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 The Battle for God (2000)

  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. 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.

• From Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life (2005)

  119 they return home. They see a plane in the sky, the plane drops one bomb, and a fragment hits and kills Kat. The unit is now fi lled with young boys, and they only seem to know how to get killed. The war has degenerated into one meaningless, futile assault after another. It is now summer 1918, and the war is dragging on. In November 1918, there are clear indications that the war is coming to an end, that an armistice will be signed, and that Paul has lived through the experience. Near the end of the book are several asterisks. Under the asterisks, the text reads that Paul was found dead, with a smile on his face, as if he was glad that the end had come. Paul was found on a day so quiet that the news from the front was only one line: “ Im Westen, nichts Neues .” Paul Bäumer was just one more of 11 million dead. Im Westen, nichts Neues encapsulated the feelings of many who fought in World War I. The British poet Wilfred Owen’s work cries out to his readers that it is not sweet and fi tting to die for one’s country. Owen died on November 4, 1918, seven days before the armistice. World War I was a war with a purpose. It put an end, for a brief period, to Germany’s desire to dominate Europe. Some men, including the American poet Alan Seeger, were stoic about the war. Seeger, a Harvard graduate living in France, joined the French Foreign Legion so that he could fi ght in the war. Seeger was killed on July 4, 1916. His poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” states that he “shall not fail that rendezvous.” After World War I, many people at all levels of government believed that no war was worth its cost. One German infantryman named Adolf Hitler, however, did not believe that the war was a great mistake; he saw it as the greatest moment of his life. Because English and French politicians were too weak and because the public believed that the war was a terrible mistake, the world found itself 30 years later in a more destructive war that would cause the deaths of 50 million people. ■ Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front. Essential Reading 120 Lecture 22: Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front Brooke, Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen: Selected Poems. Horne, Verdun. Sassoon, War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. 1. Do you think that World War I was a senseless slaughter? 2. Do you think that Vietnam exercised a similar in fl uence on the baby boom generation in America? Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At the same time as our rational worldview has proclaimed that humans are the measure of all things, and liberated us from an unseemly dependence upon a supernatural God, it has also revealed our frailty, vulnerability, and lack of dignity. Copernicus unseated us from the center of the universe, and relegated us to a peripheral role. Kant declared that we could never be certain that our ideas corresponded to any reality outside our own heads. Darwin suggested that we were simply animals, and Freud showed that far from being wholly rational creatures, human beings were at the mercy of the powerful, irrational forces of the unconscious, which could be accessed only with great difficulty. This, indeed, was demonstrated by the modern experience. Despite the cult of rationality, modern history has been punctuated by witch-hunts and world wars which have been explosions of unreason. Without the ability to approach the deeper regions of the psyche, which the old myths, liturgies, and mystical practices of the best conservative faith once provided, it seemed that reason sometimes lost its mind in our brave new world. At the end of the twentieth century, the liberal myth that humanity is progressing to an ever more enlightened and tolerant state looks as fantastic as any of the other millennial myths we have considered in this book. Without the constraints of a “higher,” mythical truth, reason can on occasion become demonic and commit crimes that are as great as, if not greater than, any of the atrocities perpetrated by fundamentalists. Modernity has been beneficial, benevolent, and humane, but it has often, especially in its early stages, felt the need to be cruel. This has been especially true in the developing world, which experienced modern Western culture as invasive, imperialistic, and alien. In the Muslim countries we have considered, the modernization process was very different and difficult. In the West, it had been characterized by independence and innovation; in Egypt and Iran, it was accompanied by dependence and imitation, as the Muslim reformers and ideologues were acutely aware. This would alter the tenor of modernity in these countries. If you bake a cake using the wrong ingredients (dried eggs instead of fresh, rice instead of flour) and with incorrect equipment, the end result will not conform to the ideal in the cookbook; it could be delicious, if different, but it could be very nasty indeed. It might be better to use techniques and ingredients that are ready to hand to create a closer approximation to the norm, using local expertise and culinary skill.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Then Antichrist would unleash a hideous persecution and Jews would die in ghastly numbers. Only a few would escape and be present to greet Jesus at his Second Coming. 57 At the same time as Protestant fundamentalists celebrated the birth of the new Israel, they were cultivating fantasies of a final genocide at the end of time. The Jewish state had come into existence purely to further a Christian fulfillment. The Jews’ fate in the Last Days is uniquely grim, since they are doomed to suffer whether or not they accept Christ. American Protestants had not suffered like the Jews, but their vision of modernity was also dark and doomed. They had evolved their literal and “scientific” reading of scripture in response to the rationalistic spirit of the modern world, yet if the true test of a religious vision is that it helps believers to cultivate the cardinal virtue of compassion (a teaching that informs the Gospels and the letters of St. Paul, if not the Book of Revelation), Protestant fundamentalism seemed to be failing as a religious movement, just as at the Scopes trial its science had proved to be defective. Indeed, their literal reading of highly selected passages of the Bible had encouraged them to absorb the Godless genocidal tendencies of modernity. M USLIMS HAD AS YET produced no fundamentalist movement, because their modernization process was not yet sufficiently advanced. They were still at the stage of reshaping their religious traditions to meet the new challenge of modernity and using Islam to help the people understand the spirit of the new world. In Egypt, a young teacher brought the ideas of Afghani, Abdu, and Rida, whose reforms had always been confined to a small circle of intellectuals, to the more ordinary people. This in itself was a modernizing move. The older reformers had still been shaped by the conservative ethos, and, like most premodern philosophers, they had been elitists and did not consider the masses capable of abstruse thought. Hasan al-Banna (1906–49) found a way to turn their reforming ideas into a mass movement. He had had a modern as well as a traditionally religious education. He had studied at the Dar al-Ulum in Cairo, the first teachers’ training college to provide a higher education in the sciences, but Banna was also a Sufi and throughout his life the spiritual exercises and rites of Sufism remained important to him. 58 For Banna, faith was not a notional assent to a creed; it was something that could be understood only if it was lived and its rituals were carefully practiced. He knew that Egyptians needed Western science and technology; he also realized that their society must be modernized, politically, socially, and economically. But these were practical and rational matters that must go hand-in-hand with a spiritual and psychological reformation.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Politics had thus become an act of worship (avodah). Before a Jew attends a synagogue service, he bathes in the mikveh, a ritual bath. In the same way, Gush rabbis have declared: “Before we sink into the gutter of politics, we should purify ourselves in the mikveh, as it is like delving into the secrets of the Torah.”14 This is a revealing remark, because it shows the dualism at the heart of Gush piety. Politics is as holy as the Torah, but—as Kook the Elder had pointed out so long ago—it is also a gutter. Since 1967, Kookists had often experienced the shock of historical events as a “burst of light,” a favorite image of Kook the Elder, but they were also acutely aware of the darkness of political failure, setbacks, and obstacles. Israeli victories were hailed as great miracles, but they were also recognized to have been brought about by modern technology and military expertise. Kookists, therefore, were actually strongly aware of the profane as well as the sacred. Their yearning for the divine was balanced by an experience of the opacity and intransigence of recalcitrant mundane reality. Hence the extremity and anguish of their prayer and activism. Their mission was to bring the whole of life—even those aspects that are most impure, banal, and perverse—under the canopy of the sacred. But where the Hasidim found joy and a new lightness in this task, the ecstasy of the Gush was often imbued with rage and resentment. They are men and women of the modern era. The divine is more distant, and it is more of a strain to transcend the pressing and insistent reality of the profane, which, as many now think, is all there is. Gush activists overcame their personal alienation in the secular State of Israel by attempting to wrest the land from the alien Arabs. They settled their own minds by uprooting themselves, going beyond the borders of Israel, and colonizing the long-lost land. The “return” to Eretz Israel was an attempt to retrieve a value and a state of mind that is more fundamental than the confusing present.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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 pre millennialism, because it envisaged Christ returning to earth before he established his thousand-year reign. (The older and more optimistic post millennialism 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. His vision could see nothing good in the modern world, which was hurtling toward destruction. Instead of becoming more virtuous, as the Enlightenment thinkers had hoped, humanity was becoming so depraved that God would soon be forced to intervene and smash their society, inflicting untold misery upon the human race. But out of this fiery ordeal, the faithful Christians would emerge triumphant and enjoy Christ’s final victory and glorious Kingdom.

