Despair

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)

  He is “Pope of the Elbe,” complained Lemnius. It was an insult that stuck. 57 61. In 1539, a new edition of Fabian von Auerswald’s classic wrestling treatise, Ringer kunst, was published in Wittenberg, illustrated by Cranach. In the woodcuts, the wily old instructor, dressed in simple clothes, throws the smartly dressed pupil with his noble airs and graces. It was printed for a student market perhaps more eager to learn martial arts than study theology. 58 — B Y 1543, three years before his death, Luther’s mood began to worsen along with his health. He now complained of constant headaches, which kept him from working. The headaches had begun during his stay at Coburg Castle in 1530 but now he was no longer able to work without having had a drink; he was unsure whether this was a natural infirmity or yet more buffetings of Satan. 59 His letters betray his impatience. To ease the headaches he now kept a vein in his leg perpetually open in another effort to rebalance the humors—much to the concern of the countess of Mansfeld, who advised him that this would only create a further weak point in his body. 60 The sore on his leg made it so difficult for him to walk that he had to use a little cart to get him to the university and church so he could lecture and preach, even though the buildings were just around the corner. “I am too tired to write,” became a frequent refrain in his letters. He was sixty years old, and also suffering from the stone, gout, constipation, urine retention, and coldness. It was believed that the body grew colder as it aged, and Luther frequently dealt with illness by having himself rubbed and warmed. He was convinced that he was going to die. “I am completely sluggish, tired, cold, that is, old and useless,” he wrote. “I have run my course; it is time for me to meet my fathers and for corruption and the worms to have their share.” 61 There were even further strains, too, in the critical friendship with Melanchthon that underpinned the Reformation, although on the face of it, the personal bonds between the two men were stronger than ever. 62 In fact, each considered the other to have saved his life. When Luther was suffering from urine retention at Schmalkalden in 1537, Melanchthon had insisted that he wait a day before traveling on to Gotha because the astrological signs were not auspicious. Luther had laughed at his credulousness, but the jolting cart dislodged his stone and enabled him to pass large quantities of urine, saving his life. 63 When in 1540 Melanchthon had fallen into a feverish melancholy and refused to eat after the debacle of Philip of Hesse’s bigamy, Luther had traveled straight to Weimar to see him, threatening, “You must eat, or else I’ll excommunicate you.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  43 The old social systems were being brutally dismantled, yet the premodern, conservative lifestyle and beliefs of the vast majority of Egyptians remained unchanged. Two societies—one, consisting only of the military and administrative personnel, modernized, and the other unmodernized—operating on entirely different norms, were gradually emerging in modern Egypt. The ulema certainly experienced the dawn of modernity as destructive. They had been a power in the land when Muhammad Ali became governor. He wooed them, made them promises, and for three years there was a honeymoon period between the pasha and the clergy. In 1809, however, the ulema lost their traditional tax-exempt status, and Umar Makram urged them to oppose Muhammad Ali and force him to rescind the new taxes. But the ulema had rarely shown a united front, and the pasha was able to lure a significant number into his own camp. Makram was exiled and with him went the last opportunity for the ulema to oppose Muhammad Ali. His departure was also a defeat for the ulema as a class. As a Muslim, Muhammad Ali was careful to pay lip service to the religious scholars and the madrasahs , but he systematically marginalized them, and divested them of any shred of power. He deposed sheikhs who defied him and, as a result, Jabarti says, most ulema acquiesced in the new policies. He also starved them financially. By seizing the revenues of the religiously endowed properties (awqaf) , he took away the ulema’s principal source of income. By 1815 a large number of the traditional Koran schools were in ruins. Sixty years later, the Islamic establishment was in desperate financial straits. There were no stipends for teachers, and mosques could no longer afford to support their prayer leaders, muezzins, Koran reciters, and caretakers. The great Mamluk buildings had deteriorated, and even the Azhar was in a wretched state. 44 In the face of this onslaught, the ulema of Egypt became cowed and reactionary. Their traditional consultative role in the government was taken by the new foreign elite of administrators, most of whom had little respect for local tradition. The ulema were left behind in the march for progress, and the pasha left them alone with their books and manuscripts. Since opposition had become impossible, the ulema turned their backs on change, entrenching themselves in their scholarly traditions. This would continue to be the chief ulema stance in Egypt. They did not regard modernity as an intellectual challenge but experienced it instead as a series of odious and destructive regulations, as theft of their power and wealth, and as an agonizing loss of prestige and influence. 45 When Muslims in Egypt came into contact with the new Western ideas, therefore, they would find no guidance from the clergy, and would look elsewhere for help.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Title page of Luther’s pamphlet on Leonhard Kaiser’s martyrdom, Von herr Lenhard Keiser in Beyern vmb des Euangelij willen verbrant, ein selige geschicht, Nuremberg, 1528. We cannot be certain of the full reasons for Luther’s collapse, but the years of argument over the Eucharist had tested his most fundamental beliefs and put his relationship with Christ on the line. Resolutely setting his face against Karlstadt and the sacramentarians had brought him to the brink. 