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.

Page 58 of 189 · 20 per page

• From A History of God (1993)

  35 Thereafter the Koran quite frequently addressed women explicitly, something that rarely happens in either the Jewish or Christian scriptures. 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  62 By setting his face against a communal Reformation, and siding with the authorities, Luther had also cut himself off from what was going on in the rest of the empire. During his time in the Wartburg, he had lost his networks beyond Saxony and Mansfeld. He would have difficulty in gaining any lasting foothold in major towns like Augsburg or Strasbourg; even Nuremberg, nominally Lutheran, did not seek his advice on a regular basis, relying instead on their own local preachers. The issues that animated the Reformation in towns throughout the empire—the tyranny of confession, the opposition to images, the demand for immediate liturgical change—all these Luther had taken off the agenda at Wittenberg. He did not understand communal values or communal politics, and ideals of “brotherhood” and compromise were alien to him. There was no compromising with the Devil, and, as he reiterated in his Invocavit Sermons, each one of us must face death and the Devil alone. He returned from the Wartburg a more forthright preacher, secure in his role as pastor of his flock. What had given him this increased confidence was both his appearance at Worms and his isolation in the Wartburg. But that had been won at the cost of dangerously narrowing his vision. While he had begun the Reformation for his “dear Germans,” and had faced down all the princes of the empire, the world he now seemed to care about most was the small backwater where he lived. 41. This woodcut shows Karlstadt and Luther on either side of a wagon in which Christ sits, driving toward salvation, while Ulrich von Hutten in armor leads the chained clergy of the old church, Murner visible as a cat. Luther and Karlstadt both hold palms of salvation, but Karlstadt is almost more prominent than Luther. The woodcut is reminiscent of Karlstadt’s Wagon, illustrated by Cranach, the first visual propaganda for the Reformation (see this page ). It folds out of a pamphlet by Hermann von dem Busche, Trivphvs veritatis. Sick der warheyt, a long poem in praise of the Reformation published in Speyer in 1524. T HE D IET OF Augsburg appeared to have resulted in a complete political impasse. But in the years that followed, efforts to defend Protestantism, avoid war, and find a way forward continued. In February 1531, the Lutherans, under the leadership of electoral Saxony and Hesse, formed a defensive league, which became known as the League of Schmalkalden. It grew rapidly over the following years as more areas joined, and it soon became a major political force.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This meant that they were not as offended as the Quraysh by the denigration of the Arabian deities. Accordingly during the summer of 622, about seventy Muslims and their families set off for Yathrib. 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. Muhammad’s rejection by the Jews was probably the greatest disappointment in his life, and it called his whole religious position into question. But some of the Jews were friendly and seem to have joined the Muslims in an honorary capacity. They discussed the Bible with him and showed him how to rebuff the criticisms of other Jews, and this new knowledge of scripture also helped Muhammad to develop his own insights.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  In Wittenberg, surrounded by students and people from all over the empire eager to study with Luther and Melanchthon, it was easy to forget just how precarious the Reformation outside the town still was, and how chaotic the situation created by Luther’s assault upon the time-honoured customs, beliefs and practices of Catholicism. Men who had once been Catholic priests or monks did not always succeed in becoming 364 MARTIN LUTHER be Getructe jn Froneffintam SaygimBar MD. CRTX: 59. This image, which prefaced the Frankfurt pirate edition of Luther's Table Talk in 1569, shows the inner circle seated around a table with Luther on the right; Johann Forster and Paul Eber are shown in addition to the original ‘team’. exemplary evangelical pastors. The pastor of Sausedlitz went around with a rifle, which he delighted in firing in the village. He hung out in the tavern and maltreated his wife, starting a suspicious liaison with a local widow.’ Those who copied Luther and excoriated the failings of the elite from the pulpit could soon find themselves isolated: no fewer than fifteen individuals, including the mayor, were FRIENDS AND ENEMIES 365 happy to testify against the preacher of Werdau, who had insulted the councillors as “‘Herods’ and ‘Caiaphases’.