Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Battle for God (2000)

  At the same time, they made the modern ethos accessible to people who had not had the opportunity to study the writings of Descartes, Newton, or John Locke. The prophetic rebellion of these American prophets was both successful and enduring in the United States, and this means that we should not expect modern fundamentalist movements in societies that are currently modernizing to be ephemeral and a passing “madness.” The new American sects may have seemed bizarre to the establishment, but they were essentially modern and an integral part of the new world. This was certainly true of the millennial movement founded by the New York farmer William Miller (1782–1849), who pored over the biblical prophecies, and, in a series of careful calculations, “proved” in a pamphlet published in 1831 that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in the year 1843. Miller was reading his Bible in an essentially modern way. Instead of seeing it as a mythical, symbolic account of eternal realities, Miller assumed that such narratives as the Book of Revelation were accurate predictions of imminent events, which could be worked out with scientific and mathematical precision. People now read texts for information. Truth must be capable of logical, scientific demonstration. Miller was treating the mythos of Scripture as though it were logos, and he and his assistant Joshua Hines constantly stressed the systematic and scientific nature of Miller’s investigations. 77 The movement was also democratic: anybody could interpret the Bible for him or herself, and Miller encouraged his followers to challenge his calculations and come up with theories of their own. 78 Improbable and bizarre as the movement seemed, Millerism had instant appeal. Some 50,000 Americans became confirmed “Millerites,” while thousands more sympathized without actually joining up. 79 Inevitably, however, Millerism turned into an object lesson in the danger of interpreting the mythos of the Bible literally. Christ failed to return, as promised, in 1843, and Millerites were devastated. Nonetheless, this failure did not mean the end of millennialism, which became and has continued to be a major passion in the United States. Out of the “Great Disappointment” of 1843, other sects, such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, appeared, adjusted the eschatological timetable, and, by eschewing precise predictions, enabled new generations of Americans to look forward to an imminent End of history.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It is self-evident that the image of someone mailing a letter lacks sufficient oomph to catapult it into the empyrean realm of “Great Moments in World History.” Indeed, one can hardly put one’s finger on any specific moment at all where mailing a letter is concerned, especially if one lives in a world without postboxes, as Luther surely did. What image should be presented? Luther docilely handing a courier a letter? Luther thoughtfully folding the finished document? It is obvious that none of these quiet transactions can compare with the thunderous ba-zazz of a hammer pounding a document of truth into fixed and plain sight for all to see. The boldness of it as an act bears metaphorical power too, inviting the observer to imagine a man doing something defiant and public and noisy. “Here!” it seems to say. And “thus!” and “look!” and other monosyllabic declarations that refuse to compromise their effect with the effeminate delicacy of a second syllable. Nor have we mentioned that the point of posting these theses on the Castle Church doors was not to alert the world to what he was saying but simply to let the academic community of Wittenberg know that he was proposing a scholarly debate—or disputation, as they were called—on the subject of these theses. So it was a declaration not to the world—most of whom could not read the Latin in which the theses were written anyway—nor even to Rome or to the pope. It was but a declaration to other theologians, all of whom read Latin, and it meant to say that this was a very important subject worthy of debate. But surely posting this ultimately incendiary document on the very doors of the Wittenberg Castle Church was itself a bold and dramatic act, was it not? Luther was after all posting theses denouncing indulgences on the door of the very church that his own prince, Frederick the Wise, had built to house his almost innumerable relics, whose viewing entitled the viewer to indulgences! Surely his posting them on these very doors was this upstart monk’s none-too-subtle way of commenting on the hypocrisy of what went on inside those doors, was it not? Could there be any other way of seeing it? Alas, for those invested in seeing great drama in this action, there certainly could be. For it so happens that because the Castle Church was very much at the center of life in the community of Wittenberg, the huge wooden doors through which everyone entered the church were the best place to post anything of any community interest, making them the all-purpose bulletin board for the small city. Innumerable other things were posted there of which history has taken no notice, but once we realize that Luther’s theses were posted in that context, we see their posting in a very different light. They were simply put on the bulletin board of that day, as anything posted must be. Even less dramatic is the entirely plausible notion that it was not Luther himself who posted the theses, but the church custodian, who was typically responsible for posting important notices on the doors of the church.2 Finally, it is even possible that a number of copies were posted on the doors of several churches in Wittenberg, as during this time there were as many as six churches in the town, the doors of which were all used for this same purpose. Of course this extraordinarily and even shockingly reduces the import and drama that history has for five centuries invested in this remembered act, but one must revise one’s understanding in accord with the facts of the situation, and these are indisputable.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But not only was it two priests who were married, but then a monk too, and this made matters even more complicated. In his To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther had taken pains to differentiate between the vows of priests and those of monks. He made it clear that the necessity of celibacy for priests was not biblical, but he had never made this case with regard to monks, who had freely and quite specifically taken such a vow. But before Luther could weigh in further on this tricky issue from the Wartburg, Karlstadt once more galloped ahead of things and wrote something in which he declared that all the vows of priests and monks were invalid, essentially rendering those vows null and void in Wittenberg by doing so. Melanchthon thought he was correct in what he said, but Luther was not so convinced. He had to think it through and clarify some things. But Karlstadt had written what he had written, and now it was Luther who was playing catch-up. One could almost get the idea that in springing ahead as he did, Karlstadt was somehow