Contempt

Passages

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

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

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

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

  important Italian city of Turin around 816, considering that his views might be useful for diplomatic negotiations with the Eastern Emperor Leo V, who was now once more promoting iconophobic policies. Claudius had little reverence for the papacy; he frequently attacked all images of the human form, pilgrimages and relics and the whole cult of the saints, and even veneration of the Cross, the symbol which still meant so much to the Eastern iconoclasts – he actually destroyed crosses in the churches of his diocese. In a sneer of portmanteau offensiveness, he characterized pilgrims as ‘ignorant sort of people who in order to obtain eternal life, want to go straight to Rome, and esteem any spiritual understanding of less account’. Despite condemnation by the Pope and censure by a synod of Frankish bishops, he died unabashed and in possession of his diocese, still protected by his patron the Frankish Emperor Louis, but a volume of hostile comment on his works continued to swell, and he was increasingly seen as a heretic, although his commentaries went on being read. Even in his lifetime, Claudius recognized that he was going against the popular mood in his diocese: pilgrimages and shrines were going to survive his biliousness, and the Frankish rulers would not stand against the tide.56 The medieval Western Church became as fixated on visual images as Easterners, and given its alternative numbering of the Ten Commandments, it had no inhibitions about continuing to develop a vigorous tradition of figural sculpture. Statues rather than icons became the centre of Latin Western devotion, particularly in cults of Our Lady (see pp. 394–5). Moreover, Westerners improved on the terminology of Nicaea, while still recognizing that subtleties could be expressed so much more neatly in Greek than in Latin: they replaced proskynēsis with another Greek word for veneration, dulia. By the thirteenth century, the growth of devotion to Mary, the Mother of God, in both East and West led John of Damascus’s admirer Thomas Aquinas to formalize a further refinement: the concept of an exceptional sort of veneration, hyperdulia, offered to the greatest of God’s creations, Mary, the mother of Jesus. It was only in the sixteenth century that Protestants who hated images rediscovered Claudius of Turin, the Council of Frankfurt and the Libri Carolini, and gleefully resurrected them to demonstrate that Protestantism was saying nothing new. The first printed edition of the Frankish bishop’s Libri Carolini was published in 1549 by another reform-minded French bishop, Jean du Tillet; he was a friend of John Calvin, and Calvin was quick to exploit the sensational find. Roman Catholics lamely protested that Calvinists had made it up.57 The conclusions of Nicaea II therefore remained contested, partly because Empress Irene’s rule proved controversial and in most respects unsuccessful, ending in her deposition and exile – her blinding of her son was certainly one

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  To this day, Zionism and the Jewish state which the movement would create have been more divisive in the Jewish world than modernity itself. A response to Zionism and the State of Israel, for or against, would become the motive power of every form of Jewish fundamentalism.40 It is largely through Zionism that secular modernity has entered Jewish life and changed it forever. This is because the first Zionists were brilliantly successful in turning the Land of Israel, one of the holiest symbols of Judaism, into a rational, mundane, practical reality. Instead of contemplating it mystically or halakhically, the Zionists settled the Land physically, strategically, and militarily. For the vast majority of the Orthodox, in these early years, this was to trample blasphemously upon a sacred reality. It was a deliberate act of profanation that defied centuries of religious tradition. For the secular Zionists were quite blatant about their rejection of religion. Their movement was indeed a rebellion against Judaism. Many of them were atheists, socialists, Marxists. Very few of them observed the commandments of the Torah. Some of them positively hated religion, which they thought had failed the Jewish people by encouraging them to sit back passively and wait for the Messiah. Instead of helping them to struggle against persecution and oppression, religion had inspired Jews to retreat from the world in strange mystical exercises or the study of arcane texts. The spectacle of Jews weeping and clinging to the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the last relic of the ancient Temple, filled many Zionists with dismay. This apparently craven dependence upon the supernatural was the obverse of everything that they were trying to achieve. The Zionists wanted to create a fresh Jewish identity, a New Jew, liberated from the unhealthy, confining life of the ghetto. The New Jew would be autonomous, the controller of his own destiny in his own land. But this quest for roots and self-respect amounted to a declaration of independence from Jewish religion.