® Johannes Heine, the pastor at Elssnig near Torgau, had a sideline in herbal and magical healing, claiming that his cures were not magical but accomplished ‘through God’s grace, which was given to him’. His unworthy conduct was reported during a Church Visitation and he was thrown into prison.’ Even Lutheran loyalists were not immune to the attractions of such quasi-magical practice. Luther had to write a long letter to Jonas’s wife telling her that while it might seem like a good idea to read a gospel passage aloud as a cure, the fact that it had to be done at a certain place and time suggested that it was not pious but superstitious. One pastor refused to allow warm water for baptism because, he argued, it was a mixture of the elements of fire and water and therefore was not pure water — Luther made short shrift of this, telling him he should consult those who knew their philosophy.* The new pastors were meant to be theologically trained, but there were not enough of them, and in rural Saxony, local trad- ition and magical belief would not simply melt away in the face of university knowledge. Luther’s influence spread through his personal connections and was limited by them as well.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Muhammad’s rejection by the Jews was probably the greatest disappointment in his life, and it called his whole religious position into question. But some of the Jews were friendly and seem to have joined the Muslims in an honorary capacity. They discussed the Bible with him and showed him how to rebuff the criticisms of other Jews, and this new knowledge of scripture also helped Muhammad to develop his own insights. For the first time Muhammad learned the exact chronology of the prophets, about which he had previously been somewhat hazy. He could now see that it was very important that Abraham had lived before either Moses or Jesus. Hitherto Muhammad probably thought that Jews and Christians both belonged to one religion, but now he learned that they had serious disagreements with one another. To outsiders like the Arabs there seemed little to choose between the two positions, and it seemed logical to imagine that the followers of the Torah and the Gospel had introduced inauthentic elements into the hanifiyyah, the pure religion of Abraham, such as the Oral Law elaborated by the Rabbis and the blasphemous doctrine of the Trinity. Muhammad also learned that in their own scriptures the Jews were called a faithless people, who had turned to idolatry to worship the Golden Calf. The polemic against the Jews in the Koran is well developed and shows how threatened the Muslims must have felt by the Jewish rejection, even though the Koran still insists that not all “the people of earlier revelation”32 have fallen into error and that essentially all religions are one.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  María soon realized that she had lost his love. She did not know how to win it back. She became aware that he was in love with her body only as he painted it. She went to the country to stay with friends for a week. But after a few days she fell ill and returned home to see her doctor. When she arrived at the house it looked uninhabited. She tiptoed to Novalis’s studio. There was no sound. Then she began to imagine that he was making love to a woman. She approached the door. Slowly and noiselessly, like a thief, she opened it. And this is what she saw: on the floor of the studio, a painting of herself; and lying over it, rubbing himself against it, her husband, naked, with his hair wild, as she had never seen him, his penis erect. He moved against the painting lasciviously, kissing it, fondling it between the legs. He lay against it as he never had against her. He seemed driven into a frenzy, and all around him were the other paintings of her, nude, voluptuous, beautiful. He threw a passionate glance at them and continued his imaginary embrace. It was an orgy with her he was having, with a wife he had not known in reality. At the sight of this, María’s own controlled sensuality flared up, free for the first time. When she took off her clothes, she revealed a María new to him, a María illumined with passion, abandoned as in the paintings, offering her body shamelessly, without hesitation to all his embraces, striving to efface the paintings from his emotions, to surpass them. A ModelMy mother had European ideas about young girls. I was sixteen. I had never gone out alone with young men, I had never read anything but literary novels, and by choice I never was like girls of my age. I was what you would call a sheltered person, very much like some Chinese woman, instructed in the art of making the most of the discarded dresses sent to me by a rich cousin, singing and dancing, writing elegantly, reading the finest books, conversing intelligently, arranging my hair beautifully, keeping my hands white and delicate, using only the refined English I had learned since my arrival from France, dealing with everybody in terms of great politeness. This was what was left of my European education. But I was very much like the Orientals in one other way: long periods of gentleness were followed by bursts of violence, taking the form of temper and rebellion or of quick decisions and positive action. I suddenly decided to go to work, without consulting anybody or asking anybody’s approval. I knew my mother would be against my plan.