Fear

Passages

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

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• From A History of God (1993)

  Luther even doubted the possibility of proving the existence of God. The only “God” who could be deduced by logical arguments, such as those used by Thomas Aquinas, was the God of the pagan philosophers. When Luther claimed that we were justified by “faith,” he did not mean the adoption of the right ideas about God. “Faith does not require information, knowledge and certainty,” he preached in one of his sermons, “but a free surrender and a joyful bet on his unfelt, untried and unknown goodness.”26 He had anticipated the solutions of Pascal and Kierkegaard to the problem of faith. Faith did not mean assent to the propositions of a creed and it was not “belief” in orthodox opinion. Instead, faith was a leap in the dark toward a reality that had to be taken on trust. It was “a sort of knowledge and darkness that can see nothing.”27 God, he insisted, strictly forbade speculative discussion of his nature. To attempt to reach him by means of reason alone could be dangerous and lead to despair, since all that we would discover were the power, wisdom and justice of God, which could only intimidate convicted sinners. Instead of engaging in rationalistic discussion of God, the Christian should appropriate the revealed truths of scripture and make them his own. Luther showed how this should be done in the creed he composed in his Small Catechism: I believe that Jesus Christ, begotten of the Father from eternity, and also the man, born of the Virgin Mary, is my Lord; who has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature, and delivered me from all sins, from death, and from the power of the devil, not with silver and gold but with his holy and precious blood and with his innocent sufferings and death, in order that I may be his, live under him and in his Kingdom and serve him in everlasting righteousness and blessedness, even as he is risen from the dead and reigns to all eternity.28 Luther had been trained in scholastic theology but had reverted to simpler forms of faith and had reacted against the arid theology of the fourteenth century, which could do nothing to calm his fears. Yet he himself could be abstruse when, for example, he tried to explain exactly how we became justified. Augustine, Luther’s hero, had taught that the righteousness bestowed upon the sinner was not his own but God’s. Luther gave this a subtle twist. Augustine had said that this divine righteousness became a part of us; Luther insisted that it remained outside the sinner but that God regarded it as though it were our own. Ironically, the Reformation would lead to greater doctrinal confusion and to the proliferation of new doctrines as the banners of the various sects which were just as rarefied and tenuous as some of those they sought to replace.

• From A History of God (1993)

  3 Overcome by the transcendent holiness of Yahweh, he was conscious only of his own inadequacy and ritual impurity. Unlike the Buddha or a Yogi, he had not prepared himself for this experience by a series of spiritual exercises. It had come upon him out of the blue and he was completely shaken by its devastating impact. One of the seraphs flew toward him with a live coal and purified his lips, so that they could utter the word of God. Many of the prophets were either unwilling to speak on God’s behalf or unable to do so. When God had called Moses, prototype of all prophets, from the Burning Bush and commanded him to be his messenger to Pharaoh and the children of Israel, Moses had protested that he was “not able to speak well.” 4 God had made allowances for this impediment and permitted his brother, Aaron, to speak in Moses’ stead. This regular motif in the stories of prophetic vocations symbolizes the difficulty of speaking God’s word. The prophets were not eager to proclaim the divine message and were reluctant to undertake a mission of great strain and anguish. The transformation of Israel’s God into a symbol of transcendent power would not be a calm, serene process but attended with pain and struggle. Hindus would never have described Brahman as a great king because their God could not be described in such human terms. We must be careful not to interpret the story of Isaiah’s vision too literally: it is an attempt to describe the indescribable, and Isaiah reverts instinctively to the mythological traditions of his people to give his audience some idea of what had happened to him. The psalms often describe Yahweh enthroned in his temple as king, just as Baal, Marduk and Dagon, 5 the gods of their neighbors, presided as monarchs in their rather similar temples. Beneath the mythological imagery, however, a quite distinctive conception of the ultimate reality was beginning to emerge in Israel: the experience with this God is an encounter with a person. Despite his terrifying otherness, Yahweh can speak and Isaiah can answer. Again, this would have been inconceivable to the sages of the Upanishads, since the idea of having a dialogue or meeting with Brahman-Atman would be inappropriately anthropomorphic. Yahweh asked: “Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?” and, like Moses before him, Isaiah immediately replied: “Here I am! (hineni!) send me!” The point of this vision was not to enlighten the prophet but to give him a practical job to do.

• From A History of God (1993)