50 His position on the Real Presence, after all, was not rational: Christ’s presence in the sacrament could not be explained, but must simply be believed; it was a matter where argument ceased. Such a position allowed him to make short work of all his opponents’ arguments, because there was no need to engage in any depth with what they were saying theologically. Instead, he retreated to a defensive stance where he could be certain that he was “with Christ,” facing the enemy. Yet this also exposed him to the worst kind of Anfechtung, the fear that he would lose faith altogether, and the terror that his assurance that Christ was with him might dissolve. If he had been deserted by Christ, then the position he had taken on the Eucharist was wrong. And if he was wrong, then it was he, and not his enemies, who was on Satan’s side. Luther had only the stark alternatives of having faith or losing it, and doubt—from which he suffered repeatedly—plunged him into despair. The rift with Karlstadt was now beyond repair, and worse, Karlstadt was accusing him of becoming like the Catholics and making martyrs himself. Around him, people were dying for the gospel and yet he was “not worthy” of martyrdom. Two themes stand out in Luther’s agonized prayer at the time: the blood of martyrs, and the need to attack the sacramentarians. Secure in Wittenberg, Luther would not be a martyr, but over the coming months he could fight the plague for his parishioners. — T HE plague receded; Luther recovered from his collapse, and his doubts faded: He became ever more certain of the correctness of his view of the Eucharist. He began to set up a new Church, and the Saxon Visitation of all the parishes in the territory began, with the instructions for the visitors of parish pastors in electoral Saxony finally agreed and printed in March 1528. 51 Luther began to see for himself just how ignorant of Christianity many Saxons were, and how many problems the fledgling ministry faced.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In America, some of the more conservative Protestants were in the grip of a similar vision, but their nightmare scenario took a religious form. The United States had also suffered a terrible conflict and an ensuing anticlimax. Americans had seen the Civil War (1861–65) between the northern and southern states in apocalyptic terms. Northerners believed that the conflict would purge the nation; soldiers sang of the “glory of the coming of the Lord.” 5 Preachers spoke of an approaching Armageddon, of a battle between light and darkness, liberty and slavery. They looked forward to a New Man and a New Dispensation emerging, phoenix-like, from this fiery trial. 6 But there was no brave new world in America either. Instead, by the end of the war, whole cities had been destroyed, families had been torn asunder, and there was a white southern backlash. Instead of utopia, the northern states experienced the rapid and painful transition from an agrarian to an industrialized society. New cities were built, old cities exploded in size. Hordes of new immigrants poured into the country from southern and eastern Europe. Capitalists made vast fortunes from the iron, oil, and steel industries, while workers lived below subsistence level. Women and children were exploited in the factories: by 1890, one out of every five children had a job. Conditions were poor, the hours long, and the machinery unsafe. There was also a new gulf between town and countryside, as large parts of the United States, especially the South, remained agrarian. If a void lay beneath the prosperity of Europe, America was becoming a country without a core. 7 The secular genre of the “future war” which so entranced the people of Europe, did not attract the more religious Americans. Instead, some developed a more consuming interest than ever before in eschatology, dreaming of a Final War between God and Satan, which would bring this evil society to a richly deserved end. The new apocalyptic vision that took root in America during the late nineteenth century is called premillennialism, because it envisaged Christ returning to earth before he established his thousand-year reign. (The older and more optimistic postmillennialism of the Enlightenment, which was still cultivated by liberal Protestants, imagined human beings inaugurating God’s Kingdom by their own efforts: Christ would only return to earth after the millennium was established.) The new premillennialism was preached in America by the Englishman John Nelson Darby (1800–82), who found few followers in Britain but toured the United States to great acclaim six times between 1859 and 1877.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He managed to modernize the administration of the Azhar and to improve the salaries and working conditions of the teachers. But ulema and students alike were fiercely opposed to any attempt to introduce modern secular subjects into the curriculum. 76 Faced with such opposition, Abdu became dispirited. In 1905, he resigned as Mufti, and died shortly afterward. The struggles of both Abdu and Afghani show how difficult it was to adapt a faith that had come to fruition in the conservative period to the entirely different ethos of the modern world. They were both aware—and rightly so—of the dangers of too rapid secularization. Islam could provide much-needed continuity at a time of dislocating transformation. Egyptians were becoming strangers to one another, and those who had been Westernized were often alienated from their own culture. They were truly at home in neither the East nor the West, and, without the mythical and cultic practices which had once given life meaning, they were beginning to descend into the void that lay at the heart of the modern experience. The old institutions were being destroyed, but the new ones were strange and imperfectly understood. Abdu and Afghani were still nourished personally by the old spirituality. When they insisted that religion must be rational, they were closer to Mulla Sadra than to European rationalists and scientists, who discounted all religiously acquired truth. When they insisted that reason was the sole arbiter of truth and that all doctrines must be capable of rational proof, they spoke as practicing mystics. Shaped by conservative norms, they saw reason and intuition as complementary. But later generations, who had imbibed more of the spirit of Western rationalism, would find that reason alone could not yield a sense of the sacred. This loss of transcendent meaning would not be counter-balanced, as in the West, by the benefits of liberation and independence, because, increasingly, it was the West that set the agenda—even in religious matters. A telling example of how confusing and damaging this could be occurred in 1899, when Qassim Amin (1865–1908) published Tahrir al-Mara (“The Liberation of Women”), which argued that the degraded position of women—in particular, the practice of veiling—was responsible for Egypt’s backwardness. The veil was “a huge barrier between woman and her elevation, and consequently a barrier between the nation and its advance.” 