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

  brought him promotion as archpriest (dean) of a cathedral. After initially supporting the reforms – indeed personally smashing up carnival tambourines and masks and abducting two dancing bears – he took up the cause of tradition. He suffered for his leadership: for years on end he was imprisoned in a cellar, and eventually in 1682 he was burned at the stake.78 This ghastly revival of a form of religious discipline by then obsolete in western Europe had a political rationale: in that year the Moscow military garrison allied with sympathizers of Avvakum briefly to seize the capital and humiliate the government of Princess Sophia, regent for her young son Peter. She soon ordered those who followed Avvakum to be punished in the same way, and over the next decade many others among them showed their defiance of heretical authority by setting fire to themselves. The movement of outrage and protest was coalescing into a series of sects which all saw themselves as the pure version of an official Church which had betrayed the faith; they came to be known as the Old Believers, a movement which gained vastly from protests against further changes in the Church during the eighteenth century, and which has survived all subsequent persecution to the present day. Romanov autocracy was completed by Tsar Aleksei’s son Peter I ‘the Great’, who defeated the rival northern power of Sweden, and humiliated and subverted the now declining Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1721 Peter proclaimed himself Emperor of All the Russias, setting patterns for Russian expansion which through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created one of the largest empires the world had seen, stretching from eastern Europe to the Pacific. The transformation of Muscovy into a newly conceived empire was accomplished not merely by military conquest but by Peter’s obsessive pursuit of Western skills and information, which he used to remould the culture of the governing elite. He saw to it that the pool of available knowledge was massively expanded. Before 1700, no more than about five hundred printed books had been published in Muscovy, most of them devotional works. By the time he died in 1725, there were around thirteen hundred more, 80 per cent of them on secular subjects. A large proportion of these were translations of foreign texts, and the Russian which emerged as the language of these books had a much expanded vocabulary – a significant portion of it being terms necessary for Peter’s pride and joy, his newly founded Russian navy.79 The brand-new capital which he designated to supplant Moscow, St Petersburg, was placed so that it was accessible to the sea routes west, and although it was full of churches, their architectural style, and that of the whole monumental stone-built city, was that of the Baroque of northern Europe, whose visual impact was becoming familiar from Dublin and Amsterdam to Stockholm and Vilnius.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Buber revealed the richness of Hasidism and Scholem explored the world of the Kabbalah. But these older spiritualities, which belonged to a different world, were increasingly opaque to Jews who were imbued with the rational spirit. Zionists often experienced their defiantly secularist ideology in ways that would once have been called religious. People had to fill the spiritual vacuum somehow, in order to avoid nihilistic despair. If conventional religion no longer worked, they would create a secularist spirituality that filled their lives with transcendent meaning. Zionism was, like other modern movements, a return to a single, fundamental value that represented a new way of being Jewish. By going back to the Land, Jews would not only save themselves from the anti-Semitic catastrophe that some felt to be imminent, but they would also find psychic healing without God, the Torah, or the Kabbalah. The Zionist writer Asher Ginsberg (1856–1927), who wrote under the pseudonym Ahad Ha-Am (“One of the People”), was convinced that Jews had to develop a more rational and scientific way of looking at the world. But, like a true modern, he wanted to return to the irreducible essence of Judaism, which could only be found when Jews returned to their roots and took up residence in Palestine. Religion, he believed, was only the outer shell of Judaism. The new national spirit that Jews would create in the Holy Land would do what God had once done for them. It would become “a guide to all the affairs of life,” would reach “to the depths of the heart” and “connect with all one’s feelings.” 53 The return to Zion would thus become the sort of interior journey once undertaken by Kabbalists: a descent to the depths of the psyche to achieve integration. Zionists, who often hated religion, instinctively spoke of their movement in Orthodox terminology. Aliyah , the Hebrew word they used for “immigration,” was originally a term used to describe an ascent to a higher state of being. They called immigrants olim (“those who ascend,” or “pilgrims”). A “pioneer” who joined one of the new agricultural settlements was called a chalutz , a word with strong religious connotations of salvation, liberation, and rescue. 54 When they arrived at the port of Jaffa, Zionists would often kiss the ground; they experienced their immigration as a new birth, and, like the biblical patriarchs, sometimes changed their names to express their sense of empowerment. The spirituality of Labor Zionism was most eloquently and powerfully expressed by Aharon David Gordon (1856–1922), who arrived in Palestine in 1904 and worked in the new cooperative settlement in Degania in the Galilee. There he experienced what religious Jews would have called an experience of the Shekhinah.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. 4. J ews and M uslims M odernize ( 1700–1870 ) I F 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. In America, the developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had split Protestant Christians into two opposing camps. There had been a similar conflict within Eastern European Jewry at the same time.