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 Martin Luther (2016)

  The treatise opens with Luther jesting that booksellers and readers should burn his earlier work on indulgences, for it was simply not radical enough. Indeed, Luther now denounces the Pope as Nimrod, the “mighty hunter,” the biblical king and tyrant who set himself up against God. The papacy is the “GRAND HUNTING OF THE BISHOP OF ROME,” that is, Rome is Babylon and the Pope is the Antichrist. Luther had already depicted the Pope as the Antichrist in To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, but there it had been hidden in the final sections of the tract; here it is emblazoned in block capitals at the start.46 Luther claimed that he owed this new insight to the attacks of Eck, Emser, and their ilk, because their lame defense of existing theology revealed just how corrupt it had become. His opponents’ works are dismissed as “the filth of this vile-smelling cloaca.” They are “wicked men,” one of them even described as “driven by a messenger of Satan.”47 Whereas Luther had tentatively suggested in 1519 that a Council of the Church might consider whether laypeople should receive the sacrament in both kinds, here he attacked the entire sacramental system of the Church and its significance for accompanying the individual through the different stages of life. Of the seven sacraments—baptism, confirmation, Communion, confession, marriage, ordination, last rites—only baptism and Communion were definitely sanctioned by Scripture. The others were just accretions of the Church, and should not be considered sacraments at all. Sacraments, Luther argued, are not works performed to please God. They are signs of God’s promise of future salvation and they require faith. Faith is what justifies the sinner, Luther proclaimed; “the sacraments…are not fulfilled when they are taking place, but when they are being believed.” Baptism is a sign that one belongs to the saved, and it is not just allegorical: It signifies “actual death and resurrection.” Once you are baptized, Luther argued, the sacrament remains valid forever: You lose its promise only if, out of despair, you turn your back on salvation.48 But the Pope had introduced endless numbers of works and ceremonies that destroyed the true meaning of baptism. Monastic and clerical vows, for instance, should be abolished, Luther argued, because in the baptismal vow we have already pledged enough. Monastic vows and works needlessly snare our conscience and we lose the freedom baptism has given us.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther advised that she should be removed from the clutches of Ernst and his wife, who were filling her “ears, eyes and all her senses and heart” with the wrong ideas. Moreover, she was a woman, “who had in addition to natural weakness, also temptation both from the Devil and from humans, so that it would be a miracle if she could resist.” She should be sent to her relatives in Nuremberg to persuade her to come to her senses. But if that did not work, then, Luther opined, “let her go and do what she wants, and the pastor should be free as if she had died”; significantly, he did not advise that she be compelled to return to him. This was too much, however, for the Elector, whose counselors worried about the scandal this would cause at Allstedt. When Kern went ahead and remarried, he was therefore accused of bigamy in the Church Visitation of 1533. 82 Many of the newly married evangelical pastors found marriage hard after having been socialized from their youth in all-male environments, raised to view women as temptresses, dirtied receptacles for male lust. Luther, for one, rarely even saw a woman in the confessional when he was a monk; so far as we know, he had no female friends until he began to know the Wittenberg elite a little better, especially the Cranach and Krapp families. Luther could employ a misogynistic humor with women as well as men: When Justus Jonas’s wife was pregnant, he wrote to her suggesting it would be a daughter because girls take up so much room in the womb, “just like their mothers, who make the world too tight for a poor man.” 83 When Johannes Lang’s wife died, Luther wrote, “I do not know whether to congratulate or pity you.” 84 She had been a rich widow, and when Lang first married her, Thomas Müntzer had remarked acidly: “the so-called pious people, the princes’ parsons who preach the gospel to them, marry old women with great wealth, for they are worried that they might finally have to look for their own bread.” 85 But there was nothing unusual in contracting an economically advantageous marriage. Most craft workshops were run by a married couple, and it was common for a widow to marry the workshop’s journeyman, so as to keep the business going. In peasant households too the labor of husband and wife was essential to run a farm, and marriage naturalized the economic relationships of subordination and obedience. Through marriage, property and social status were transmitted, relationships solidified, political dynasties established, and inheritance safeguarded. This applied to the new profession of married clergy, too.

• From A History of God (1993)

  He described God as “the great companion, the fellow-sufferer, who understands.” Williams liked Whitehead’s definition; he liked to speak of God as the “behavior” of the world or an “event.”9 It was wrong to set the supernatural order over against the natural world of our experience. There was only one order of being. This was not reductionist, however. In our concept of the natural we should include all the aspirations, capacities and potential that had once seemed miraculous. It would also include our “religious experiences,” as Buddhists had always affirmed. When asked whether he thought God was separate from nature, Williams would reply that he was not sure. He hated the old Greek idea of apatheia, which he found almost blasphemous: it presented God as remote, uncaring and selfish. He denied that he was advocating pantheism. His theology was simply trying to correct an imbalance, which had resulted in an alienating God which was impossible to accept after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Others were less optimistic about the achievements of the modern world and wanted to retain the transcendence of God as a challenge to men and women. The Jesuit Karl Rahner has developed a more transcendental theology, which sees God as the supreme mystery and Jesus as the decisive manifestation of what humanity can become. Bernard Lonergan also emphasized the importance of transcendence and of thought as opposed to experience. The unaided intellect cannot reach the vision it seeks: it is continually coming up against barriers to understanding that demand that we change our attitudes. In all cultures, human beings have been driven by the same imperatives: to be intelligent, responsible, reasonable, loving and, if necessary, to change. The very nature of humanity, therefore, demands that we transcend ourselves and our current perceptions, and this principle indicates the presence of what has been called the divine in the very nature of serious human inquiry. Yet the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar believes that instead of seeking God in logic and abstractions, we should look to art: Catholic revelation has been essentially Incarnational. In brilliant studies of Dante and Bonaventure, Balthasar shows that Catholics have “seen” God in human form. Their emphasis on beauty in the gestures of ritual, drama and in the great Catholic artists indicates that God is to be found by the senses and not simply by the more cerebral and abstracted parts of the human person.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. They turned to the imaginary comforts of religion and philosophy in an attempt to establish some illusory sense of control, trying to propitiate an “agency” they imagine lurking behind the scenes to ward off terror and disaster. Aristotle had been wrong: philosophy was not the result of a noble desire for knowledge but of the craven longing to avoid pain. The cradle of religion, therefore, was ignorance and fear, and a mature, enlightened man must climb out of it. Holbach attempted his own history of God. First men had worshipped the forces of nature. This primitive animism had been acceptable because it had not tried to get beyond this world. The rot had set in when people had started to personify the sun, wind and sea to create gods in their own image and likeness. Finally they had merged all these godlings into one big Deity, which was nothing but a projection and a mass of contradictions. Poets and theologians had done nothing over the centuries but

