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 Satyricon (1)

  “What fury,” she exclaims, “turns peace to war? What evil deed Was by these hands committed? Trojan hero there is none Absconding in this ship with bride of Atreus’ cuckold seed Nor crazed Medea, stained by life’s blood of her father’s son! But passion scorned, becomes a power: alas! who courts his end By drawing sword amidst these waves? Why die before our time? Strive not with angry seas to vie and to their fury lend Your rage by piling waves upon its savage floods sublime !” CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND NINTH.

• From Satyricon (1)

  Some beast that slays men with his teeth shall escape, for by that His value to men is enhanced! The vessels receive Strange ravening monsters; the tiger behind gilded bars And pacing his cage is transported to Rome, that his jaws May drip with the life blood of men to the plaudits of men Oh shame! To point out our impending destruction; the crime Of Persia enacted anew; in his puberty’s bloom The man child is kidnapped; surrenders his powers to the knife, Is forced to the calling of Venus; delayed and hedged round The hurrying passage of life’s finest years is held back And Nature seeks Nature but finds herself not. Everywhere These frail-limbed and mincing effeminates, flowing of locks, Bedecked with an infinite number of garments of silk Whose names ever change, the wantons and lechers to snare, Are eagerly welcomed! From African soil now behold The citron-wood tables; their well-burnished surface reflects Our Tyrian purples and slaves by the horde, and whose spots Resemble the gold that is cheaper than they and ensnare Extravagance. Sterile and ignobly prized is the wood But round it is gathered a company sodden with wine; And soldiers of fortune whose weapons have rusted, devour The spoils of the world. Art caters to appetite. Wrasse From Sicily brought to their table, alive in his own Sea water. The oysters from Lucrine’s shore torn, at the feast Are served to make famous the host; and the appetite, cloyed, To tempt by extravagance. Phasis has now been despoiled Of birds, its littoral silent, no sound there is heard Save only the wind as it rustles among the last leaves. Corruption no less vile is seen in the campus of Mars, Our quirites are bribed; and for plunder and promise of gain Their votes they will alter. The people is venal; corrupt The Senate; support has its price! And the freedom and worth Of age is decayed, scattered largesse now governs their power; Corrupted by gold, even dignity lies in the dust. Cato defeated and hooted by mobs, but the victor Is sadder, ashamed to have taken the rods from a Cato: In this lay the shame of the nation and character’s downfall, ‘Twas not the defeat of a man! No! The power and the glory Of Rome were brought low; represented in him was the honor Of sturdy Republican Rome. So, abandoned and wretched, The city has purchased dishonor: has purchased herself! Despoiled by herself, no avenger to wipe out the stigma Twin maelstroms of debt and of usury suck down the commons. No home with clear title, no citizen free from a mortgage, But as some slow wasting disease all unheralded fastens Its hold on the vitals, destroying the vigor of manhood, So, fear of the evils impending, impels them to madness. Despair turns to violence, luxury’s ravages needs must Repaired be by bloodshed, for indigence safely can venture. Can art or sane reason rouse wallowing Rome from the offal

• From Satyricon (1)