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  After the Franco-Prussian War, the nations of Europe began a frantic arms race which led them inexorably to the First World War. They appeared to see war as a Darwinian necessity in which only the fittest would survive. A modern nation must have the biggest army and the most murderous weapons that science could provide, and Europeans dreamed of a war that would purify the nation’s soul in a harrowing apotheosis. The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914 it was unusual to find a single year in which a novel or short story describing a horrific future war did not appear in some European country.4 The “Next Great War” was imagined as a terrible but inevitable ordeal: out of the destruction, the nation would arise to a new and enhanced life. At the very end of the nineteenth century, however, British novelist H. G. Wells punctured this utopian dream in The War of the Worlds (1898) and showed where it was leading. There were terrifying images of London depopulated by biological warfare, and the roads of England crowded with refugees. He could see the dangers of a military technology that had been drawn into the field of the exact sciences. He was right. The arms race led to the Somme and when the Great War broke out in 1914, the people of Europe, who had been dreaming of the war to end all wars for over forty years, entered with enthusiasm upon this conflict, which could be seen as the collective suicide of Europe. Despite the achievements of modernity, there was a nihilistic death wish, as the nations of Europe cultivated a perverse fantasy of self-destruction.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Israel began as a defiantly secular state, for example, but now the Prime Minister of Israel must go hat in hand to the religious parties to make a government. In Egypt, Islamic fundamentalism is as popular today as Nasserism was in the 1960s. Even in the United States, politicians have to flaunt their born-again credentials. At the height of the Lewinsky scandal, we saw President Clinton attending a prayer breakfast and weeping and saying he had sinned. But, on another level, fundamentalism represents a defeat for the religious traditions that fundamentalists are fighting to preserve, because they tend to downplay compassion, which all the world faiths insist is the primary religious virtue, and overstress the more belligerent and intolerant aspects of the tradition. At the root of fundamentalism are nihilism, hopelessness, and despair. We have to try to make the huge imaginative effort to put ourselves in the shoes of the fundamentalists because they threaten our values just as we threaten theirs. If we understand a bit more clearly what the fundamentalists really mean, if we learn to read the imagery of fundamentalism, we take the first step in learning about and understanding each other. You can make war in a minute, but peace takes a long time. I called my book The Battle for God not just because it was a snappy title but because I saw a society that is so polarized that the two sides are not yet ready to come to the table. Both sides are cowering in their corners and looking out at the same world but they don’t see the same thing. We’ve got to learn to listen. One of the things I am trying to do in my book is to decode some of the fundamentalist imagery so that we can see what lies at the root of what they’re trying to say—the myths and dreams, the fears and anxieties. Instead of dismissing fundamentalists as a bunch of loons and crazies, we must listen to what they have to say. Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion Have you or someone close to you ever adhered to a religious group that Karen Armstrong would define as fundamentalist? Does her view of fundamentalism “ring true” for you? Karen Armstrong uses the terms mythos and logos to describe “two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge.” Mythos is concerned with “the eternal and the universal,” she writes, and logos is concerned with “rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought.” How do these terms apply to your own experience of religious and secular life? Armstrong points out that the first Grand Inquisitor, whose mission was to stamp out Judaism in Spain, was himself a Jew who converted to Catholicism.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Muslims must make themselves more rational. This must be their top priority. They had neglected the natural sciences and, as a result, fallen behind Europe. They had been told to close “the gates of ijtihad” and to accept the rulings of the ulema and the sages of the past. This, Afghani insisted, had nothing to do with authentic Islam. It encouraged a subservience that not only was wholly opposed to the modern spirit but denied the “essential characteristics” of Muslim faith, which were “dominance and superiority.” 60 As it was, the West now “owned” science, and the Muslims were weak and vulnerable. 61 Afghani could see that the old conservative ethos, symbolized by the closing of the gates of ijtihad , was holding Muslims back. But like any reformer who tries to make the mythos of religion sound like logos , he ran the risk of producing inadequate religious discourse on the one hand, and faulty science on the other. The same could be said of his activism. Afghani rightly pointed out that Islam was a faith that expressed itself in action. He liked to quote the Koranic verse: “Verily, God does not change men’s condition, unless they change their inner selves.” 