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)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  before consigning to oblivion both the boy and the increasingly wraith-like imperial succession in the West. Now that the Eastern Empire stood alone, it often paid little attention to the opinions or outraged representations of the leading bishop in the surviving Western Church, the pope in Rome. A series of popes, increasingly assertive in the Church (see pp. 322–9), took it as axiomatic that their sainted predecessor Leo had said the last word on the subject of the natures in Jesus Christ in his ‘Tome’, delivered to the unreceptive Miaphysite bishops at Ephesus in 449 (see pp. 225–6). Rome measured every turn of policy in Constantinople by how much it seemed to honour the ‘Tome’, and popes could not appreciate the multitude of political and military considerations preoccupying Eastern emperors when they contemplated questions of Christology. As a result, from 482 until 519, Rome and Constantinople were in formal schism because the Byzantine Emperor Zeno and his bishop, Acacius, in the capital backed a formula of reunion (Henotikon) with the Miaphysites: it contained fresh condemnations of Nestorius (an easy target), praised key documents from Cyril’s attack on him, but in a manner deeply offensive to Rome remained silent on the ‘Tome of Leo’, which the Miaphysite party at Ephesus had treated with such contempt.6 It took a change of emperor in 518 to put an end to the Henotikon and the ‘Acacian schism’. Justin I was an illiterate Latin-speaking soldier from a Western background who had an instinctive respect for the Bishop of Rome and he abruptly speeded up negotiations for reconciliation which had been languishing for years.7 The emperors’ preoccupation with the Miaphysites is all the more understandable since, not just in Egypt but throughout the Eastern Empire, there continued to be Miaphysites hostile to the work of the Council of Chalcedon. Western Syria and Asia Minor were full of them. The Emperor Zeno, himself a native of south-west Asia Minor, tried posthumously to recruit the celebrated pillar-dweller Simeon Stylites (see pp. 207–8) as a champion of the Chalcedonian deal, and he rapidly and vigorously promoted Simeon’s cult. Within a couple of decades of the hermit’s death, Zeno was pouring money and labour into the building of what was then the largest church in the Middle East to shelter the Stylite’s pillar at its heart.8 The church’s magnificent surviving ruins still testify to Zeno’s anxiety to bring back Syrian Miaphysites into the fold of Chalcedon, but although Simeon’s cult flourished in the region, the Chalcedonian cause did not. The most impressive and articulate theologian of the early sixth century was Severus, who came from what is now south-western Turkey. He was so firm in his Miaphysite views that at first he rejected the Henotikon as an unsatisfactory compromise, until the prospect of the Bishopric of Antioch changed his mind. His hold on that powerful see ended with the

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  But modern science was beginning to discredit mythology. The British scientist Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) synthesized the findings of his predecessors by a rigorous use of the evolving scientific methods of experimentation and deduction. Newton posited the idea of gravity as a universal force that held the entire cosmos together and prevented the celestial bodies from colliding with one another. This system, he was convinced, proved the existence of God, the great “Mechanick,” since the intricate design of the cosmos could not have come about by accident.12 Like the other early modern scientists, Newton had brought human beings what he believed to be utterly new and certain information about the world. He was sure that his “system” coincided exactly with objective reality and had taken human knowledge further than before. But his total immersion in the world of logos made it impossible for Newton to appreciate that other, more intuitive forms of perception might also offer human beings a form of truth. In his view, mythology and mystery were primitive and barbaric ways of thought. “ ’Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion,” he wrote irritably, “ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.”13