  As Puritans braved the Atlantic to settle in New England, Jesuit missionaries traveled the globe: Francis Xavier (1506–1552) evangelized India and Japan, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) took the Gospel to China and Robert de Nobili (1577–1656) to India. Like the Puritans again, Jesuits were often enthusiastic scientists, and it has been suggested that the first scientific society was not the Royal Society of London or the Accademia del Cimento but the Society of Jesus. Yet Catholics seemed as troubled as the Puritans. Ignatius, for example, regarded himself as such a great sinner that he prayed that after his death his body might be exposed on a dung heap to be devoured by birds and dogs. His doctors warned him that if he continued to weep so bitterly during Mass, he might lose his sight. Teresa of Avila, who reformed the monastic life of women in the order of discalced Carmelites, had a terrifying vision of the place reserved for her in Hell. The great saints of the period seemed to regard the world and God as irreconcilable opposites: to be saved one had to renounce the world and all natural affections. Vincent de Paul, who lived a life of charity and good works, prayed that God would take away his love for his parents; Jane Francis de Chantal, who founded the Order of the Visitation, stepped over the prone body of her son when she went to join her convent: he had flung himself over the threshold to prevent her departure. Where the Renaissance had tried to reconcile heaven and earth, the Catholic Reformation tried to split them asunder. God may have made the reformed Christians of the West efficient and powerful, but he did not make them happy. The Reformation period was a time of great fear on both sides: there were violent repudiations of the past, bitter condemnations and anathemas, a terror of heresy and doctrinal deviation, a hyperactive awareness of sin and an obsession with Hell. In 1640 the controversial book of the Dutch Catholic Cornells Jansen was published, which, like the new Calvinism, preached a frightening God who had predestined all men except the elect to eternal damnation. Naturally Calvinists praised the book, finding that it “taught the doctrine of the irresistible power of the grace of God that is correct and in accordance with Reformed doctrine.” 42 How can we account for this widespread fear and dismay in Europe? It was a period of extreme anxiety: a new kind of society, based on science and technology, was beginning to emerge that would shortly conquer the world. Yet God seemed unable to alleviate these fears and provide the consolation that the Sephardic Jews, for example, had found in the myths of Isaac Luria.

• From A History of God (1993)

  During the first years of his mission, Muhammad attracted many converts from the younger generation, who were becoming disillusioned with the capitalistic ethos of Mecca, as well as from underprivileged and marginalized groups, which included women, slaves and members of the weaker clans. At one point, the early sources tell us, it seemed as though the whole of Mecca would accept Muhammad’s reformed religion of al-Lah. The richer establishment, who were more than happy with the status quo, understandably held aloof, but there was no formal rupture with the leading Qurayshis until Muhammad forbade the Muslims to worship the pagan gods. For the first three years of his mission it seems that Muhammad did not emphasize the monotheistic content of his message, and people probably imagined that they could go on worshipping the traditional deities of Arabia alongside al-Lah, the High God, as they always had. But when he condemned these ancient cults as idolatrous, he lost most of his followers overnight and Islam became a despised and persecuted minority. We have seen that the belief in only one God demands a painful change of consciousness. Like the early Christians, the first Muslims were accused of an “atheism” which was deeply threatening to society. In Mecca, where urban civilization was so novel and must have seemed a fragile achievement for all the proud self-sufficiency of the Quraysh, many seem to have felt the same sinking dread and dismay as those citizens of Rome who had clamored for Christian blood. The Quraysh seem to have found a rupture with the ancestral gods profoundly threatening, and it would not be long before Muhammad’s own life was imperiled. Western scholars have usually dated this rupture with the Quraysh to the possibly apocryphal incident of the Satanic Verses, which has become notorious since the tragic Salman Rushdie affair. Three of the Arabian deities were particularly dear to the Arabs of the Hijaz: al-Lat (whose name simply meant “the Goddess”) and al-Uzza (the Mighty One), who had shrines at Taif and Nakhlah respectively, to the southeast of Mecca, and Manat, the Fateful One, who had her shrine at Qudayd on the Red Sea coast. These deities were not fully personalized like Juno or Pallas Athene. They were often called the banat al-Lah, the Daughters of God, but this does not necessarily imply a fully developed pantheon. The Arabs used such kinship terms to denote an abstract relationship: thus banat al-dahr (literally, “daughters of fate”) simply meant misfortunes or vicissitudes. The term banat al-Lah may simply have signified “divine beings.” These deities were not represented by realistic statues in their shrines but by large standing stones, similar to those in use among the ancient Canaanites, which the Arabs worshipped not in any crudely simplistic way but as a focus of divinity. Like Mecca with its Kabah, the shrines at Taif, Nakhlah and Qudayd had become essential spiritual landmarks in the emotional landscape of the Arabs. Their forefathers had worshipped there from time immemorial, and this gave a healing sense of continuity.

• From A History of God (1993)