62 Instead of retreating into the madrasahs , Muslims must become involved in the world of politics if they wanted to save Islam. In the modern world, truth was pragmatic; it had to be shown to work in the physical, empirical realm, and Afghani wanted to prove that the truth of Islam could be just as effective as the Western ideologies in the world of his day. He realized that Europe would soon rule the globe, and was determined to make the Muslim rulers of his day aware of this danger. But Afghani’s revolutionary schemes were often self-destructive and morally dubious. None of them bore fruit, and they led simply to official curtailment of his activities. He was expelled from Egypt for anti-government agitation in 1879, from Iran in 1891, and, though he was subsequently allowed to reside in Istanbul, he was kept under close surveillance by the Ottoman authorities. The attempt to convert religious truth into a program for political action runs the risk of nihilism and disaster, and Afghani laid himself open to the charge of “using” Islam in a superficial way to back up his ill-thought-out revolutionary activism. 63 He had clearly not integrated the religious imperative with his politics in sufficient depth. When, in 1896, one of his disciples, at his urging, assassinated Nasir ad-Din Shah, Afghani violated one of the central tenets of all religion: respect for the absolute sanctity of human life. He had made Islam look not only inefficient and bizarre but also immoral. The obvious defects of his thought sprang from his desperation. Afghani was convinced that the Islamic world was about to be wiped out by the imperialistic West.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Holocaust was also a reminder of the dangers that can accrue from the death of God in human consciousness. In Christian theology, hell had been defined as the absence of God. The camps seemed an uncannily accurate reproduction of the imagery of the inferno, which had haunted Europeans for centuries. The flaying, racking, whipping, screaming, and mocking, the deformed, distorted bodies, the flames, and the stinking air all recalled the Christian hell depicted by the poets, painters, sculptors, and dramatists of Europe.3 Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, giving human beings a glimpse of what life could be like once all sense of sacredness has been lost. At its best (and only at its best), religion had helped people to cultivate an appreciation of the holiness of humanity in its myths, rituals, and cultic and ethical practices. By the mid-twentieth century, it seemed that an unfettered rationalism could feel impelled to create a hell upon earth, an objective correlative of God’s absence. There was a nihilistic impulse that could draw human beings who had more power than they had ever had before to expend enormous creativity in mass destruction. The symbol of God had marked the limit of human potential and, in the conservative period, had imposed a constraint upon what men and women could do. The commandments of the Law had reminded them that the world was not theirs to do with as they chose. Modern human beings now prized autonomy and freedom so greatly that the idea of an omnipotent divine legislator was abhorrent to them, and this development marked a great advance in human dignity. But the Holocaust and the Gulag show what can happen when people cast off all such restraint or make the nation or polity the supreme value. New ways of teaching human beings to respect the sacredness of life and the world would have to be found that would not compromise modern integrity with inadequate symbols of the “supernatural.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  For some, this religious movement seems to have been a bridge that would enable them, later, to make the difficult transition to rational modernity. The alacrity with which so many had been ready to jettison the Torah, and the persistence of Shabbateans in dreaming of a new Law, demonstrated that they were ready to envisage change and reform. 61 Gershom Scholem, who has written the definitive study of Shabbetai and Shabbateanism, has argued that many of these closet Shabbateans would become pioneers of the Jewish Enlightenment or of the Reform movement. He points to Joseph Wehte in Prague, who spread the ideas of the Enlightenment in Eastern Europe during the early nineteenth century and had once been a Shabbatean; Aron Chovin, who introduced the Reform movement in Hungary, was also a Shabbatean in his youth. 62 Scholem’s theory has been disputed, and cannot be proved definitively one way or the other, but it is generally acknowledged that Shabbateanism did much to undermine traditional rabbinic authority and that it enabled Jews to envisage a change that would once have seemed taboo and impossible. After Shabbetai’s death, two radical Shabbatean movements led to the mass conversion of Jews into the dominant faith. In 1683, about 200 families in Ottoman Turkey converted to Islam. This sect of donmeh (“converts”) had their own secret synagogues, but also prayed in the mosques. At its peak, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sect numbered some 115,000 souls. 63 It started to disintegrate in the early nineteenth century, when members began to receive a modern, secular education and no longer felt the need for any religion. Some donmeh youth became active in the secularist Young Turk rebellion of 1908. The second of these movements was more sinister and showed the nihilism that can result from a literal translation of myth into practical action. Jacob Frank (1726–91) was initiated into Shabbateanism while visiting the Balkans. When he returned to his native Poland, he formed an underground sect whose members observed Jewish law in public but in secret indulged in forbidden sexual practices. When he was excommunicated in 1756, Frank converted first to Islam (during a visit to Turkey) and then to Catholicism, taking his flock with him. Frank did not simply cast off the restrictions of the Torah, but positively embraced immorality. In his view, the Torah was not merely outmoded but dangerous and useless. The commandments were the laws of death and must be discarded. Sin and shamelessness were the only ways to achieve redemption and to find God. Frank had come not to build but “only to destroy and annihilate.”