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In his writings—though not in Calvin’s—we can see that the old vision of the complementarity of reason and mythology was eroding. In his usual pugnacious way, Luther spoke of Aristotle with hatred, and loathed Erasmus, whom he regarded as the epitome of reason, which, he was convinced, could only lead to atheism. In pushing reason out of the religious sphere, Luther was one of the first Europeans to secularize it. 6 Because, for Luther, God was utterly mysterious and hidden, the world was empty of the divine. Luther’s Deus Absconditus could not be discovered either in human institutions or in physical reality. Medieval Christians had experienced the sacred in the Church, which Luther now declared to be Antichrist. Nor was it permissible to reach a knowledge of God by reflecting on the marvelous order of the universe, as the scholastic theologians (also objects of Luther’s simmering rage) had done. 7 In Luther’s writings, God had begun to retreat from the physical world, which now had no religious significance at all. Luther also secularized politics. Because mundane reality was utterly opposed to the spiritual, church and state must operate independently, each respecting the other’s proper sphere of activity. 8 Luther’s passionate religious vision had made him one of the first Europeans to advocate the separation of church and state. Yet again, the secularization of politics began as a new way of being religious. Luther’s separation of religion and politics sprang from his disgust with the coercive methods of the Roman Catholic Church, which had used the state to impose its own rules and orthodoxy. Calvin did not share Luther’s vision of a Godless world. Like Zwingli, he believed that Christians should express their faith by taking part in political and social life rather than by retreating to a monastery. Calvin helped to baptize the emergent capitalist work ethic by declaring labor to be a sacred calling, not, as the medievals thought, a divine punishment for sin. Nor did Calvin subscribe to Luther’s disenchantment of the natural world. He believed that it was possible to see God in his creation, and commended the study of astronomy, geography, and biology. Calvinists of the early modern period would often be good scientists. Calvin saw no contradiction between science and scripture. The Bible, he believed, was not imparting literal information about geography or cosmology, but was trying to express ineffable truth in terms that limited human beings could understand. Biblical language was balbative (“baby talk”), a deliberate simplification of a truth that was too complex to be articulated in any other way. 9 The great scientists of the early modern period shared Calvin’s confidence, and also saw their researches and discussions within a mythical, religious framework. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) believed that his science was “more divine than human.”

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

  bishops; rulers like Charlemagne or the local bishops who were their creations had called councils to decide on Church law and policy, even contradicting papal opinions from time to time. When the Pope crowned Charlemagne in 800, it had been in practice if not in theory from a position of some weakness (see p. 349), and later Holy Roman Emperors had proved to have minds of their own. In fact it is a paradox, and an anticipation of the troubles which were now to afflict relations between pope and emperor, that the first pope who can be regarded as a reformer was a German imposed on Rome in 1046 as Clement II, after the Emperor Henry III had forcibly seen off the claims of three competing claimants to the papal title.16 However they arrived at their new situation, the reforming popes now constructed a view of their position which did not brook contradiction. The very name Clement was a manifesto, reminding the world that the first Clement had been a close successor of Peter. Pope Leo IX (reigned 1049–54) was in the final year of his pontificate responsible for the drastic step of excommunicating the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Keroularios in his own cathedral in Constantinople. The immediate issue was a dispute about eucharistic bread. At some point after it had become apparent that East and West had begun drifting apart, in the years after Chalcedon, the Latin West had come to use unleavened bread (azyma in Greek) at the Eucharist. Azyma had the advantage of not dropping into crumbs when it was broken, a matter of some importance now that eucharistic bread was increasingly identified with the Body of the Lord – yet the Greeks (rightly) regarded this as yet another Western departure from early custom. Was such bread really bread at all? Pope Leo sent his close friend Cardinal Humbert as negotiator with the Patriarch in 1054. Humbert was a former monk of Cluny who had recently been appointed archbishop in Sicily, an area of constant tension between Churches of Greek and Latin usage, and he was not inclined to diplomacy. Beginning with calculated rudeness to the Patriarch after their arrival in Constantinople, Humbert and his fellow envoys then appeared while worship was proceeding in the Great Church of Hagia Sophia. They strode through the congregation up to the altar and placed on it the Pope’s declaration of excommunication, quitting the building with a ceremonial shaking of its dust from their feet, amid jeers from a hostile crowd. This was only a personal excommunication of the Patriarch and his associates, but unlike the Acacian schism of the late fifth century (see p. 234), Pope and Oecumenical Patriarch did not declare the excommunication revoked for another nine hundred years after the events of 1054, and even now in many areas the reconciliation between Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism is distinctly shaky.17

