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 51 of 182 · 20 per page

• 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  People remarked that he had become a new man, ‘such exquisite things did he now preach’.” When it became clear that the Elector would be hostile to any ‘inno- vations’, Karlstadt ignored him and, on Christmas Day, he invited those present who wished to take Communion to do so, whether or not they had made confession. A thousand people are reported to have attended. To the horror of the canons of All Saints, many of those who took Communion had not kept the obligatory fast but had eaten and drunk beforehand; some were even said to have consumed brandy. Dressed in lay clothing, Karlstadt officiated at Mass in the parish church, and when the wafers were twice dropped — one falling on a man’s coat, another onto the floor — he simply told the parish- ioners to pick them up. Yet touching the Host was too great a taboo even for convinced evangelicals, and Karlstadt had to do it himself. At New Year he celebrated Communion in both kinds again, and this time too a thousand people participated. Wittenberg was undergoing an evangelical revival.” 224 MARTIN LUTHER Just six months after he had written his tract against vows,” Karlstadt acted upon his beliefs. A newsletter, which he may not have written himself, included not only the resolutions of the Augustinian order who met in Wittenberg in January, and a Latin prayer in praise of Luther — ‘We should rather believe one truthful Martin than the whole mob of the papists. We know that Christ was truly reborn through Martin; you, O God, do guard him for us™ — but also the announcement that Karl- stadt was going to marry. On 26 December 1521, Justus Jonas and Melanchthon, along with two wagons filled with ‘educated, valiant people’ from Wittenberg, travelled to the village of Segrehna where they witnessed Karlstadt’s engagement to Anna von Mochau.” Although it squared with his tract on vows, Karlstadt’s decision sat oddly with his admonitions to Gelassenheit, to leaving all human attachments behind. Anna von Mochau was on the face of it an extraordinary choice as bride. Aged fifteen, she was the daughter of a poor nobleman, chosen neither for her looks — she was ‘not very pretty’ according to one contemporary — nor her wealth.™ Interestingly, Luther later made a similar choice, marrying outside the Wittenberg elite, and choosing a former nun who was also from a minor noble family. Status clearly mattered to Karlstadt: his own family claimed nobility, and he used their coat of arms as his ‘brand’.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  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. In Poland and Lithuania there were public processions in his honor. In the Ottoman empire, prophets wandered through the streets describing visions in which they had seen Shabbetai seated upon a throne. All business ceased; ominously, the Jews of Turkey dropped the name of the sultan from the Sabbath prayers and put in Shabbetai’s name instead. Eventually, when Shabbetai arrived in Istanbul in January 1666, he was arrested as a rebel and imprisoned in Gallipoli. After centuries of persecution, exile and humiliation, there was hope. All over the world, Jews had experienced an inner freedom and liberation that seemed similar to the ecstasy that the Kabbalists had experienced for a few moments when they contemplated the mysterious world of the sefiroth. Now this experience of salvation was no longer simply the preserve of a privileged few but seemed common property. For the first time, Jews felt that their lives had value; redemption was no longer a vague hope for the future but was real and full of meaning in the present. Salvation had come! This sudden reversal made an indelible impression. The eyes of the whole Jewish world were fixed on Gallipoli, where Shabbetai had even made an impression on his captors. The Turkish vizier housed him in considerable comfort.

• From A History of God (1993)