77 The book caused an uproar, not because it was saying anything new, but because an Egyptian writer had internalized and adopted a colonial prejudice. For years, men and women in Egypt had been agitating for fundamental changes in the position of women.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The economic changes over the last four hundred years have been accompanied by immense social, political, and intellectual revolutions, with the development of an entirely different, scientific and rational, concept of the nature of truth; and, once again, a radical religious change has become necessary. All over the world, people are finding that in their dramatically transformed circumstances, the old forms of faith no longer work for them: they cannot provide the enlightenment and consolation that human beings seem to need. As a result, men and women are trying to find new ways of being religious; like the reformers and prophets of the Axial Age, they are attempting to build upon the insights of the past in a way that will take human beings forward into the new world they have created for themselves. One of these modern experiments—however paradoxical it may superficially seem to say so—is fundamentalism. We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. 3 Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. 4 Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He was beginning to realize that the position of the Supreme Faqih could weaken the authority of the institutions that the Islamic republic needed if it was to survive in the modern world. He was an old man. If he kept intervening and overturning the decisions of government institutions on the basis of his personal charisma, the Majlis and Council would lose their credibility and integrity, and the Islamic constitution would not survive his death. The impasse between the Council and the Majlis continued. Khomeini tried to shame the ulema by pointing to the example of the Iranian children who were dying every day as martyrs in the war with Iraq. These child martyrs show the moral dangers of translating a mystical insight into practical policy. From the moment war was declared, adolescents had crowded into the mosques begging to be sent to the front. Many of them came from the slums and shantytowns and had been radicalized during the Revolution. Afterward, they found their inevitably dull and grim lives an anticlimax. Some had joined the Foundation for the Downtrodden or worked for Construction Jihad, but this could not compare with the excitement of the battlefield. Iran was technically ill-equipped for the war; there had been a population explosion, and the youth formed the majority group in the country. The Foundation for the Downtrodden became the nucleus of an army of twenty million young people who were eager for action. The government passed an edict which allowed male children from the age of twelve to enlist at the front without their parents’ permission. They would become the wards of the Imam, and could be assured of a place in paradise in the event of their death. Tens of thousands of adolescents, wearing crimson headbands (the insignia of a martyr), poured into the war zone. Some cleared minefields, running ahead of the troops and often getting blown to pieces. Others became suicide-bombers, attacking Iraqi tanks kamikaze-style. Special scribes were sent to the front to write their wills, many of which took the form of letters to Imam Khomeini, and spoke of the light he had brought into their lives and of the joy of fighting “alongside friends on the road to Paradise.” 25 These young people restored Khomeini’s faith in the Revolution; they were following the example of Imam Husain, dying in order to “witness” to the primacy of the Unseen. It was the highest form of asceticism, through which a Muslim transcends self and achieves union with God.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  To their exasperation, redemption seemed to have stalled. The Labor government did not annex the occupied territories, and, though they built military settlements there, there was still talk of exchanging land for peace. The victory of 1967 had led to an Israeli complacency, which was shattered when, in October 1973 on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the most solemn day in the Jewish year, Egypt and Syria invaded Sinai and the Golan Heights, taking the Israelis completely by surprise. This time the Arab armies made a much better showing and were only pushed back by the IDF with great difficulty. Israelis were shocked, and a mood of depression and doubt settled on the country. Israel had been caught off-guard, and this near-defeat seemed the result of ideological decline. Kookists agreed. In 1967, God had made his will clear, but instead of capitalizing on this victory and taking over the territories, the Israeli government had temporized and worried about antagonizing the goyim, especially in the United States. The Yom Kippur War was God’s punishment and a reminder. Now religious Jews must come to the nation’s rescue. One Kookist rabbi compared secular Israel to a soldier falling in the desert after fighting an heroic war. Faithful Jews, who had never abandoned religion, would take over and carry on his mission. 94 The Six Day War had confirmed the Kookists in their vision and led to a couple of settlement ventures, but their movement did not really take wing until after the shock of the war of Yom Kippur. An article by the Kookist rabbi Yehuda Amital expressed the new militancy. In “The Meaning of the Yom Kippur War,” Amital demonstrated that deep fear of annihilation that lies at the heart of so many fundamentalist movements. The October assault had reminded all Israelis of their isolation in the Middle East and shown that they were encircled by enemies who seemed dedicated to the destruction of their state. This raised the specter of the Holocaust. Now Amital declared that the old Zionist policy had been discredited. The secular state had not solved the Jewish problem; anti-Semitism was worse than ever. “The State of Israel is the only state in the world which faces destruction,” he argued. There was no way that Jews could be “normalized,” becoming like all the other nations, as the secular Zionists had hoped. But there was another Zionism, that preached by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, which declared that the redemptive process was now far advanced. Instead of seeing the war as yet another Jewish catastrophe, it should be regarded as an act of purification. The secular Jews, whose Zionism had been so lamentably inadequate that it had brought the nation to the brink of catastrophe, had tried to fuse Judaism with the empirical rationalism and democratic culture of the modern West. This foreign influence must be eliminated.