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Brutal as it undoubtedly was, however, muruwah had many strengths. It encouraged a deep and strong egalitarianism and an indifference to material goods which, again, was probably essential in a region where there were not enough of the essentials to go round: the cults of largesse and generosity were important virtues and taught the Arabs to take no heed for the morrow. These qualities would become very important in Islam, as we shall see. Muruwah had served the Arabs well for centuries, but by the sixth century it was no longer able to answer the conditions of modernity. During the last phase of the pre-Islamic period, which Muslims call the jahiliyyah (the time of ignorance), there seems to have been widespread dissatisfaction and spiritual restlessness. The Arabs were surrounded on all sides by the two mighty empires of Sassanid Persia and Byzantium. Modern ideas were beginning to penetrate Arabia from the settled lands; merchants who traveled into Syria or Iraq brought back stories of the wonders of civilization. Yet it seemed that the Arabs were doomed to perpetual barbarism. The tribes were involved in constant warfare, which made it impossible for them to pool their meager resources and become the united Arab people that they were dimly aware of being. They could not take their destiny into their own hands and found a civilization of their own. Instead they were constantly open to exploitation by the great powers: indeed, the more fertile and sophisticated region of Southern Arabia in what is now Yemen (which had the benefit of the monsoon rains) had become a mere province of Persia. At the same time, the new ideas that were infiltrating the region brought intimations of individualism that undermined the old communal ethos. The Christian doctrine of the afterlife, for example, made the eternal fate of each individual a sacred value: how could that be squared with the tribal ideal which subordinated the individual to the group and insisted that a man or woman’s sole immortality lay in the survival of the tribe?

• From A History of God (1993)

  In the introduction to his treatise Les météores , he explained that it was natural for us to “have more admiration for the things above us than for those on our level or below.” 9 Poets and painters had, therefore, depicted the clouds as God’s throne, had imagined God sprinkling dew upon the clouds or hurling lightning against the rocks with his own hand: This leads me to hope that if I here explain the nature of the clouds, in such a way that we will no longer have occasion to wonder at anything that can be seen of them, or anything that descends from them, we will easily believe that it is similarly possible to find the causes of everything that is most admirable above the earth. Descartes would explain clouds, winds, dew and lightning as mere physical events in order, as he explained, to remove “any cause to marvel.” 10 The God of Descartes, however, was the God of the philosophers who took no cognizance of earthly events. He was revealed not in the miracles described in scripture but in the eternal laws that he had ordained: Les météores also explained that the manna that had fed the ancient Israelites in the desert was a kind of dew. Thus had been born the absurd type of apologetics that attempt to “prove” the veracity of the Bible by finding a rational explanation for the various miracles and myths. Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, for example, has been interpreted as his shaming people in the crowd to produce the picnics that they had surreptitiously brought with them and hand them around. Well-intentioned as it is, this kind of argument misses the point of the symbolism that is of the essence of biblical narrative. Descartes was always careful to submit to the rulings of the Roman Catholic Church and saw himself as an orthodox Christian. He saw no contradiction between faith and reason. In his treatise Discourse on Method , he argued that there was a system that would enable humanity to reach all truth. Nothing lay beyond its grasp. All that was necessary—in any discipline—was to apply the method and it would then be possible to piece together a reliable body of knowledge that would disperse all confusion and ignorance. Mystery had become muddle, and the God whom previous rationalists had been careful to separate from all other phenomena had now been contained within a human system of thought. Mysticism had not really had time to take root in Europe before the dogmatic convulsions of the Reformation. Thus the type of spirituality that thrives upon mystery and mythology and is, as its name implies, deeply connected with them was strange to many Christians in the West.