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

  Emperor in his last years – the most remarkable feature having been the pardon granted to Arius – and they also gained support from a succession of emperors who came after him in the East when the imperial power was divided once more. At the height of their success they managed to harry and make fugitives out of most of their opponents in the Church’s leadership. Chief among these was Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who allied ruthlessness to an acute theological mind. Athanasius was fixedly determined to defend the doctrinal consensus on the nature of divinity achieved at Nicaea (although it is noticeable that even he was very cautious about using the term homoousios until around 350). He had an ear for a memorable phrase which would stick in the mind: the equality of Son and Father was ‘like the sight of two eyes’.63 At the heart of his thinking was a potent and paradoxical idea which he inherited from Irenaeus, one that has been much echoed since, particularly in the Orthodox world, and sums up the fascination of Christianity’s idea of an incarnate God: the Son of God ‘has made us sons of the Father, and deified men by becoming himself man’.64 Athanasius was also a genius at categorizing in order to damn: he styled all those who disagreed with him ‘Arians’, and the term has stuck. In the end, many of his opponents in the next generation were prepared to wear the label with pride.65 In the course of the struggle, some Arians became ever more extreme, saying that the Son was actually unlike the Father (hence their being called ‘Anomoeans’ in Greek, or ‘Dissimilarians’ in Latin). In reaction, a middle party was concerned to unite as much of the Church as it could, and backed the formulation of creeds which said merely that the Son is ‘like’ the Father (from which comes the party’s name ‘Homoean’, from the Greek word homoios for ‘like’). Its greatest triumph was to win the backing of the Emperor Constantius II, who through his military victories reunited the whole empire, and who was therefore able in 359, after much negotiation and previous drafting, to dictate a Homoean formula to two councils representing East and West. This statement, an effort to settle the dispute once and for all, was named the Creed of Ariminum after the Western council which was steamrollered into accepting it. In the end it failed to stick, and survived only as a rallying statement of those who came to think of themselves as Arians.66 Maybe the Homoean formula of Ariminum would have succeeded in uniting the Church if Constantius had not unexpectedly died in his mid-forties in 361. He had been leading an army to defend himself against his cousin, the Caesar Julian, who was propelled by Constantius’s death as sole emperor on to the imperial throne. Christianity was now thrown into confusion as Julian, whom Christians subsequently angrily labelled ‘the Apostate’, startlingly abandoned

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Yet both Pentecostalists and fundamentalists were reacting, in their different ways, to the fact that by the early decades of the twentieth century, Western discourse had reached an unprecedented complexity. At the Scopes trial, Bryan had fought for the “common sense” of ordinary folk and tried to strike a blow against the tyranny of the experts and the specialists. The Pentecostalists were revolting against the hegemony of reason, but, like the fundamentalists, were insisting on the right of the least educated people to speak out and make their voices heard. True to their exclusive and condemnatory piety, the fundamentalists hated the Pentecostalists. Warfield argued that the age of miracles had ceased; the Pentecostalists were as bad as the Roman Catholics in their belief that God overturned the laws of nature on a regular basis today. The unreason of the Pentecostalists was an affront to the scientific and verbal control that the fundamentalists were seeking to exert over faith, in their struggle to ensure its survival in a world that seemed hostile to it. Other fundamentalists accused the Pentecostalists of superstition and fanaticism; one went so far as to call the movement “the last vomit of Satan.”52 This vituperative and judgmental strain was one of the most unattractive traits of the new Protestant fundamentalism, and, after the Scopes Trial, this condemnatory attitude, which is so far from the spirit of the Gospels, would become even more marked. But, despite their differences, both the fundamentalists and the Pentecostalists were trying to fill the void left by the victory of reason in the modern Western world. In their emphasis upon love and their wariness of doctrine, the Pentecostalists were closer to the middle-class liberal Protestants at this early stage, though later in the century, as we shall see, some would be drawn into the more extreme, hard-line fundamentalist camp and would lose their sense of the primacy of charity.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like New Light Protestantism, Hasidism became a mass movement in opposition to the religious establishment; Hasidim formed their own congregations, just as the New Lights had established their own churches. Both were popular movements with folk elements. Just as the radical Protestants castigated the elite for relying on their learning and theological expertise, the Hasidim reviled the arid Torah scholarship of the rabbis. The Besht declared that prayer must take precedence over the study of Torah, a revolutionary step. For centuries, Jews had accepted the authority of a rabbi based on his Torah learning, but because the rabbis seemed to have retreated from the urgent social problems of the community into the sacred texts, the Hasidim denounced this trivializing scholarship, even though they studied sacred texts themselves in their own way. New Light Protestantism had been a modernizing spirituality, however, while Hasidism was a typically conservative reform movement. Its spirituality was mythical, based on the Lurianic symbol of divine sparks that had been trapped in matter during the primal catastrophe, but the Besht transformed this tragic vision into a positive appreciation of the omnipresence of God. A spark of the divine could be found in absolutely everything. There was no place where God was not: the most accomplished Hasidim became aware of this hidden divine dimension by means of the practices of concentration and attachment (devekut) to God at all times. No activity, however worldly or carnal, was profane. God was always present and available and could be experienced while Hasidim were eating, drinking, making love, or conducting business. Hasidim must show their awareness of this divine presence. From the very first, Hasidic prayer was noisy and ecstatic; Hasidim would combine their worship with strange, violent gestures, designed to help them to put their whole selves into their prayer. They used to clap, throw their heads backward and forward, beat on the walls with their hands, and sway their bodies to and fro. The Hasid was to learn, at a level deeper than the cerebral, that his whole being must be pliable to the divine forces in his immediate environment, as a candle flame responds to every fluctuation of the wind. Some Hasidim would even turn somersaults in the synagogues, to express the overturning of the ego in its total surrender to God.6