trying to lead the Reformation in Luther’s absence. Things weren’t yet at a point where this caused problems, but when Luther read the theses that Karlstadt had written on the subject of the vows of monks and priests, he quickly discovered a fly in the ointment. Luther said in an August 3 letter to Melanchthon that he was bothered by some sloppy biblical exegesis that Karlstadt had used to make his argument against monkish vows: I highly approve of his effort and diligence, of course, although I rather wish that he had not twisted that passage about the “seed” which was sacrificed to Molech into a reference to the emission of semen. [Our] enemies will ridicule the distortion of this passage since it is clearer than light that it refers to the sons and daughters who were being sacrificed as a burnt offering to the idol.20 In Scripture, “seed” often refers to one’s offspring—as in Genesis 3, where, talking to the serpent, God says he will “put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed.”21 What Karlstadt had done was confuse the onanistic idea of spilled seed with the word “seed” in a passage about Moloch, an idol to which pagan tribes sacrificed their children. Luther saw this childish mistake immediately and felt that it compromised Karlstadt’s entire argument, and therefore brought down the whole of their cause. And there were other errors too. Three days later, Luther was complaining about Karlstadt’s work to Spalatin:

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But in the mid-1520s, the universes of Luther and Erasmus had approached the limits of how far they could coexist on friendly terms. Luther’s criticisms of the church had become shrill and aggressive in a way that was unthinkable a few years earlier. Erasmus had many times commented on how deeply troubled he was by Luther’s tone, which he thought was hurting the larger cause of bringing reforms to the church. Although Erasmus himself often got into trouble with the church, he never took those fatal transgressive steps beyond the church’s pale that Luther had, and it was clearly important to him that he never stray beyond that palisade of what passed for orthodoxy—and the church’s good graces. He had an uncanny ability to finesse things and to tiptoe back into the church’s embrace whenever necessary. So the baseline to which Luther hewed in his criticism of the church was very different from that to which Erasmus hewed, and at some point the difference between those baselines became painfully obvious to Erasmus. Doing what Luther had done after Worms, such as identifying the papacy with the Antichrist and burning the papal bull, was well beyond Erasmus’s limits. In order to make this clear to the church and to show his final fealty to it, Erasmus was asked by King Henry VIII of England to write something against Luther. So the dance Erasmus had been able to dance in which he contrived to have his cake and eat it too had come to an end. The church wished him to make clear that these were two different cakes. No matter what Erasmus did or didn’t do now, many would think him guilty of having created the Humanist and critical atmosphere that made Luther possible. Still this point marks when Humanism and Luther’s Reformation must clarify their limits. Many were eager to hear Erasmus on these issues. Just as there were many Humanists like Hutten who despised the church and were more for Reformation even than Luther, there were Humanists who were looking for clarification. Precisely how far could they stray? Erasmus must tell them. But Erasmus was not eager for the confrontation with Luther any more than he was eager for confrontation with the church. It was never his way. Luther was in a similar bind on his other flank. After the Peasants’ War, the Catholic church blasted Luther for his role in starting the snowball down the hill. In July 1525, his old enemy Jerome “the Goat” Emser, who had been chaplain to Duke George, wrote How Luther Has Promoted Rebellion in His Books. And then his newer and future archenemy Johannes Cochlaeus—who would replace Emser as George’s chaplain—wrote against him too. If this weren’t enough, in October, Luther’s friend Capito and the Swiss Reformer Huldrych Zwingli got in their licks. It was a dog-pile-on-the-rabbit low point for Luther.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It didn’t seem that anyone had moved or would move, but all Philip was hoping for was that on this single sticking point they would agree to disagree and not let it hamper them from uniting in a common Protestant front against the emperor. Surely they agreed on so much else that to allow this single disagreement to scuttle everything was unwise. And perhaps it was, but essentially that was what now happened. When they ended their discussion, Zwingli was visibly moved, even saying that he had deeply desired Luther’s friendship and that he had looked forward to meeting Luther more than any other person in all of France or Germany. But Luther was no more moved by this Swiss olive branch than by the Italian kiss of Miltitz eleven years before. His response to Zwingli was as cold as ice. “Pray God,” he said, “that you may come to a right understanding of this matter.”4 But why was Luther behaving this way? When Bucer, trying to get an answer, asked what it was that Luther did not like about the position of their Swiss friends, Luther replied, Our spirit is different from yours; it is clear that we do not possess the same spirit, for it cannot be the same spirit when in one place the words of Christ are simply believed and in another place the same faith is censured, resisted, regarded as false, and attacked with all kinds of malicious and blasphemous words. Therefore, as I have previously said, we commend you to the judgment of God.5 Again he had brought up the dubious and ironically unbiblical idea of “the spirits.” And that was that. So Luther effectively showed the back of his hand to this man, who was on the verge of tears. As a result, Zwingli now actually wept. But it seems that Luther would not even allow himself to lean in Zwingli’s direction, much less share in his warm desire for friendship. Luther’s dismissively resorting to this language of different “spirits” was precisely the same as when he had spoken with Karlstadt about whether Karlstadt possessed “the spirit of Allstedt,” which was a murderous and wild spirit that he knew to be in Müntzer. What led Luther to think that he saw such things so clearly, that they might have the same “spirit”—which is to say the Holy Spirit of God—while differing in good faith on some details, however important those details might be? But Luther was not interested in discussing this. That he categorized Zwingli’s good faith attempts to explain himself as in any way “malicious” or “blasphemous” is patently strange, for who else would have characterized them that way? Certainly not anyone else in the room, including all those on Luther’s side. So the question remains: Was Luther being insufferably, abominably, perversely bullheaded, or was he being a divinely inspired and immovable outpost of truth?