  CHAPTER THE ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-EIGHTH. (As she said this OEnothea brought) out a leathern dildo which, when she had smeared it with oil, ground pepper, and pounded nettle seed, she commenced to force, little by little, up my anus. The merciless old virago then anointed the insides of my thighs with the same decoction; finally mixing nasturtium juice with elixir of southern wood, she gave my genitals a bath and, picking up a bunch of green nettles, she commenced to strike me gently all over my belly below the navel. {The nettles stung me horribly and I suddenly took to my heels, with the old hags in full pursuit.} Although they were befuddled with wine and lust they followed the right road and chased me through several wards, screaming “Stop thief.” I made good my escape, however, although every toe was bleeding as the result of my headlong flight. (I got home as quickly as I could and, worn out with fatigue, I sought my couch, but I could not snatch a wink of sleep for the evil adventures which had befallen me kept running through my brain and, brooding upon them, I came to the conclusion that no one could be so abjectly unfortunate. “Has Fortune, always inimical to me, stood in need of the pangs of love, that she might torture me more cruelly still,” I cried out; “unhappy wretch that I am! Fortune and Love have joined forces to bring about my ruin. Cruel Eros himself had never dealt leniently with me, loved or lover I am put to the torture! Take the case of Chrysis: she loves me desperately, never leaves off teasing me, she who despised me as a servant, because, when she was acting as her mistress’s go-between, I was dressed in the garments of a slave: she, I say) that same Chrysis, who looked with contempt upon your former lowly lot, is now bent upon following it up even at the peril of her life; (she swore that she would never leave my side on the day when she told me of the violence of her passion: but Circe owns me, heart and soul, all others I despise. Who could be lovelier than she?) What loveliness had Ariadne or Leda to compare with hers? What had Helen to compare with her, what has Venus? If Paris himself had seen her with her dancing eyes, when he acted as umpire for the quarreling goddesses, he would have given up Helen and the goddesses for her! If I could only steal a kiss, if only I might put my arms around that divine, that heavenly bosom, perhaps the virility would come back to this body and the parts, flaccid from witchcraft would, I believe, come into their own. Contempt cannot tire me out: what if I was flogged; I will forget it! What if I was thrown out! I will treat it as a joke! Only let me be restored to her good graces!

• From Shunned (2018)

  “No,” Randy said, and looked me straight in the eye. “That’s not something we’re going to do.” A seed of cognition hit me, and my entire body registered the full meaning of his words. The intensity of his emotional outburst suddenly made more sense. I was stalling this conversation for another day, but Randy wasn’t leaving any doors open. I’d failed his test. When he said he couldn’t support me, he meant that he and his family, including my niece and nephew, wouldn’t come to my house or help me in any way. My stand for freedom was more than he could tolerate, and he was taking immediate steps, exceeding even the judicial requirements of the church. He got out of the car without saying another word. My face and chest grew numb from the sense of finality. He returned to his car, fired the ignition, and drove away without even a glance toward me. The shunning had begun. Chapter 8 [image "Images" file=Image00000.jpg] What you are looking for is what is looking. —St. Francis of Assisi T he next weekend I reveled in two languorous mornings, sipping coffee and reading the paper in bed. With no call to evangelize and no one else to please or answer to, time took on a charitable expansiveness. I felt like I was on vacation. I was thirty-one years old and living alone for the first time. A quiet pride bubbled inside my newfound self-sufficiency. I don’t recall feeling lonely, only liberated and grateful for this new peace and freedom. Mom and Lory called to check in or invite me over, but with increasing frequency I already had plans and declined. I sensed through the long pauses that this disturbed them. All my fraternizing with worldly people lessened my chances of returning to the fold. “I feel like I don’t know you anymore,” Mom said. I’d purchased new living room furniture and was thrilled when it was delivered. It was Saturday morning, and Mom was the first person I called to come over and see the ensemble. She dropped by my apartment on her way home from field service. She made passing comments about my “temporary insanity” and her expectation that I would “come to my senses” and return to my religion and even my marriage. As she sat down and ran her hand over the fabric of the couch, she made all the necessary compliments, but there was no enthusiasm behind her words. I’d spent the morning at home, and my bed was still unmade. She was wearing a skirt; I had on shorts for bike riding. “Really, Lindy, who is this person who does whatever she wants?” I sensed by the way she blew on her tea before sipping it that she thought I was selfish. Whenever we break away from long-established habits others create for us, those others must label us as selfish to preserve their sense of order.