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The rabbi’s ten-minute speech was not only bewildering, but obscurely disturbing to the Israelis who watched him on their television sets. He did not mention the coalition talks directly and addressed none of the issues that obsessed the rest of the nation. He was clearly quite indifferent to such issues as Palestinian rights, national defense, or the feasibility of exchanging territory for peace. He had not a single good word to say about the State of Israel. Instead of seeing the Jewish state as a savior, he referred bleakly to the “terrible and awful” time in which the Haredim now lived. The wars that worried the rabbi were not the Arab-Israeli wars, but the long battle waged by the Zionists against religion. “The wars we are fighting [against those who oppose tradition] did not begin today; they began already at the time of the First World War, and only the Master of the Universe knows what else is expected,” the rabbi said with great emotion. But the outcome was not in doubt: “The Jew cannot be destroyed. He may be killed, but his children will continue to cleave to the Torah.” Bad enough that they were cast as the enemy; but, to their dismay, Laborites had to hear their sacred institutions and themselves denounced as not merely un-Jewish but positively anti-Jewish. “Is Labor something holy?” asked the rabbi derisively. “Have they not separated themselves from the past, and seek a new Torah?” These kibbutzniks were no better than gentiles; they did not even know what Shabbat or Yom Kippur was. How could such people be trusted to decide “critical and essential matters facing the Jewish people?” There could be no deal with Labor politicians. “When they are in the Knesset, they are not interested in strengthening religiosity. To the contrary, they seek to pass laws that will destroy the Jewish religion.”76 The significance of that evening in Yad Eliahu Stadium did not lie simply in the fact that Rabbi Schach, alone and unaided, appeared effortlessly to have swung the balance in favor of Likud, but that it marked the extraordinary journey of the Haredim from a despised out-group to the heart of power. The occasion also showed that there were “two nations” in Israel, who scarcely understood one another’s language and shared none of the same concerns. It also revealed the deep hatred that inspired the piety of so many of the Haredim, a rage directed not merely against gentiles, but also against their fellow Jews.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Nevertheless, a large number of people still want to be religious and have tried to evolve new forms of faith. Fundamentalism is just one of these modern religious experiments, and, as we have seen, it has enjoyed a certain success in putting religion squarely back on the international agenda, but it has often lost sight of some of the most sacred values of the confessional faiths. Fundamentalists have turned the mythos of their religion into logos, either by insisting that their dogmas are scientifically true, or by transforming their complex mythology into a streamlined ideology. They have thus conflated two complementary sources and styles of knowledge which the people in the premodern world had usually decided it was wise to keep separate. The fundamentalist experience shows the truth of this conservative insight. By insisting that the truths of Christianity are factual and scientifically demonstrable, American Protestant fundamentalists have created a caricature of both religion and science. Those Jews and Muslims who have presented their faith in a reasoned, systematic way to compete with other secular ideologies have also distorted their tradition, narrowing it down to a single point by a process of ruthless selection. As a result, all have neglected the more tolerant, inclusive, and compassionate teachings and have cultivated theologies of rage, resentment, and revenge. On occasion, this has even led a small minority to pervert religion by using it to sanction murder. Even the vast majority of fundamentalists, who are opposed to such acts of terror, tend to be exclusive and condemnatory of those who do not share their views.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This was tantamount to a declaration of civil war. Other Gush rabbis raised the question whether Rabin had become a rodef (“pursuer”), one who actively threatens the life of a Jew, and so is deemed worthy of death under Jewish law. 105 On November 4, 1995, Yigal Amir, a former student of a hesder yeshiva , an army veteran, and a student at Bar Ilan University, assassinated Rabin during a peace rally in Tel Aviv. His study of Jewish law, he said later, had persuaded him that Rabin was just such a rodef , an enemy of the Jewish people; he had a duty to kill him. 106 Like the murder of Sadat, the assassination of Rabin showed that two wars are being fought in the Middle East. One is the Arab-Israeli conflict; the other is a war within such individual countries as Israel and Egypt, between secularists and religious. Religious Jews are not alone in feeling outraged and attacked at a profound level. Secularists in Israel likewise feel repelled and assaulted by religious Jews. Walking around a Haredi district in Jerusalem, the celebrated Israeli novelist Amos Oz recalled that the early Zionists detested Orthodox Judaism and “would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls. In an eruption of hatred and loathing, they portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls.” To this secular hatred the Haredim have responded in kind. On the walls of the districts inhabited by members of Neturei Karta, Oz noted the black swastikas and graffiti: “Death to the Zionist Hitlerites.” “To hell with [the Laborite mayor of Jerusalem] Teddy Kollek.” Oz was also reminded of his teacher, Dov Sadan, who had argued that secular Zionism was just a passing episode in Jewish history, and that Orthodox Judaism would reemerge, “swallow Zionism and digest it.” Now as he wandered around the streets of this ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, Oz felt claustrophobic and overwhelmed by the vitality of Haredi Judaism, “for as it grows and swells, it threatens your own spiritual existence and eats away at the roots of your own world, prepared to inherit it all when you and your kind are gone.” 107 Secularist Israelis, it appears, also fear annihilation and feel irrational dread when confronted with their religious enemies. Oz touched upon the core of the problem. Fundamentalists and secularists—of whatever faith—are at war because they have entirely different conceptions of the sacred. When speaking about Gush Emunim, Oz called it “a cruel and obdurate sect” which had emerged “from a dark corner of Judaism, and is threatening to destroy all that is dear and holy to us.” For secularists and liberals—be they Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—such Enlightenment values as the autonomy of the individual and intellectual liberty, are inviolable and holy. They cannot compromise or make concessions on such issues.