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  20 My Concept of Commitment My concept of commitment was to take all you could give. —Chris Smither, No Love Today In the sunlit study of a couples’ counselor, huge potted plants are thriving—ficus and mother-in-law tongue and wandering Jew with shoots sending out small explosions of streaky green. Across from us, the therapist smiles from a moon-shaped face. In the next room, one of her bespectacled kids saws through violin scales. This doctor—in her loose muslin dress and Birkenstock sandals, her long wavy hair dragged into a bun with a pen stuck through it— appears to have cobbled together what I want: a happy family. I tell her about snapping at Dev and making him cry—the reason we’re here. She tries to reassure me that Dev’s childhood, however shadowed by our scratching at each other, doesn’t mirror my own. You’re both very worried about Dev’s feelings, she says, but he’s in no way neglected. (In some ways, true enough. But having your parents circle each other—I still contend—splits a child in two.) Warren’s just a better parent, I say. Is that true? she asks him. His long legs in khakis bend and unbend, mantislike. He says, Mary’s very loving, very good about seeing he plays with other kids all the time... He trails off, and she says, But? She gets very overwhelmed and snappish, he finishes. He’s perfectly patient with Dev, I say. Well, probably, she tells me with that smile, if Warren was up all night like you, he might be less perfect. I doubt that, I say. She asks me to say more, and I outline Warren’s steadiness. How his devotion to poetry has inspired me to strive for a higher bar in my work. I praise his integrity and self-discipline, saying, I wanted a solid family. That’s part of why I married him, for the stability he offered. She leads me on, but now the stabilization feels... Stultifying, I say. She eventually turns to Warren. Why’d you marry Mary? It seemed like time, he says. We’d been together three years. We loved each other—health insurance and so forth. She very much wanted a family. I stare at him, awaiting some of his former warmth for me to squeeze through the stone, but he ticks off what might be qualities in a personals ad— attractive, athletic, smart. She’s much more social than I, he adds, very loyal, a very devoted mother... Whoever you married would have those qualities, she says. I think he married me—I interrupt—to rebuke his upbringing. Now he resents my absorption with the baby or that his father chips in my rent! (These pet theories conveniently skim over my own—at this point—innately repellent disposition.) That’s so damned unfair, he says. It’s Warren’s turn, the therapist says levelly. Toward the end, when she asks how much I’m drinking, I halve it. Still she suggests I try out an evening support group for people trying to give up booze.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  So we see that here Luther sounds as much like a pacifist as any who ever lived, and although trying to square that with the man who exhorted the nobles to “stab and kill” the uprising peasants may seem difficult, we see that Luther’s theology held that we must obey the governmental authorities set over us, even if they should wish to kill us. If we take up arms against them, as the peasants had, then Luther sided with the government and did not counsel them to put up their swords at all; on the contrary, they must use them in their proper sphere to restore order. In any event the idea of some kind of common theological confession was itself not objectionable to Luther, so at the end of July he and Melanchthon agreed that they would go. The meeting was set for October 1–4. Luther left with Melanchthon and Justus Jonas on September 14 or 15. They were joined by their younger colleague Kaspar Crüciger and by George Rörer. Luther’s assistant during this time was Veit Dietrich, who might have been along as well. They traveled through Torgau, where they met with Elector John, and then through Gotha and Eisenach, where two more Lutheran ministers joined them. In Altenburg, Spalatin greeted them, and then they continued on to Marburg. The city and castle of Marburg itself were begun in the eleventh century as a fort overlooking the Lahn River, which lay almost a thousand feet below the castle’s ramparts. When Luther and his team arrived in their several wagons on the morning of the thirtieth, they discovered that Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and others were already there, including Martin Bucer, whom Luther rather good-naturedly called a “rascal” for siding with the Zwinglians on the issue of the Real Presence. Andrew Osiander from Nuremberg and Johannes Agricola from Augsburg would arrive the next day. All in all, it was the largest gathering of Protestant theologians ever assembled. On the first day, two separate discussions were held, one between Luther and Oecolampadius and another between Zwingli and Melanchthon. As Luther fully expected, nothing at all new was said by anyone. Oecolampadius and Zwingli reiterated their position that while it was true that Jesus was by faith spiritually present in the Communion elements, nonetheless he could not be bodily present in any way. Their pre-quantum understanding of the physical universe made it difficult for them to imagine that somehow Jesus could be seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven and simultaneously somehow in the body and blood of the Lord’s Supper. Luther again contended that God could do many things we could not understand and if the Scripture said “This is my body” we need not worry about the details. We had enough in those words to have what we needed. The words were not fuzzy or complicated in any way, and to pretend they were was a simple lack of faith or worse.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Unfortunately, as in Christianity, the religion was later hijacked by the men, who interpreted texts in a way that was negative for Muslim women. The Koran does not prescribe the veil for all women but only for Muhammad’s wives, as a mark of their status. Once Islam had taken its place in the civilized world, however, Muslims adopted those customs of the Oikumene which relegated women to second-class status. They adopted the customs of veiling women and secluding them in harems from Persia and Christian Byzantium, where women had long been marginalized in this way. By the time of the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), the position of Muslim women was as bad as that of their sisters in Jewish and Christian society. Today Muslim feminists urge their menfolk to return to the original spirit of the Koran. This reminds us that, like any other faith, Islam could be interpreted in a number of different ways; consequently it evolved its own sects and divisions. The first of these—that between the Sunnah and Shiah—was prefigured in the struggle for the leadership after Muhammad’s sudden death. Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s close friend, was elected by the majority, but some believed that he would have wanted Ali ibn Abi Talib, his cousin and son-in-law, to be his successor (kalipha). Ali himself accepted Abu Bakr’s leadership, but during the next few years he seems to have been the focus of the loyalty of dissidents who disapproved of the policies of the first three caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab and Uthman ibn Affan. Finally Ali became the fourth caliph in 656: the Shiah would eventually call him the first Imam or Leader of the ummah. Concerned with the leadership, the split between Sunnis and Shiis was political rather than doctrinal, and this heralded the importance of politics in Muslim religion, including its conception of God. The Shiah-i-Ali (the Partisans of Ali) remained a minority and would develop a piety of protest, typified by the tragic figure of Muhammad’s grandson Husayn ibn Ali, who refused to accept the Ummayads (who had seized the caliphate after the death of his father Ali) and was killed with his small band of supporters by the Ummayad Caliph Yazid in 680 on the plain of Karbala, near Kufa in modern Iraq. All Muslims regard the immoral slaughter of Husayn with horror, but he has become a particular hero of the Shiah, a reminder that it is sometimes necessary to fight tyranny to the death. By this time, the Muslims had begun to establish their empire. The first four caliphs had been concerned only to spread Islam among the Arabs of the Byzantine and Persian empires, which were both in a state of decline. Under the Ummayads, however, the expansion continued into Asia and North Africa, inspired not by religion so much as by Arab imperialism.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Atheism had always been a rejection of a current conception of the divine. Jews and Christians had been called “atheists” because they denied pagan notions of divinity, even though they had faith in a God. The new atheists of the nineteenth century were inveighing against the particular conception of God current in the West rather than other notions of the divine. Thus Karl Marx (1818–1883) saw religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature … the opium of the people, which made this suffering bearable.”16 Even though he adopted a Messianic view of history that was heavily dependent upon the Judeo-Christian tradition, he dismissed God as irrelevant. Since there was no meaning, value or purpose outside the historical process, the idea of God could not help humanity. Atheism, the negation of God, was also a waste of time. Yet “God” was vulnerable to the Marxist critique, since he had often been used by the establishment to approve a social order in which the rich man sat in his palace while the poor man sat at its gate. This was not true of the whole of monotheistic religion, however. A God who condoned social injustice would have appalled Amos, Isaiah or Muhammad, who had used the idea of God to quite different ends that were quite close to the Marxist ideal. Similarly, the literal understanding of God and scripture made the faith of many Christians vulnerable to the scientific discoveries of the period. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), which revealed the vast perspectives of geological time, and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), which put forward the evolutionary hypothesis, seemed to contradict the biblical account of creation in Genesis. Since Newton, creation had been central to much Western understanding of God, and people had lost sight of the fact that the biblical story had never been intended as a literal account of the physical origins of the universe. Indeed, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo had long been problematic and had entered Judaism and Christianity relatively late; in Islam the creation of the world by al-Lah is taken for granted, but there is no detailed discussion of how this happened. Like all other Koranic speech about God, the doctrine of creation is only a “parable,” a sign or a symbol. Monotheists in all three religions had regarded the creation as a myth, in the most positive sense of the word: it was a symbolic account which helped men and women to cultivate a particular religious attitude. Some Jews and Muslims had deliberately created imaginative interpretations of the creation story that departed radically from any literal sense. But in the West there had been a tendency to regard the Bible as factually true in every detail. Many people had come to see God as literally and physically responsible for everything that happens on earth, in rather the same way as we ourselves make things or set events in motion.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Coming back to the director and her employee Greg: We’d given this team the Motivators Assessment, and Greg’s results showed that “Developing Others” and “Teamwork” were near the bottom of his list of twenty-three core drivers. That could be problematic. After all, if promoted, his new job would be about helping a department of a dozen people grow and “develop,” all while building a cohesive group with a strong sense of “teamwork.” We sat down and asked Greg to describe his worst days on the job, and he mentioned becoming frustrated when mentoring younger employees and/or helping one of his project teams work through sticky personnel issues and conflicts. When we asked Greg about his best days, he brightened up. He was usually off-site working with clients, solving their issues, and looking like a hero. About people management, he confided, “My team members have conflicts. There are folks here who don’t take feedback well. I have all these peers playing politics.” Then he paused and asked, “You’ve done this awhile. Is that what management is always like?” We nodded. “A lot of leading is just that. It’s about resolving people issues, but it’s also about enabling others to succeed.” We added that some folks loved what he loathed. Later we explained to Greg’s boss that while he might become a serviceable manager, there was a very good chance he would be miserable in the role, which might lead to anxiety and burnout. It also might be clear, pretty fast, to his team members that his heart wasn’t in the job. We wish everyone always took our brilliant advice (or that our advice was always brilliant). This story took a turn for the worse. Based on the director’s continued recommendation, after she was promoted to another role a few months later, Greg took over the team. He was smart, he’d figure it out, the company brass reasoned. That situation lasted for just about six months before the team revolted. Greg, they said, was slow to respond to their concerns, unsympathetic to their personal issues, and wrapped up in his own deliverables. The HR partner assigned to his team had tried to coach Greg during the months he was in the role; but as sharp as Greg was, he just couldn’t seem to change. Thankfully, the company didn’t fire him. The HR partner and Greg worked together to create a new role in which he would continue on the payroll as the team’s senior consultant. In the three years since, he has taken on other tasks (internal executive coaching for one), broadened his reach working as a liaison with other departments, and assumed more responsibility in product development. Greg is a bright guy who, to the benefit of everyone involved, is no longer managing anyone except himself. As this organization learned, putting people in the wrong positions can cause anxiety and undue stress, not only for the person in the wrong position, but also for the team they work with.