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In his celebrated book Christianity and Liberalism (1 923), the Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937), the most intellectual of the fundamentalists, argued that the liberals were pagans, who, by denying the literal truth of such core doctrines as the Virgin Birth, denied Christianity itself. There were horrific fights in the general assemblies of the denominations, when fundamentalist Presbyterians tried to impose their five-point creed on the church; after a particularly bitter dispute, Riley seceded from the Baptist Assembly to found his own Bible Baptist Union of hard-liners. Some fundamentalist Baptists remained in the mainline denomination, hoping to effect reform from within, only to earn Riley’s undying hatred. 26 The campaigns continued; feeling escalated to such a point that any attempt at mediation only made matters worse. When the liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1969), a peaceable man and one of the most influential American clergymen of the time, pleaded for tolerance in a sermon delivered at the Baptist Convention of 1922 (later published in The Baptist as “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”), the rancor of the response showed the visceral disgust that these liberal ideas inspired. 27 It spread to other denominations. After the sermon, there seemed to be a landslide movement toward the fundamentalist camp: the more conservative Disciples of Christ, Seventh-Day Adventists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and the Salvation Army rallied to the fundamentalist cause. Even Methodists and Episcopalians, who had remained aloof from the controversy, were challenged by the conservatives in their ranks to define and make obligatory “the vital and eternal truths of the Christian religion.” 28 By 1923, it looked as though the fundamentalists would indeed win and that they would rid the denominations of the liberal danger. But then a new campaign caught the attention of the nation and eventually brought the whole fundamentalist movement into disrepute. In 1920, the Democratic politician and Presbyterian William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) had launched a crusade against the teaching of evolution in schools and colleges. In his view, it was not the Higher Criticism but Darwinism that had been responsible for the atrocities of the First World War. 29 Bryan had been impressed by two books which claimed to establish a direct link between evolutionary theory and German militarism: Benjamin Kidd’s The Science of Power (1918) and Vernon L. Kellogg’s Headquarter Nights (1917), which included interviews with German officers who described the influence that Darwinism had allegedly played in persuading the Germans to declare war. Not only had the notion that only the strong could or should survive “laid the foundation for the bloodiest war in history,” Byran concluded, but “the same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brutal ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and supernatural from the Bible.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Believes in the equal distribution of America’s wealth to reduce poverty and bring about equality. Believes in control of the environment, control of energy, and its limitation. Believes in the removal of American patriotism, and the free-enterprise system, disarmament, and the creation of a one-world socialistic government.105 This list, which seems to have been compiled from the first and second Manifestos of the American Humanist Society (1933 and 1973), an organization of little influence, could, nevertheless, be described as a reasonably accurate description of the liberal mind-set that evolved during the sixties. But in the way of most ideologies, it was, of course, also a caricature and an oversimplification of liberalism. Not all liberals who desire sexual equality or the equal distribution of wealth are atheists. Liberals who believe in gay rights would never sanction incest. No liberal would agree that there is “no right, no wrong”; instead they believe that there needs to be some revision of the moral strictures of the past. A desire to achieve a coming-together of previously hostile nation-states, in such organizations as the European Union or the United Nations, by no means implies a desire for “one-world socialistic government.” But the list is useful in showing how values which many liberal Christians and secularists alike would regard as self-evidently good (such as concern for the poor or for the environment) were regarded by fundamentalists as manifestly evil. It would appear that there were “two nations” in the United States at this time in rather the same way as in Iran or Israel. Modern society seemed to have become polarized in such a way that it was increasingly difficult for people in the different camps to understand one another. Because the subcultures were so isolated and separatist, many may not even have realized that there was a problem. But Protestant fundamentalists did not regard this definition of secular humanism as a caricature. They saw secular humanism as a rival religion, which had its own creed, its own objectives, and a distinctive organization. They drew support for this belief from a footnote to the Supreme Court judgment Torcaso v. Watkins (1961), which explicitly listed “secular humanism” among those world religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God,” such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Ethical Culture.106 Fundamentalists would use this later to argue that the beliefs and values of the “secular humanism” practiced by the government and the legislators should be outlawed from public life as firmly as conservative Protestantism.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But even during the first assembly of 1806, Enlightenment hostility to the Jewish people surfaced in an offensive address by Louis Count Molé, Napoleon’s commissioner. He had heard that Jewish moneylenders in Alsace were evading conscription and fleecing the population. The Jewish delegates to the Assembly, therefore, had the task of revitalizing that sense of civic morality which their people had lost during the long centuries of “degrading existence.”16 On March 17, 1808, Napoleon imposed economic strictures on the Jews, which were later called the “Infamous Decrees.” During the three years that they were enforced, thousands of Jewish families were ruined. As the American historian Norman Cantor points out, Napoleon offered the Jews a “Faustian bargain”: they had to sell their unique Jewish soul in exchange for emancipation.17 For all its inspiring talk about liberté, the modern, centralized state was unable to tolerate autonomous anomalies such as the ghetto. The enlightened polity had to be legally and culturally uniform, and Jews presented a “problem” that must be rationalized away. They must become assimilated, bourgeois Frenchmen, abandon their separate way of life, and privatize their religion: Jews as Jews had to vanish. The French solution became the pattern of Jewish emancipation in the rest of Europe. The new toleration was an improvement on the old segregation, but it was the result not solely of the noble idealism of the Enlightenment but of the needs of the modern state. A similar pragmatism had, as we have seen, led to the constitutional acceptance of pluralism in the United States. If they were to respond effectively to the challenge of the modern world and build a prosperous society, governments had to use all the human resources at their disposal. Whatever the official religion of the state, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and secularists were all needed in the new economic and industrial programs. The fabled business acumen of the Jews was particularly desirable, and it was deemed essential to harness this asset to the benefit of the state.18 The old prejudices remained, however. Except in France and Holland, the rights granted to the Jews were withdrawn after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815) and the collapse of his empire. Jews were herded back into the ghettos, the old restrictions returned, and there were new pogroms. But the needs of the modern state eventually forced one government after another to extend full citizenship to its Jews, provided that they accepted the Faustian bargain. Those states that granted equality and citizenship to Jews, such as Britain, France, Holland, Austria, and Germany, prospered;19 those eastern European states that did not democratize but tried to confine the benefits of modernity to an elite, fell behind. By 1870, Jewish emancipation had been achieved throughout western Europe; in eastern Europe and Russia, however, where governments used more coercive methods of abolishing Jewish separatism, millions of Jews were alienated from the modern state and clung defiantly to rabbinic and Hasidic traditions.20

