Excitement

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 33 of 182 · 20 per page

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  On the left, Cranach depicts Christ driving the moneylenders out of the temple, while the illustration on the right, captioned “Antichrist,” shows the Pope surrounded by fat cardinals and bishops, signing letters of indulgence and granting dispensations affixed with seals, for which he has received the pile of coins placed on the table below. — I N the meantime in Wittenberg, the excitement caused by the events at Worms could not be put on hold. Luther had braved the threat of martyrdom, and now others wanted to put the idea of the restoration of the pure Christian Church into practice. Luther’s own increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric added urgency to reform. In May 1521, Melanchthon and Cranach published their Passional Christi und Antichristi, a set of thirteen paired illustrations by Cranach that contrasted the pomp and grandeur of the Pope with Christ’s humility. A cooperative venture, the texts were compiled by Melanchthon with the quotations from canon law put together by the Wittenberg jurist Johannes Schwertfeger. First a Latin and then German versions appeared, appealing as much to the unlettered as to the educated. Once seen, the visual contrasts, and the proclamation that the Pope was the Antichrist, could not be forgotten. The pamphlet concluded with a brief tongue-in-cheek explanation that the booklet was not defamatory because everything in it was in canon law. It was being published for the benefit of Christian folk, to give a handy summary of the basis of “spiritual fleshly law.” Its legacy for Lutheran art was to be long-lasting. “Antithetical” treatments of the church of Luther and the church of the Pope would be painted on the walls of the Torgau chapel, and in the castle chapel in Schmalkalden. 37 Propaganda based on denigration of the Catholic Church, it added further urgency to reform with its message that the Day of Judgment was nearing. Now Gabriel Zwilling began to push for radical changes in Wittenberg. In his attack on the celebration of private Masses he was supported by Nikolaus von Amsdorf and Justus Jonas, both members of the foundation of All Saints and Luther’s powerful allies. Luther, it seemed, also approved of this move, and in November he wrote De abroganda missa privata ( On the Abrogation of the Private Mass ), which rejected the idea that the Mass was a sacrifice. The Mass, Luther argued, was not a work that we undertake to please God; rather, it is a sacrament in which we receive God’s grace. This might seem a fine distinction but its effects were shattering.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  There were also causes to be passionate about. Humanists united to defend the Hebrew scholar Johannes Reuchlin when he was persecuted by the Dominicans of Cologne, who wanted to destroy all Hebrew texts. Spalatin sought Luther’s view of the affair in 1514 and received a forthright reply, defending the man whose grammar Luther himself had used when he learned Hebrew with Lang in Erfurt. Jewish blasphemy, Luther argued, could not be purged as the Dominicans demanded, because the prophets of the Old Testament foretold that the Jews would insult and blaspheme against Christ, so destroying it would delete the evidence and turn God and the prophets into liars. This insight clearly gripped him, “more than language can say,” and he insisted that those who did not understand this paradox understood nothing of theology. He showed no sympathy with Jewish writings for their own sake, however: He would maintain throughout his life that these were indeed blasphemous.44 Two of Luther’s most significant writings from this time were theses of disputation composed for his students, like the one he had composed for Bernhardi. The custom was for the pupil to expound theses that reflected the master’s views as part of their progression through the degrees. Ritualized debates, they depended on skill in argument and rhetoric, and provided a kind of licensed intellectual aggression. With the position set out as a series of related sequential claims, it was easier to accept or reject particular points of the argument, and to inspect the links between one proposition and another. It permitted intellectual adventurousness and freedom, because ideas could be tried out, without claiming that they were established truths. Such tests and intellectual combat greatly appealed to Luther, and the Reformation would develop the technique into a high art. In 1517, Luther’s student Franz Günter defended a set of theses written by Luther against scholasticism, which are in many ways more radical and shocking than the Ninety-five Theses. They proclaimed that Aristotle was not only unnecessary for the study of theology, but positively harmful. In a university where Aristotle formed a major part of the syllabus, this position was a slap in the face for those like Nikolaus von Amsdorf, who lectured on Aristotle’s Ethics. But Luther’s student won, the faculty collectively awarding him victory. Luther then sent the theses to Erfurt, although not under his name, as he knew that they would meet with opposition. He joked that although the Wittenbergers considered them acceptable and “orthodox,” the Erfurters would judge them “cacodoxa”—shit doctrine.45 He was right. His former colleagues and teachers at the monastery were outraged.46

• From A History of God (1993)

