herself almost to death. She’s assembling a wreath of fragrant eucalyptus using shades of muted green with faded yellow roses. You’ve gotten really good at this, Betty, I say, and it’s true she’s found a meticulous but subtly tinted order. You should work in a florist’s shop, Tina says. What do you do, anyway, I mean, for a living? She shrugs. (I’d later find out she took care of the wheelchair-bound father who’d raped her.) Do you find it morbid, Tina says, that we’re making wreaths? What does that conjure for you? Wreaths make me think of Christmas, skinny Betty says. That is my least favorite time of year. I meant gravestones. You find them on gravestones, Tina says. Maybe they want us all dead, Pam says. Well the feeling’s mutual. I hate those bitches. Which ones? I want to know. All of them. I say, What’s not to like? They’re nothing if not nice. You’re like those people who fall in love with their kidnappers, Pam says. Like what’s-her-name. Who held up the bank. The rich bitch. Betty says, Patty Hearst. How many suicide attempts does everybody have? Tina blurts out. I have unlucky thirteen. People go around with their various numbers. I have only about half of one, I say. You’re bullshitting me, Tina says.

• From A History of God (1993)

  During the nineteenth century, one major philosopher after another rose to challenge the traditional view of God, at least the “God” who prevailed in the West. They were particularly offended by the notion of a supernatural deity “out there” which had an objective existence. We have seen that though the idea of God as the Supreme Being had gained ascendancy in the West, other monotheistic traditions had gone out of their way to separate themselves from this type of theology. Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians had all insisted in their different ways that our human idea of God did not correspond to the ineffable reality of which it was a mere symbol. All had suggested, at one time or another, that it was more accurate to describe God as “Nothing” rather than the Supreme Being, since “he” did not exist in any way that we could conceive. Over the centuries, the West had gradually lost sight of this more imaginative conception of God. Catholics and Protestants had come to regard “him” as a Being who was another reality added on to the world we know, overseeing our activities like a celestial Big Brother. Not surprisingly, this notion of God was quite unacceptable to many people in the postrevolutionary world, since it seemed to condemn human beings to an ignoble servitude and an unworthy dependence that was incompatible with human dignity. The atheistic philosophers of the nineteenth century rebelled against this God with good reason. Their criticisms inspired many of their contemporaries to do the same; they seemed to be saying something entirely new, yet when they addressed themselves to the question of “God,” they often unconsciously reiterated old insights by other monotheists in the past.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  —HOW had the former allies come to this? The answer lies in the efflorescence of reforming ideas in the two years since Luther had returned from the Wartburg, as the movement began to go in different directions beyond his control. After the defeat of the Wittenberg movement in 1522 and his own silencing, Karlstadt, who retained his post of archdeacon, had at first resumed his university position and kept a low profile. But he was isolated and treated with disdain by Melanchthon and others. Increasingly radical, he began to take a grim view of university life, arguing that academic work and degrees generated nothing but dissension and boastfulness. “What does one seek in the higher schools than to be honored by others?” he asked. “Therefore, one aspires to be a master, another a doctor and then a doctor of sacred Scripture.” University scholars “seek doctoral honors with such avarice and greed that they envy and persecute all other equal teaching.” All this was wrong because we “cannot…believe and trust God while we receive such honors.” This was an astonishing pronouncement by someone who had always relished disputations and the cut and thrust of debate. Now he castigated academic rituals: “on account of academic glory we kneel down, give money and set up festivities and costly meals to gain some clout with and earn respect from people.” Karlstadt drew the consequences and repudiated his doctoral title—although Luther studiously referred to him throughout his life as “Dr. Karlstadt.” It was country life and rural labor that now began to attract the man who had once insisted on his noble lineage, and he increasingly spent time outside Wittenberg, purchasing his own farm in Wörlitz.9 In yearning to be a farmer, Karlstadt was in step with the times. Peasants, so often regarded with contempt as rural boors, began to be idealized for their honest toil and simple evangelical faith. The figure whose remarkable success best encapsulated this mood was Diepold Peringer, the so-called peasant of Wöhrd. Peringer claimed that he could neither read nor write, but he preached inspirationally and published evangelical tracts. These were printed and circulated widely throughout Germany, often illustrated with a striking woodcut of a staunch peasant in stout boots, holding a flail and gesturing with his right hand like a preacher. These images were the more remarkable because they seemed to hark back to the revolutionary peasants of the Bundschuh organization in the late fifteenth century, which had united the peasants in rebellion under the sign of the peasant boot.