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Mormons subsequently founded their own independent kingdoms, first in Illinois and, finally, in Utah. The establishment looked with disdain upon Dow, Stone, and Joseph Smith, regarding them as mindless demagogues who had nothing to offer the modern world. These preachers seemed to be barbarous anachronisms, relics of a primitive bygone world. The response of the mainline clergy and American aristocrats to these latter-day prophets was not dissimilar to the way in which liberals and secularists regard fundamentalist leaders today. But they were wrong to dismiss them. Men such as Dow or Joseph Smith have been described as folk geniuses. 74 They were able to bring the revolutionary modern ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech, and independence to the folk in an idiom that uneducated people could understand and make their own. These new ideals that were going to be essential in the new world that was coming to birth in America were brought to the less privileged majority in a mythological context that gave them meaning, and provided a necessary continuity during this time of turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. These new prophets demanded recognition, and, though they were reviled by the established elite, their reception by the people showed that they answered a real need. They were not content with individual conversions, like the preachers of the First Great Awakening, but wanted to change society. They were able to mobilize the population in nationwide mass movements, using popular music and the new communications media to skilled effect. Instead of trying to impose the modern ethos from above, like the Founding Fathers, they built from the ground up and led what amounted to a grassroots rebellion against the rational establishment. They were highly successful. The sects founded by Elias Smith, O’Kelly, Campbell, and Stone, for example, amalgamated to form the Disciples of Christ. By 1860, the Disciples had some 200,000 members and had become the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in the United States. 75 Like the Mormons, the Disciples had institutionalized a popular discontent that the establishment could not ignore. But this radical Christian rebellion against the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment had a still more profound effect. The Second Great Awakening managed to lead many Americans away from the classical republicanism of the Founders to the more vulgar democracy and rugged individualism that characterize much American culture today. They had contested the ruling elite and won a substantial victory. There is a strain in the American spirit that is closer to the populism and anti-intellectualism of the nineteenth-century prophets than to the cool ethos of the Age of Reason.