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Qutb did not survive. In 1964, possibly at the request of the prime minister of Iraq, he was released from prison. During his incarceration, his sisters had smuggled his work out and distributed it secretly, but after his release, Qutb published Milestones. The following year, the government uncovered a network of terrorist cells which it alleged to be plotting to assassinate Nasser. Hundreds of Brothers, including Qutb, were arrested, and in 1966, as a result of Nasser’s insistence, Qutb was executed. To the end, however, Qutb himself remained an ideologue rather than an agitator. He always argued that the stockpiling of weapons by the Brothers was a defensive measure only, to prevent a repetition of the events of 1954. He probably thought that the time was not yet ripe to commence a jihad. The vanguard had to go through the first three stages of the Muhammadan program before they were spiritually and strategically ready to commence the assault on the jahiliyyah. Not all the Brothers would follow him. Most remained true to the more moderate, reformist vision of Hudaybi, but in the prisons and camps a number of Muslims studied Qutb’s work, discussed it, and, in the more religious climate after the Six Day War, began to create a cadre. The Shii Muslims of Iran also experienced a new wave of secularist aggression when Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi announced his White Revolution in 1962. This consisted of the establishment of state capitalism, the institution of increased profit-sharing for the workforces and reforms to undermine the semifeudal forms of land ownership, and the creation of a literacy corps.32 Some of the shah’s projects were successful. The industrial, agricultural, and social projects looked impressive, and the 1960s saw a large increase in the Gross National Product. Even though the shah personally thought women an inferior sex, he introduced reforms that improved their status and education, though this only benefited women of the upper classes. In the West, the shah’s achievements were hailed with enthusiasm: Iran seemed a beacon of progress and sanity in the Middle East. After the Musaddiq crisis, the shah courted America, supported the State of Israel, and was rewarded with foreign investment that kept the economy afloat. But even at the time, astute observers noted that these reforms did not go far enough. They favored the rich, concentrated on city dwellers, and ignored the peasantry. The profits derived from oil and natural gas were not used efficiently but were spent on showy projects and the latest in military technology.33 As a result, the basic structures of society remained untouched and an even greater gulf yawned between the Westernized rich and the traditional poor, who had been left behind in the old agrarian ethos.

