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.

Page 75 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The pointlessness and futility of trench warfare defied the logic and rationalism of the age, and had nothing whatever to do with human need. The people of the West looked straight into the void that some had sensed for decades. The economy of the West had also begun to falter, and in 1910 had begun the decline that would lead to the Great Depression of the 1930 S . The world seemed to be hurtling toward some unimaginable catastrophe. The Irish poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) saw the “Second Coming” not as a triumph of righteousness and peace, but as the birth of a savage, pitiless era: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world , The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity . 1 But these were also years of unparalleled creativity and astonishing achievements in the arts and sciences, revealing the full flowering of the modern spirit. In all fields, the most creative thinkers seemed possessed by the desire to create the world anew, throw away the forms of the past, and break free. Modern people had evolved an entirely different mentality and could no longer look at the world in the same way. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel had developed narratives that expressed an ordered progress of cause and effect; modern narratives splintered, leaving the reader uncertain about what had happened or what to think. Painters such as Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) dismembered their subjects or viewed them from two different perspectives at the same time; they seemed deliberately to flout the expectation of the viewer, and announced that a new vision was necessary. In both the arts and the sciences, there was a desire to go back to first principles, to irreducible fundamentals, and from this zero base to start again. Scientists now searched for the atom or the particle; sociologists and anthropologists reverted to primeval societies or primitive artifacts. This was not like the conservative return ad fontes , because the aim was not to re-create the past but to break it asunder, to split the atom, and bring forth something entirely new. Some of these endeavors were an attempt to create a spirituality, without God or the supernatural.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. Myth could not be demonstrated by rational proof; its insights were more intuitive, similar to those of art, music, poetry, or sculpture. Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it.5 Myth was also associated with mysticism, the descent into the psyche by means of structured disciplines of focus and concentration which have been evolved in all cultures as a means of acquiring intuitive insight. Without a cult or mystical practice, the myths of religion would make no sense. They would remain abstract and seem incredible, in rather the same way as a musical score remains opaque to most of us and needs to be interpreted instrumentally before we can appreciate its beauty.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  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. 4. Jews and Muslims Modernize (1700–1870)

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  This is the martyrdom sought by all God’s saints and prophets … the people want this meaning.” 18 Scientific rationalism could not answer questions about the ultimate meaning of life; that had always been the preserve of myth. In the West, the abandonment of mythology had led, in some quarters, to the perceived void, which Sartre had described as a God-shaped hole. Many Iranians had been disoriented by the sudden lack of inwardness in their daily and political life. Khomeini was convinced that people were three-dimensional beings; they had spiritual as well as material needs, and in showing that they were willing to die for a state that made religion central to its identity, they had been trying to regain their full humanity. 19 Khomeini himself rarely forgot the transcendent aspect of politics, even during a crisis. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out, Bani Sadr suggested that it might be useful to release the former shah’s military personnel from prison to direct operations. Khomeini refused. The Revolution, he said, had not been about economic prosperity or territorial integrity. He cited a story about Imam Ali during his struggle in Syria with Muawiyyah, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, who was challenging his rule. Just before the army went into battle, Ali delivered a sermon to the soldiers about the divine unity (tawhid) . When his officers asked if this homily had been appropriate at such a time, Ali replied: “This is the reason we are fighting Muawiyyah, not for any worldly gain.” 20 The battle was to preserve the unity of the ummah , which must reflect the unity of God. The Muslims were fighting for tawhid , not for the conquest of Syria. This, of course, was admirable, but it posed a problem. Human beings need meaning and mythos , but they also need hard, rational logos , too. In premodern society, these two spheres had both been seen as indispensable. But just as myth could not be explained in rational or logical terms, it could not be expressed in practical politics. This had been difficult, and had sometimes resulted in a de facto separation of religion and politics. The theology of the Imamate had suggested that there was an incompatibility between the mystical vision and the hardheaded pragmatism that is required of a head of state. Khomeini sometimes blurred the crucial distinction between mythos and logos . As a result, some of his policies were disastrous. The economy suffered from the sudden sharp fall in oil revenue after the hostage crisis and from the lack of sound state investment. The ideological purges deprived state departments and industry of competent management.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Living in medias res , they cannot see the direction that their society is taking, but experience its slow transformation in incoherent ways. As the old mythology that gave structure and significance to their lives crumbles under the impact of change, they can experience a numbing loss of identity and a paralyzing despair. The most common emotions, as we shall see, are helplessness and a fear of annihilation that can, in extreme circumstances, erupt in violence. We see something of this in Luther. During his early life, he was prey to agonizing depressions. None of the medieval rites and practices of the faith could touch what he called the tristitia (“sorrow”) that made him terrified of death, which he imagined as total extinction. When this black horror descended upon him, he could not bear to read Psalm 90, which describes the evanescence of human life and portrays men being condemned by the anger and fury of God. Throughout his career, Luther saw death as an expression of God’s wrath. His theology of justification by faith depicted human beings as utterly incapable of contributing to their own salvation and wholly reliant on the benevolence of God. It was only by realizing their powerlessness that they could be saved. To escape his depressions, Luther plunged into a frenzy of activity, determined to do what good he could in the world, but consumed also by hatred. 4 Luther’s rage against the Pope, the Turks, Jews, women, and rebellious peasants—not to mention every single one of his theological opponents—would be typical of other reformers in our own day, who have struggled with the pain of the new world and who have also evolved a religion in which the love of God is often balanced by a hatred of other human beings. Zwingli and Calvin also experienced utter impotence before they were able to break through to a new religious vision that made them feel born again. They too had been convinced that there was nothing they could contribute to their own salvation and that they were powerless before the trials of human existence. Both stressed the absolute sovereignty of God, as modern fundamentalists would often do. 5 Like Luther, Zwingli and Calvin also had to re-create their religious world, sometimes resorting to extreme measures and even to violence in order to make their religion speak to the new conditions of a world that was unobtrusively but irrevocably committed to radical transformation.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Bakkers were chiefly known for their Christian theme park, Heritage USA, which portrayed the evangelical experience of North America Disney-style, and attracted huge numbers of visitors. In an intriguing article, the American anthropologist Susan Harding suggests that the Bakkers were quite consciously staging a revolt against Falwell’s commonsense religiosity and pushing fundamentalism into a new, postmodern phase.113 Since the late nineteenth century, American fundamentalists had responded to the challenge of modernity by trying to make their faith wholly rational. They had emphasized the virtues of reason and plain sense; they had embraced a sober literalism that eschewed imagination and fantasy; they had organized the world into watertight compartments in which right was utterly and obviously distinct from wrong, and true believers in an entirely different category from secularists and liberal Christians. Theirs had been an ethic of separation; fundamentalists had created a counterculture that was supposed to be everything that the Godless mainstream was not: it was a faith that offered cast-iron certainty and hierarchy to challenge the doubts, open questions, and shifting roles of the modern world. Heritage USA, however, like other forms of postmodern culture, was characterized by a mixing of genres, play, indulgence, and vivid spectacle. By trying to make their faith scientific and rational, the fundamentalists had pushed religion into an unnatural mode. As fundamentalists had rebelled against the scientific rationalism of Darwin, based on hypothesis and free inquiry, by clinging to the Baconian ideal, so now the Bakkers revolted against the rationalism of the old-style fundamentalists like Falwell. As Harding points out, in its depiction of American Christian history, Heritage USA was an ensemble of categories in a wild mélange. Instead of insisting that truth was factual, the exhibits in Heritage USA drew attention to their artificial and unnatural assemblage in the park. The shopping mall was a hodgepodge of Victorian and colonial architecture, an eclectic mix of styles and periods that did not attempt verisimilitude. At the entrance, Billy Graham’s “actual” home was displayed, but there were photographs on the walls showing its dismantling and rebuilding in the theme park, its displacement from the original site being part of the point. There was an “exact replica” of the Upper Room in Jerusalem (where Jesus was believed to have eaten the Last Supper and instituted the Eucharist), but it was deliberately made to look like a reproduction. Church services were held in a television studio, and, unlike Falwell, the Bakkers never televised a regular communion service or a sermon. The emphasis was always on performance, spectacle, and fantasy rather than on the literal fundamentalist Word.