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In October 1990, they killed the Speaker of the Egyptian parliament, Rifaat Mahjub, and gunned down the determined secularist Faraj Foda in 1992. That year saw the first Islamist attacks on European and American tourists. 66 Since tourism is crucial to the economy, Mubarak responded with raids and indiscriminate, clumsy mass arrests, which put more fuel on the flames. By 1997, human rights groups claimed that 20,000 suspected guerrillas were being detained without trial in Egyptian prisons, many— yet again—arrested for simply possessing an inflammatory pamphlet or attending a meeting. On November 17, 1997, the terrorist group Jamaat al- Islamiyyah massacred fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians at Luxor, insisting that this attack would “not be the last, because the Mujahedin will continue their work as long as the government continues to torture and kill the sons of the Islamic movement.” 67 The war continues. Desperation and helplessness have continued to inspire a minority of Sunni Muslims in Egypt to turn Islam into an ideology that, in its justification of murder, is a total distortion of religion. LIKE EGYPT, Israel was also becoming a more religious country. This was nowhere more evident than in the political rise of the Haredim during the 1980s. A minority of the ultra-Orthodox Jews continued to regard the State of Israel as inherently evil, “a pollution that encompasses all other pollutions, a complete heresy that includes all other heresies.” 68 “In its very essence, Zionism utterly denies the essentials of our faith,” wrote Yeramiel Domb in the Neturei Karta newsletter in 1975. “It is an absolute denial that reaches down to the very depths, the very foundations, the very roots.” 69 But most of the Haredim did not go so far; they simply saw the state as having no religious significance and regarded it with utter indifference. This neutrality enabled them to take part in the political process. The Hasidim could even see their political work in a religious light, as a redemption of the divine sparks trapped in the secular institutions of the state. By pressing for such religious legislation as the banning of pork, or promoting more stringent Sabbath observance, they could make Israeli society more open to the possibility of messianic transformation. The Lithuanian Misnagdim had a more pragmatic attitude. They had entrenched themselves more deeply than ever in the yeshiva world, and used the state to buttress their own institutions. They were entirely uninterested in questions of state, of defense, of domestic or foreign policy; their sole criterion for the support of one party rather than another was the amount of funding and political backing it was willing to devote to the yeshivot. 70 Survival was still the major objective of the Haredim. Their attitude to the gentile world had hardened since the 1960s.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. By making “God” a wholly notional truth, struggling to reach the divine by intellect alone, as some modern believers had attempted to do, modern men and women had killed it for themselves. The whole dynamic of their future-oriented culture had made the traditional ways of apprehending the sacred psychologically impossible. Like the Jewish Marranos before them, who had themselves been thrust, for very different reasons, into a religious limbo, many modern men and women were experiencing the truths of religion as tenuous, arbitrary, and incomprehensible. Nietzsche’s madman believed that the death of God had torn humanity from its roots, thrown the earth off course, and cast it adrift in a pathless universe. Everything that had once given human beings a sense of direction had vanished. “Is there still an above and below?” he had asked. “Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?” 96 A profound terror, a sense of meaninglessness and annihilation, would be part of the modern experience. Nietzsche was writing at a time when the exuberant exhilaration of modernity was beginning to give way to a nameless dread. This would affect not only the Christians of Europe, but Jews and Muslims, who had also been drawn into the modernizing process and found it equally perplexing.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I went mad in full possession of my senses. Just long enough to cry out. I did cry out. A faint cry, a call for help, to crack the ice in which the whole scene was fatally freezing. My mother turned her head. For me the whole town is inhabited by the beggar woman in the road. And all the beggar women of the towns, the rice fields, the tracks bordering Siam, the banks of the Mekong—for me the beggar woman who frightened me is inhabited by them. She comes from everywhere. She always ends up in Calcutta wherever she started out from. She’s always slept in the shade of the cinnamon-apple trees in the playground. And always my mother has been there beside her, tending her foot eaten up with maggots and covered with flies. Beside her, the little girl in the story. She’s carried her two thousand kilometers. She’s had enough of her, wants to give her away. Go on, take her. No more children. No more child. All dead or thrown away, it amounts to a lot after a whole life. The one asleep under the cinnamon-apple trees isn’t yet dead. She’s the one who’ll live longest. She’ll die inside the house, in a lace dress. She’ll be mourned. She’s on the banks of the rice fields on either side of the track, shouting and laughing at the top of her voice. She has a golden laugh, fit to wake the dead, to wake anyone who listens to children’s laughter. She stays outside the bungalow for days and days, there are white people in the bungalow, she remembers they give food to beggars. And then one day, lo and behold, she wakes at daybreak and starts to walk, one day she goes, who can tell why, she turns off toward the mountains, goes up through the forest, follows the paths running along the tops of the mountains of Siam. Having seen, perhaps, seen a yellow and green sky on the other side of the plain, she crosses over. At last begins to descend to the sea. With her great gaunt step she descends the slopes of the forest. On, on. They are forests full of pestilence. Regions of great heat. There’s no healthy wind from the sea. There’s the stagnant din of mosquitoes, dead children, rain every day. And then here are the deltas. The biggest deltas in the world. Made of black slime. Stretching toward Chittagong. She’s left the tracks, the forests, the tea roads, the red suns behind, and she goes forward over the estuary of the deltas. She goes in the same direction as the world, toward the engulfing, always distant east.