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

  In that charged encounter is a characteristic moment of tension for Christianity: how does one form of authority relate to another, and which is going to prevail? Perpetua was disobedient not just to her father but to the institutional Catholic Church which later enrolled her among its martyrs, because she was a Montanist. Some of the most remarkable passages in her account occur in her description of the second and third dreams or visions that she had in her prison cell. She saw her younger brother Dinocrates, who had died of cancer at the age of seven without being baptized as a Christian, in a dark place, very hot and thirsty, and just out of reach of a cooling pool of water. She prayed for him. In the third dream, she watched him drink from the pool, and ‘play joyfully as young children do’; the cancerous growth in his face melted away. Perpetua did not comment on this vision of release, but the likelihood is that she would not have needed to for the contemporary readership she envisaged. What she was saying was that, through prayer, she had been granted the power to release the dead from suffering because of her faith in the ‘New Prophecy’. Dinocrates needed no institutional Church or cleric to remedy his lack of sacramental grace. But perhaps the most agonizing moral choice of all for Perpetua was whether to be a martyr or a good mother. In choosing to affirm her faith and face imprisonment and death, she was forced to abandon her suckling baby. There followed a miserable alternation of separation and return of the child, in which in the end she was told in her prison cell that her baby no longer wanted her breasts. Seldom do we read a Christian text which so brutally exposes what a Christian commitment might mean: it returns us to the terrifying story of Genesis 22, when God commanded the Patriarch Abraham to make a human sacrifice of his own young son, Isaac, and only countermanded the order as the butcher’s knife was raised. In counterpoint to the Church’s pronounced drive towards conformity with society’s often perfectly reasonable expectations, which we have noted as such a characteristic feature of the later literature in the New Testament (see pp. 114–18), Christian obedience repeatedly plays a troubling wild card. It is the Apostle Peter’s impudent retort to the angry high priest of the Jerusalem Temple, recorded in Acts 5.29: ‘We must obey God rather than men.’ Not so long after Perpetua brutally confounded her father’s natural expectations and set herself up as the agent of God’s forgiveness, bishops including Peter’s self-styled successor in Rome would come to find themselves cast in the role of the high priest: furious at the disobedience of Christians to their own authority and in the end even condemning Christians to death, as once Peter had been by the Roman authorities. More often than such incidents of dramatic intensity as Perpetua’s sufferings,