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

  worship that it contains hymns of hate, directed towards named individuals who are defined as heretical, all the way from Arius through Miaphysites, Dyophysites and Iconoclasts.2 Take, for instance, these lines from the fifth sticheron (hymn) for Great Vespers on the Sunday after the Feast of the Ascension. In celebration of the first Council of Nicaea, the liturgy describes with relish (and one malevolent theological pun) the wretched end of Nicaea’s arch-villain in fatal diarrhoea on the privy: Arius fell into the precipice of sin, Having shut his eyes so as not to see the light, And he was ripped asunder by a divine hook so that along with his entrails he forcibly emptied out all his essence [ousia!] and his soul, and was named another Judas both for his ideas and the manner of his death. Such liturgical performance of hatred is embarrassing for modern ecumenical discussions among Eastern Christians when it is directed at cherished saints of one of the Churches participating, but it is probably to be preferred to the Western practice of burning heretics. There were very few burnings in the Byzantine Empire and they ceased soon after the West resumed burnings in the eleventh century, although in later centuries burnings resumed in Orthodox Muscovy – apparently first thanks to prompting from envoys of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1490.3 In fact there was a long tradition in the Orthodox Church of leading churchmen criticizing burnings at the stake, which has little or no parallel in medieval Western Catholicism.4 Once the Orthodox Churches of the East and the Balkans were in the hands of the Ottoman Turks, persecuting Christian heretics was in any case no longer a practical proposition for Orthodox Christians – but the hymns of hate remained, liturgical affirmations that there was one truth in Orthodoxy which had fought its way past a series of satanic temptations to error. Continuity is not the same as changelessness. The Church of Constantinople and the Churches which sprang from it were wedded to imperial politics and the politics of the empire’s successor-states: their spirituality has moved in rhythms set by these chances of history. The destruction of the empire in 1453 did not merely encourage the Church to cling fiercely to its evolved theological identity, denying that any other could be or had been possible; it also led Churches which escaped the catastrophe to reaffirm the role of sacred monarchy in the mould of