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In 1141 Bernard summoned Abelard to appear before the Council of Sens, which he packed with his own supporters, some of whom stood outside to intimidate Abelard when he arrived. That was not difficult to do since, by this time, Abelard had probably developed Parkinson’s disease. Bernard attacked him with such eloquence that he simply collapsed and died the following year. It was a symbolic moment, which marked a split between mind and heart. In the Trinitarianism of Augustine, heart and mind had been inseparable. Muslim Faylasufs such as Ibn Sina and al-Ghazzali may have decided that the intellect alone could not find God, but they had both eventually envisaged a philosophy which was informed by the ideal of love and by the disciplines of mysticism. We shall see that during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the major thinkers of the Islamic world attempted to fuse mind and heart and saw philosophy as inseparable from the spirituality of love and imagination promoted by the Sufis. Bernard, however, seemed afraid of the intellect and wanted to keep it separate from the more emotional, intuitive parts of the mind. This was dangerous: it could lead to an unhealthy dissociation of sensibility that was in its own way just as worrying as an arid rationalism. The Crusade preached by Bernard was a disaster partly because it relied on an idealism that was untempered by common sense and was in flagrant denial of the Christian ethos of compassion. 34 Thus Bernard’s treatment of Abelard was conspicuously lacking in charity, and he had urged the Crusaders to show their love for Christ by killing the infidels, and driving them out of the Holy Land. Bernard was right to fear a rationalism that attempted to explain the mystery of God and threatened to dilute the religious sense of awe and wonder, but unbridled subjectivity that fails to examine its prejudices critically can lead to the worst excesses of religion. What was required was an informed and intelligent subjectivity, not an emotionalism of “love,” which represses the intellect violently and abandons the compassion which was supposed to be the hallmark of the religion of God. Few thinkers have made such a lasting contribution to Western Christianity as Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), who attempted a synthesis of Augustine and the Greek philosophy which had recently been made available in the West. During the twelfth century, European scholars had flocked to Spain, where they encountered Muslim scholarship. With the help of Muslim and Jewish intellectuals they undertook a vast translation project to bring this intellectual wealth to the West.

• From A History of God (1993)

  make a gigantic, exaggerated man, whom they will render illusory by dint of heaping together incompatible qualities. Human beings will never see in God, but a being of the human species, in whom they will strive to aggrandize the proportions, until they have formed a being totally inconceivable. History shows that it is impossible to reconcile the so-called goodness of God with his omnipotence. Because it lacks coherence, the idea of God is bound to disintegrate. The philosophers and scientists have done their best to save it but they have fared no better than the poets and theologians. The “hautes perfections” that Descartes claimed to have proved were simply the product of his imagination. Even the great Newton was “a slave to the prejudices of his infancy.” He had discovered absolute space and created a God out of the void who was simply “un homme puissant,” a divine despot terrorizing his human creators and reducing them to the condition of slaves.69 Fortunately the Enlightenment would enable humanity to rid itself of this infantilism. Science would replace religion. “If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.”70 There are no higher truths or underlying patterns, no grand design. There is only nature itself; Nature is not a work; she has always been self-existent; it is in her bosom that everything is operated; she is an immense laboratory, provided with the materials, and who makes the instruments of which she avails herself to act. All her works are the effects of her own energy, and of those agents or causes which she makes, which she contains, which she puts in action.71 God was not merely unnecessary but positively harmful. By the end of the century, Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827) had ejected God from physics. The planetary system had become a luminosity extending from the sun, which was gradually cooling. When Napoleon asked him: “Who was the author of this?” Laplace simply replied: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.” For centuries monotheists in each of the God-religions had insisted that God was not merely another being. He did not exist like the other phenomena we experience. In the West, however, Christian theologians had got into the habit of talking about God as though he really were one of the things that existed. They had seized upon the new science to prove the objective reality of God as though he could be tested and analyzed like anything else. Diderot, Holbach and Laplace had turned this attempt on its head and come to the same conclusion as the more extreme mystics: there was nothing out there. It was not long before other scientists and philosophers triumphantly declared that God was dead.