• From A History of God (1993)

  In the year before the hijra or migration to Yathrib (or Medina, the City, as the Muslims would call it), Muhammad had adapted his religion to bring it closer to Judaism as he understood it. After so many years of working in isolation he must have been looking forward to living with members of an older, more established tradition. Thus he prescribed a fast for Muslims on the Jewish Day of Atonement and commanded Muslims to pray three times a day like the Jews, instead of only twice as hitherto. Muslims could marry Jewish women and should observe some of the dietary laws. Above all, Muslims must now pray facing Jerusalem like the Jews and Christians. The Jews of Medina were at first prepared to give Muhammad a chance: life had become intolerable in the oasis, and like many of the committed pagans of Medina they were ready to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially since he seemed so positively inclined toward their faith. Eventually, however, they turned against Muhammad and joined those pagans who were hostile to the newcomers from Mecca. The Jews had sound religious reasons for their rejection: they believed that the era of prophecy was over. They were expecting a Messiah, but no Jew or Christian at this stage would have believed that they were prophets. Yet they were also motivated by political considerations: in the old days, they had gained power in the oasis by throwing in their lot with one or the other warring Arab tribe. Muhammad, however, had joined both these tribes with the Quraysh in the new Muslim ummah, a kind of super-tribe of which the Jews were also members. As they saw their position in Medina decline, the Jews became antagonistic. They used to assemble in the mosque “to listen to the stories of the Muslims and laugh and scoff at their religion.”31 It was very easy for them, with their superior knowledge of scripture, to pick holes in the stories of the Koran—some of which differed markedly from the biblical version. They also jeered at Muhammad’s pretensions, saying that it was very odd that a man who claimed to be a prophet could not even find his camel when it went missing.

• From A History of God (1993)

  His was the God of the philosophers, not the God of the Bible. Inevitably a reaction set in. Some Jews turned to mysticism and developed the esoteric discipline of Kabbalah, as we shall see. Others recoiled from philosophy when tragedy struck, finding that the remote God of Falsafah was unable to console them. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Christian Wars of Reconquest began to push back the frontiers of Islam in Spain and brought the anti-Semitism of Western Europe to the peninsula. Eventually this would culminate in the destruction of Spanish Jewry, and during the sixteenth century the Jews turned away from Falsafah and developed an entirely new conception of God that was inspired by mythology rather than scientific logic. The crusading religion of Western Christendom had separated it from the other monotheistic traditions. The First Crusade of 1096–99 had been the first cooperative act of the new West, a sign that Europe was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism known as the Dark Ages. The new Rome, backed by the Christian nations of Northern Europe, was fighting its way back onto the international scene. But the Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial people and they wanted an aggressive religion. During the eleventh century, the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Cluny and its affiliated houses had tried to tether their martial spirit to the church and teach them true Christian values by means of such devotional practices as the pilgrimage. The first Crusaders had seen their expedition to the Near East as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but they still had a very primitive conception of God and of religion. Soldier saints like St. George, St. Mercury and St. Demetrius figured more than God in their piety and, in practice, differed little from pagan deities. Jesus was seen as the feudal lord of the Crusaders rather than as the incarnate Logos: he had summoned his knights to recover his patrimony—the Holy Land—from the infidel. As they began their journey, some of the Crusaders resolved to avenge his death by slaughtering the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley. This had not been part of Pope Urban II’s original idea when he had summoned the Crusade, but it seemed simply perverse to many of the Crusaders to march 3,000 miles to fight the Muslims, about whom they knew next to nothing, when the people who had—or so they thought—actually killed Christ were alive and well on their very doorsteps.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The ideals of the Rabbis were close to the second of the God-religions, which had its roots in exactly the same tradition. A 3 A Light to the Gentiles T THE SAME TIME as Philo was expounding his Platonized Judaism in Alexandria and Hillel and Shammai were arguing in Jerusalem, a charismatic faith healer began his own career in the north of Palestine. We know very little about Jesus. The first full-length account of his life was St. Mark’s Gospel, which was not written until about the year 70, some forty years after his death. By that time, historical facts had been overlaid with mythical elements which expressed the meaning Jesus had acquired for his followers. It is this meaning that St. Mark primarily conveys rather than a reliable straightforward portrayal. The first Christians saw him as a new Moses, a new Joshua, the founder of a new Israel. Like the Buddha, Jesus seemed to encapsulate some of the deepest aspirations of many of his contemporaries and to give substance to dreams that had haunted the Jewish people for centuries. During his lifetime, many Jews in Palestine had believed that he was the Messiah: he had ridden into Jerusalem and been hailed as the Son of David, but, only a few days later, he was put to death by the agonizing Roman punishment of crucifixion. Yet despite the scandal of a Messiah who had died like a common criminal, his disciples could not believe that their faith in him had been misplaced. There were rumors that he had risen from the dead. Some said that his tomb had been found empty three days after his crucifixion; others saw him in visions, and on one occasion 500 people saw him simultaneously. His disciples believed that he would soon return to inaugurate the Messianic Kingdom of God, and, since there