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The first of these was led by Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan Kirmani (1810–71), a Qajar prince and a cousin and stepson of Fath Ali Shah, whose father was the governor of the turbulent province of Kirman. There, Karim Khan became involved with the Shaikhi sect, a radical mystical movement founded by Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsai (1753–1826) of Kerbala. He had been deeply influenced by the mysticism of Mulla Sadra and the School of Isfahan, which the Usuli mullahs had tried to suppress. Ahsai and his disciple, Sayyid Kazim Rashti (1759–1843), taught that each of the prophets and imams had perfectly reflected the divine will; their lives and example were gradually drawing the whole of humanity toward a state of perfection. The Hidden Imam was not in hiding in this world; he had been translated to the world of pure archetypes (alam al-mithal), whence, through his earthly representatives, who knew how to penetrate this mystical realm, he continued to guide human beings to the point when they would no longer need the laws of the Shariah; they would internalize God’s will and apprehend it directly, instead of following a set of external rules. This, of course, was anathema to the mujtahids. Ahsai taught that there always existed in the world a “Perfect Shiah,” a group of rare, infallible human beings who were able to get in touch with the Hidden Imam through the intuitive disciplines of contemplation. The implication was that the faith of the mujtahids was incomplete, legalistic, and literalistic. It was certainly inferior to the mystical insights of Ahsai and his disciples.61 The Shaykhi school, as it was called, was very popular in Iraq and Azerbaijan, but it remained a philosophy, an idea rather than a concrete political program. It was Karim Khan, who became the Shaykhi leader after the death of Rashti, who turned it into a rebellion against the mujtahids. He publicly denounced their narrow legalism, their unimaginative literalism, and their lack of interest in new ideas. Muslims must not imagine that their sole duty was taqlid, the emulation of a jurist. Anybody was capable of interpreting the scriptures. The mujtahids were simply doling out old truths, when the world needed something entirely new. Humanity was constantly changing and evolving, so that each prophet superseded the last. In each generation, the Perfect Shiah unveiled more and more of the esoteric meaning of the Koran and the Shariah, drawing out their hidden depths in an ongoing revelation. The faithful must listen to these mystical teachers, who were appointed by the Imam and whose power had been usurped by the mujtahids.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In Egypt, Islam had come under sustained ideological attack during the 1960s. Nasser was at the height of his popularity, and had called for a “cultural revolution” and the implementation of what he called “scientific socialism.” In the National Charter of May 1962, he reinterpreted history from a socialist perspective; it was an ideology that “proved” that capitalism and monarchy had both failed, and that socialism alone would lead to “progress,” defined as self-government, productivity, and industrialization. Religion was regarded by the regime as irredeemably passé. After the destruction of the Muslim Brotherhood, Nasser no longer bothered to use the old Islamic rhetoric. In 1961, the government castigated the ulema for their timorous adherence to their old medieval studies, and for the “defensive, reserved and rigid attitude” of the Azhar, which made it impossible to “adapt itself to contemporary times.” Nasser had a point. The Egyptian ulema had indeed closed ranks against the modern world and would continue to resist reform.2 They were making themselves an anachronism and losing all influence over the modernizing sectors of Egyptian society. Similarly, the immoral, injudicious terrorism of a fringe group of the Muslim Brotherhood had been largely responsible for the destruction of the Society. The Muslim establishment seemed to be putting itself out of business and demonstrating its incompatibility with the modern world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  38 In the premodern world, myth was not supposed to be a blueprint for practical action, which was strictly the preserve of logos . The function of myth had been to give such action meaning and ground it spiritually. The Shabbetai Zevi affair had shown how disastrous it could be to apply stories and images that belonged to the unseen world of the psyche to the realm of politics. Since the shock of that fiasco, the old prohibition against treating the messianic mythos as though it were logos , capable of pragmatic application, had acquired in the Jewish imagination the force of a taboo. Any human attempt to achieve redemption or “hasten the end” by taking practical steps to realize the Kingdom in the Holy Land, was abhorrent. Jews were even forbidden to recite too many prayers for the return to Zion. To take any kind of initiative amounted to a rebellion against God, who alone could bring Redemption; anyone who took such action was going over to the “Other Side,” the demonic world. Jews must remain politically passive. This was a condition of the existential state of Exile. 39 In rather the same way as Shii Muslims, Jews had outlawed political activism, knowing all too well from Jewish history how potentially lethal it could be to incarnate myth in history. To this day, Zionism and the Jewish state which the movement would create have been more divisive in the Jewish world than modernity itself. A response to Zionism and the State of Israel, for or against, would become the motive power of every form of Jewish fundamentalism. 40 It is largely through Zionism that secular modernity has entered Jewish life and changed it forever. This is because the first Zionists were brilliantly successful in turning the Land of Israel, one of the holiest symbols of Judaism, into a rational, mundane, practical reality. Instead of contemplating it mystically or halakhically, the Zionists settled the Land physically, strategically, and militarily. For the vast majority of the Orthodox, in these early years, this was to trample blasphemously upon a sacred reality. It was a deliberate act of profanation that defied centuries of religious tradition. For the secular Zionists were quite blatant about their rejection of religion. Their movement was indeed a rebellion against Judaism. Many of them were atheists, socialists, Marxists. Very few of them observed the commandments of the Torah. Some of them positively hated religion, which they thought had failed the Jewish people by encouraging them to sit back passively and wait for the Messiah. Instead of helping them to struggle against persecution and oppression, religion had inspired Jews to retreat from the world in strange mystical exercises or the study of arcane texts. The spectacle of Jews weeping and clinging to the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the last relic of the ancient Temple, filled many Zionists with dismay.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Like many modern people, Spinoza regarded all formal religion with distaste. Given his experience of excommunication, this was hardly surprising. He dismissed the revealed faiths as a “compound of credulity and prejudices,” and “a tissue of meaningless mysteries.”38 He had found ecstasy in the untrammeled use of reason, not by immersing himself in the biblical text, and as a result, he viewed Scripture in an entirely objective way. Instead of experiencing it as a revelation of the divine, Spinoza insisted that the Bible be read like any other text. He was one of the first to study the Bible scientifically, examining the historical background, the literary genres, and the question of authorship.39 He also used the Bible to explore his political ideas. Spinoza was one of the first people in Europe to promote the ideal of a secular, democratic state which would become one of the hallmarks of Western modernity. He argued that once the priests had acquired more power than the kings of Israel, the laws of the state became punitive and restrictive. Originally, the kingdom of Israel had been theocratic but because, in Spinoza’s view, God and the people were one and the same, the voice of the people had been supreme. Once the priests seized control, the voice of God could no longer be heard.40 But Spinoza was no populist. Like most premodern philosophers, he was an elitist who believed the masses to be incapable of rational thought. They would need some form of religion to give them a modicum of enlightenment, but this religion must be reformed, based not on so-called revealed law but on the natural principles of justice, fraternity, and liberty.41 Spinoza was undoubtedly one of the harbingers of the modern spirit, and he would later become somewhat of a hero to secularist Jews, who admired his principled exodus from the shelter of religion. But Spinoza had no Jewish followers in his lifetime, even though it appeared that many Jews were ready for fundamental change. At about the same time as Spinoza was developing his secular rationalism, the Jewish world was engulfed by a messianic ferment that seemed to cast reason to the winds. It was one of the first of the millennial movements of the modern period, which provided men and women with a religious way of breaking with the sacred past and reaching out for something entirely new. We shall often find this in our story. Few people are able to understand the intellectual elite who propounded the secularist philosophies of modernity; most have made the transition to the new world by means of religion, which provides some consoling continuity with the past and grounds the modern logos in a mythical framework.