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

  Alexandrian theologians, following Origen’s line, tended to stress the distinctness of the three persons of the Trinity, so they were reluctant to stress a further distinctness within the person of Christ. Diodore and Theodore, familiar with an Antiochene literal and historical reading of the Gospel lives of Jesus, were ready to emphasize the real humanity of Christ; they also tended to stress the oneness of the whole trinitarian Godhead, so they were much more prepared to talk of two natures in Christ, truly human and truly divine, in a way which Alexandrians were inclined to think blasphemous. As an image to explain these different positions, the Alexandrian view of Christ’s humanity and divinity contained in a single Person has been likened (although not by Alexandrians themselves) to a vessel which contains wine and water, perfectly and inextricably mixed, in contrast to the view of Theodore and his associates, where the vessel of Christ’s person could be said to contain two natures as it might oil and water, mingling but not mixing. Diodore and Theodore were particularly galvanized to defend their point of view by their horror at Apollinaris’s assertion that Christ was indwelled by the Logos, which replaced a human mind in him. They determinedly affirmed Christ’s real human nature alongside his divinity. For Theodore, it was vital to remember that Christ was the Second Adam, who had effected human redemption by offering himself as a true human being – that emphasis lay behind the frenetically self-destructive attitudes of contemporary Syrian monks towards their bodies, determined to get as close as was possible to the self-denial of the human Jesus. God had become a particular man, not humanity in general, Theodore insisted: ‘to say that God indwells everything has been agreed to be the height of absurdity, and to circumscribe his essence is out of the question. So it would be naïve in the extreme to say that the indwelling [of God in Jesus] was a matter of essence.’ It was therefore vital to keep the distinction between the man Jesus, despite his ‘outstanding inclination to the good’, and the eternal Word, which partook of the essence of the Godhead.82 The real flashpoint came in 428, when an energetic and tactless priest called Nestorius was chosen as Bishop of Constantinople. Nestorius was a devoted admirer of Theodore, having been his pupil in Antioch. His promotion did not please Bishop Cyril, successor to Athanasius in a line of resourceful and power- conscious politician-bishops of Alexandria, a prelate whom we have already met in connection with the lynching of the philosopher Hypatia (see pp. 220–21). Cyril, though unlikely to have been a pleasant man to know, was more than simply an unscrupulous party boss.83 When he contemplated his Saviour Jesus, he could see only God, mercifully offering his presence to sinful humanity, especially every time the Church offered Christ’s flesh and blood in the bread

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

  4. Christianity in the Second Century Equally, the real nature of the gnostic has no solidarity with the flesh of the human body; we should ‘be one of those who pass by’, as the Gospel of Thomas phrases it.38 Mortal flesh must be mortified because it is despicable – or, on the contrary, the soul might be regarded as so independent of the body that the most wildly earthly excesses would not imperil its salvation. Hostile ‘mainstream’ Christian commentators probably took much more relish in contemplating such excesses than was justified by practice among gnostic believers. Their prurient accounts are to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. In the fourth century, Epiphanius/Epiphanios, an energetically unpleasant Cypriot bishop and heresy hunter, described gnostic rites parodying the Eucharist with the use of semen and menstrual blood.39 In fact, the austere, ascetic strain in gnosticism is far more reliably attested than any licentiousness, and that makes it unwise to rebrand gnostic belief as a more generous-minded, less authoritarian alternative to the Christianity which eventually became mainstream. Still less plausible is a view of gnostic belief as a form of proto-feminism.40 Gnostic hatred of the body would match very uneasily with some modern emphases on the liberating power of sexuality or feminism’s physical celebration of all that it is to be female. It is nevertheless the case that gnostics opposed the authority structures then evolving in parts of the Church, particularly in relation to one important issue: martyrdom. As we will see (see Chapter 5), this was a crucial issue in a Church which, from the death of its founder onwards, repeatedly faced bouts of persecution from the authorities of both the Roman and the Sassanian empires.