• 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. The goyim who worshipped them were fools and Yahweh hated them.28

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  In the face of the obvious facts of his environment he counseled against hatred, and his word is, “Love your enemies,… that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.” Why? Despite all the positive psychological attributes of hatred we have outlined, hatred destroys finally the core of the life of the hater. While it lasts, burning in white heat, its effect seems positive and dynamic. But at last it turns to ash, for it guarantees a final isolation from one’s fellows. It blinds the individual to all values of worth, even as they apply to himself and to his fellows. Hatred bears deadly and bitter fruit. It is blind and nondiscriminating. True, it begins by exercising specific discrimination. This it does by centering upon the persons responsible for the situations which create the reaction of resentment, bitterness, and hatred. But once hatred is released, it cannot be confined to the offenders alone. It is difficult for hatred to be informed as to objects when it gets under way. I remember that when I was an undergraduate in Atlanta, Georgia, a man came into the president’s office, in which I was the errand boy. The president was busy, so the man engaged me in conversation. Eventually he began talking about his two little boys. He said, among other things, “I am rearing my boys so that they will not hate Negroes. Do not misunderstand me. I do not love them, but I am wise enough to know that if I teach my boys to hate Negroes, they will end up hating white people as well.” Hatred cannot be controlled once it is set in motion. Some years ago a medical friend of mine gave me a physical examination. After weighing me he said, “You’d better watch your weight. You are getting up in years now, and your weight will have a bad effect on your vital organs.” He explained this in graphic detail. While he was talking, I chuckled; for, as I looked at him, I saw a man about 5 feet 4 inches in height who weighed 215 pounds. My friend, the doctor, thought his body knew that he was a doctor. But his body did not know he was a doctor; the only thing it knew was that he was accumulating more energy through his food than his body was able to consume. Hence his body did precisely what mine was doing. It stored energy in the form of fat. Hatred is like that. It does not know anything about the pressures exerted upon the weak by the strong. It knows nothing about the extenuating circumstances growing out of a period of national crisis, making it seemingly necessary to discipline men in hatred of other human beings. The terrible truth remains.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Like a pair of boxers, the two sides then went through tortuous semi-public arguments over judges, safe conducts, and where the debate should take place.” Leipzig was ruled by the Elector’s cousin Duke Georg of Saxony, known to be critical of indulgences and eager to stage the debate, although his attitude to Luther’s theology was as yet unclear. The nearest large town to Wittenberg, it was on a major trade route, and it was some distance away from Eck’s home ground of Ingolstadt. Wittenberg University’s connections with Leipzig dated back to its foundation, and many of its early staff were drawn from the older institution. Hence, from Luther’s point of view it seemed a good option, but he soon realised that he had chosen a particularly hostile environment. Eck’s ambition and aggression equalled Luther's own. Like Luther, Eck was sensitive to the envy of others, as his student Urbanus Rhegius had noticed. And as Luther would later be, Eck was already doubtful about Erasmus, northern Europe’s leading humanist; early in 1518, he had written to Erasmus criticising him for placing St Jerome’s authority above that of St Augustine.* Erasmus was by then at the height of his fame and his many followers did not take kindly to attacks on the Renaissance superstar. The young Justus Jonas — an Erfurt law graduate and later a prominent humanist and reformer — was one of those who made the pilgrimage to Antwerp to meet his idol, and wrote excitedly: ‘T was with my father in Christ Erasmus of Rotterdam, say it as much as you like, I was, I was, I was with Erasmus!” Writing critically to Erasmus was a calculated act, for Eck would have known that his letter would be passed around. Like Luther, therefore, he was delib- erately using irreverence to make a name for himself."° Luther’s private correspondence from this period was also peppered with deprecating remarks about Erasmus, and he would later write that Eck was more to his taste because at least he attacked the enemy openly, whereas Erasmus moved by stealth." Like Eck, Luther had little use for petty politeness. Unlike the monk from Wittenberg, however, Eck had experience in politics. He had been chosen to participate in the disputation about usury which took place in Augsburg in 1514-15. This was an issue of immense importance to the rich merchant families of southern Germany, as Church doctrine continued to prohibit the taking of 130 MARTIN LUTHER interest on risk-free money loans altogether. Money was different from other commodities, Thomas Aquinas had argued, because it was not consumed when it was used.