• From Satyricon (1)

  The Roman matron had learned how to be a mother, the lesson of love was an unopened book; and, when the foreign hetairai poured into the city, and the struggle for supremacy began, she soon became aware of the disadvantage under which she contended. Her natural haughtiness had caused her to lose valuable time; pride, and finally desperation drove her to attempt to outdo her foreign rivals; her native modesty became a thing of the past, her Roman initiative, unadorned by sophistication, was often but too successful in outdoing the Greek and Syrian wantons, but without the appearance of refinement which they always contrived to give to every caress of passion or avarice. They wooed fortune with an abandon that soon made them the objects of contempt in the eyes of their lords and masters. “She is chaste whom no man has solicited,” said Ovid (Amor. i, 8, line 43). Martial, writing about ninety years later says: “Sophronius Rufus, long have I been searching the city through to find if there is ever a maid to say ‘No’; there is not one.” (Ep. iv, 71.) In point of time, a century separates Ovid and Martial; from a moral standpoint, they are as far apart as the poles. The revenge, then, taken by Asia, gives a startling insight into the real meaning of Kipling’s poem, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.” In Livy (xxxiv, 4) we read: (Cato is speaking), “All these changes, as day by day the fortune of the state is higher and more prosperous and her empire grows greater, and our conquests extend over Greece and Asia, lands replete with every allurement of the senses, and we appropriate treasures that may well be called royal,--all this I dread the more from my fear that such high fortune may rather master us, than we master it.” Within twelve years of the time when this speech was delivered, we read in the same author (xxxix, 6), “for the beginnings of foreign luxury were brought into the city by the Asiatic army”; and Juvenal (Sat. iii, 6), “Quirites, I cannot bear to see Rome a Greek city, yet how small a fraction of the whole corruption is found in these dregs of Achaea? Long since has the Syrian Orontes flowed into the Tiber and brought along with it the Syrian tongue and manners and cross-stringed harp and harper and exotic timbrels and girls bidden stand for hire at the circus.” Still, from the facts which have come down to us, we cannot arrive at any definite date at which houses of ill fame and women of the town came into vogue at Rome.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  We cannot be certain of the full reasons for Luther’s collapse, but the years of argument over the Eucharist had tested his most fundamental beliefs and put his relationship with Christ on the line. Resolutely setting his face against Karlstadt and the sacramentarians had brought him to the brink.50 His position on the Real Presence, after all, was not rational: Christ’s presence in the sacrament could not be explained, but must simply be believed; it was a matter where argument ceased. Such a position allowed him to make short work of all his opponents’ arguments, because there was no need to engage in any depth with what they were saying theologically. Instead, he retreated to a defensive stance where he could be certain that he was “with Christ,” facing the enemy. Yet this also exposed him to the worst kind of Anfechtung, the fear that he would lose faith altogether, and the terror that his assurance that Christ was with him might dissolve. If he had been deserted by Christ, then the position he had taken on the Eucharist was wrong. And if he was wrong, then it was he, and not his enemies, who was on Satan’s side. Luther had only the stark alternatives of having faith or losing it, and doubt—from which he suffered repeatedly—plunged him into despair. The rift with Karlstadt was now beyond repair, and worse, Karlstadt was accusing him of becoming like the Catholics and making martyrs himself. Around him, people were dying for the gospel and yet he was “not worthy” of martyrdom. Two themes stand out in Luther’s agonized prayer at the time: the blood of martyrs, and the need to attack the sacramentarians. Secure in Wittenberg, Luther would not be a martyr, but over the coming months he could fight the plague for his parishioners. —THE plague receded; Luther recovered from his collapse, and his doubts faded: He became ever more certain of the correctness of his view of the Eucharist. He began to set up a new Church, and the Saxon Visitation of all the parishes in the territory began, with the instructions for the visitors of parish pastors in electoral Saxony finally agreed and printed in March 1528.51 Luther began to see for himself just how ignorant of Christianity many Saxons were, and how many problems the fledgling ministry faced. Over the next years, Luther’s energies would be devoted to creating a new catechism, institutionalizing a new Church in partnership with the Elector and his officials, and continuing his battle against the sacramentarians.52