• From Action (2014)

  • Public transportation. This one is a gamble, and you have to be discerning, because most of the time, people are taking the train to or from work. If you’re into women, be ESPECIALLY conscious of the fact that you are one of forty-two others peering at any attractive female-bodied person in whatever your vicinity is, and it’s best to be among the often slim fraction of those who are decent enough to not do or say anything to express that. If you MUST hit on a fellow passenger, passing notes is less horrible than expecting someone to talk to you, especially when your miniature letter just says “oh my god you are so gorgeous” and you look up and the person won’t meet your eyes because they’re blushing so much, as one memorable guy in a sexy yellow sweater proved to me. Trains are better for furtive glances back and forth across the car that you can then fantasize about for the rest of your life than they are for trying to fulfill those daydreams. • The company for which you work. I’ve undeniably had heaps of sex with colleagues and peers outside of my direct professional biznet (what “in-the-know” corporate insiders like me call “business networks”). So please trust me when I say that getting with coworkers whom you see five days out of the week is pretty dicey—and also one of the sexiest known kinds of entanglements, so long as the two biznetters are smart enough to keep their less-than-professional connection secret, which ramps up the hotness quotient by an enormous margin and has the additional perk of ensuring that you both don’t wind up unemployed. I had two and a half work side-pieces when I worked in an office of the same size and genial temperament as the Death Star, and it made going to work far more bearable. I wouldn’t recommend this at smaller companies, or if there’s a significant power differential between the two employees who are hard at work. I would never have sex with a subordinate or a boss, because the prospect that there would be some subtext of expectation based on one person’s higher-ranking title is too exploitative to follow through with on good faith. If this person works in an unrelated department or is on the same professional plane, though? Use your judgment—your job is (usually) more important than ones that begin with “hand” or “blow,” but there have been instances where I went right ahead and hooked up in the third-floor conference room that no one uses anyway. Consider discretion an unspoken point on the “skill sets” segment of your resume, and you’ll likely be fine. • Planet Hollywood in scenic Orlando, Florida. Other odds were working against me, too—like, his name was Gilbert, but I remained undeterred—at least I heard it right that time.

• From Action (2014)

  Save for the cases in which you’re flagged down by catcallers and “suitors” with defunct understandings of what qualifies as a compliment, turning people down with kindness is an admirable practice. You might not have the kind of tender nerves that make hitting on someone feel like a potentially humiliating risk, but don’t make the assumption that everyone else shares your unflappability! Even if the person wooing you is grounded and easy about any potential negative reaction, it’s still less than preferable to have someone sneer into their drink at your advances. Say, “Thanks, but I’m not interested,” like a self-actualized adult. If someone invades your space, interrupts or touches you without asking, or comes at you clumsily, you do not owe them your politeness, as they haven’t paid any mind to yours. In those cases, I like to crisply pronounce every letter in the phrase “You need to back up,” while looking at the offending party like I want to garnish them with parsley and masticate ’em. That’s usually enough to get the shitheel to slur, “SOH-RRY!” and maybe call me a bitch, then leave. Perfect! Whom Should You Bone? [image file=image_394.jpg] Anyone who’s lucky enough that you should want to. I was going to add, “… as long as they seem like a good person,” but who needs goodness when sometimes you want an encounter to carbonate what you think sexual quality is all about? Often, if you allow the opposite of what you would have engineered to happen without trying to apply the grid of “What You Like” onto it, you find that that framework has more elasticity than you thought. Like, did you know, heretofore until you pinioned your limbs around the person you’re boning, that you were into being bitten like one of those shockingly oversized turkey legs at a county fair, as aggressed by a guy named Ron with something to prove? You did not. Now, you’re sure of it. Allow for the chance for every word in “What You Like” to change meanings whenever you have sex. The act of “what” you’re doing, the “you” who knows only how they’ve gone about sex with people who aren’t the person they’re salivating about in the current moment, and whether “liking” something includes finding room to make it worthy of attention besides, “THIS IS WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO ME SO FAR THAT IS COMPARABLE TO NO-CLOTHES-TIMES I HAD SEEN AT THE MOVIES WHERE THE PEOPLE WERE VERY ‘MTV BEACH BODY CALIFORNIA’ HOT, WHICH I LIKED.” Keep things mutable, and you’ll maximize your happiness.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Besht believed that the ordinary Hasid could not achieve union with God directly. He would find the divine only in the person of a Zaddik (“a righteous man”) who had mastered devekut , a constant mystical consciousness of God which was beyond the reach of most people. 10 The Hasid was, therefore, wholly dependent upon his Zaddik, an attitude which Kant would have condemned as unworthy tutelage. Hasidism was thus deeply at odds with the Enlightenment, and many Hasidim would reject it when it began to penetrate Eastern Europe. While the Besht was alive, the rabbinic establishment did not take him seriously, but Dov Ber, the new leader, a learned man, was a very different proposition, and the movement spread under his leadership. When it reached Lithuania, it came to the attention of a powerful figure: Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–97), head (gaon) of the Academy of Vilna. The Gaon was appalled by the Hasidic movement, especially its denigration of Torah study, which was his chief passion. His scholarship, however, was very different from the casuistic studies of the corrupt Polish rabbis, and had a deeply mystical cast. His sons tell us that he used to study all night with his feet in icy water to keep himself awake. For the Gaon, Torah study was a more aggressive exercise than it was for the Hasidim. He relished what he called the “effort” of study, and it seems as though this intense mental activity tipped him into a new level of awareness. When he did allow himself to sleep, the Torah penetrated his dreams and he would experience a mystical ascent to the divine. Torah study was thus an encounter with God. As his disciple, Rabbi Hayyim Volozhiner (1749–1821), whom we shall meet later, explained: “he who studies Torah communes with God, for God and the Torah are one.” 11 But the Gaon also made time for modern studies; he was proficient in astronomy, anatomy, mathematics, and foreign languages. He found the Hasidim heretical and obscurantist. The conflict became acrimonious. The Gaon’s supporters, whom the Hasidim called Misnagdim (“opponents”), would sometimes observe the rites of mourning when one of their number became a Hasid, as though he had died; the Hasidim, for their part, did not regard the Misnagdim as proper Jews. Eventually, in 1772, the Gaon excommunicated the Hasidim of Vilna and Brody; the shock of this expulsion is said to have killed Dov Ber. Toward the end of the Gaon’s life, Rabbi Shneur Zalman (1745–1813), a Hasidic leader in Ukraine and Belorussia, sought to effect a reconciliation, but the Gaon refused to speak with him.