  He became a wanderer among the Jewish communities of the Ottoman empire. During a manic spell in Istanbul, he announced that the Torah had been abrogated, crying aloud: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, Who permits the forbidden!” In Cairo he caused scandal by marrying a woman who had fled the murderous pogroms in Poland in 1648 and now lived as a prostitute. In 1662 Shabbetai set off for Jerusalem: at this point he was in a depressive phase and believed that he must be possessed by demons. In Palestine he heard about a young, learned Rabbi called Nathan who was a skilled exorcist, so he set out to find him in his home in Gaza. Like Shabbetai, Nathan had studied the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria. When he met the troubled Jew from Smyrna, he told him that he was not possessed: his dark despair proved that he was indeed the Messiah. When he descended to these depths, he was fighting against the evil powers of the Other Side, releasing the divine sparks in the realm of the kelipoth which could only be redeemed by the Messiah himself. Shabbetai had a mission to descend into hell before he could achieve the final redemption of Israel. At first Shabbetai would have none of this, but eventually Nathan’s eloquence persuaded him. On May 31, 1665, he was suddenly seized with a manic joy and, with Nathan’s encouragement, he announced his Messianic mission. Leading Rabbis dismissed all this as dangerous nonsense, but many of the Jews of Palestine flocked to Shabbetai, who chose twelve disciples to be the judges of the tribes of Israel, which would soon reassemble. Nathan announced the good news to the Jewish communities in letters to Italy, Holland, Germany and Poland, as well as to the cities of the Ottoman empire, and Messianic excitement spread like wildfire through the Jewish world. Centuries of persecution and ostracism had isolated the Jews of Europe from the mainstream, and this unhealthy state of affairs had conditioned many to believe that the future of the world depended upon the Jews alone. The Sephardim, descendants of the exiled Jews of Spain, had taken Lurianic Kabbalah to their hearts, and many had come to believe in the imminent End of Days. All this helped the cult of Shabbetai Zevi. Throughout Jewish history, there had been many Messianic claimants, but none had ever attracted such massive support. It became dangerous for Jews who had their reservations about Shabbetai to speak out. His supporters came from all classes of Jewish society: rich and poor, learned and uneducated. Pamphlets and broadsheets spread the glad tidings in English, Dutch, German and Italian.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings. 4 Trinity: The Christian God I N ABOUT 320 a fierce theological passion had seized the churches of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. Sailors and travelers were singing versions of popular ditties that proclaimed that the Father alone was true God, inaccessible and unique, but that the Son was neither coeternal nor uncreated, since he received life and being from the Father. We hear of a bath attendant who harangued the bathers, insisting that the Son came from nothingness, of a money changer who, when asked for the exchange rate, prefaced his reply with a long disquisition on the distinction between the created order and the uncreated God, and of a baker who informed his customer that the Father was greater than the Son. People were discussing these abstruse questions with the same enthusiasm as they discuss football today. 1 The controversy had been kindled by Arius, a charismatic and handsome presbyter of Alexandria, who had a soft, impressive voice and a strikingly melancholy face. He had issued a challenge which his bishop, Alexander, found impossible to ignore but even more difficult to rebut: how could Jesus Christ have been God in the same way as God the Father? Arius was not denying the divinity of Christ; indeed, he called Jesus “strong God” and “full God,” 2 but he argued that it was blasphemous to think that he was divine by nature: Jesus had specifically said that the Father was greater than he. Alexander and his brilliant young assistant Athanasius immediately realized that this was no mere theological nicety. Arius was asking vital questions about the nature of God. In the meantime, Arius, a skillful propagandist, had set his ideas to music, and soon the laity were debating the issue as passionately as their bishops. The controversy became so heated that the emperor Constantine himself intervened and summoned a synod to Nicaea in modern Turkey to settle the issue. Today Arius’s name is a byword for heresy, but when the conflict broke out there was no officially orthodox position and it was by no means certain why or even whether Arius was wrong. There was nothing new about his claim: Origen, whom both sides held in high esteem, had taught a similar doctrine. Yet the intellectual climate in Alexandria had changed since Origen’s day, and people were no longer convinced that the God of Plato could be successfully wedded with the God of the Bible. Arius, Alexander and Athanasius, for example, had come to believe a doctrine that would have startled any Platonist: they considered that God had created the world out of nothing ( ex nihilo ), basing their opinion on scripture.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  29. and 30. Other portraits of Luther clearly owe a debt to Cranach’s etching. The image above left appeared on a pamphlet in Low German on the reasons why Luther burned the books of the Pope, published in 1520. This has the initials that were to become famous: D.M.L., the doctor title forming part of the name. Luther’s famously deep-set eyes are powerfully presented. Versions of the portrait on the right were used on editions of many different works, including On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and On Secular Authority . The first of Luther’s three great Reformation writings, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, published in August 1520, was audacious in its very conception. On the instructions of his superior in the Augustinian order, Staupitz had advised him not to publish anything for a while, but by the time Luther received the letter, four thousand copies of the tract were rolling off the press. 