  The terms éclaircissement and Aufklärung have definite religious connotations. The God of Jonathan Edwards also contributed to the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1775. In the eyes of the revivalists, Britain had lost the new light that had shone so brightly during the Puritan revolution and now seemed decadent and regressive. It was Edwards and his colleagues who led Americans of the lower classes to take the first steps toward revolution. Messianism was essential to Edwards’s religion: human effort would hasten the coming of God’s Kingdom, which was attainable and imminent in the New World. The Awakening itself (despite its tragic finale) made people believe that the process of redemption described in the Bible had already begun. God was firmly committed to the project. Edwards gave the doctrine of the Trinity a political interpretation: the Son was “the deity generated by God’s understanding” and thus the blueprint of the New Commonwealth; the Spirit, “the deity subsisting in act,” was the force which would accomplish this master plan in time. 45 In the New World of America, God would thus be able to contemplate his own perfections on earth. The society would express the “excellencies” of God himself. The New England would be a “city on the hill,” a light unto the Gentiles “shining with a reflection of the glory of Jehovah risen upon it, which shall be attractive and ravishing to all.” 46 The God of Jonathan Edwards, therefore, would be incarnated in the Commonwealth: Christ was seen as embodied in a good society. Other Calvinists were in the van of progress: they introduced chemistry into the curriculum in America, and Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson, saw scientific knowledge as a prelude to the final perfection of humanity. Their God did not necessarily mean obscurantism, as the American liberals sometimes imagined. The Calvinists disliked Newton’s cosmology, which left God with little to do once he had got things started. As we have seen, they preferred a God who was literally active in the world: their doctrine of predestination showed that in their view God was actually responsible for everything that happened here below, for good or ill.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Muslims regarded the new Turkey and Iran with suspicion and fascination. In Iran there was already an established tradition whereby the mullahs opposed the shahs in the name of the people. They sometimes achieved extraordinary success. In 1872, when the shah sold the monopoly for the production, sale and export of tobacco to the British, putting Iranian manufacturers out of business, the mullahs issued a fatwa forbidding Iranians to smoke. The shah was forced to rescind the concessions. The holy city of Qom became an alternative to the despotic and increasingly draconian regime in Teheran. Repression of religion can breed fundamentalism, just as inadequate forms of theism can result in a rejection of God. In Turkey, the closure of the madrasahs led inevitably to the decline of the authority of the ulema . 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.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Banished from Mihlhausen in late 1524, Miintzer returned with popular support in February 1525, to a reformed city under the influence of the radical preacher Heinrich Pfeiffer. This was a world made anew, as people were fired by the ideals of godly law and Christian brotherhood. Together Pfeiffer and Miintzer created an Eternal Council, a group of committed followers who replaced what had been an elected oligarchy, and set about forming alliances with like-minded towns. Miintzer prepared for the apocalypse. “Don’t let your sword get cold, don’t let it hang down limply! Hammer away ding-dong on the anvils of Nimrod, cast down their tower to the ground!’ he wrote to the people of Allstedt, urging them to join in the rebellion. ‘Go to it, go to it, go to it’, he urged repeatedly in this letter, and one can get an echo of what must have been electrifying preaching — a heady brew of visual metaphor, rhythmic repetition, and violent language.’ Miintzer was particularly eager to attract the miners, and many of those from the Mansfeld region where Luther had grown up were drawn to his movement. By early May, the Miihlhausen-Thuringian peasant army was plundering convents and castles and forcing local nobles in the Bichsfeld to join by entering into a Christian covenant; only Count Ernst, Miintzer’s long-standing foe since the Allstedt days, remained firm. But then the peasant army split. No more than a small contingent went to join the Frankenhausen band, which desperately needed reinforcements, whilst the rest headed back for Mihlhausen. Miintzer mustered only 300 men to accompany him to Frankenhausen. By the time they arrived on 12 May, the revolt there had lost momentum. Stuck in the town, the peasant army was unable to continue its advance. Miintzer pushed for a confrontation with the region’s rulers. He ended the overtures that had been made to Count Ernst and Count 264 MARTIN LUTHER Albrecht of Mansfeld and his correspondence became increasingly driven by his hatred of Luther and the princes. As he wrote to Count Ernst: ‘Brother Ernst, just tell us, you miserable, wretched sack of worms, who made you a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his dear blood? You shall and will have to prove that you are a Christian’; while to Count Albrecht of Mansfeld, Luther’s supporter, he wrote on the same day: ‘Couldn't you find in your Lutheran pudding and your Wittenberg soup what Ezekiel has prophesied in his thirty- seventh chapter?