• From The Lover (1984)

  I expect she was waiting for me but fell asleep as she waited, impatient and angry. She must have been crying too, and then lapsed into oblivion. I’d like to wake her up, have a whispered conversation. I don’t talk to the man from Cholon any more, he doesn’t talk to me, I need to hear H.L.’s questions. She has the matchless attentiveness of those who don’t understand what is said to them. But I can’t wake her up. Once she’s awakened like that, in the middle of the night, H.L. can’t go back to sleep again. She gets up, wants to go outside, does so, goes down the stairs, along the corridors, out all alone into the big empty playgrounds, she runs, she calls out to me, she’s so happy, it’s irresistible, and when she’s not allowed to go out with the other girls, you know that’s just what she wants. I hesitate, but then no, I don’t wake her up. Under the mosquito net the heat is stifling, when you close the net after you it seems unendurable. But I know it’s because I’ve come in from outside, from the banks of the river where it’s always cool at night. I’m used to it, I keep still, wait for it to pass. It passes. I never fall asleep right away despite the new fatigues in my life. I think about the man from Cholon. He’s probably in a nightclub somewhere near the Fountain with his driver, they’ll be drinking in silence, they drink arrack when they’re on their own. Or else he’s gone home, he’s fallen asleep with the light on, still without speaking to anyone. That night I can’t bear the thought of the man from Cholon any more. Nor the thought of H.L. It’s as if they were happy, and as if it came from outside themselves. And I have nothing like that. My mother says, This one will never be satisfied with anything. I think I’m beginning to see my life. I think I can already say, I have a vague desire to die. From now on I treat that word and my life as inseparable. I think I have a vague desire to be alone, just as I realize I’ve never been alone any more since I left childhood behind, and the family of the hunter. I’m going to write. That’s what I see beyond the present moment, in the great desert in whose form my life stretches out before me. I forget the words of the telegram from Saigon. Forget whether it said my younger brother was dead or whether it said, Recalled to God. I seem to remember it was Recalled to God. I realized at once, she couldn’t have sent the telegram.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  36 The Puritans, radical Calvinists who had started by opposing what they deemed the “popery” of the Church of England, also had an extreme, tumultuous spirituality. Their “born-again” conversions were often traumatic; many experienced an agony of guilt, fear, and paralyzing doubt before the breakthrough, when they sank blissfully into the arms of God. Their conversion gave them great energy and enabled them to play leading roles in early modernity. They were good capitalists and often good scientists. But sometimes the effects of grace wore off and Puritans suffered a relapse, falling into chronic depressive states and in a few cases even committing suicide. 37 Conservative religion had not usually been hysterical in this way. Its rituals and cult had been designed to attune people to reality. Bacchanalian cults and frenzied ecstasy had certainly occurred but had involved the few rather than the majority. Mysticism was not for the masses. At its best, it was a one- to-one process, in which the adept was carefully supervised to make sure that he or she did not fall into unhealthy psychic states. The descent into the unconscious was an enterprise demanding great skill, intelligence, and discipline. When expert guidance was not available, the results could be deplorable. The crazed and neurotic behavior of some of the medieval Christian saints, which was often due to inadequate spiritual direction, showed the dangers of an undisciplined cultivation of alternate states of mind. The reforms of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross had been designed precisely to correct such abuses. When mystical journeys were undertaken en masse, they could degenerate into crowd hysteria, the nihilism of the Sabbatarians, or the mental imbalance of some of the Puritans. Emotional excess became a feature of American religious life during the eighteenth century. It was especially evident in the First Great Awakening, which erupted in Northampton, Connecticut, in 1734 and was chronicled by the learned Calvinist minister Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Before the Awakening, Edwards explained, the people of Northampton had not been particularly religious, but in 1734 two young people died suddenly, and the shock (backed up by Edwards’s own emotive preaching) plunged the town into a frenzied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. People stopped work and spent the whole day reading the Bible. Within six months, three hundred people in the town had experienced a wrenching “born-again” conversion.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Unlike their elders, these children had ceased to be “slaves of nature,” wedded to self-interest and the material world. They were helping Iran achieve “a situation which we cannot describe in any other way except to say that it is a divine country.” 