35 It sold out in a fortnight and its effect was electrifying: Luther’s friend Johannes Lang thought that it was “frightful and wild.” 36 Written in German, it was addressed to laypeople, not clerics. Luther argued that since the Church seemed unable to reform itself, lay authorities must step in. In a single stroke, Luther swept away the obstacles that had prevented lay authorities from dealing with abuses in the Church, because they did not have ecclesiastical authority or imperial backing. Papal power, Luther argued, was buttressed by “three walls”: that the Church had its own spiritual law; that the papacy alone had the right to interpret Scripture; and that only the Pope could call a Council of the Church. He made short work of each of these defenses: Spiritual law was merely an invention of the papacy, designed to frustrate laypeople from reforming the Church; the authority of Scripture must come before that of the Pope; anyone can call a council when the need arises, and those most suitable to do so are the temporal authorities. Luther’s rhetoric brilliantly exploited the opposition between the Curia and the emperor and the German princes, as he drew out the political consequences of granting the German secular authorities power to act. Rome is a center of business, sucking Germany dry of money, Luther argued as he listed the Church’s financial abuses, from the pallium fee incoming bishops had to pay to charging money for matrimonial dispensations. “If that is not a brothel above all imaginable brothels, then I do not know what brothels are,” he concluded.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  His days at Eisenach certainly made a lasting impression, and it was through the Schalbes that Luther heard about another figure who would later become significant to him: a renegade Franciscan monk named Johann Hilten.33 In the 1470s Hilten had started making apocalyptic prophecies, warning of Turkish power and criticizing monasticism openly. He ended up imprisoned in a cell in Eisenach, where, according to later Lutheran propagandists, he died of starvation around the turn of the century—a victim of the cruelty of the monks. Decades later, in 1529, the story came up again when Luther was visiting his friend Friedrich Myconius. By now the parallels between Luther and Hilten were striking: Both were graduates of Erfurt who had become monks and rebelled against the Church. Moreover, the Turks had just laid siege to Vienna, making Hilten’s warnings suddenly prescient. When he got home, Luther wrote excitedly to Myconius, wanting to find out everything he could about the monk, and begging his friend to leave nothing out.34 Why was Luther so excited? Hilten had apparently prophesied that soon someone would arise and attack the papacy. In the story Luther first heard from Myconius, the event had been predicted for 1514, but there were other versions that more helpfully foretold the prophet’s arrival in 1516. Later biographers saw this as proof of Luther’s divine mission, even if it was off by a year. Luther himself cited the prophecy approvingly with the date of 1516, believing that it referred to himself. When Melanchthon, Luther’s most important collaborator, wrote the Apology for the Augsburg confession of 1530, the founding articles of the Lutheran faith, he began the section on monastic vows with the life story of Hilten and his maltreatment by the “pharisaic bitterness and envy” of the monks. Melanchthon added that, in an echo of John the Baptist, Hilten had predicted before he died that “[a]nother man will come…who will destroy you monks…him you will not be able to resist.”35 The figure of Hilten then made its way into Luther hagiography, and his prophecies were republished in the late sixteenth century and again in the seventeenth. For later Lutherans, Hilten was a prophet and proof that Luther was a man of God. Yet he was also an awkward hero, who reputedly had written letters in blood to a beloved, and whose truculent apocalypticism hinted at mental instability. It may be telling that the Lutheran chronicler Ludwig Rabus, who had lived for a time in Luther’s household, referred to the prophecy but did not include Hilten in his compendium of Lutheran martyrs and the “elect of God.”

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Kuch doesn’t consult with the Everywhere Spirit in public anymore and the only time he uses his war cry is at the whistle when he’s on the bottom in the referee’s position. But he still does all his Indian stuff when he wrestles off. Kuch screams and I bounce in my takedown dance. I’m too fast. I take him down with single-leg dives, double-leg dives, sweeps. I counter his dives with a whizzer, slipping my arm under his armpit to the back of his head and levering downward so he either has to let go of my leg or get flipped over on his back. Kuch is strong. If he locks me up he can snap my head down to the mat or shuck me off, spinning me sideways, opening me up for a fireman’s carry. I dance away and don’t lock up with Kuch. We go takedowns for three minutes and I lead 12–0. Now we go to the referee’s position—one guy down on his hands and knees and the other guy kneeling beside him with one arm around his waist, fingers on his belly button, and the other hand gripping his elbow. The top guys’s chin is in line with the bottom guy’s spine. They both look straight ahead at the referee’s hand, which is supposed to move at the same time he blows his whistle to start the round. The down guy has the better chance to score points. He can escape for one point, or reverse and get control of the top guy for two points. The top guy tries to keep control and work for a pin. In a real match, when you escape you work for a takedown, and when you reverse you work for a pin. But in wrestle-offs, when we get an escape or a reversal we go back to the referee’s position and start again. Kuch is down first. He’s very strong and he’s quick. He pops right to his feet, screaming, trying for an escape. But I go to a double-heel trip and haul him back down to the mat. He’s too out of breath now to keep up his steady stream of war cries. I counter his sitout. I follow him on his roll. I try to pin him toward the end of the round, but either I’m too tired or he’s not tired enough. I can’t take him to his back. Now I get three minutes from down. I throw my best moves from here. I walk out on him—“crawl” out, actually, charging on my hands and knees, like a giant little kid escaping from his playpen; then I explode into a sitout and reverse for two points. I pop to my feet, bellowing like a goosed dromedary, and use a standing switch for two. I lock his arm and roll, escaping for a point. I buck back and hip over, reversing for two.