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The letter, brilliantly formulated so as to stress their loyalty, reveals that their position was in fact closer to Karlstadt’s, since they too were purifying their churches of images and beginning to raise questions about the Real Presence in the sacrament. They bluntly informed Luther that in Zurich, Basle and even in Strasbourg, most biblically informed people shared Karlstadt’s views.“ Indeed, it seems that many found Karlstadt’s explanation of the sacrament and his belief in the spiritual presence of Christ to be the more persuasive. Karlstadt’s maturing theology was clearly marked by his experiences at Wittenberg, where the communal reformation had fired his enthusiasm. This vision was popular elsewhere too, particularly in southern Germany, because it entailed social reform with a renewal of morals, reorganised poor relief, and popular lay involvement. It was very different from Luther’s ideal of a top-down Reformation. Some also disliked Luther’s attempt to impose his views on others by appealing to their personal loyalty. ‘I am very upset by the dissension between Karlstadt and yourself,’ Otto Brunfels wrote, ‘for I favour you both, and I do not love you in such a way that I cannot also embrace Karlstadt most sincerely.’* The grammarian Valentin Ickelsamer complained of Luther’s writings, “what are these booklets against the spirit of Allstedt . . . but a cunning attempt to provoke the princes against good Karlstadt?’** Outside Wittenberg, the spectacle of the two reformers in discord was seen as disastrous for the Reformation’s image, and while Karlstadt had been careful to hold back from attacking his former colleague, Luther had taken to publicly accusing Karlstadt of being possessed by the Devil.” Yet THE BLACK BEAR INN 257 Karlstadt never set himself up as a rival to Luther; had he done so, the story of the Reformation might well have been different. Luther seemed well aware of just how much was at risk, and it is an indication of his concern that he replied to the letter of the Stras- bourg preachers not with a manuscript missive, but with a printed public letter, which he duly dispatched via their messenger.** The delay in his response, caused by printing his letter, had far-reaching conse- quences. The Strasbourgers had written to Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich at the same time, who now also denied the Real Presence in the sacrament, and his handwritten letter arrived before Luther's printed reply. Martin Bucer, previously inclined to Luther, was persuaded by Zwingli’s views ‘with hand and foot’, as a delighted Capito reported.’ In his response, Luther mused unwisely, ‘I confess, that if Dr Karlstadt or someone else had been able to instruct me five years ago, that there was nothing but bread and wine in the sacrament, he would have done me a great service. I suffered such great temptations at that time and twisted and struggled, because I saw weil that this would have been the biggest coup against the papacy.’

• From Little Birds (1979)

  My lover, Marcel, had to go home that night; he lived quite far away. I was free. I left him at eleven o’clock and went to see Mary. I was wearing my flounced Spanish cretonne dress and a flower in my hair, and I was all bronzed by the sun and feeling beautiful. When I arrived, Mary was lying on her bed cold-creaming her face, her legs and her shoulders because she had been lying on the beach. She was rubbing cream into her neck, her throat—she was covered with cream. This disappointed me. I sat at the foot of her bed and we talked. I lost my desire to kiss her. She was running away from her husband. She had married him only to be protected. She had never really loved men but women. At the beginning of her marriage, she had told him all sorts of stories about herself that she should not have told him—how she had been a dancer on Broadway and slept with men when she was short of money; how she even went to a whorehouse and earned money there; how she met a man who fell in love with her and kept her for a few years. Her husband never recovered from these stories. They awakened his jealousy and doubts, and their life together had become intolerable. The day after we met, she left Saint-Tropez, and I was filled with regrets for not having kissed her. Now I was about to see her again. In New York I unfold my wings of vanity and coquetry. Mary is as lovely as ever and seems much moved by me. She is all curves, softness. Her eyes are wide and liquid; her cheeks, luminous. Her mouth is full; her hair blond, and luxuriant. She is slow, passive, lethargic. We go to the movies together. In