was nothing heretical about such a belief, their sect was accepted as authentically Jewish by no less a person than Rabbi Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel and one of the greatest of the tannaim. His followers worshipped in the Temple every day as fully observant Jews. Ultimately, however, the New Israel, inspired by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, would become a Gentile faith, which would evolve its own distinctive conception of God. By the time of Jesus’ death in about 30 CE, the Jews were passionate monotheists, so nobody expected the Messiah to be a divine figure: he would simply be an ordinary, if privileged, human being. Some of the Rabbis suggested that his name and identity were known to God from all eternity. In that sense, therefore, the Messiah could be said to have been “with God” from before the beginning of time in the same symbolic way as the figure of divine Wisdom in Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The idea of a personal God seems increasingly unacceptable at the present time for all kinds of reasons: moral, intellectual, scientific and spiritual. Feminists are also repelled by a personal deity who, because of “his” gender, has been male since his tribal, pagan days. Yet to talk about “she”—other than in a dialectical way—can be just as limiting, since it confines the illimitable God to a purely human category. The old metaphysical notion of God as the Supreme Being, which has long been popular in the West, is also felt to be unsatisfactory. The God of the philosophers is the product of a now outdated rationalism, so the traditional “proofs” of his existence no longer work. The widespread acceptance of the God of the philosophers by the deists of the Enlightenment can be seen as the first step to the current atheism. Like the old Sky God, this deity is so remote from humanity and the mundane world that he easily becomes Deus Otiosus and fades from our consciousness. The God of the mystics might seem to present a possible alternative. The mystics have long insisted that God is not an-Other Being; they have claimed that he does not really exist and that it is better to call him Nothing. This God is in tune with the atheistic mood of our secular society, with its distrust of inadequate images of the Absolute. Instead of seeing God as an objective Fact, which can be demonstrated by means of scientific proof, mystics have claimed that he is a subjective experience, mysteriously experienced in the ground of being. This God is to be approached through the imagination and can be seen as a kind of art form, akin to the other great artistic symbols that have expressed the ineffable mystery, beauty and value of life. Mystics have used music, dancing, poetry, fiction, stories, painting, sculpture and architecture to express this Reality that goes beyond concepts. Like all art, however, mysticism requires intelligence, discipline and self-criticism as a safeguard against indulgent emotionalism and projection. The God of the mystics could even satisfy the feminists, since both Sufis and Kabbalists have long tried to introduce a female element into the divine. There are drawbacks, however. Mysticism has been regarded with some suspicion by many Jews and Muslims since the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco and the decline of latter-day Sufism. In the West, mysticism has never been a mainstream religious enthusiasm. The Protestant and Catholic Reformers either outlawed or marginalized it, and the scientific Age of Reason did not encourage this mode of perception. Since the 1960s, there has been a fresh interest in mysticism, expressed in the enthusiasm for Yoga, meditation and Buddhism, but it is not an approach that easily consorts with our objective, empirical mentality.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Feminists are also repelled by a personal deity who, because of “his” gender, has been male since his tribal, pagan days. Yet to talk about “she”—other than in a dialectical way—can be just as limiting, since it confines the illimitable God to a purely human category. The old metaphysical notion of God as the Supreme Being, which has long been popular in the West, is also felt to be unsatisfactory. The God of the philosophers is the product of a now outdated rationalism, so the traditional “proofs” of his existence no longer work. The widespread acceptance of the God of the philosophers by the deists of the Enlightenment can be seen as the first step to the current atheism. Like the old Sky God, this deity is so remote from humanity and the mundane world that he easily becomes Deus Otiosus and fades from our consciousness. The God of the mystics might seem to present a possible alternative. The mystics have long insisted that God is not an-Other Being; they have claimed that he does not really exist and that it is better to call him Nothing. This God is in tune with the atheistic mood of our secular society, with its distrust of inadequate images of the Absolute. Instead of seeing God as an objective Fact, which can be demonstrated by means of scientific proof, mystics have claimed that he is a subjective experience, mysteriously experienced in the ground of being. This God is to be approached through the imagination and can be seen as a kind of art form, akin to the other great artistic symbols that have expressed the ineffable mystery, beauty and value of life. Mystics have used music, dancing, poetry, fiction, stories, painting, sculpture and architecture to express this Reality that goes beyond concepts. Like all art, however, mysticism requires intelligence, discipline and self-criticism as a safeguard against indulgent emotionalism and projection. The God of the mystics could even satisfy the feminists, since both Sufis and Kabbalists have long tried to introduce a female element into the divine. There are drawbacks, however. Mysticism has been regarded with some suspicion by many Jews and Muslims since the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco and the decline of latter-day Sufism. In the West, mysticism has never been a mainstream religious enthusiasm. The Protestant and Catholic Reformers either outlawed or marginalized it, and the scientific Age of Reason did not encourage this mode of perception. Since the 1960s, there has been a fresh interest in mysticism, expressed in the enthusiasm for Yoga, meditation and Buddhism, but it is not an approach that easily consorts with our objective, empirical mentality. The God of the mystics is not easy to apprehend.