• From A History of God (1993)

  While the pooling of resources and discoveries drew people together, the new specialization inevitably pulled them apart in other ways. Hitherto it had been possible for an intellectual to keep abreast of knowledge on all fronts. The Muslim Faylasufs, for example, had been proficient in medicine, philosophy and aesthetics. Indeed, Falsafah had offered its disciples a coherent and inclusive account of what was believed to be the whole of reality. By the seventeenth century, the process of specialization that would become so marked a feature of Western society was beginning to make itself felt. The various disciplines of astronomy, chemistry and geometry were beginning to become independent and autonomous. Ultimately in our own day it would be impossible for an expert in one field to feel any competence whatever in another. It followed that every major intellectual saw himself less as a conserver of tradition than as a pioneer. He was an explorer, like the navigators who had penetrated to new parts of the globe. He was venturing into hitherto uncharted realms for the sake of his society. The innovator who made such an effort of imagination to break new ground and, in the process, overthrow old sanctities, became a cultural hero. There was new optimism about humanity as control over the natural world, which had once held mankind in thrall, appeared to advance in leaps and bounds. People began to believe that better education and improved laws could bring light to the human spirit. This new confidence in the natural powers of human beings meant that people came to believe that they could achieve enlightenment by means of their own exertions. They no longer felt that they needed to rely on inherited tradition, an institution or an elite—or, even, a revelation from God—to discover the truth. Yet the experience of specialization meant that people involved in the process of specialization were increasingly unable to see the whole picture. Consequently innovative scientists and intellectuals felt obliged to work out their own theories of life and religion, starting from scratch. They felt that their own enhanced knowledge and effectiveness gave them the duty to look again at the traditional Christian explanations of reality and bring them up to date. The new scientific spirit was empirical, based solely on observation and experiment. We have seen that the old rationalism of Falsafah had depended upon an initial act of faith in a rational universe. The Western sciences could take nothing for granted in this way, and the pioneers were increasingly ready to risk a mistake or knock down established authorities and institutions such as the Bible, the Church and the Christian tradition. The old “proofs” for God’s existence were no longer entirely satisfactory, and natural scientists and philosophers, full of enthusiasm for the empirical method, felt compelled to verify the objective reality of God in the same way as they proved other demonstrable phenomena.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The Jews had not yet begun to philosophize, but during the fourth century they came under the influence of Greek rationalism. In 332 BCE Alexander of Macedonia defeated Darius III of Persia and the Greeks began to colonize Asia and Africa. They founded city-states in Tyre, Sidon, Gaza, Philadelphia (Amman) and Tripolis and even at Shechem. The Jews of Palestine and the diaspora were surrounded by a Hellenic culture which some found disturbing, but others were excited by Greek theater, philosophy, sport and poetry. They learned Greek, exercised at the gymnasium and took Greek names. Some fought as mercenaries in the Greek armies. They even translated their own scriptures into Greek, producing the version known as the Septuagint. Thus some Greeks came to know the God of Israel and decided to worship Yahweh (or Iao, as they called him) alongside Zeus and Dionysus. Some were attracted to the synagogues or meeting houses which the diaspora Jews had evolved in place of the Temple worship. There they read their scriptures, prayed and listened to sermons. The synagogue was unlike anything else in the rest of the ancient religious world. Since there was no ritual or sacrifice, it must have seemed more like a school of philosophy, and many flocked to the synagogue if a well-known Jewish preacher came to town, as they would queue up to hear their own philosophers. Some Greeks even observed selected parts of the Torah and joined Jews in syncretist sects. During the fourth century BCE, there were isolated instances of Jews and Greeks merging Yahweh with one of the Greek gods.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  The visit to Rome was by far the longest journey he ever undertook, and his only trip outside German-speaking lands. It seems to have confirmed his sense that he was a “German.” Throughout his later work, he unfailingly talks about Italians in negative terms, writing of the papal emissary Karl von Miltitz, for example, that as an “Italian” he was fond of flowery prose, while deceiving him with his warmth and friendliness. The one place where he seems to have felt at home in Rome was the German church of Santa Maria dell’Anima, where he thought that religious devotion was being properly carried out. In 1540 he gave a damning verdict: “By miraculous advice I came to Rome, so that I saw the head of all wickedness and the seat of the Devil.”37 His initial excitement can be sensed from his recollection of arriving in the Eternal City: Luther flung himself on the ground, hailing the city hallowed by the blood of martyrs.38 Rome in 1510 would have been a strange place, much of it a ghost town, with building having barely commenced on what would become the largest church in Christendom, St. Peter’s. Even the existing church, Luther later judged, was too big to preach in.39 Rome’s medieval population was only a fraction of what it would have been in Roman times. Luther mentioned the catacombs and the hills but, for someone formed by the classics, he made surprisingly little reference to the classical heritage. He would have seen, however, just what ancient Rome had accomplished—and how far the sixteenth century was from equaling it. Buildings like the Colosseum and other antique ruins lay unused, their stone being carted off for St. Peter’s. Years later Luther still remembered that the Colosseum could accommodate 200,000 spectators, but only its foundations and some of its crumbling walls had been visible.40 He recalled the oppressive Italian nights and the resulting nightmares. Desperately thirsty, and knowing that the water was polluted, the monks were advised to eat pomegranates to cure their headaches, and by this fruit “God saved our lives.”41