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There could be no going back to the age of crusade or inquisition. Secularism was there to stay. But at the same time, by the mid-twentieth century, the world also had to come to terms with the fact that the “void” was no longer merely a psychic vacuum, but had been given graphic and terrifying embodiment. Between 1914 and 1945, seventy million people in Europe and the Soviet Union had died violent deaths. 1 Some of the worst atrocities had been perpetrated by Germans, who lived in one of the most cultivated societies in Europe. It was no longer possible to assume that a rational education would eliminate barbarism, since the Nazi Holocaust revealed that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university. The sheer scale of the Nazi genocide or the Soviet Gulag reveals their modern origins. No previous society could have dreamed of implementing such grandiose schemes of extermination. The horrors of the Second World War (1939–45) only ended with the explosion of the first atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This, again, was a horrifying vision of the power of modern science and the germ of nihilism in modern culture. For decades, men and women had dreamed of a final apocalypse wrought by God; now, it appeared, human beings no longer needed a supernatural deity to end the world. They had used their prodigious skill and learning to find the means of doing this very efficiently for themselves. As they contemplated these new facts of life, people became aware as never before of the limitations of the rationalistic ethos. Faced with catastrophe on such a scale, reason is silent; there is—literally—nothing that it can say. The Holocaust would become an icon of evil for modern times. It was a by-product of modernity, which, from the very beginning, had often involved acts of ethnic cleansing. The Nazis used many of the tools and achievements of the industrial age to deadly effect. The death camps were a fearful parody of the factory, right down to the industrial chimney itself. They made full use of the railways, the advanced chemical industry, and efficient bureaucracy and management. The Holocaust was an example of scientific and rational planning, in which everything is subordinated to a single, limited, and clearly defined objective. 2 Born of modern scientific racism, the Holocaust was the ultimate in social engineering in what has been called the “garden” culture of the twentieth century. Science itself was also deeply implicated in the death camps and the eugenic experiments carried out there. At the very least, the Holocaust showed that a secularist ideology could be just as lethal as any religious crusade. The Holocaust was also a reminder of the dangers that can accrue from the death of God in human consciousness.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The news of Kaiser’s imprisonment and impending martyrdom weighed heavily on Luther. In December 1524, “Brother Henry”—a Dutch Lutheran who had also been a student at Wittenberg and a follower of Karlstadt—had been murdered by hostile peasants. Luther had written a pamphlet about his martyrdom, one of the first of many martyrologies of the Reformation.40 His reaction to the Kaiser case, however, was much more emotional and was pervaded by a strong sense of foreboding. On May 20, a month and a half before his breakdown, he wrote to Kaiser, and was in no doubt about what fate awaited him.41 In October, still under the impact of his collapse, Luther continued to write about how he felt “unequal” to Kaiser; he was nothing but a “wordy preacher,” whereas “Leo” was a powerful man of action, a “lion” and “emperor” true to his name.42 It is not surprising that Luther should have identified with Kaiser. There would be even more surprising parallels as the case unfolded. Weak and debilitated from his time in prison, Kaiser on July 17 was forced to participate in a disputation with none other than Johannes Eck, Luther’s antagonist at Leipzig, who had even gone to Rome to procure the bull against him. It is unclear whether Luther knew before his collapse that Eck had taken an interest in Kaiser’s case. Luther had been the butt of Eck’s coarse humor at Leipzig, and now Eck mocked Kaiser to his face as a man “whose wares are even worse than his salesmanship.”43 Unable to burn Luther, Eck meant to burn Kaiser. Protected by the Elector Friedrich and his successor Johann, Luther was safe. In fact it was now he who was on the side of the authorities, as he had wryly noted after his encounter with Karlstadt in the Black Bear Inn: “I who ought to have become a martyr have reached the point where I am now making martyrs of others.”44 Karlstadt was very much on his mind, too, and shortly before the breakdown, Luther had become convinced that he would never win him back to the fold. At the climax of his collapse he worried that his death or the Devil’s attacks would prevent him writing against the sacramentarians, and he felt the weight and isolation of leading the movement: “Oh what dreadful misery the Schwärmer [enthusiasts] will cause after my death!”45