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

  communities left. In a symbolic annexation which echoes similar architectural appropriations by Christians from predecessor sacred buildings, the eighth- century Great Mosque in Sana’a in the Yemen incorporates columns from the demolished cathedral built there two centuries before by the Miaphysite ruler Abraha (see pp. 244–5). It may be the result of a policy of thorough Islamic destruction that no trace remains of a Bible in Arabic which can be dated to the era of flourishing Christianity before the coming of Islam; on the other hand, given the Syriac character of the Arabian Churches before, maybe it had never existed.13 Elsewhere, there was no such extreme policy of suppression, and in fact in most of the societies newly dominated by Islam two or more centuries passed before there was anything like a Muslim majority. Although to begin with there was no effort to fill the cities with Muslim converts, wherever a church or cathedral was a prominent central building, it was likely to become the main mosque. It was natural that many Christians should assume that the Arab conquests signalled the end of the world, and there was much excited writing to that effect, but, as has so far proved the case in Christian history, apocalypse was postponed and everyday life took over.14 Someone would have to do practical deals with the conquerors. In default of action from the shattered secular authorities, a number of Christian bishops followed the example of Sophronios’s surrender to Caliph Umar I in Jerusalem and negotiated permanent settlements. Regardless of the era in which they were actually concluded, conventionally these came to be known collectively as the Pact or Covenant (dhimma) of Umar; this referred to a second caliph called Umar (reigned 717–20), though the attribution may have been retrospective. The Pact had its precedent already in the Sassanian Empire. Christians and Jews as People of the Book (and later, by extensions of dubious logic but practical utility, other significant religious minorities) were organized into separate communities or millets, defined by their common practice of the same religion, which was guaranteed as protected as long as it was primarily practised in private. They were given a specified tax burden and their second-class status was defined as that of a dhimmi (a non- Muslim protected under a dhimma). The conquerors thus remained a military and governing elite, aloof from their conquered populations, having to concentrate their scattered forces through their huge new dominions in garrisons. They were a good deal less interested in Christian beliefs than the Christians were in them. Christians learned about Islam, not always with great accuracy, in order to denounce it and justify themselves against it. Significantly, the terms in which they denounced the new prophecy were similar to the insults which they directed towards other Christians

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  25 Unable to retain even a tenuous link with Judaism, Alvaro was forced into a religious limbo. As an old man of seventy, he was finally imprisoned by the Inquisition for a repeated and deliberate denial of the doctrine of the afterlife. “Let me be well off down here,” he had said on more than one occasion, “since I don’t know if there is anything beyond.” 26 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. In 1492, about eighty thousand Jews who had refused to convert to Christianity had been given asylum in Portugal by King João II.

• 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.