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Gush branches opened all over the country. The cadre formed a master plan for the settlement of the whole of the West Bank: the aim was to import hundreds of thousands of Jews into the area and to colonize all the strategic mountain strongholds. Experts on the geography of the region, on demography, and on settlement were consulted. Administrative bodies were established for planning and propaganda. One of these was Mate Mirtzai, which organized settlement operations. 10 Squatters, often led by Levinger, would drive their old, battered trailers to a desolate West Bank hilltop in the dead of night. When the army arrived to expel them, the right-wing parties in the Knesset accused the Labor government of behaving exactly the same way as the British in pre-state days. It was a clever stratagem. The Israeli government was now cast in the role of oppressor, and it was the Gush settlers who seemed to embody Israel’s heroic past. The Gush managed to establish only three settlements during these years, however. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was anxious to conciliate Egypt and Syria during this postwar period, and was ready to make small territorial concessions. He continued to resist the combined pressure of the Gush and the Right. But the Gush continued its propaganda efforts, organizing huge rallies and hikes across the West Bank. In 1975, crowds carried Torah scrolls through the occupied territories, singing, dancing, and clapping, secularists joining the religious Zionists. On Independence Day 1976, nearly twenty thousand armed Jews attended a West Bank “picnic,” marching from one part of Samaria to another. 11 These militant hikes and demonstrations were often timed to coincide with the establishment of a new settlement or with another illegal squat. All these actions encouraged some Israelis to see the territories as essentially Jewish, and helped to break down the taboo against settling in occupied land. Gush was pragmatic, clever, and resourceful. It appealed to atheists and secularists, but for its Orthodox members it was an essentially religious movement. From the Rabbis Kook, they had inherited a kabbalistic piety. Establishing a settlement in what the Gush believed to be Jewish land was to extend the realm of the sacred and to push back the frontiers of the “Other Side.” A settlement was what Christians would call a sacrament, an outward symbol of hidden grace that made the divine present in the profane world in a new and more effective way. It was what Isaac Luria had called tikkun , an act of restoration that would one day transform the world and the cosmos. The hikes, marches, battles with the army, and illegal squats were a form of ritual that brought a sense of ecstasy and release.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Al-Afghani was a convinced, even a passionate theist, but there is little talk of God in The Refutation of the Materialists, his only book. Because he knew that the West valued reason and regarded Islam and Orientals as irrational, al-Afghani tried to describe Islam as a faith distinguished by its ruthless cult of reason. In fact, even such rationalists as the Mutazilis would have found this description of their religion strange. Al-Afghani was an activist rather than a philosopher. It is, therefore, important not to judge his career and convictions by this one literary attempt. Nevertheless, the depiction of Islam in a way calculated to fit what is perceived as a Western ideal shows a new lack of confidence in the Muslim world that would shortly become extremely destructive. Muhammad Abduh (1849–1005), al-Afghani’s Egyptian disciple, had a different approach. He decided to concentrate his activities in Egypt alone and to focus on the intellectual education of its Muslims. He had had a traditional Islamic upbringing, which had brought him under the influence of the Sufi Sheikh Darwish, who had taught him that science and philosophy were the two most secure paths to the knowledge of God. Consequently when Abduh began to study at the prestigious al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, he was soon disillusioned by its antiquated syllabus. Instead he was attracted to al-Afghani, who coached him in logic, theology, astronomy, physics and mysticism. Some Christians in the West felt that science was the enemy of faith, but Muslim mystics had often used mathematics and science as an aid to contemplation. Today Muslims in some of the more radical mystical sects of the Shiah, such as the Druzes or the Alawis, are particularly interested in modern science. In the Islamic world there are grave reservations about Western politics but few find it a problem to reconcile their faith in God with Western science. Abduh was excited by his contact with Western culture and was especially influenced by Comte, Tolstoy and Herbert Spencer, who was a personal friend. He never adopted a wholly Western lifestyle, but liked to visit Europe regularly to refresh himself intellectually. This did not mean that he abandoned Islam. Far from it; like any reformer, Abduh wanted to return to the roots of his faith. He therefore advocated a return to the spirit of the Prophet and the first four Rightly Guided Caliphs (rashidun). This did not entail a fundamentalist rejection of modernity, however.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The podium I approach sits in the middle of a student lounge with chairs lined up like a tribunal of judges. In my hand, the sheaf of papers shivers. I lean on the podium. I feel my puppet’s mouth open and shut, and I presume the words written down come out, though I say little between the poems. At the end, I’m okay, not having pissed my pants or had a seizure from shame. Some of my students even show up, which touches me. When dinner’s suggested, I’m steered to a restaurant not of my choosing, the first joint with a liquor license I’ve entered in months. Any trepidations I once had about a cocktail’s proximity go poof the instant I cross the threshold, for the atmosphere is harmlessly convivial. At the podium, I hadn’t felt like a poet. But here—among the patrons in crisp-collared shirts and wools that look nubbily expensive—I’m Apollinaire in Paris, just in from walking his lobster down the street on a leash. Somebody takes my coat. Every glass I pass is glittering. The host squires us to the heavy linen tablecloth, the chatter weaving around me, and when the waiter bends at the waist above me, smiling conspiratorially, I hear my puppet mouth ask for a martini. That inverted triangle of glass—with frost at its lip and a speared olive at its nexus—is the perfect accessory to the place. No lightning bolt splits the chandeliered ceiling to pin me where I perch. No one’s expression alters one whisker, and I don’t even consider canceling the order, since just placing it shifted some geological plates around my innards. It lends an almost sexual thrill to waiting for it. Delicious, crossing the threshold into abandon. The martini must’ve come, and I must’ve drunk it, but the wine and cognac and whatnot that I took in that night cauterize the memory. I briefly wake, stumbling down wet streets, looking for my car. How had I been deposited in Boston’s fashionable South End? I turn around on a cobbled street. I have an image of sipping green chartreuse from thimbled glasses, feeling it go down like race-car fuel. Are those people I knew?