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

  place in the Western Church. Unlike in the East, where Churches in the great cities had competing claims, there was no rival to the pope’s position in the West, particularly as the Latin North African Church, once so self-assertive, was laid low by the seventh-century Arab invasions. The Church’s constant search for a source of authority to solve its disputes encouraged the trend. For all the honour paid to great oecumenical councils like Nicaea and Chalcedon, the conflicts in their aftermaths, and the messy outcome of the council of 553, revealed the drawbacks in this method of decision-making. The battered prestige of the Bishop of Rome was restored and then extended by the pontificate of Pope Gregory I (590–604), often known as ‘the Great’. He was from the same wealthy, traditional administrative background as Ambrose two centuries before, and indeed he was Prefect of the City of Rome before becoming a monk in the city. Gregory was the first monk to become pope, although this was not monasticism as Pachomius or even Martin had known it: Gregory financed the foundation of the monastery which he entered, built on a family property within the city, and a later tradition asserted that his mother, Silvia, customarily sent him vegetables to his monastery on a silver dish.11 This Roman aristocrat showed no enthusiasm for the claims of the surviving Roman emperor. For six years Gregory had represented the Church of Rome as a diplomat (apocrisiary) at the Byzantine Court; despite or perhaps because of this, he had no great affection for or high opinion of the Greeks. When at the end of the sixth century Byzantine power in Italy was shattered by a central European people known as Lombards, Gregory certainly did not see the Lombard victory as a baffling catastrophe, as many had seen Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. On the contrary, in 592–3 he presided over a separate peace with the Lombards, ignoring the Byzantine imperial representative in Ravenna. He strongly objected to the title of Oecumenical or Universal Patriarch which the Patriarch of Constantinople had used for the past century, particularly because its justification was that the patriarch was bishop in the Universal City of Constantinople, ‘Universal’ because it was capital of the empire. It may have been in order to highlight the pride embodied in the Oecumenical Patriarch’s title that Gregory adopted one of aggressive self-deprecation, which his successors have used ever since: ‘Servant of the servants of God’.12 Gregory did have a strong sense of urgency in his papacy, for the good reason that he believed that the end of the world was imminent. It was easy to assume this, amid the political upheavals and decay of the society which had brought his family their prestige and fortune.13 If the Last Days were coming soon, it was essential that all Christians, not just monks, should prepare themselves for the end by reforming their lives; the clergy, chiefly himself, should be energetic in