26 As long as men and women focused solely on the material and the mundane, they became less than human. “Dying does not mean nothingness,” Khomeini declared, “it is life.” 27 Martyrdom had become a crucial part of Iran’s revolt against the rational pragmatism of the West and essential to the Greater Jihad for the nation’s soul. 28 But despite Khomeini’s insistence that martyrdom was not “nothingness,” there was nihilism in this shocking dispatch of thousands of children to an early, violent death. It contravened fundamental human values, crucial to religious and secularists alike, about the sacred inviolability of life and our instinctive urge to protect our children at the cost of our own lives, if necessary. This cult of the child martyr was another fatal distortion of faith, to which fundamentalists in all three monotheistic traditions are prone. It sprang, perhaps, from the terror that comes from battling against powerful enemies who seek our destruction. But it also shows how perilous it can be to translate a mystical, mythical imperative into a pragmatic, military or political policy. When Mulla Sadra had spoken of the mystical death to self, he had not envisaged the physical, voluntary death of thousands of young people. Again, what works well in the spiritual domain can become destructive and even immoral if interpreted literally and practically in the mundane world. It was clearly proving very difficult to create a truly Islamic polity. In December 1987, Khomeini, now frail and ailing, addressed himself once again to the constitutional issue. This time, the Council of Guardians was blocking the labor laws, which, they claimed, contravened the Shariah. Khomeini, who supported the populist Majlis against the more elitist and reactionary ulema on the Council, declared that the state had the power to replace fundamental Islamic systems if the welfare of the people demanded it. The Shariah was a preindustrial code, and needed to be radically adapted to the needs of the modern world, and Khomeini seemed to sense this. The state, he said, could substitute those fundamental Islamic systems, by any kind of social, economic, labor ... urban affairs, agricultural, or other system, and can make the services ... that are the monopoly of the state into an instrument for the implementation of general and comprehensive policies. 29 Khomeini had made a declaration of independence. The state must have a “monopoly” in such practical matters, and must be emancipated from the constraining laws of traditional religion. Two weeks later, he went further.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  They alternated between soaring highs and devastating lows; sometimes they were quite broken and “sank into an abyss, under a sense of guilt that they were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God.” At other times they would “break forth into laughter, tears often at the same time issuing like a flood, and intermingling a loud weeping.” 38 The revival was just burning itself out when George Whitefield (1714–70), an English Methodist preacher, toured the colonies and sparked a second wave. During his sermons, people fainted, wept, and shrieked; the churches shook with the cries of those who imagined themselves saved and the groans of the unfortunate who were convinced that they were damned. It was not only the simple and unlearned who were so affected. Whitefield had an ecstatic reception at Harvard and Yale, and finished his tour in 1740 with a mass rally where he preached to 30,000 people on Boston Common. Edwards showed the dangers of this type of emotionalism in his account of the Awakening. When the revival died down in Northampton, one man was so cast down that he committed suicide, convinced that this loss of ecstatic joy could only mean that he was predestined to Hell. In other towns too, “multitudes ... seemed to have it strongly suggested to them, and pressed upon them, as if somebody had spoken to them, ‘Cut your own throat, now is a good opportunity. Now!’ ” Two people went mad with “strange enthusiastic delusions.” 39 Edwards insisted that most people were calmer and more peaceful than before the Awakening, but his apologia shows how perilous it could be to imagine that religion is purely an affair of the heart. Once faith was conceived as irrational, and the inbuilt constraints of the best conservative spirituality were jettisoned, people could fall prey to all manner of delusions. The rituals of a cult were carefully designed to lead people through a trauma so that they came out healthily on the other side of it. This was clear in the rites of Lurianic Kabbalah, where the mystic was allowed to express his grief and abandonment but made to finish the vigil joyfully. Similarly, the popular Shii processions in honor of Husain gave people an outlet for their frustration and anger, but in a ritualized form: they did not usually run amok after the ceremony was over and vent their rage on the rich and powerful. But in Northampton, there was no stylized cult to help people through their rite of passage. Everything was spontaneous and undisciplined. People were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions and even to indulge them. For a few, this proved fatal. Nevertheless, Edwards was convinced that the Awakening was the work of God.