• From A History of God (1993)

  These ideas were comprehensible in a strictly Jewish context, though later Christians with a Greek background would interpret them differently. In the Acts of the Apostles, written as late as 100 CE, we can see that the first Christians still had an entirely Jewish conception of God. On the feast of Pentecost, when hundreds of Jews had congregated in Jerusalem from all over the diaspora to celebrate the gift of the Torah on Sinai, the Holy Spirit had descended upon Jesus’ companions. They heard “what sounded like a powerful wind from heaven … and something appeared to them that seemed like tongues of fire.”26 The Holy Spirit had manifested itself to these first Jewish Christians as it had to their contemporaries, the tannaim. Immediately the disciples rushed outside and began preaching to the crowds of Jews and Godfearers from “Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya around Cyrene.”27 To their amazement, everybody heard the disciples preaching in his own language. When Peter rose to address the crowd, he presented this phenomenon as the apogee of Judaism. The prophets had foretold the day when God would pour out his Spirit upon mankind so that even women and slaves would have visions and dream dreams.28 This day would inaugurate the Messianic Kingdom, when God would live on earth with his people. Peter did not claim that Jesus of Nazareth was God. He “was a man, commended to you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you.” After his cruel death, God had raised him to life and had exalted him to a specially high status “by God’s right hand.” The prophets and Psalmists had all foretold these events; thus the “whole House of Israel” could be certain that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah.29 This speech appears to have been the message (kerygma) of the earliest Christians.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  It seems that the town council supported their decisions, conferring citizenship on one former brother IN THE WARTBURG 211 39. The final pages of the Passional juxtaposed Christ’s Ascension with the descent of the Pope, accompanied by a crew of devils with fantastical snouts, beaks and claws, into the flames of hell where a rotund, tonsured cleric is already roasting. who had become a carpenter. Staupitz’s dream of a unified, reformed Augustinian order was beginning to evaporate: under the impact of Luther’s ideas, monasticism was gradually collapsing from within. A movement which had characterised Western Christianity almost from its beginnings, and which had developed powerful institutions throughout Europe, was losing credibility. Zwilling now began to push for a fully reformed Mass, which offered the wine as well as the bread to the laity. Consequently, on 29 September, ina private ceremony, Melanchthon received Communion in both kinds with his students.” Zwilling must have been a powerful personality and preacher — one contemporary describes him as a ‘second prophet’ sent by God, ‘another Martin’ who perhaps even exceeded the first. A sense of his preaching style emanates from hostile reports about his later sermons at Eilenburg, shortly after he had left Wittenberg around New Year 1522. Not only did he speak the words of consecration in German and give Communion in two kinds, but he dressed in lay clothes. Indeed, he seems to have designed his own preaching ‘look’, which would later be adopted by Luther and others. In place of a monkish cassock he wore a black student gown (Luther and the other 212 MARTIN LUTHER preachers would wear an academic talar), a shirt with black braiding and a hat of beaver fur. He had no tonsure but his hair had been combed forward: to one shocked observer he looked ‘like a devil’. But it was the hat that probably outraged contemporaries the most: to cover one’s head showed disrespect for the sacrament.” Beaver fur was a fashion item; and the colour of his clothing — black, an expensive dye in this period — connoted status, so Zwilling may have been attempting to make himself look like a man of standing. His preaching style seems to have been simple and forthright, offering a rather cut-down version of Luther’s theology. There were two paths, he was said to have told his congregation: one led to hell, and that was the broad path of doing good works, the other was narrow and led to heaven.* Zwilling’s preaching first and foremost addressed his fellow Augus- tinians, but theirs was a public church, and people flocked to hear him.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  His letters at this time, especially those to Spalatin, convey a sense of exaltation and exhilaration as he came to accept that he was likely to die a martyr. The letters written before Augsburg are marked by a sense of urgency: “This affair has to be handled in a great hurry. They 122 MARTIN LUTHER have given me only a short time’, or ‘Fast action is necessary here. The days fly by and the appointed day draws near.” All this increased the singular importance of the meeting. In May 1518, when he dedicated his explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses to Staupitz, he had written that ‘only one thing is left, my poor, weak little bit of body, worn out by constant abuse . . . if they want to take that away by force or intrigue, they will only make me poorer of my life by one or two hours’. With his health weakened by excessive asceticism, he had never expected to live long, and this belief had stamped his religiosity. The prospect of martyrdom now intensified that streak in his spirituality, and increased his conviction of election that had marked him ever since St Anna had saved him from the storm. From Augsburg on 11 October, he had written to Melanchthon who, to his delight, had just been made professor of Greek at Wittenberg, telling him that there was no news ‘except that the whole town is full of rumours of my name and everyone desires to see the man of such fires of Herostratus’. In classical mythology, Herostratus burned the temple of Artemis to the