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  After the war, no thinking person could be serenely optimistic about the progress of civilization. The most cultivated and advanced nations in Europe had crippled each other with the new military technology, and the war itself seemed a hideous parody of the mechanization that had brought such wealth and power. Once the intricate apparatus of conscription, transportation of troops, and manufacture of armaments had been set up and switched on, it acquired its own momentum and became difficult to stop. 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 1930S. 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. The painting, sculpture, poetry, and drama of the early twentieth century were all quests for meaning in a disordered, changing world; they were trying to create novel modes of perception and modern myths.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Battle Lines (1870–1900) BY THE END of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the new society which had finally come to fruition in the West was not quite the universal panacea that some had imagined. The dynamic optimism that had inspired Hegel’s philosophy had given way to perplexing doubt and malaise. On the one hand, Europe was going from strength to strength; there was confidence and an exultant sense of mastery as the industrial revolution brought some of the nation- states more wealth and power than they had ever achieved before. But just as characteristic were the isolation, ennui, and melancholy explored by Charles Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), the sickening doubt articulated by Alfred Tennyson in In Memoriam (1850), and the destructive lassitude and discontent of Flaubert’s eponymous heroine in Madame Bovary (1856). People felt obscurely afraid. Henceforth, at the same time as they celebrated the achievements of modern society, men and women would also experience an emptiness, a void, that rendered life meaningless; many would crave certainty amid the perplexities of modernity; some would project their fears onto imaginary enemies and dream of universal conspiracy. We shall find all these elements in the fundamentalist movements that developed in all three of the monotheistic faiths alongside modern culture. Human beings find it almost impossible to live without a sense that, despite the distressing evidence to the contrary, life has ultimate meaning and value. In the old world, mythology and ritual had helped people to evoke a sense of sacred significance that saved them from the void, in rather the same way as did great works of art. But scientific rationalism, the source of Western power and success, had discredited myth and declared that it alone could lead to truth. Yet reason could not address the ultimate questions; that had never been within the competence of logos. As a result, traditional faith was no longer possible for a growing number of Western men and women. The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) would discover that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by a desire for eros and procreation. Increasingly, an apparently perverse yearning for (and terror of) extinction would surface in modern culture. People were beginning to recoil from the civilization they had created, at the same time as they enjoyed the undoubted benefits it conferred. Thanks to modern science, most people in the West lived healthier, longer lives; their democratic institutions meant that, for the most part, life was more equitable. Americans and Europeans were rightly proud of their achievements. But the dream of universal brotherhood that had sustained Enlightenment thinkers was proving to be a chimera. The Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) had revealed the hideous effects of modern weaponry, and there was a dawning realization that science might also have a malignant dimension. There was a sense of anticlimax.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The painting, sculpture, poetry, and drama of the early twentieth century were all quests for meaning in a disordered, changing world; they were trying to create novel modes of perception and modern myths. The psychoanalytical science of Sigmund Freud, which strove to uncover the most fundamental layers of the unconscious, was also a search for new insight and an attempt to access a hidden source of spiritual strength. Freud had no time for conventional religion, which he regarded as the most serious enemy of the logos of science. 2 But he tried to revive a modern sense of the old myths of the Greeks and even made up mythical fictions of his own. The horror and fear of much of the modern experience lent new urgency to the search for some intangible significance which could save human beings from despair, but which could not be attained by the normal processes of logical, discursive thought. Freud, indeed, for all his devotion to scientific rationalism, showed that reason represented only the outermost rind of the mind, overlaying a seething cauldron of unconscious, irrational, and primitive impulses that profoundly affect our behavior but over which we have little control. Religious people too were making similar attempts to build a new vision on fundamentals. The most prescient realized that it was impossible for fully modernized people to be religious in the old way. The conservative spirituality, which had helped people to adjust to essential limitations and to accept things as they were, would not help people in this iconoclastic, future-oriented climate. The whole tenor of their thought and perception had changed. Many in the West, whose education had been entirely rational, were not equipped for the mythical, mystical, and cultic rituals that had evoked a sense of transcendent value in the past. There was no going back. If they wanted to be religious, they would have to develop rites, beliefs, and practices that spoke to them in their radically altered circumstances. In the early twentieth century, people were trying to find new ways to be religious. Just as people in the first Axial Age (c. 700–200 BCE) had found that the old paganism no longer worked in the new conditions of their period and had evolved the great confessional faiths, so too, in this second Axial Age, there was a similar challenge. Like any truly creative enterprise, the search for modern (and, later, for postmodern) faith was supremely difficult. The quest continues; as yet, no definitive or even very satisfactory solution has emerged. The religiosity that we call “fundamentalism” is just one of these attempts. The Protestants of the United States had been aware for some time of the need for something new.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