the dark she takes my hand. She is being analyzed and has discovered what I sensed long ago: that she has never known a real orgasm, at thirty-four, after a sexual life that only an expert accountant could keep track of. I am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her. Mary says, “It is very hard to talk about sex, I am so ashamed.” She is not ashamed of doing anything at all, but she cannot talk about it. She can talk to me. We sit for hours in perfumed places where there is music. She likes places where actors go. There is a current of attraction between us, purely physical. We are always on the verge of getting into bed together. But she is never free in the evenings. She will not let me meet her husband. She is afraid I will seduce him.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  I started to leave. He said, “You know, there is an understanding here about models who do not know how to enjoy themselves. If you take this attitude nobody will give you any work.” I did not believe him. The next morning I began to knock on the doors of all the artists I could find. But Ronald had already paid them a visit. So I was received without cordiality, like a person who has played a trick on another. I did not have the money to return home, nor the money to pay for my room. I knew nobody. The country was beautiful, mountainous, but I could not enjoy it. The next day I took a long walk and came upon a log cabin by the side of a river. I saw a man painting there, out of doors. I spoke to him. I told him my story. He did not know Ronald, but he was angry. He said he would try to help me. I told him all I wanted was to earn enough to return to New York. So I began to pose for him. His name was Reynolds. He was a man of thirty or so, with black hair, very soft black eyes and a brilliant smile—a recluse. He never went to the village, except for food, nor frequented the restaurants or bars. He had a lax walk, easy gestures. He had been on the sea, always on tramp steamers, working as a sailor so that he could see foreign countries. He was always restless. He painted from memory what he had seen in his travels. Now he sat at the foot of a tree and never looked around him but painted a wild piece of South American jungle. Once when he and his friends were in the jungle, Reynolds told me, they had smelled such a strong animal odor they thought they would suddenly see a panther, but out of the bushes had sprung with incredible velocity a woman, a naked savage woman, who looked at them with the frightened eyes of an animal, then ran off, leaving this strong animal scent behind her, threw herself into the river and swam away before they could catch their breath. A friend of Reynolds had captured a woman like this. When he had washed off the red paint with which she was covered, she was very beautiful. She was gentle when well treated, succumbed to gifts of beads and ornaments.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  “Not if you don’t want them to.” “But do they try . . . ?” I saw that he was anxious. We were walking to my house from the railway station, through the dark fields. I turned to him and offered my mouth. He kissed me. I said, “Stephen, take me, take me, take me.” He was completely dumbfounded. I was throwing myself into the refuge of his big arms, I wanted to be taken and have it all over with, I wanted to be made woman. But he was absolutely still, frightened. He said, “I want to marry you, but I can’t do it just now.” “I don’t care about the marriage.” But now I became conscious of his surprise, and it quieted me. I was immensely disappointed by his conventional attitude. The moment passed. He thought it was merely an attack of blind passion, that I had lost my head. He was even proud to have protected me against my own impulses. I went home to bed and sobbed. ONE ILLUSTRATOR asked me if I would pose on Sunday, that he was in a great rush to finish a poster. I consented. When I arrived he was already at work. It was morning and the building seemed deserted. His studio was on the thirteenth floor. He had half of the poster done. I got undressed quickly and put on the evening dress he had given me to wear. He did not seem to pay any attention to me. We worked in peace for a long while. I grew tired. He noticed it and gave me a rest. I walked about the studio looking at the other pictures. They were mostly portraits of actresses. I asked him who they were. He answered me with details about their sexual tastes: “Oh, this one, this one demands romanticism. It’s the only way you can get near her. She makes it difficult. She is European and she likes an intricate courtship. Halfway through I gave it up. It was too strenuous. She was very beautiful though, and there is something wonderful about getting a woman like that in bed. She had beautiful eyes, an entranced air, like some Hindu mystic. It makes you wonder how they will behave in bed.