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

  to his friend Abbot Paul Volz, antiquary and future Lutheran preacher, written to preface the 1518 edition of the Enchiridion, Erasmus asked the rhetorical question, ‘What is the state [‘civitas’] but a great monastery?’73 This had important implications. First, it denied that there was anything distinctive or useful about monasteries: if the city-state or commonwealth (that is, the whole of society) was to become a monastery, then the monastic vocation which Erasmus himself loathed and had escaped was put firmly in its place, and perhaps his own personal guilt at his flight was exorcized. Second, in Erasmus’s ideal society everyone was to be an active citizen of a ‘civitas’ as in ancient Greek city-states, and everyone had a duty to behave as purely as monks were supposed to do under a monastic rule. Third, the person to make sure that they did so was the prince. This message much appealed to secular rulers, and fitted in with the existing late medieval trend towards princes and commonwealths taking power in matters of religion and morality out of the hands of churchmen. Catholic and Protestant alike developed this theme of Erasmian humanism, so that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became an age which historians have termed ‘the Reformation of Manners’, when governments began to regulate public morality and tried to organize every individual in society in an unprecedented fashion – on both sides of the Reformation chasm. That was one of the most long-lasting consequences of Erasmus’s writings and in that respect sixteenth- century Europe is his Europe. Yet his legacy was much wider. Beyond the appreciation of scholars, cultivated people showed their cultivation by enjoying his prose. The people of the Netherlands were proud of his birth there and they did not forget his pleas for tolerance. Significantly, the Roman Inquisition at one stage tried to ban all his writings, and religious radicals of whom mainstream Protestants disapproved found much varied inspiration in what he had written. One important matter to interest radicals was that Desiderius Erasmus did not share in Western theologians’ general stampede to praise Augustine of Hippo. He had too much respect for creativity and dignity in human beings to accept Augustine’s premise that the human mind had been utterly corrupted in the fall of Adam and Eve. Even before he turned towards theology as his main preoccupation, he began around 1489 drafting a work called the Antibarbari, eventually published in 1520. One of the aims of this was to defend humanist learning against scholastics, but it had a more general underlying purpose: Erasmus was protesting against the whole perspective on knowledge which sees the only real truth as what is revealed by divine grace, rather than what is available through the reasoning faculties of the human mind and through the acquisition of education. He was expressing his distrust of mysticism, such as that of the

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

  This has been preserved for us only because it is embedded in the text of a Christian answer written by Origen some seventy years later – a useful recurrent accident in the history of Christian polemic which has preserved many texts which would otherwise have disappeared.23 Celsus felt that certainty was unattainable in religious matters, but he loved the old gods of Rome because they were the pillars of the society which he loved. Probably aware of Justin Martyr’s claims for Christianity’s antiquity, he emphasized its novelty among religions. He deplored the superstition of Eastern mystery cults as much as he deplored Christian stupidity in paying divine honours to a recently executed Palestinian carpenter. Yet if Christian belief was stupid, it was particularly dangerous because of its worldwide coherence: it was a conspiracy, and one which Celsus saw as especially aimed at impressionable young people. The result of Christian propaganda would be to leave the emperor defenceless, ‘while earthly things would come into the power of the most lawless and savage barbarians.’24 THIRD-CENTURY IMPERIAL CRISIS When Celsus wrote these words, about 180, they would have had a new and terrible significance for his Roman readers. During the second century, the empire ceased to expand; it reached its maximum extent under the Emperor Trajan (reigned 98–117), who annexed new territories in what are now Romania and Iraq. After that, the people on the frontiers began pushing back, which meant that Roman emperors from now onwards faced a constant battle to keep their borders secure. Over many centuries, people after people pushed westwards from the interior of Asia, and now a new phase in this long process caused disruption among the tribes in central Europe, forcing them in turn to look westwards and southwards for refuge, inside Rome’s territories. When the Danube froze in the winter of 166–7, it was a particular disaster for the empire, giving thousands of the Langobardi a chance to cross over and devastate Rome’s central European provinces. On the eastern Roman frontier, matters became even more serious in the early third century. A new dynasty in Iran, the Sassanians, regained Iranian independence from their neighbours the Parthians, and they were determined to take revenge on the world of Greece and Rome for the humiliations inflicted on Iran centuries before by Athens and the Hellenistic monarchs after Alexander the Great (see pp. 35–40). The dynasty’s founder, Shah (King) Ardashir, made his intention plain by additionally taking the name of the ancient Iranian king and conqueror Darius. In 260 Ardashir’s son Shapur