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

• From Shunned (2018)

  I hadn’t broken the habit of sharing good news with him. I was going to tell my family that weekend and swore him to secrecy, trusting his discernment. The next day, my parents were attending a meeting at the Kingdom Hall when Todd Sterling approached and started lamenting my move to Chicago. Mom and Dad were stunned by the news and embarrassed to hear it this way. Befuddled, they left early and phoned Lory, who then phoned me in tears. They were angry with Ross and disappointed in me. They put two and two together, realizing my recent “business” trips to Chicago were part of a thoughtful exit strategy. While Mom, Dad, and Lory were all sad to see me move, I made no effort to communicate with Randy, and the others avoided mentioning him. I’d given them a lot to process in a short period of time, throwing myself wholeheartedly into life-altering choices without seeking their advice or needing their help to make anything happen. A moving crew would arrive at my door and handle everything at my new employer’s expense. This left them with only the task of preparing themselves emotionally, and I felt a heavy cloak of despair and resignation come over them. In every sense, I was moving farther away. Brian reluctantly accepted my resignation. “You’re biting off a lot of change at once,” he said. “Divorce, a new job, a new city.” His grave expression showed genuine concern for me. He didn’t know to mention the fourth change: leaving the Witness fold. “If anything changes after you move, and you want to come back, just give me a call.” I squirmed as he spoke, not wanting to think about all the extremes in my life. As my family drove me to the airport, less than thirty-six hours before I’d report for my first day at my new job, my hope and longing were bigger than any sense of loss in leaving. While we waited together at the gate, I struggled to find a polite balance between excitement and sadness. When the time came to board the plane, I kissed and hugged everyone goodbye. Lory handed me a letter I was to read on the plane, and two homemade cassettes of all the Kingston Trio albums we’d ever listened to. “In case you get homesick,” she said, then looked down and stepped aside. I took my seat on the plane and grabbed some Kleenex in case an avalanche of emotion struck me, but the tears never came. And now here I was, just one month into my new life, when Steve got this idea for us to do the L.A.T.E. Ride. It wasn’t a competitive race, but the excitement at the starting line was palpable.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Reason and logos were improving the lot of men and women in the modern world in a myriad practical ways, but they were not competent to deal with those ultimate questions that human beings seem forced, by their very nature, to ask and which, hitherto, had been the preserve of mythos. As a result, despair and alienation, as described by Pascal, have been a part of the modern experience. But not for everybody. John Locke (1632–1704), who was one of the first to initiate the philosophical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, had none of Pascal’s existential angst. His faith in life and human reason was serene and confident. He had no doubts about God’s existence, even though, strictly speaking, he was aware that proving the reality of a deity that lay beyond our sense experience did not pass Bacon’s empirical test. Locke’s religion, relying entirely on reason, was similar to the deism espoused by some of the Jewish Marranos. He was fully convinced that the natural world gave ample evidence for a Creator and that if reason were allowed to shine forth freely, everybody would discover the truth for himself. False and superstitious ideas had only crept into the world because priests had used cruel and tyrannical methods, such as the Inquisition, to force the people to accept their orthodoxy. For the sake of true religion, therefore, the state must tolerate all manner of beliefs, and must concern itself solely with the practical administration and government of the community. Church and state must be separate, and neither must interfere in the business of the other. This was the Age of Reason, and for the first time in human history, Locke believed, men and women would be free, and, therefore, able to perceive the truth.20