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. Muslims had little time or energy to develop their understanding of God in the traditional way. They were engaged in a struggle to catch up with the West.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Christianity, therefore, had the worst of both worlds. It lacked the venerable antiquity of Judaism and had none of the attractive rituals of paganism, which everybody could see and appreciate. It was also a potential threat, since Christians insisted that theirs was the only God and that all the other deities were delusions. Christianity seemed an irrational and eccentric movement to the Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius (70–160), a superstitio nova et prava, which was “depraved” precisely because it was “new.” 31 Educated pagans looked to philosophy, not religion, for enlightenment. Their saints and luminaries were such philosophers of antiquity as Plato, Pythagoras and Epictetus. They even saw them as “sons of God”: Plato, for example, was held to have been the son of Apollo. The philosophers had maintained a cool respect for religion but saw it as essentially different from what they were doing. They were not dried- up academics in ivory towers but men with a mission, anxious to save the souls of their contemporaries by attracting them to the disciplines of their particular school. Both Socrates and Plato had been “religious” about their philosophy, finding that their scientific and metaphysical studies had inspired them with a vision of the glory of the universe. By the first century CE, therefore, intelligent and thoughtful people turned to them for an explanation of the meaning of life, for an inspiring ideology and for ethical motivation. Christianity seemed a barbaric creed. The Christian God seemed a ferocious, primitive deity, who kept intervening irrationally in human affairs: he had nothing in common with the remote, changeless God of a philosopher like Aristotle. It was one thing to suggest that men of the caliber of Plato or Alexander the Great had been sons of a god, but a Jew who had died a disgraceful death in an obscure corner of the Roman empire was quite another matter. Platonism was one of the most popular philosophies of late antiquity. The new Platonists of the first and second century were not attracted to Plato the ethical and political thinker but to Plato the mystic. His teachings would help the philosopher to realize his true self, by liberating his soul from the prison of the body and enabling him to ascend to the divine world. It was a noble system, which used cosmology as an image of continuity and harmony. The One existed in serene contemplation of itself beyond the ravages of time and change at the pinnacle of the great chain of being. All existence derived from the One as a necessary consequence of its pure being: the eternal forms had emanated from the One and had in their turn animated the sun, stars and moon, each in their respective sphere.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The extremists who did apostasize adopted a theology of Incarnation, thus breaking another Jewish taboo. They came to believe that Shabbetai Zevi had not only been the Messiah but an incarnation of God. As in Christianity, this belief evolved gradually. Abraham Cardazo taught a doctrine that was similar to St. Paul’s belief in the glorification of Jesus after his resurrection: when the redemption had begun at the time of his apostasy, Shabbetai had been raised to the Trinity of parzufim: “the Holy One [Malka Kadisha] blessed be He, removed himself upward and Shabbetai Zevi ascended to be God in his place.”49 He had, therefore, somehow been promoted to divine status and had taken the place of the God of Israel, the second parzuf. Soon the Donmeh, who had converted to Islam, took the idea a step further and decided that the God of Israel had descended and been made flesh in Shabbetai. Since they also came to believe that each of their leaders was a reincarnation of the Messiah, it followed that they became avatars too, in rather the same way, perhaps, as the Shii Imams. Each generation of apostates, therefore, had a leader who was an incarnation of the divine. Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who led his Ashkenazic disciples to baptism in 1759, had implied that he was God incarnate at the very beginning of his career. He has been described as the most frightening figure in the entire history of Judaism. He was uneducated and proud of it but had the ability to evolve a dark mythology that attracted many Jews who had found their faith empty and unsatisfying. Frank preached that the Old Law had been abrogated. Indeed, all religions must be destroyed so that God could shine forth clearly. In his Slowa Panskie (The Sayings of the Lord), he took Sabbatarianism over the edge into nihilism. Everything had to be broken down: “Wherever Adam trod, a city was built, but wherever I set foot all will be destroyed, for I have come into this world only to destroy and annihilate.”50 There is a disturbing similarity to some of the sayings of Christ, who had also claimed that he had come to bring not peace but the sword. Unlike Jesus and St. Paul, however, Frank proposed to put nothing in the place of the old sanctities. His nihilistic creed was not too dissimilar, perhaps, to that of his younger contemporary the Marquis de Sade. It was only by descending to the depths of degradation that men could ascend to find the Good God. This meant not only the rejection of all religion but the commission of “strange acts” that resulted in voluntary abasement and utter shamelessness.

• 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.