• From A History of God (1993)

  His ideas spread among the Jews of Southern France and Spain, so that by the beginning of the fourteenth century, there was what amounted to a Jewish philosophical enlightenment in the area. Some of these Jewish Faylasufs were more vigorously rationalistic than Maimonides. Thus Levi ben Gershom (1288–1344) of Bagnols in Southern France denied that God had knowledge of mundane affairs. 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  I applied myself to apologetics, scripture, theology and church history. I delved into the history of the monastic life and embarked on a minute discussion of the Rule of my own order, which we had to learn by heart. Strangely enough, God figured very little in any of this. Attention seemed focused on secondary details and the more peripheral aspects of religion. I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God, but he remained a stern taskmaster who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalizingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about “God,” seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate—and highly self-contradictory—doctrine of the Trinity or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem? Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. My interest in religion continued, however, and I made a number of television programs about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience. The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown. Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Almost as worrisome is Lecia’s grim focus on a brisket Mother promised to fix. Whenever we drive home, Mother tempts Lecia with some childhood dish—chicken and dumplings, fudge, red beans and rice—but never, not once, follows through. Lecia’s ongoing capacity to hope for these dishes just stumps me. On the road before her, there’s a shimmering mirage of meat shredded in lush gravy with a side of buttery potato hunks. Does she bounce up and down a little in anticipation like a kid on a carousel? I believe she does, though the next instant, her face clouds. It won’t be there, will it? she says, shooting me a look. There’s a newspaper cartoon of a bucket-headed boy repeatedly talked into running at the football held by a wicked pigtailed girl who yanks it away so the boy falls on his ass every time. How many times, Lecia says, am I going to run at that football? Many, it turns out. With scads of costly professional help, I gave up pining for maternal behavior long ago. But Lecia had once hired Mother to pick up her son Case at kindergarten until—a few weeks in—Mother forgot the boy in the parking lot. Given fat sums to answer Lecia’s insurance office phones, Mother tended to snipe into the receiver What? The way Stalin trusted Hitler not to invade Russia, Lecia trusts Mother. In a way, I admire the simple persistence of both parties—Lecia’s overfunctioning, Mother’s under. On any given holiday, Mother sits on her spreading white ass on either porch glider or couch. Which idleness—in some perverse way—I also envy. It takes fortitude to station yourself immobile before the classic-movie channel for days at a pop while hordes of individuals bake and whip, sauté and sear; serve and clear; and eventually scrub cheese crusts off casseroles and pan drippings from a blackened oven. For weeks I’ve hounded Mother daily about brisket, and she’s sworn to ante up. But yesterday her corns hurt, and as late as dawn this morning, the meat hadn’t been bought. She was having palpitations, but I swore if the stove was cold when we walked in, I’d head back to the airport. It could kill me to go to the store with my heart fluttering this way, she said. If you drop dead making this brisket, I said, you’ll go straight up to live with Baby Jesus . I’m thinking of going back to being a Buddhist, she said. Then you’ll escape the wheel of rebirth, I said. Minutes after we pull in, my sister’s face floats cherublike above an electric skillet holding a mess of peppery brisket. She uses her hand to wave toward her nose the white ribbons of steam swiveling up. Mother breathes frost on her big square glasses, then wipes them. She looks stunned we’re making such a big deal. Oh, she says with a distracted look, I forgot to get the blow-up mattress.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The literal understanding of such doctrines as the omniscience of God will not work. Not only is Milton’s God cold and legalistic, he is also grossly incompetent. In the last two books of Paradise Lost, God sends the Archangel Michael to console Adam for his sin by showing him how his descendants will be redeemed. The whole course of salvation history is revealed to Adam in a series of tableaux, with a commentary by Michael: he sees the murder of Abel by Cain, the Flood and Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the call of Abraham, the Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Law on Sinai. The inadequacy of the Torah, which oppressed God’s unfortunate chosen people for centuries, is, Michael explains, a ploy to make them yearn for a more spiritual law. As this account of the future salvation of the world progresses—through the exploits of King David, the exile to Babylon, the birth of Christ and so forth—it occurs to the reader that there must have been an easier and more direct way to redeem mankind. The fact that this tortuous plan with its constant failures and false starts is decreed in advance can only cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its Author. Milton’s God can inspire little confidence. It must be significant that after Paradise Lost no other major English creative writer would attempt to describe the supernatural world. There would be