ground, but it seems that Luther was using the reference in a double sense, suggesting that he, like Herostratus, was not only destroying the ‘temple’ of the papacy, but that he himself was also likely to be burned. ‘I will be burned for you and them, if it pleases God’, Luther continued. ‘I would prefer to perish, and which upsets me most gravely, I would prefer to lose your most sweet conversation in all eternity than that I should revoke.” It is almost as if he were admonishing Melanchthon not to join him in martyrdom, while he ‘burned for you and them’, sacrificed himself for their sake. Indeed, Luther was not just thinking about himself. As he wrote to Spalatin from Augsburg soon after 14 October, if he were to be oppressed by force, then Karlstadt and the whole Wittenberg faculty, which had been supporting Luther’s theological position, would find itself under threat. The survival of the university, so recently founded, would be imperilled.” Convinced he was destined for martyrdom, Luther increasingly began to compare himself to Christ. In a letter from Nuremberg to his Wittenberg friends as he journeyed to Augsburg, he wrote, ‘May God’s will be done . . .

• From A History of God (1993)

  He evolved a Jewish form of Yoga, using the usual disciplines of concentration such as breathing, the recitation of a mantra and the adoption of a special posture to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Abulafia was an unusual Kabbalist. He was a highly erudite man, who had studied Torah, Talmud and Falsafah before being converted to mysticism by an overwhelming religious experience at the age of thirty-one. He seems to have believed that he was the Messiah, not only to Jews but also to Christians. Accordingly, he traveled extensively throughout Spain making disciples and even ventured as far as the Near East. In 1280 he visited the Pope as a Jewish ambassador. Although Abulafia was often very outspoken in his criticism of Christianity, he seems to have appreciated the similarity between the Kabbalistic God and the theology of the Trinity. The three highest sefiroth are reminiscent of the Logos and Spirit, the Intellect and Wisdom of God, which proceed from the Father, the Nothingness lost in inaccessible light. Abulafia himself liked to speak about God in a Trinitarian manner. To find this God, Abulafia taught that it was necessary “to unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it.” The phrase “untying the knots” is also found in Tibetan Buddhism, another indication of the fundamental agreement of mystics worldwide. The process described can perhaps be compared to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock those complexes that impede the mental health of the patient. As a Kabbalist, Abulafia was more concerned with the divine energy that animates the whole of creation but which the soul cannot perceive. As long as we clog our minds with ideas based on sense perception, it is difficult to discern the transcendent element of life. By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia taught his disciples to go beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world. One of his methods was the Hokhmah ha-Tseruf (The Science of the Combination of the Letters), which took the form of a meditation on the Name of God. The Kabbalist was to combine the letters of the divine Name in different combinations with a view to divorcing his mind from the concrete to a more abstract mode of perception. The effects of this discipline—which sound remarkably unpromising to an outsider—appear to have been remarkable. Abulafia himself compared it to the sensation of listening to musical harmonies, the letters of the alphabet taking the place of notes in a scale. He also used a method of associating ideas, which he called dillug (jumping) and kefitsah (skipping), which is clearly similar to the modern analytic practice of free association.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The early Christians felt that Jesus was in some mysterious way still alive and that the “powers” that he had possessed were now embodied in them, as he had promised. We know from Paul’s epistles that the first Christians had all kinds of unusual experiences that could have indicated the advent of a new type of humanity: some had become faith healers, some spoke in heavenly languages, others delivered what they believed were inspired oracles from God. Church services were noisy, charismatic affairs, quite different from a tasteful evensong today at the parish church. It seemed that Jesus’ death had indeed been beneficial in some way: it had released a “new kind of life” and a “new creation”—a constant theme in Paul’s letters. 20 There were, however, no detailed theories about the crucifixion as an atonement for some “original sin” of Adam: we shall see that this theology did not emerge until the fourth century and was only important in the West. Paul and the other New Testament writers never attempted a precise, definitive explanation of the salvation they had experienced. Yet the notion of Christ’s sacrificial death was similar to the ideal of the bodhisattva, which was developing at this time in India. Like the bodhisattva, Christ had, in effect, become a mediator between humanity and the Absolute, the difference being that Christ was the only mediator and the salvation he effected was not an unrealized aspiration for the future, like that of the bodhisattva, but a fait accompli. Paul insisted that Jesus’ sacrifice had been unique. Although he believed that his own sufferings on behalf of others were beneficial, Paul was quite clear that Jesus’ suffering and death were in quite a different league. 21 There is a potential danger here. The innumerable Buddhas and the elusive, paradoxical avatars all reminded the faithful that ultimate reality could not be adequately expressed in any one form. The single Incarnation of Christianity, suggesting that the whole of the inexhaustible reality of God had been manifest in just one human being, could lead to an immature type of idolatry. Jesus had insisted that the “powers” of God were not for him alone. Paul developed this insight by arguing that Jesus had been the first example of a new type of humanity. Not only had he done everything that the old Israel had failed to achieve, but he had become the new adām, the new humanity in which all human beings, goyim included, must somehow participate.