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Feuerbach had put his finger on an essential weakness in the Western tradition which had always been perceived as a danger in monotheism. The kind of projection which pushes God outside the human condition can result in the creation of an idol. Other traditions had found various ways of countering this danger, but in the West it was unfortunately true that the idea of God had become increasingly externalized and had contributed to a very negative conception of human nature. There had been an emphasis on guilt and sin, struggle and strain in the religion of God in the West ever since Augustine, which was alien, for example, to Greek Orthodox theology. It is not surprising that philosophers such as Feuerbach or Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who had a more positive view of humanity, wanted to get rid of this deity which had caused widespread lack of confidence in the past. Atheism had always been a rejection of a current conception of the divine. Jews and Christians had been called “atheists” because they denied pagan notions of divinity, even though they had faith in a God. The new atheists of the nineteenth century were inveighing against the particular conception of God current in the West rather than other notions of the divine. Thus Karl Marx (1818–1883) saw religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature ... the opium of the people, which made this suffering bearable.” 16 Even though he adopted a Messianic view of history that was heavily dependent upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, he dismissed God as irrelevant. Since there was no meaning, value or purpose outside the historical process, the idea of God could not help humanity. Atheism, the negation of God, was also a waste of time. Yet “God” was vulnerable to the Marxist critique, since he had often been used by the establishment to approve a social order in which the rich man sat in his palace while the poor man sat at its gate. This was not true of the whole of monotheistic religion, however. A God who condoned social injustice would have appalled Amos, Isaiah or Muhammad, who had used the idea of God to quite different ends that were quite close to the Marxist ideal. Similarly, the literal understanding of God and scripture made the faith of many Christians vulnerable to the scientific discoveries of the period.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  45 A highly emotional account of the Kerbala story, the Rawdat ash-Shuhada by the Iraqi Shii Waiz Kashift (d. 1504), was recited at special meetings known as rawda-khani (“recitals of the Rawdat”), while the people wailed and cried aloud. The rituals had always had a revolutionary potential, demonstrating as they did the willingness of the people to fight tyranny to the death. Now, however, instead of encouraging the masses to see Husain as an example, Majlisi and his clergy taught them to see the Imam as a patron who could secure their admission to paradise if they showed their devotion to him by lamenting his death. The rituals now endorsed the status quo, urging the people to curry favor with the powerful, and look only to their own interests. 46 It was an emasculation and a degradation of the old Shii ideal; it also bowdlerized the conservative ethos. Instead of helping people to attune themselves to the basic laws and rhythms of existence, the cult was simply used to keep the masses in line. It was a development that showed in quite a different way how destructive political power could be to religion. One of Majlisi’s chief targets was the school of mystical philosophy developed in Isfahan by Mir Dimad (d. 1631) and his pupil, Mulla Sadra (d. 1640), a thinker who would have a profound influence on future generations of Iranians. 47 Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra were both utterly opposed to the new intransigence of some of the ulema. They saw it as a total perversion of the Shiah, and, indeed, of all religion. In the old days, when the Shiis had searched for hidden meanings in scripture, they had implicitly acknowledged that divine truth was illimitable, fresh insights were always possible, and no single interpretation of the Koran could suffice. For Mir Dimad and Mulla Sadra, true knowledge could never be a matter of intellectual conformity. No sage or religious authority, however eminent, could claim a monopoly of truth. They also expressed clearly the conservative conviction that mythology and reason were both essential for a full human life: each was diminished unless complemented by the other. Mir Dimad was a natural scientist as well as a theologian. Mulla Sadra criticized both the ulema, for belittling the insights of mystical intuition, and the Sufis, for decrying the importance of rational thought. The true philosopher had to become as rational as Aristotle, but must then go beyond him in an ecstatic, imaginative apprehension of truth.