no more Spensers or Miltons. Henceforth the supernatural and the spiritual would become the domain of more marginal writers, such as George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis. Yet a God who cannot appeal to the imagination is in trouble. At the very end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve take their solitary way out of the Garden of Eden and into the world. In the West too, Christians were on the threshold of a more secular age, though they still adhered to belief in God. The new religion of reason would be known as Deism. It had no time for the imaginative disciplines of mysticism and mythology. It turned its back on the myth of revelation and on such traditional “mysteries” as the Trinity, which had for so long held people in the thrall of superstition. Instead it declared allegiance to the impersonal “Deus” which man could discover by his own efforts. François-Marie de Voltaire, the embodiment of the movement that would subsequently become known as the Enlightenment, defined this ideal religion in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). It would, above all, be as simple as possible.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The inadequacy of the Torah, which oppressed God’s unfortunate chosen people for centuries, is, Michael explains, a ploy to make them yearn for a more spiritual law. As this account of the future salvation of the world progresses—through the exploits of King David, the exile to Babylon, the birth of Christ and so forth—it occurs to the reader that there must have been an easier and more direct way to redeem mankind. The fact that this tortuous plan with its constant failures and false starts is decreed in advance can only cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its Author. Milton’s God can inspire little confidence. It must be significant that after Paradise Lost no other major English creative writer would attempt to describe the supernatural world. There would be no more Spensers or Miltons. Henceforth the supernatural and the spiritual would become the domain of more marginal writers, such as George MacDonald and C. S. Lewis. Yet a God who cannot appeal to the imagination is in trouble. At the very end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve take their solitary way out of the Garden of Eden and into the world. In the West too, Christians were on the threshold of a more secular age, though they still adhered to belief in God. The new religion of reason would be known as Deism. It had no time for the imaginative disciplines of mysticism and mythology. It turned its back on the myth of revelation and on such traditional “mysteries” as the Trinity, which had for so long held people in the thrall of superstition. Instead it declared allegiance to the impersonal “Deus” which man could discover by his own efforts. François-Marie de Voltaire, the embodiment of the movement that would subsequently become known as the Enlightenment, defined this ideal religion in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764). It would, above all, be as simple as possible. Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? that which tended to make men just without making them absurd? that which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense? Would it not be that which did not uphold its belief with executioners, and did not inundate the earth with blood on account of unintelligible sophism?... which taught only the worship of one god, justice, tolerance and humanity? 21 The churches had only themselves to blame for this defiance, since for centuries they had burdened the faithful with a crippling number of doctrines. The reaction was inevitable and could even be positive. The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of God, however. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire.

• From Little Birds (1979)

  They got married. They took a trip around the world together. What Edna discovered in their travels was that the social captain supplied a great deal of the sexual intrigue in person. Edna returned from the trip estranged from her husband. Sexually he had not awakened her. She did not know why. Sometimes she thought it was because of her discovery of his having belonged to so many women. From the first night, it seemed that his possession was not of her, but of a woman like a hundred others. He had shown no emotion. When he undressed her he had said, “Oh, you have such thick hips. You seemed so slender, I never imagined you could have such thick hips.” She felt humiliated, she felt that she was not desirable. This paralyzed her own confidence, her own outflow of love and desire for him. Partly in a mood of revenge, she began to look at him just as coldly as he had looked at her, and what she saw was a man of forty whose hair was growing thin, who was soon going to be very fat and looked ready to retire into a familiar and stolid life. He was no longer the man who had seen all the world. Then came Robert, thirty years old, dark-haired, with burning brown eyes like some animal that looked at once hungry and tender. He was fascinated by Edna’s voice, enchanted by the softness of it. He was completely spellbound by her. He had just won a scholarship with an acting company. He and Edna shared a love of the stage. He renewed her faith in herself, in her attractiveness. He was not even quite aware that it was love. He treated her somewhat like an older sister, until one day backstage, when everyone had gone home and Edna had been rehearsing him, listening to him, giving her impressions, they acted out a kiss that did not stop. He took her, on the sofa of the stage setting, awkwardly, hurriedly, but with such an intensity that she felt him as she had never felt her husband. His words of praise, worship, cries of wonder, incited her, and she bloomed in his hands. They fell on the floor. The dust got into their throats, but they were still kissing, caressing, and Robert had a second erection.