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Alvaro’s conviction meant that his son-in-law, Fernando de Rojas (c. 1465–1541), author of the tragicomic romance La Celestina, also came under suspicion. He therefore cultivated a careful facade of respectable Christianity, but in La Celestina, first published in 1499, we find a bleak secularism beneath the bawdy exuberance. There is no God; love is the supreme value, but when love dies, the world is revealed as a wasteland. At the end of the play, Pleberio laments the suicide of his daughter, who alone gave meaning to his life. “O world, world,” he concludes, “when I was young I thought there was some order governing you and your deeds.” But now you seem to be a labyrinth of errors, a frightful desert, a den of wild beasts, a game in which men move in circles … a stony field, a meadow full of serpents, a flowering but barren orchard, a spring of cares, a river of tears, a sea of suffering, a vain hope.27 Unable to practice the old faith, alienated by the cruelty of the Inquisition from the new, Rojas had fallen into a despair that could find no meaning, no order, and no ultimate value. The last thing that Ferdinand and Isabella had intended was to make Jews skeptical unbelievers. But throughout our story we will find that coercion of the sort they employed is counterproductive. The attempt to force people to accept the prevailing ideology against their will or before they are ready for it often results in ideas and practices which, in the eyes of the persecuting authorities themselves, are highly undesirable. Ferdinand and Isabella were aggressive modernizers who sought to suppress all dissidence; but their inquisitorial methods led to the formation of a secret Jewish underground and to the first declarations of secularism and atheism in Europe. Later some Christians would become so disgusted by this type of religious tyranny that they too would lose faith in all revealed religion. But secularism could be just as ferocious and, during the twentieth century, the imposition of a secularist ethos in the name of progress has been an important factor in the rise of a militant fundamentalism, which has sometimes been fatal to the government concerned.

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

  take in Latin Europe in the same era, if the politics of the eastern Mediterranean had not curtailed the urge or the opportunity to consider new possibilities for Orthodox culture. Over the early fourteenth century, the empire briefly revived after 1261 descended into renewed civil war and loss of territory, both in the west to the expansionist Orthodox monarchy in Serbia and in the east to a new branch of Turkish tribes who had carved out for themselves a principality in north-west Asia Minor and who survived a determined effort by the Byzantines to dislodge them in a significant victory in 1301. Their warlord leader was called Osman, and they took their name of Ottomans from him. During the fourteenth century, the Ottomans extended their power through Asia Minor and the Balkans, overwhelming the Bulgarians and encircling Byzantine territory. More and more Orthodox Christians found themselves under Islamic rule, and in an atmosphere of increasing intolerance for their religion, which might be seen as part of a general cultural mood in fourteenth-century Asia, North Africa and Europe (see pp. 275–8). Already in the 1330s, the shift to Islamic dominance seemed so irreversible that the Patriarch of Constantinople issued informal advice to Christians in Asia Minor that it would not necessarily imperil their salvation if they did not openly profess their faith.31 As before in Byzantine history, when secular administration decayed, monasteries flourished. Mount Athos, now the most prominent survivor of the holy mountains, remained independent of Ottoman rule until as late as 1423, assiduously cultivating the Muslim authorities which had by then encircled it for more than half a century. It is significant that, when given the choice in 1423, the Athonian monks preferred the Muslim overlordship of the sultan to a chance which they were offered of rule by the Venetians: the thought of Latin overlordship by the conquerors of 1204 was repulsive to them.32 By then, the emperor had long been only one patron-monarch among many for the Athonian monasteries. Sava’s foundation on Mount Athos had been one indication that already in the twelfth century it was becoming a focus for multiple Orthodox identities beyond its Greek origins. A proliferation of divinely sanctioned rulers were drawing their legitimacy from their Orthodox Churches, as far away as the Principality of Kiev and the rulers in Muscovy. It was in this age that one of the most familiar features of the Orthodox church interior arrived at its developed form: the iconostasis, a wall-like barrier veiling altar and sanctuary area from worshippers. The word means ‘stand for images’, because now the barrier is covered in pictures of saints and sacred subjects, in patterns which have become fixed in order and positioning. Customarily the wall does not reach the ceiling, so that the sound of the clergy’s liturgical chanting at