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For Kookists, the return of even one inch of the sacred land would be a victory for the forces of evil. And they found, to their surprise, that they had secular allies. Shortly after the war, a group of distinguished Israeli poets, professors, retired politicians, and army officers had formed the Land of Israel Movement to prevent the government from making any territorial concessions. Over the years, the Movement helped the Kookists to formulate their ideology in a way that would appeal to the public, and gave them financial and moral support. Gradually, the Kookists were being drawn into the mainstream. In April 1968, Moshe Levinger led a small group of Kookists and their families to celebrate Passover in Hebron, the city where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are thought to be buried. Since Muslims also venerate these Jewish patriarchs as great prophets, Hebron was a holy city for them too. For centuries, Palestinians had called Hebron al-Khalil, because of its sacred associations with Abraham, the “friend” of God. But Hebron also evoked darker memories. On August 24, 1929, during a period of great tension between Arabs and Zionists in Palestine, fifty-nine Jewish men, women, and children had been massacred in Hebron. Levinger and his party checked into the Park Hotel, pretending to be Swiss tourists, but when Passover was over they refused to leave and stayed on as squatters. This was embarrassing for the Israeli government, since the Geneva conventions forbade any settlement in territory occupied during hostilities, and the United Nations was demanding that Israel withdraw from the land they had conquered. But the chutzpa of the Kookists reminded Laborites of their own pioneers in their Golden Age, and the government was, therefore, reluctant to evict them. 92 Levinger’s group immediately went on the offensive in the Cave of the Patriarchs. After the Six Day War, the Israeli military government had opened the shrine, which had been closed during the hostilities, for worship once again, making special arrangements for Jews to pray there without disturbing the Arabs. This was not good enough for the Jewish settlers, who began to press for more space and time in the Cave. They would refuse to leave on Fridays in time to let the Muslims in for their weekly communal prayer; sometimes they would leave the halls, but block the main entrance, so that the Muslim worshippers could not get in; they would hold a kiddush in the Cave, drinking wine, which they knew the Muslims would find offensive, and, on Independence Day 1968, they flew the Israeli flag at the shrine, in defiance of government regulations. Tension escalated and—inevitably, perhaps—a hand grenade was thrown at some Jewish visitors by a Palestinian outside the mosque. 93 Reluctantly, the Israeli government established an enclave for the settlers outside Hebron; the new settlement was protected by the IDF. Levinger called it Kiryat Arba (the biblical name for Hebron) and it has remained a bastion for the most extreme, violent, and provocative Zionist fundamentalists.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This spirit of tolerance and cooperation was strikingly demonstrated in the policies of Akbar, the third Moghul emperor, who reigned from 1560 to 1605 and who respected all faiths. Out of sensitivity to the Hindus, he became a vegetarian, gave up hunting—a sport he greatly enjoyed—and forbade the sacrifice of animals on his birthday or in the Hindu holy places. In 1575 he founded a House of Worship, where scholars from all religions could meet to discuss God. Here, apparently, the Jesuit missionaries from Europe were the most aggressive. He founded his own Sufi order, dedicated to “divine monotheism” (tawhid-e-ilahi), which proclaimed a radical belief in the one God who could reveal himself in any rightly guided religion. Akbar’s own life was eulogized by Abulfazl Allami (1551–1602) in his Akbar-Namah (The Book of Akbar), which attempted to apply the principles of Sufism to the history of civilization. Allami saw Akbar as the ideal ruler of Falsafah and the Perfect Man of his time. Civilization could lead to universal peace when a generous, liberal society was created by a ruler like Akbar who made bigotry impossible. Islam in its original sense of “surrender” to God could be achieved by any faith: what he certainly called “Muhammad’s religion” did not have the monopoly of God. Not all Muslims shared the vision of Akbar, however, and many saw him as a danger to the faith. His tolerant policy could only be sustained while the Moghuls were in a position of strength. When their power began to decline and various groups began to revolt against the Moghul rulers, religious conflicts escalated among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. The emperor Aurengzebe (1618–1707) may have believed that unity could be restored by greater discipline within the Muslim camp: he enacted legislation to put a stop to various laxities like wine-drinking, made cooperation with Hindus