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Luther had known what was coming, but he was in exhilarated mood. Comparing his travails at Worms with Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, he had written to Cranach on 28 April, two days after leaving Worms: ‘For a little while we must suffer and be silent. A little time, and you will not see me again; a little more time and you will see me.” ¢ — june bias of tad wes sricsi en nates pind am ALE Pelee co ps ie BA a nee eS bode ad ~ A at 3 5 7 a > ts Oe rs sf tEs 4 ees i are om at alter send 2 . . mig Ord feniicled wie ay) — —_ fy. r¢ Dy + rns ‘= on = Sahay v Ast asd Para a ett tena a ieee > Se sas 2 = os ¥ ot patie = . “ey oe «3 mf a aS “4 kts vid ied” 3 anya nti eee ae Th} yi aad ee ae Pdr ieay Peegeeh hy Pteary) To bqends BH, A" cae ois RP ta teoeeids eis ey jem 72 7 7 sa bate rae be 2662 nee we y 5 _ =— 7 ‘ cut oe asl” abite Lije See bad sag » oe 1h “te . . 5 > arte pone <a rie be iv oo OPse — Sire ksier a} wc) bein d Gs Og, Se *awies« A) ov _— re i he Ps 2 Ceres hae Shy er remy 7 ee > ost hang Bait thls atone de ie hewn ee Tema. abr Nae euitce me chives We Witcsh nxt ewtiedge we AegePAG, Aire Pee Se Saree Pinang fy be Fea EY 2? ee as fais) 5 ire oh un Eaton bah 0 Pier Se, Cor 2 Nie ate oO A CT remot 4 willy -es ait oA tec wa dil re vests AUN A OME hie yah Le ma weskey 5 wey-+e rai ~~ thew We end phe Ae tate? Eh” ee a uaetaharnenaiaabel mie be ahaa et. antes at AS Se z vm a ae * e ei pe 9 In the Wartburg No one was to know Luther’s whereabouts. After the excitement of Worms, where the great princes of the empire had queued up to meet him, where he had been surrounded by supporters and friends from dawn till dusk, and where his every word had been noted and its significance weighed, Luther was now alone. On 4 May, having visited his relatives in Méhra on his way back from the Diet, Luther had been kidnapped near Burg Altenstein and brought by a circuitous route to Wartburg Castle, towering high up above Eisenach, hidden in the woods. The castle walls are hewn into the rock of the hills with views on three sides; to Luther it felt as if he was in the kingdom of the birds.

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  But on rereading the text he decided that Luther was correct, and began to be influenced by Luther's understanding of Augustine.* Both radical and passionate, Karlstadt easily got lost in the thread of his own thought and needed direction: Luther’s intensity seems to have unleashed his creativity, sparking him to rethink all his intellectual and spiritual positions. Schurff, more cautious by nature, was also capti- vated, perhaps because Luther was able to articulate the desperation and sense of sinfulness he too had felt. Luther clearly had an intel- lectual drive that drew others to him, in part because they recognised their own ideas in what he argued. He was intellectually independent and decisive, and could communicate complex opinions with passion. His energy and conviction rather than intellectual superiority may explain why he became the leading figure at Wittenberg so quickly. These were exciting times as a generation of intellectuals felt that they witnessed the dawn of a new era. It seemed that scholasticism, with its tortured deference to Aristotle, was finished. The university syllabus at Wittenberg had been a careful compromise between via moderna and via antiqua, but by 1516 Johannes Lang was enthusing that students were ‘eagerly hearing lectures on the Bible and the Church Fathers, while the so-called scholastic doctors have hardly two or three listeners’.” In 1517-18 Luther lectured on Hebrews, Karlstadt on Augus- tine, the humanist Aesticampianus on Jerome — this was a whole programme of study invigorated by a humanist-style return to the sources. There were also causes to be passionate about. Humanists united to defend the Hebrew scholar Johannes Reuchlin when he was perse- cuted 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 94 MARTIN LUTHER himself had used when he learnt 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.“ 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.