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Old values no longer applied; there had to be a new law, and a new freedom that could only be achieved by a flagrant disavowal of the old norms. I have also shown that there is an inbuilt nihilism in the more extreme forms of fundamentalism. Fundamentalists in all three faiths have cultivated fantasies of destruction and annihilation. Sometimes, as I have shown in chapter ten, they have been driven to acts that are deliberately self-destructive. An obvious example is the plot of the Jewish Underground to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in 1979; an act that could have destroyed the State of Israel. These Jewish fundamentalists were impelled by a mystical belief: if they caused an apocalypse here on earth, God would be “forced” to send Redemption from on high. Again, it is difficult to imagine a more nihilistic act than that of the Muslim suicide bomber. On quite a different level, the bizarre antics of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, which led to the television scandals of the 1980s in the United States, represented a nihilistic revolt against the more sober fundamentalism of Jerry Falwell. This was also a form of post-fundamentalism that seems to have encouraged an antinomian pursuit of “holy sin.” Perhaps the hijackers of September 11 had also reached a point where they were evolving a form of Muslim antinomian post-fundamentalism too and felt that nothing was sacred any longer. Once that point is reached, the most cruel and evil behavior can be seen as a positive good. At all events, the hideous September attack shows that when people begin to use religion to justify hatred and killing, and thus abandon the compassionate ethic of all the great world religions, they have embarked on a course that represents a defeat for faith. This aggressive piety can tip some of its more extreme proponents into a moral darkness that endangers us all. If fundamentalists in all three faiths are beginning to embrace more radical and nihilistic creeds, this is a truly perilous development. It is all the more important, therefore, that we learn to understand what lies behind this profound desperation and what impels fundamentalists to act as they do. It is still the case that only a tiny proportion of fundamentalists take part in acts of terror and that most are simply trying to lead a religious life in a world that seems, to them, inimical to faith. Let us make sure that it stays that way. INTRODUCTION ONE OF the most startling developments of the late twentieth century has been the emergence within every major religious tradition of a militant piety popularly known as “fundamentalism.” Its manifestations are sometimes shocking. Fundamentalists have gunned down worshippers in a mosque, have killed doctors and nurses who work in abortion clinics, have shot their presidents, and have even toppled a powerful government.

• From Shunned (2018)

  I couldn’t muster enough remorse to cry and decided to stop dating for a few months. It took too much energy, and I needed to build my strength, focus on my work, and try to confront the existential dilemmas facing me. I caught myself staring into space a lot over the coming days, curled up with a kitten I’d adopted from the local shelter, wondering if unsatisfying romantic relationships were punishment from God for leaving my marriage. Scratching his chin while talking to Leo, I got a scary glimpse of my future self, years hence, holed up in my apartment, gray and frail and alone, wearing a quilted bathrobe, surrounded by cats. The neighborhood children would call me the Cat Lady behind my back, and I’d pass out stale hard candy at Halloween. The next day stretched before me with no plans. I pushed through the void and headed out to an early-afternoon matinee at Watertower Place, then wandered through the shopping mall, finding post holiday crowds surging past the corners of each escalator bank. What weeks earlier had seemed blessed and shiny now felt tired and brassy. The music was irritating, and every face appeared devoid of joy. This really is an awful holiday. I decided to leave, but with a free evening looming ahead of me, I was reluctant to return home. The first thing I did when I got to my apartment was to check the phone for messages. The stutter of the dial tone gave my heart a hopeful lift. Someone had called me. My whole body relaxed as I listened to a call from Deborah, an elder’s wife from the local Kingdom Hall whom I’d met a couple months earlier when Lory had come for a three-day visit. She’d convinced me to take her to the local Kingdom Hall for services, and that is when we met Deborah, a compact woman with a jolly, rambunctious nature. At that point in time, I had not preached or attended meetings in over six months. I was irritated by the predictability of the message, but Lory was my guest, so I endured the boredom for her sake. My official status was ‘inactive.’ Deborah took on the role of hostess and introduced us to other people there. Deborah asked for my phone number and I saw no harm in giving it to her. She and her husband, Ray, were having a few friends (from the Hall, no doubt) over for dinner and charades that evening and wondered if I’d like to come. Feeling like a castaway just discovered on a deserted island, I was thrilled to accept and called her back right away. Deborah and her husband lived on the third level of a modest brownstone that was less than a mile from my place.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

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

• From The Battle for God (2000)

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

• From Martin Luther (2016)

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