• From The Lover (1984)

  And you must try not to destroy the habits of the poor. His father has just built a whole series of compartments with covered balconies overlooking the street. This makes the streets very light and agreeable. People spend the whole day on these outside balconies. Sleep there, too, when it’s very hot. I say I’d have liked to live on an outside balcony myself, when I was small it was my dream, to sleep out of doors. Suddenly I have a pain. Very slight, almost imperceptible. It’s my heartbeat, shifted into the fresh, keen wound he’s made in me, he, the one who’s talking to me, the one who also made the afternoon’s pleasure. I don’t hear what he’s saying, I’ve stopped listening. He sees, stops. I tell him to go on. He does. I listen again. He says he thinks about Paris a lot. He thinks I’m very different from the girls in Paris, not nearly so nice. I say the compartments can’t be as profitable as all that. He doesn’t answer. Throughout our affair, for a year and a half, we’d talk like this, never about ourselves. From the first we knew we couldn’t possibly have any future in common, so we’d never speak of the future, we’d talk about day-to-day events, evenly, hitting the ball back and forth. I tell him his visit to France was fatal. He agrees. Says he bought everything in Paris, his women, his acquaintances, his ideas. He’s twelve years older than I, and this scares him. I listen to the way he speaks, makes mistakes, makes love even—with a sort of theatricality at once contrived and sincere. I tell him I’m going to introduce him to my family. He wants to run away. I laugh. He can only express his feelings through parody. I discover he hasn’t the strength to love me in opposition to his father, to possess me, take me away. He often weeps because he can’t find the strength to love beyond fear. His heroism is me, his cravenness is his father’s money. Whenever I mention my brothers he’s overcome by this fear, as if unmasked. He thinks my people all expect a proposal of marriage. He knows he’s lost, done for already in my family’s eyes, that for them he can only become more lost, and as a result lose me. He says he went to study at a business school in Paris, he tells the truth at last, says he didn’t do any work and his father stopped his allowance, sent him his return ticket, and he had to leave. This retreat is his tragedy. He didn’t finish the course at the business school. He says he hopes to finish it here by correspondence. The meetings with the family began with the big meals in Cholon.

• From The Lover (1984)

  But it’s by the way we’re dressed, us children, all anyhow, that I recognize a mood my mother sometimes used to fall into, and of which already, at the age we were in the photo, we knew the warning signs—the way she’d suddenly be unable to wash us, dress us, or sometimes even feed us. Every day my mother experienced this deep despondency about living. Sometimes it lasted, sometimes it would vanish with the dark. I had the luck to have a mother desperate with a despair so unalloyed that sometimes even life’s happiness, at its most poignant, couldn’t quite make her forget it. What I’ll never know is what kind of practical considerations made her leave us like that, every day. This time, perhaps, it’s the foolish thing she’s just done, the house she’s just bought—the one in the photograph—which we absolutely didn’t need, and at a time when my father was already very ill, not far from death, only a few months. Or has she just learned she’s got the same illness he is going to die of? The dates are right. What I don’t know, and she can’t have known either, is what kind of considerations they were that haunted her and made that dejection rise up before her. Was it the death, already at hand, of my father? Or the dying of the light? Doubts about her marriage? About her husband? About her children? Or about all these appurtenances in general? It happened every day. Of that I’m sure. It must have come on quite suddenly. At a given moment every day the despair would make its appearance. And then would follow an inability to go on, or sleep, or sometimes nothing, or sometimes, instead, the buying of houses, the removals, or sometimes the moodiness, just the moodiness, the dejection. Or sometimes she’d be like a queen, give anything she was asked for, take anything she was offered, that house by the Small Lake, for absolutely no reason, my father already dying, or the flat-brimmed hat, because the girl had set her heart on it, or the same thing with the gold lamé shoes. Or else nothing, or just sleep, die. I’ve never seen any of those films where American Indian women wear the same kind of flat-brimmed hat, with their hair in braids hanging down in front. That day I have braids too, not put up as usual, but not the same as theirs either. I too have a couple of long braids hanging down in front like those women in the films I’ve never seen, but mine are the braids of a child. Ever since I’ve had the hat, I’ve stopped putting my hair up so that I can wear it. For some time I’ve scraped my hair back to try to make it flat, so that people can’t see it. Every night I comb and braid it before I go to bed, as my mother taught me.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  108 America, which had been founded as a Bible-based republic, had now become a secular state, a catastrophe, John Whitehead (president of the conservative Rutherford Institute) attributed to a gross misreading of the First Amendment. Jefferson’s “wall of separation” was designed, Whitehead believed, to protect religion from the state, not vice versa. 109 But now the humanist judges had made the state an object of worship: “The state is seen as secular,” he argued, but “the state is religious, because its ‘ultimate concern’ is the perpetuation of the state itself.” Secular humanism, therefore, amounted to a rebellion against God’s sovereignty, and its worship of the state was idolatrous. 110 Not only had the conspiracy completely infiltrated American society, but it had also conquered the world. For the fundamentalist writer Pat Brooks, the secular humanists formed “a huge conspiratorial network” which was “fast approaching its goal of bringing in a ‘new world order,’ a vast world government that would reduce the world to slavery.” 