impossible, reduced the number of Hindu festivals and doubled the taxes of Hindu merchants. The most spectacular expression of his communalist policies was the widespread destruction of Hindu temples. These policies, which had completely reversed the tolerant approach of Akbar, were abandoned after Aurengzebe’s death, but the Moghul empire never recovered from the destructive bigotry he had unleashed and sanctified in the name of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  But Jews, Christians and Muslims who punctiliously attend divine services yet denigrate people who belong to different ethnic and ideological camps deny one of the basic truths of their religion. It is equally inappropriate for people who call themselves Jews, Christians and Muslims to condone an inequitable social system. The God of historical monotheism demands mercy not sacrifice, compassion rather than decorous liturgy. There has often been a distinction between people who practice a cultic form of religion and those who have cultivated a sense of the God of compassion. The prophets fulminated against their contemporaries who thought that temple worship was sufficient. Jesus and St. Paul both made it clear that external observance was useless if it was not accompanied by charity: it was little better than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Muhammad came into conflict with those Arabs who wanted to worship the pagan goddesses alongside al-Lah in the ancient rites, without implementing the compassionate ethos that God demanded as a condition of all true religion. There had been a similar divide in the pagan world of Rome: the old cultic religion celebrated the status quo, while the philosophers preached a message that they believed would change the world. It may be that the compassionate religion of the One God has only been observed by a minority; most have found it difficult to face the extremity of the God-experience with its uncompromising ethical demands. Ever since Moses brought the tablets of the Law from Mount Sinai, the majority have preferred the worship of a Golden Calf, a traditional, unthreatening image of a deity they have constructed for themselves, with its consoling, time-honored rituals. Aaron, the high priest, presided over the manufacture of the golden effigy. The religious establishment itself is often deaf to the inspiration of prophets and mystics who bring news of a much more demanding God. God can also be used as an unworthy panacea, as an alternative to mundane life and as the object of indulgent fantasy. The idea of God has frequently been used as the opium of the people. This is a particular danger when he is conceived as an-other Being—just like us, only bigger and better—in his own heaven, which is itself conceived as a paradise of earthly delights. Yet originally, “God” was used to help people to concentrate on this world and to face up to unpleasant reality. Even the pagan cult of Yahweh, for all its manifest faults, stressed his involvement in current events in profane time, as opposed to the sacred time of rite and myth. The prophets of Israel forced their people to confront their own social culpability and impending political catastrophe in the name of the God who revealed himself in these historical occurrences. The Christian doctrine of Incarnation stressed the divine immanence in the world of flesh and blood.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Frank was not a Kabbalist but preached a cruder version of Cardazo’s theology. He believed that each of the three parzufim of the Sabbatarian Trinity would be represented on earth by a different Messiah. Shabbetai Zevi, whom Frank used to call “The First One,” had been the incarnation of “the Good God,” who was Cardazo’s Atika Kadisha (the Holy Ancient One); he himself was the incarnation of the second parzuf, the God of Israel. The third Messiah, who would incarnate the Shekinah, would be a woman whom Frank called “the Virgin.” At present, the world was in thrall to evil powers, however. It would not be redeemed until men had adopted Frank’s nihilistic gospel. Jacob’s ladder was in the shape of a V: to ascend to God, one had first to descend to the depths like Jesus and Shabbetai: “This much I tell you,” Frank declared, “Christ, as you know, said that he had come to redeem the world from the power of the devil, but I have come to redeem it from all the laws and customs that have ever existed. It is my task to annihilate all this so that the Good God can reveal himself.”51 Those who wished to find God and liberate themselves from the evil powers had to follow their leader step by step into the abyss, violating all the laws that they held most sacred: UI say to you that all who would be warriors must be without religion, which means that they must reach freedom under their own powers.”52