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Therefore, far from being something which might be piled up to make the sinner acceptable to God and help reach salvation, good works can do nothing to make us other than what we are — imperfect people. But while Karlstadt and Luther denied that human beings had free will, Eck argued that this would lead to antinomianism — a state of affairs where people reject all laws and commit all sorts of sin. This matter would soon become a major fissure within Reformation thought. Leipzig was a defeat for Luther, as he bitterly recognised when he told Lang that Eck was boasting of victory.” His supporters tried to put a positive gloss on the affair; Mosellanus proclaimed that “Eck triumphed with all who either follow like donkeys and understood nothing of the whole matter . . . or who wished the Wittenbergers ill for some other reason’, while Amsdorf wrote to a friend that comparing Eck with Luther would be likening ‘stone or rather dung’ with ‘the most beautiful and finest gold’. But even Amsdorf had to admit that Eck ‘screamed’ better than Luther; and that to every one of Luther’s arguments, Eck had responded with eight or nine of his own, making sure always to have the last word.” Popular opinion also gave Eck the laurels. He had taken on two opponents all by himself, producing “Herculean and Samsonite arguments’ that were delivered in a voice ‘like thunder and lightning’. Luther and Karlstadt had been accompanied by a whole posse of assistants: Lang, Melanchthon, three THE LEIPZIG DEBATE 137 jurists and a host of graduates who all pored over the protocol of the debate by night and who helped Luther during the day.® Yet all their scholarly learning combined had not managed to get the better of the bluff Eck. Luther was particularly irked by the fact that the Leipzigers had presented Eck with a robe and a beautiful chamois coat.* No such honour had been shown the Wittenbergers, who also had been given only an obligatory welcome drink on their arrival, whilst Eck was feted all over town. Luther thought that Eck was motivated solely by self-glory and envy, an allegation which became a leitmotif of every account of the debate he gave for the rest of his life, most strongly in his brief autobiographical reflections that prefaced the collected edition of his Latin works in 1545.» Eck’s supporters accused Luther of the same self-interest. The recriminations, the insults and the obsession with ‘envy’ on both sides suggest that the debate raised disturbing emotions in all the participants.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Soon there would be more than enough of the ‘excitement and dissension’ Luther had welcomed in his speech at the Diet. Ulrich von Hutten, the German knight and humanist, identified so closely with the event that he wrote two letters to his ‘amico sancto’, exhorting Luther to stand firm but warning of the ‘dogs’, his opponents, and talking of the need for swords, bows and arrows. Both letters were soon printed, joining a flood of pamphlets Hutten had authored which bemoaned the burning of Luther’s books and called for ‘manly’ resist- ance against the ‘effeminate’ bishops.” Luther also had the enthusiastic support of the knight Franz von Sickingen, who made his living as a mercenary and by levying ‘protection’ money from the rich towns along the Rhine. Opportunistic attacks on merchants by armed knights and bandits were a frequent occurrence — in fact, one such raid had occurred not far from Worms itself earlier on during the Diet.” By a fine irony Sickingen had undertaken a feud against the city of Worms almost a decade before. Hutten had convinced Sickingen of the rightness of Luther's cause, and Sickingen now offered the monk sanctuary at Ebernburg, one of his castles. Luther, however, was careful to keep his distance. These knights not only offered armed protection but were willing to take up arms in support of the gospel. In the autumn of 1522, they would 186 MARTIN LUTHER take on the archbishop of Trier, who had been prominent in attempts to reach a negotiated settlement with Luther in the wake of the Diet, expecting the peasants to flock to their support. But the peasants did not rise up, and within a week Sickingen ran out of gunpowder. The knight was forced to retreat, first to Ebernburg and then to his castle at Landstuhl where in May 1523 he was besieged by Philip of Hesse and the Palatine Elector. He counted on being able to hold out for four months in his newly reinforced castle, but modern artillery blew it to bits in short order, and Sickingen perished from a wound soon afterwards. Hutten too died that year. Their revolt was not quite the last hurrah of the power of the knights, a group that found itself becoming marginalised as the wealth and political reach of the princes increased, and as the cities grew richer and stronger: such feuds were to continue throughout Luther’s lifetime. Their defeat in 1523, however, did mark the end of the ideal of the united ‘Christian nobility’ of which Luther had dreamed three years before, when he wrote To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. * On the evening of 18 April 1521 in Worms, Emperor Charles himself composed a reply to Luther in his own hand.* He was careful not to pretend to have theological knowledge of the issues Luther had raised, stating simply that ‘Our ancestors, who were also Christian princes, were nevertheless obedient to the Roman Church which Dr Martin now attacks.”