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

  Augustine’s Rule; he was drawn into campaigns across the Pyrenees to win back southern France from the Cathar heresy. The effort was having little success, and Dominic realized why: it was being led by churchmen who conducted their task like the great prelates they were, surrounded by attendants and all the magnificence of their rank. Nothing was less calculated to impress those familiar with Cathar expressions of contempt for Catholic corruption.To this situation, Dominic brought the practicality and closeness to ordinary life of his Augustinian background. In 1215 he got official permission from one of the bishops in the area affected by the Cathars to start a new effort: a campaign of preaching in which he and his helpers would lead a life so simple and apostolic in poverty as to outdo the Cathars, and convince people that the official Church was a worthy vehicle for a message of love and forgiveness. Not only that, but his preachers would have the best education that he could devise to make even their simplest message intellectually tough. Though his efforts in southern France had little immediate success amid the ferocity of the Albigensian Crusade, his idea blossomed; unlike some of the other leaders of new movements in his age, he was intent on emphasizing his close loyalty to the pope, and Pope Honorius III took a personal interest in drafting the document which in 1217 named Dominic’s new organization as an Order of Preachers – the only order, one contemporary noted, to take its name from its function.11 The new friars also quickly gained the nickname Dominicans, and otherwise Blackfriars, from the black hood which they wore with their white robe. They avoided holding property so that they would not build up wealth like the monastic orders; instead, they lived by begging from people in ordinary society (hence the alternative name of friars, ‘mendicants’, from the Latin verb for begging). This mobility in the world was a significant addition to the West’s armoury of spiritual resources, recreating a form of monastic wandering which always remained common in the Eastern Churches, but which centuries before had been firmly discouraged for Western monks by no less a figure than St Benedict himself (see pp. 317–18). Yet significantly the Westerners still did not allow their holy men to wander at random, as did the Churches of Orthodoxy and further east. To avoid unseemly competition between different communities of friars, they came to work within agreed set boundaries or limits, which gained them yet another nickname, ‘limiters’. Their life of begging made the friars very vulnerable to their public. They would have to be in constant contact with the people to whom they ministered, always needing to justify their existence by service. Their task was to bring a message of good news and comfort to the whole Church. They were evangelists, showmen in church or market square, but they could also quietly hear

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

  analytical approach to the world, his mastery of logical thought, confronted the Platonism of Christian theologians. A debate opened up, in dialogue also with Arab and Jewish commentators on ancient thought, discussing the old problem of how to relate the work of reason to the revealed truths of Christian faith. All three religions of revelation confronted the same problem. Aristotle’s categorizations might suggest that the world could be understood without that special divine grace of knowledge otherwise closed to human intelligence. Although the participants in this debate often bitterly disagreed with each other, to the extent that on occasion they would secure their opponents’ condemnation as heretics, the movement can be summed up in the term ‘scholasticism’: that is, the thought and educational method of the scholae, the new university schools. In essence it was a way of building up knowledge through discussion: a method of quaestiones, assertion, denial, counter-assertion, and a final effort to harmonize the debate. It respected authorities, but this was an alarmingly and unpredictably expanding body of authorities who themselves might not agree. Scholasticism was disputatious, sceptical, analytical, and that remained the characteristic of Western intellectual exploration long after most Western intellectuals had parted company with scholasticism itself. And it had its precedent in the method used in Islamic higher education. It is a happy irony that one of the great expressions of the cultural unity of the Latin West, evolved in the age of the Crusades, had its roots in the culture which the West was trying to destroy. By the end of the twelfth century, the Western Church was thus facing challenges both from heresy and from the potentially uncontrollable nature of scholastic thought, bred in new institutions, the universities. None of its existing structures seemed well adapted to the purpose, and its first reaction to the growth of heresy was to redouble repression, evidenced at its worst in the Albigensian Crusade (see pp. 387–8). Western Christianity exhibited an urge to punish itself which should not simply be attributed to the lurid imaginations of clergy. For instance, in the city of Perugia in central Italy, a startling new movement began in the troubled year of 1260: flagellants, crowds of the laity who indulged in communal ritual beatings as acts of penitence for the sins of the world and of themselves. They walked in their bloodstained processions from Italy over the Alps in midwinter, right through central Europe northwards until they reached the furthest bounds of Poland. On the way they inspired reversals of local quarrels and miseries in festivals of forgiveness. One Italian chronicler enthused that ‘almost all those in disagreement were returned to concord; usurers and thieves hastened to restore what they had taken away … captives were released and exiles were given permission to return to their homes’.7 Whatever the reality

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

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