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Reason seemed the answer. Yet could a God drained of the mystery that had for centuries made him an effective religious value in other traditions appeal to the more imaginative and intuitive Christians? The Puritan poet John Milton (1608–74) was particularly disturbed by the Church’s record of intolerance. A true man of his age, he had attempted, in his unpublished treatise On Christian Doctrine, to reform the Reformation and to work out a religious creed for himself that did not rely upon the beliefs and judgments of others. He was also doubtful about such traditional doctrines as the Trinity, Yet it is significant that the true hero of his masterpiece Paradise Lost is Satan rather than the God whose actions he intended to justify to man. Satan has many of the qualities of the new men of Europe: he defies authority, pits himself against the unknown, and in his intrepid journeys from Hell, through Chaos to the newly created earth, he becomes the first explorer. Milton’s God, however, seems to bring out the inherent absurdity of Western literalism. Without the mystical understanding of the Trinity, the position of the Son is highly ambiguous in the poem. It is by no means clear whether he is a second divine being or a creature similar to, though of higher status than, the angels. At all events, he and the Father are two entirely separate beings who must engage in lengthy conversations of deep tedium to learn each other’s intentions, even though the Son is the acknowledged Word and Wisdom of the Father. It is, however, Milton’s treatment of God’s foreknowledge of events on earth that makes his deity incredible. Since of necessity God already knows that Adam and Eve will fall—even before Satan has reached the earth—he must engage in some pretty specious justification of his actions before the event. He would have no pleasure in enforced obedience, he explains to the Son, and he had given Adam and Eve the ability to withstand Satan. Therefore they could not, God argues defensively, justly accuse Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate; As if Predestination over-rul’d Thir will, dispos’d by absolute Decree Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed Thir own revolt; not I: if I foreknew, Foreknowledge had no influence on thir fault, Which had no less prov’d certain unforeknown … I formed them free, and free they must remain, Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordaind Thir freedom; they themselves ordaind thir fall.20 Not only is it difficult to respect this shoddy thinking, but God comes across as callous, self-righteous and entirely lacking in the compassion that his religion was supposed to inspire. Forcing God to speak and think like one of us in this way shows the inadequacies of such an anthropomorphic and personalistic conception of the divine. There are too many contradictions for such a God to be either coherent or worthy of veneration.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The visionary excitement of the Wittenberg movement, the sense of the great things that could be done with the funds liberated from Masses and monasteries, the feeling of evangelical power as thousands of citizens took Communion in both kinds—all this was lost as Luther insisted on his leadership, not collective action. It is unlikely that a communal Reformation would ever have had much chance in Wittenberg. The town was simply too small to support it, and its reliance on the Elector, with so many in the town’s political elite close to the court, meant that it had no tradition of independence. The tinder of economic and political grievance among large numbers of artisans was also missing. The other great institution in the town, the university, was not likely to risk alienating its founder, and the students, who did have a tradition of activism, had little loyalty to Wittenberg, especially since many of them were beginning to question the point of academic studies altogether. Once Duke Georg had secured the imperial mandate that enabled Catholic bishops to roll back the Reformation, the Elector had no choice but to knuckle under—or risk losing his power and title. Had Luther, ever the realist, not reversed the changes of December and January, as the mandate required, the Reformation in Wittenberg is unlikely to have survived. But the idea of a communal Reformation made by the people was not dead. In town after town—Zwickau, Augsburg, Nördlingen, Nuremberg, and Strasbourg—popular movements would bring in the Reformation, as crowds attacked clergy and petitioned their town councils, and evangelical preachers gave their listeners a glimpse of what a reformed commune could mean. All the actions that had galvanized the Wittenberg populace were repeated across the empire, with evangelicals interrupting sermons, destroying altarpieces, tearing up Mass books, urinating in chalices, or mocking the clergy—and they drew on the same repertoire of carnivalesque ritual and comedy that the Wittenberg students had developed. 61 Nor was Karlstadt forgotten. In Riga and Livonia it was his ideas, not Luther’s, that were picked up and put into practice by local reform movements; in Oldersum and other parts of East Frisia, his views about the sacrament were taken up, while Luther’s seemed superstitious; the town of Magdeburg adopted features of the Wittenberg reform movement; and as late as 1524, a pamphlet published in Speyer could depict Luther and Karlstadt leading the Reformation together.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The doctrine of the Incarnation—as fumblingly expressed by Athanasius and Maximus—was an attempt to articulate the universal insight that “God” and man must be inseparable. In the West, where the Incarnation was not formulated in this way, there has been a tendency for God to remain external to man and an alternative reality to the world that we know. Consequently, it has been all too easy to make this “God” a projection, which has recently become discredited. Yet by making Jesus the only avatar , we have seen that Christians would adopt an exclusive notion of religious truth: Jesus was the first and last Word of God to the human race, rendering future revelation unnecessary. Consequently, like Jews, they were scandalized when a prophet arose in Arabia during the seventh century who claimed to have received a direct revelation from their God and to have brought a new scripture to his people. Yet the new version of monotheism, which eventually became known as “Islam,” spread with astonishing rapidity throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Many of its enthusiastic converts in these lands (where Hellenism was not on home ground) turned with relief from Greek Trinitarianism, which expressed the mystery of God in an idiom that was alien to them, and adopted a more Semitic notion of the divine reality. 