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  Education was the key; the common people should be educated as they were in France, girls to the same standard as boys. 51 Tahtawi believed that Egypt stood on the brink of a glorious future. He was intoxicated by the promise of modernity; he wrote a poem in praise of the steam engine, and saw the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railways of the United States as engineering feats that would bring the far- flung peoples of the earth together in brotherhood and peace. Let French and British scientists and engineers come and settle in Egypt! This could only accelerate the rate of progress. 52 During the 1870s, a new group of writers from what is now Lebanon and Syria came and settled in Cairo. 53 Most of them were Christians who had been educated in the French and American missionary schools and thus had access to Western culture. They were practitioners of the new journalism and found that they had more freedom in Khedive Ismail’s Cairo than in the Ottoman territories. They established new journals, which published articles on medicine, philosophy, politics, geography, history, industry, agriculture, ethics, and sociology, bringing crucial modern ideas to the general Arab reader. Their influence was enormous. In particular, these Christian Arabs were keen that the Muslim states should become secular, and insisted that science alone and not religion was the basis of civilization. Like Tahtawi they were in love with the West, and communicated this enthusiasm to the people of Egypt. It is poignant to look back at this early admiration in the light of the hostility that developed later. Tahtawi and the Syrian journalists were living in a brief period of harmony between East and West. The old crusading hatred of Islam seemed to have died in Europe, and Tahtawi clearly did not see Britain and France as a political threat, even though his sojourn in Paris coincided with the brutal colonization of Algeria by the French. For Tahtawi, the British and French were simply bearers of progress. But in 1871, an Iranian arrived in Cairo who had come to fear the West, which, he realized, was on the way to achieving world hegemony. Even though he was Iranian and a Shii, Jamal al-Din (1839–97) styled himself “al-Afghani” (the Afghan), probably because he hoped to attract a wider audience in the Islamic world by presenting himself as a Sunni. 54 He had had a traditional madrasah education, which had included both fiqh (jurisprudence) and the esoteric disciplines of Falsafah and mysticism (irfan), yet he had become convinced, during a visit to British India, that modern science and mathematics were the key to the future. Afghani, however, did not fall in love with the British as Tahtawi had fallen under the spell of the Parisians.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This meant that the more educated, sober and responsible element in Islam declined, while the more extravagant forms of underground Sufism were the only forms of religion left. Other reformers were convinced that forcible repression was not the answer. Islam had always thrived on contact with other civilizations, and they believed that religion was essential for any deep and long-lasting reform of their society. There was a great deal that needed to change; much had become backward-looking; there was superstition and ignorance. Yet Islam had also helped people to cultivate serious understanding: if it were allowed to become unhealthy, the spiritual well-being of Muslims all over the world would also suffer. The Muslim reformers were not hostile to the West. Most found Western ideals of equality, freedom and brotherhood congenial, since Islam shared the values of Judeo-Christianity which had been such an important influence in Europe and the United States. The modernization of Western society had—in some respects—created a new type of equality, and the reformers told their people that these Christians seemed to live better Islamic lives than the Muslims. There was enormous enthusiasm and excitement at this new encounter with Europe. The wealthier Muslims were educated in Europe, absorbed its philosophy, literature and ideals, and came back to their own countries eager to share what they had learned. At the beginning of the twentieth century, almost every single Muslim intellectual was also an ardent admirer of the West. The reformers all had an intellectual bias, and yet they were also nearly all associated with some form of Islamic mysticism. The more imaginative and intelligent forms of Sufism and Ishraqi mysticism had helped Muslims in previous crises, and they turned toward them again. The experience of God was not regarded as a clog but as a force for transformation at a deep level that would hasten the transition to modernity. Thus the Iranian reformer Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838–87) was an adept of the Ishraqi mysticism of Suhrawardi at the same time as he was a passionate advocate of modernization. As he toured Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt and India, al-Afghani attempted to be all things to all men. He was capable of presenting himself as a Sunni to Sunnis, a Shii martyr to Shiis, a revolutionary, a religious philosopher and a parliamentarian. The mystical disciplines of Ishraqi mysticism help Muslims to feel at one with the world around them and to experience a liberating loss of the boundaries that hedge in the self. It has been suggested that al-Afghani’s recklessness and adoption of different roles had been influenced by the mystical discipline, with its enlarged concept of self. 25 Religion was essential, though reform was necessary.