111 Like other fundamentalists, Brooks saw the enemy as omnipresent, and pursuing its objective relentlessly over a long period. He saw it at work in the Soviet Union, on Wall Street, in Zionism, in the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve System. The cabal that was masterminding this international conspiracy included the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Kissinger, Brzezinski, the shah, and Omar Torrijos, the former Panamanian dictator. 112 This terror of secular humanism was as irrational and as ungovernable as any of the other paranoid fantasies we have considered, and sprang from the same fear of annihilation. The Protestant fundamentalists’ view of modern society in general and of America in particular was as demonic as that of any Islamist. For Franky Schaeffer, for example, the West was about to enter an electronic dark age, in which the new pagan hordes, with all the power of technology at their command, are on the verge of obliterating the last strongholds of civilized humanity. A vision of darkness lies before us. As we leave the shores of Christian western man behind, only a dark and turbulent sea of despair stretches endlessly ahead ... unless we fight. 113 Like Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists, American Protestants also felt that their backs were to the wall and that they would have to fight in order to survive. Just as Sayyid Qutb’s description of a modern jahili city was difficult for liberal Muslims to recognize, the vision of America that Protestant fundamentalists were evolving was radically different from that of the liberal mainstream.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  50 The war years seemed to prove that the postmillennial optimism of the liberals had been deluded; fundamentalists regarded the new United Nations in as negative a light as they had the old League of Nations. It would prepare the world for the dictatorship of Antichrist and the ensuing Tribulation. There could be no world peace. “The Bible contradicts such a utopian dream,” wrote Herbert Lockyear in 1942. “This is not to be the last war. Present horrors are but the spawn to produce still more terrible anguish.” 51 This was a vision diametrically opposed to the view of the liberal establishment. There were “two nations” in America, unable to share each other’s vision of the modern world. The premillennial vision endorsed the fundamentalists’ feeling of utter helplessness. The atomic bomb, they believed, had been foretold by St. Peter, who had predicted that on the last day, “with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, the earth and all that it contains will be burnt up.” 52 There was no hope of averting the final holocaust, David Grey Barnhouse reflected in Eternity magazine in 1945: “the divine plan moves forward to its inevitable fulfillment.” In his best-seller The Atomic Age and the Word of God (1948), the fundamentalist author Wilbur Smith argued that the bomb proved that the literalists had been right all along. 53 The exact predictions of the atomic explosion in Scripture showed that the Bible was indeed inerrant and must be read according to its plain sense. Yet this fatalistic scenario also gave the fundamentalists, who felt despised and ostracized by the mainstream culture, a sense of confidence and superiority. They had privileged information, denied to the secularist or liberal Christian, and knew what was really going on. The catastrophic events of the twentieth century were really heading toward Christ’s final victory. Moreover, the atomic holocaust would not affect the true believers, since, as we have seen, they were convinced that they would be raptured up to heaven before the End. It was only the apostates and unbelievers who would suffer those final tortures. Premillennialism was, therefore, fueling the resentment experienced by fundamentalists by allowing them to cultivate fantasies of revenge that were quite out of keeping with the spirit of the Gospels. There was contradiction too in their apparently positive vision of the new State of Israel. The Jewish people had been central to the vision of John Darby, the founder of premillennialism.

• From The Lover (1984)

  And there’s the headache, too, which often makes her lie limp, motionless, ghastly pale, with a wet bandage over her eyes. And the loathing of life that sometimes seizes her, when she thinks of her mother and suddenly cries out and weeps with rage at the thought of not being able to change things, not being able to make her mother happy before she dies, not being able to kill those responsible. His face against hers he receives her tears, crushes her to him, mad with desire for her tears, for her anger. He takes her as he would his own child. He’d take his own child the same way. He plays with his child’s body, turns it over, covers his face with it, his lips, his eyes. And she, she goes on abandoning herself in exactly the same way as he set when he started. Then suddenly it’s she who’s imploring, she doesn’t say what for, and he, he shouts to her to be quiet, that he doesn’t want to have anything more to do with her, doesn’t want to have his pleasure of her any more. And now once more they are caught together, locked together in terror, and now the terror abates again, and now they succumb to it again, amid tears, despair, and happiness. They are silent all evening long. In the black car that takes her back to the boarding school she leans her head on his shoulder. He puts his arm around her. He says it’s a good thing the boat from France is coming soon to take her away and separate them. They are silent during the drive. Sometimes he tells the driver to go around by the river. She sleeps, exhausted, on his shoulder. He wakes her with kisses. In the dormitory the light is blue. There’s a smell of incense, they always burn incense at dusk. The heat is oppressive, all the windows are wide open, and there’s not a breath of air. I take my shoes off so as not to make any noise, but I’m not worried, I know the mistress in charge won’t get up, I know it’s accepted now that I come back at night at whatever time I like. I go straight to where H.L. is, always slightly anxious, always afraid she may have run away during the day. But she’s there. She sleeps deeply, H.L. An obstinate, almost hostile sleep, I remember. Expressing rejection. Her bare arms are flung up in abandon around her head. Her body is not lying down decorously like those of the other girls, her legs are bent, her face is invisible, her pillow awry.