3 A Light to the Gentiles A T THE SAME TIME as Philo was expounding his Platonized Judaism in Alexandria and Hillel and Shammai were arguing in Jerusalem, a charismatic faith healer began his own career in the north of Palestine. We know very little about Jesus. The first full-length account of his life was St. Mark’s Gospel, which was not written until about the year 70, some forty years after his death. By that time, historical facts had been overlaid with mythical elements which expressed the meaning Jesus had acquired for his followers. It is this meaning that St. Mark primarily conveys rather than a reliable straightforward portrayal. The first Christians saw him as a new Moses, a new Joshua, the founder of a new Israel. Like the Buddha, Jesus seemed to encapsulate some of the deepest aspirations of many of his contemporaries and to give substance to dreams that had haunted the Jewish people for centuries. During his lifetime, many Jews in Palestine had believed that he was the Messiah: he had ridden into Jerusalem and been hailed as the Son of David, but, only a few days later, he was put to death by the agonizing Roman punishment of crucifixion. Yet despite the scandal of a Messiah who had died like a common criminal, his disciples could not believe that their faith in him had been misplaced. There were rumors that he had risen from the dead. Some said that his tomb had been found empty three days after his crucifixion; others saw him in visions, and on one occasion 500 people saw him simultaneously.

• From A History of God (1993)

  3 A Light to the GentilesAT THE SAME TIME as Philo was expounding his Platonized Judaism in Alexandria and Hillel and Shammai were arguing in Jerusalem, a charismatic faith healer began his own career in the north of Palestine. We know very little about Jesus. The first full-length account of his life was St. Mark’s Gospel, which was not written until about the year 70, some forty years after his death. By that time, historical facts had been overlaid with mythical elements which expressed the meaning Jesus had acquired for his followers. It is this meaning that St. Mark primarily conveys rather than a reliable straightforward portrayal. The first Christians saw him as a new Moses, a new Joshua, the founder of a new Israel. Like the Buddha, Jesus seemed to encapsulate some of the deepest aspirations of many of his contemporaries and to give substance to dreams that had haunted the Jewish people for centuries. During his lifetime, many Jews in Palestine had believed that he was the Messiah: he had ridden into Jerusalem and been hailed as the Son of David, but, only a few days later, he was put to death by the agonizing Roman punishment of crucifixion. Yet despite the scandal of a Messiah who had died like a common criminal, his disciples could not believe that their faith in him had been misplaced. There were rumors that he had risen from the dead. Some said that his tomb had been found empty three days after his crucifixion; others saw him in visions, and on one occasion 500 people saw him simultaneously. His disciples believed that he would soon return to inaugurate the Messianic Kingdom of God, and, since there was nothing heretical about such a belief, their sect was accepted as authentically Jewish by no less a person than Rabbi Gamaliel, the grandson of Hillel and one of the greatest of the tannaim. His followers worshipped in the Temple every day as fully observant Jews. Ultimately, however, the New Israel, inspired by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, would become a Gentile faith, which would evolve its own distinctive conception of God.

• From A History of God (1993)

  There are drawbacks, however. Mysticism has been regarded with some suspicion by many Jews and Muslims since the Shabbetai Zevi fiasco and the decline of latter-day Sufism. In the West, mysticism has never been a mainstream religious enthusiasm. The Protestant and Catholic Reformers either outlawed or marginalized it, and the scientific Age of Reason did not encourage this mode of perception. Since the 1960s, there has been a fresh interest in mysticism, expressed in the enthusiasm for Yoga, meditation and Buddhism, but it is not an approach that easily consorts with our objective, empirical mentality. The God of the mystics is not easy to apprehend. It requires long training with an expert and a considerable investment of time. The mystic has to work hard to acquire this sense of the reality known as God (which many have refused to name). Mystics often insist that human beings must deliberately create this sense of God for themselves, with the same degree of care and attention that others devote to artistic creation. It is not something that is likely to appeal to people in a society which has become used to speedy gratification, fast food and instant communication. The God of the mystics does not arrive ready made and prepackaged. He cannot be experienced as quickly as the instant ecstasy created by a revivalist preacher, who quickly has a whole congregation clapping its hands and speaking in tongues. It is possible to acquire some of the mystical attitudes. Even if we are incapable of the higher states of consciousness achieved by a mystic, we can learn that God does not exist in any simplistic sense, for example, or that the very word “God” is only a symbol of a reality that ineffably transcends it. The mystical agnosticism could help us to acquire a restraint that stops us rushing into these complex matters with dogmatic assurance. But if these notions are not felt upon the pulse and personally appropriated, they are likely to seem meaningless abstractions. Secondhand mysticism could prove to be as unsatisfactory as reading the explanation of a poem by a literary critic instead of the original. We have seen that mysticism was often seen as an esoteric discipline, not because the mystics wanted to exclude the vulgar herd but because these truths could only be perceived by the intuitive part of the mind after special training. They mean something different when they are approached by this particular route, which is not accessible to the logical, rationalist faculty.