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  28 Halfway Home …Everyone I met Wore part of my destiny like a carnival mask. “I’m Bartleby the Scrivener,” I told the Italian waiter. “Me, too,” he replied. —Charles Simic, “St. Thomas Aquinas” R ather than rejoice about the grant, I start to steel myself against the ceremony now rushing toward me like a jail on wheels. David and Jack convince me to join their Sunday study group at a shambling halfway house. The place sits on hospital grounds across from a methadone dispensary. A favorite joke of the residents is to use magic markers to manufacture a closed sign on the clinic, so eventually the panicked methadone addicts holler and pound the door. Walking into the house, I expect to find tattooed thugs and strippers and former felons, which I do. But most are working stiffs, plus a professor. There’s even a disbarred lawyer who’d once passed out in a snow bank and woke in a hospital with neither hand nor foot—the blackened appendages having been amputated—a fairly common injury among the homeless, it turns out. On my first afternoon there, David bends over a former hooker’s study guide for her high school equivalency exam, and I see the hooker later help a Boston banker handle his own toddler during a visit—the same unlikely, democratic exchange of skills as my Cambridge meeting. The house director is a woman I hate on sight: a stork-thin blonde with manners that strike me as prissy, like she’s instituting a no-cussing rule for the house, for one: say a bad word, you chip in a buck to the party fund. Save for a slightly spastic right hand, she looks like a runway model, being nearly six feet tall with long hair the color of sunflowers. In the recovery community, she’s legendary. Mother Teresa with altitude, I overhear one resident say. She did biochemical research for NASA before her career in chemical dependency. The white Mustang convertible she drives has a high-test engine, and I once heard a felon remark she looks like a dentist’s wife, i.e., never done a day’s work in her life and somebody always taking care of her teeth. Her name is Deb, and when I whine about how hard it is not to drink on afternoons alone with Dev, she invites the two of us to stop by the house for a snack. I can bring a video for him. She’ll even personally counsel me if she has time. Fat chance, I think at first, but the lure of a sober hangout proves too great to stay away. The writers I once passed flasks of vodka back and forth with have been scarce since I pledged off. On Dev’s first visit to the house, he passes two residents exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke, transfixed by a Thai kickboxing movie. I tuck Dev’s head under my coat, and he says, What’re they watching? Grown-up show, I say.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty. They are often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they may admit the truth.24 One of the “problems” that had to be overcome was Islam. A negative image of the Prophet Muhammad and his religion had developed in Christendom at the time of the Crusades and had persisted alongside the anti-Semitism of Europe. During the colonial period, Islam was viewed as a fatalistic religion that was chronically opposed to progress. Lord Cromer, for example, decried the efforts of the Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh, arguing that it was impossible for “Islam” to reform itself.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  By marrying such a young woman, he was also following noble conventions. While townswomen were usually ten years older at marriage, young brides were more common in noble circles. Even so, the difference in age was striking: Karlstadt was aged thirty-five, almost a generation older than the bride. It is unclear how they met but she probably had connections to Wittenberg, because Luther said that he ‘knew the girl’, when he welcomed the news of the engagement from the Wartburg.” It was a bold choice on her part too, for although Karlstadt was not a monk, he was a cleric. The very idea of a priest’s wife was radically new; those who lived with priests had previously been denounced as priests’ whores, excluded from honourable society, and their children considered bastards. Indeed, not everyone hailed the wedding. A pamphlet of a mock ‘wedding Mass’ was published, which called Karlstadt a ‘fish- erman of wives’ when he should have been, like the disciples of Jesus, a fisher of men.” A man who liked to give splendid parties, Karlstadt spent fifty guilders on the wedding feast held on 19 January, even travelling to KARLSTADT AND THE CHRISTIAN CITY OF WITTENBERG 225 Leipzig for special spices: he clearly intended the banquet to be a public statement. There was a large guest list, including the whole town council and the university, while his invitation to the Elector was even printed. Spiteful stories about the wedding soon circulated among the Reformation’s opponents. Cochlaeus told the tale of Karl- stadt’s neighbour who was asked to procure the prized game for the wedding feast, and killed ‘the miller’s donkey’ instead. The guests only discovered what they were eating when they came across its cloven hooves.” The pace of reform in Wittenberg further accelerated. On 6 January 1522, the Augustinian order met in the town. From the sidelines, Luther had written to Linck and Lang, admonishing them to follow the gospel and support reform.