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

  centre of Christian gravity westwards. The military crisis caused by the late- sixth-century wars between the Byzantine and Sassanian empires, and the short- sighted destruction by those war-locked empires of the various Christian buffer states along their borders (see pp. 253–4), gave a perfect opportunity for the armies to sweep first north out of Arabia, then east and west into Byzantine and Sassanian territory. Christianity’s internal divisions made the task easier: there were plenty of Miaphysite or Dyophysite Christians who had no especial affection for the Chalcedonian rulers in Constantinople, and equally, plenty of Christians who had little time for Zoroastrian Sassanians, and who did not defend them against the new masters. In Egypt, for example, excavations at one of its greatest international Christian shrines, that of St Menas at Abū Mīnā, have revealed how suddenly Greek documents disappeared from the life of the community when the Muslim armies arrived. The last Greek receipts for the wine harvest scribbled on pottery are precisely for the invasion year of 641, and from then on the Coptic Church was entirely in charge at the shrine.10 The Muslim conquerors did little to explain their faith to their new subjects or to convert them to it. It might have been possible for Christians initially to regard these newcomers as a peculiar sort of Arian Christian sect, while Dyophysites would note with approval that they gave honour to the Virgin Mary without tolerating a cult of her. So the sudden irruption of the Muslims might be a catastrophe, but it could be endured for the time being, particularly if it brought quieter times than the campaigns of Heraclius. The result was one of the most rapid shifts of power in history.11 Between 634 and 637, three battles crippled the armies of Byzantium and the Sassanians. In February 638, only eight years after the Emperor Heraclius had triumphantly restored the True Cross to Christian Jerusalem, the city fell to Muslim forces after a year’s siege; it was in any case a shadow of its former self, devastated only a quarter-century earlier by the Sassanian Shah Khusrau II. Sophronios, the Melchite or Chalcedonian Patriarch of Jerusalem, insisted on making the surrender in person to the Caliph Umar. Umar entered the city in deliberate humility in plain robes, riding on a camel, and he treated the new conquest with equally deliberate forbearance. He knew that he was fulfilling the design of the Prophet in doing so, because the conquest of Jerusalem was no incidental military victory. Umar signified the triumph of Islam on the vacant site of the Temple by building a mosque above the ruins. In doing so, the Caliph achieved what the Emperor Julian the Apostate (see p. 217) had planned long before: to restore honour and splendour to this long-desecrated sacred site which Christians had deliberately spurned, and whose memory had been so vital for Muhammad. In the early 690s the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik outdid

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

  grip on the former republic was faltering, and the extraordinary flowering of art and culture which they had fostered in Florence seemed mocked by the growing misery of the situation throughout Italy: perfect conditions in which Savonarola could thunder apocalyptically about the dangers of rampant sexuality, especially sodomy, and demand radical political and moral reform in the name of God. To the existing Florentine secular republican resentments against tyranny was added the dangerously potent idea that divine action would bring a total transformation in existing society: it was to be a theme of militant religious radicalism in Europe over the next two centuries. Accordingly the Medici, humiliated in battle by King Charles of France in 1494, were expelled and a rigorously regulated republic proclaimed, in which Savonarola’s reorganization of society could begin. The message of his oratory was that his audience could rule supreme, or, if they remained stubborn, they would lose everything: I gave you an apple, as a mother does when she gives an apple to her son when he cries in order to comfort him; but then when he continues to cry further and she cannot soothe him, she takes the apple away and gives it to another son … If you do not want to repent and be converted to God, He will take the apple from you and give it to another … do these four things that I have told you, and I promise you that you will be richer than ever, more glorious than ever, more powerful than ever.61 This was the first republic in human history where those in charge narrowly defined the concept of ‘republic’ as necessarily involving rule by the whole people – Savonarola’s Florence has not often been awarded the credit for this innovation. That legacy of a particular and rather frightening Christian vision of reform has become one of the most important political ideas of the modern world.62 Savonarola was selfconsciously traditional in religion, but for the moment he was able to defy Pope Alexander VI’s order to cease preaching, and he scorned the excommunication from what he called in 1495 and at other times the ‘Babylon of Rome’. Alas for him, the continuing political and economic miseries of the city did not suggest any imminent intervention by an approving God, and his enemies were able to overwhelm the political faction supporting him. In 1498 the friar’s power collapsed: he was tortured and burned at the stake with his chief lieutenants. He left many admirers. Throughout Europe, pious humanists valued the deep spirituality of his writings and overlooked the grim chaos into which his republic had descended. Far away in the kingdom of that aspiring Medici Henry VIII, Savonarola’s meditations composed in prison after his torture continued to be much read, and two were incorporated in an officially approved English primer in 1534. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer quoted the friar unacknowledged in his final dramatic sermon before himself being burned at the stake in 1556, and half a century later, by ecumenical contrast, the English