• From A History of God (1993)

  If space was unchangeable and infinite—two cardinal features of the system—where did God fit in? Was not space itself somehow divine, possessing as it did the attributes of eternity and infinity? Was it a second divine entity, which had existed beside God from before the beginning of time? Newton had always been concerned about this problem. In the early essay De Gravitatione et Aequipondio Fluidorum, he had returned to the old Platonic doctrine of emanation. Since God is infinite, he must exist everywhere. Space is an effect of God’s existence, emanating eternally from the divine omnipresence. It was not created by him in an act of will but existed as a necessary consequence or extension of his ubiquitous being. In the same way, because God himself is eternal, he emanates time. We can, therefore, say that God constitutes that space and time in which we live and move and have our being. Matter, on the other hand, was created by God on the day of creation by a voluntary act. One could perhaps say that he had decided to endow some parts of space with shape, density, perceptibility and mobility. It was possible to stand by the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing because God had brought forth material substance from empty space: he had produced matter out of the void. Like Descartes, Newton had no time for mystery, which he equated with ignorance and superstition. He was anxious to purge Christianity of the miraculous, even if that brought him into conflict with such crucial doctrines as the divinity of Christ. During the 1670s he began a serious theological study of the doctrine of the Trinity and came to the conclusion that it had been foisted on the Church by Athanasius in a specious bid for pagan converts. Arius had been right: Jesus Christ had certainly not been God, and those passages of the New Testament that were used to “prove” the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation were spurious. Athanasius and his colleagues had forged them and added them to the canon of scripture, thus appealing to the base, primitive fantasies of the masses: “Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, & for that reason to like best what they understand least.” 14 To expunge this mumbo jumbo from the Christian faith became something of an obsession for Newton. In the early 1680s, shortly before publishing the Principia, Newton began work on a treatise which he called The Philosophical Origins of Gentile Theology. This argued that Noah had founded the primordial religion—a Gentile theology—which had been free of superstition and had advocated a rational worship of one God. The only commandments were love of God and love of neighbor. Men were commanded to contemplate Nature, the only temple of the great God. Later generations had corrupted this pure religion, with tales of miracles and marvels.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. 20 Not only is it difficult to respect this shoddy thinking, but God comes across as callous, self-righteous and entirely lacking in the compassion that his religion was supposed to inspire. Forcing God to speak and think like one of us in this way shows the inadequacies of such an anthropomorphic and personalistic conception of the divine. There are too many contradictions for such a God to be either coherent or worthy of veneration. The literal understanding of such doctrines as the omniscience of God will not work. Not only is Milton’s God cold and legalistic, he is also grossly incompetent. In the last two books of Paradise Lost, God sends the Archangel Michael to console Adam for his sin by showing him how his descendants will be redeemed. The whole course of salvation history is revealed to Adam in a series of tableaux, with a commentary by Michael: he sees the murder of Abel by Cain, the Flood and Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the call of Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law on Sinai.