  10 The Death of God?BY THE BEGINNING of the nineteenth century, atheism was definitely on the agenda. The advances in science and technology were creating a new spirit of autonomy and independence which led some to declare their independence of God. This was the century in which Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud forged philosophies and scientific interpretations of reality which had no place for God. Indeed, by the end of the century, a significant number of people were beginning to feel that if God was not yet dead, it was the duty of rational, emancipated human beings to kill him. The idea of God which had been fostered for centuries in the Christian West now appeared disastrously inadequate, and the Age of Reason seemed to have triumphed over centuries of superstition and bigotry. Or had it? The West had now seized the initiative, and its activities would have fateful consequences for Jews and Muslims, who would be forced to review their own position. Many of the ideologies which rejected the idea of God made good sense. The anthropomorphic, personal God of Western Christendom was vulnerable. Appalling crimes had been committed in his name. Yet his demise was not experienced as a joyous liberation but attended by doubt, dread and, in some cases, agonizing conflict. Some people tried to save God by evolving new theologies to free him from the inhibiting systems of empirical thought, but atheism had come to stay.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Unfortunately, however, Aquinas gives the impression that God can be discussed in the same way as other philosophical ideas or natural phenomena by prefacing his discussion of God with a demonstration of God’s existence from natural philosophy. This suggests that we can get to know God in much the same way as other mundane realities. Aquinas lists five “proofs” for God’s existence that would become immensely important in the Catholic world and would also be used by Protestants: Aristotle’s argument for a Prime Mover. A similar “proof” which maintains that there cannot be an infinite series of causes: there must have been a beginning. The argument from contingency, propounded by Ibn Sina, which demands the existence of a “Necessary Being.” Aristotle’s argument from the Philosophy that the hierarchy of excellence in this world implies a Perfection that is the best of all. The argument from design, which maintains that the order and purpose that we see in the universe cannot simply be the result of chance. These proofs do not hold water today. Even from a religious point of view, they are rather dubious, since, with the possible exception of the argument from design, each proof tacitly implies that “God” is simply an-other being, one more link in the chain of existence. He is the Supreme Being, the Necessary Being, the Most Perfect Being. Now, it is true that the use of such terms as “First Cause” or “Necessary Being” implies that God cannot be anything like the beings we know but rather their ground or the condition for their existence. This was certainly Aquinas’s intention. Nevertheless, readers of the Summa have not always made this important distinction and have talked about God as if he were simply the Highest Being of all. This is reductive and can make this Super Being an idol, created in our own image and easily turned into a celestial Super Ego. It is probably not inaccurate to suggest that many people in the West regard God as a Being in this way.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Listen (shema), Israel! Yahweh is our Elohim, Yahweh alone (ehad)! You shall love Yahweh with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let these words I urge upon you today be written on your hearts.32 The election of God had set Israel apart from the goyim, so, the author makes Moses say, when they arrived in the Promised Land they were to have no dealings whatever with the native inhabitants. They “must make no covenant with them or show them any pity.”33 There must be no intermarriage and no social mixing. Above all, they were to wipe out the Canaanite religion: “Tear down their altars, smash their standing stones, cut down their sacred poles and set fire to their idols,” Moses commands the Israelites, “For you are a people consecrated to Yahweh your Elohim; it is you that Yahweh our Elohim has chosen to be his very own people out of all the peoples in the earth.”34 When they recite the Shema today, Jews give it a monotheistic interpretation: Yahweh our God is One and unique. The Deuteronomist had not yet reached this perspective. “Yahweh ehad” did not mean God is One, but that Yahweh was the only deity whom it was permitted to worship. Other gods were still a threat: their cults were attractive and could lure Israelites from Yahweh, who was a jealous God. If they obeyed Yahweh’s laws, he would bless them and bring them prosperity, but if they deserted him the consequences would be devastating: You will be torn from the land which you are entering to make your own. Yahweh will scatter you among the peoples, from one end of the earth to the other; there you will serve other gods of wood and of stone that neither you nor your fathers have known … Your life from the outset will be a burden to you … In the morning you will say, “how I wish it were evening!” and in the evening, “how I wish it were morning!” such terror will grip your heart, such sights your eyes will see.35 When King Josiah and his subjects heard these words at the end of the seventh century, they were about to be confronted by a new political threat. They had managed to keep the Assyrians at bay and had thus avoided the fate of the ten northern tribes, who had endured the punishments described by Moses. But in 606 BCE, the Babylonian King Nebupolassar would crush the Assyrians and begin to build his own empire.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  He had made Islam look not only inefficient and bizarre but also immoral. The obvious defects of his thought sprang from his desperation. Afghani was convinced that the Islamic world was about to be wiped out by the imperialistic West. While he was living in Paris during the 1880s, he encountered the new scientific racism in the work of the philologist Ernest Renan (1823–92), and the two men debated the place of Islam in the modern world. Renan believed that the Semitic languages Hebrew and Arabic were corrupt and an example of arrested development. They lacked the progressive, developmental qualities inherent in “Aryan” linguistic systems, and could not regenerate themselves. In the same way, the Semitic races had produced no real art, commerce, or civilization. Islam was especially incompatible with modernity, as witness the obvious inferiority of the Muslim countries, the decadence of their governments, and the “intellectual nullity” of the Muslims themselves. Like the peoples of Africa, the population of the Islamic world was mentally incapable of scientific rationalism, and unable to form a single original idea. As European science spread, Renan confidently predicted, Islam would wither away and would, in the near future, cease to exist. 64 It is not surprising that Afghani feared for the survival of Islam, or that he tended to overemphasize the scientific rationality of the Muslim vision. A new defensiveness had crept into Muslim thought, in response to a very real threat. The stereotypical and inaccurate view of Islam in the work of such modern thinkers as Renan would justify the colonial invasion of the Islamic countries. Colonialism sprang from the needs of Europe’s expanding capitalist economy. Hegel had argued that an industrialized society would be compelled to expand “in order to search around outside itself among other peoples ... for consumers and thereby for the necessary means of subsistence.” This quest for new markets would “also provide the soil for colonization toward which the fully developed bourgeoisie is pushed.” 65 By the end of the century, the colonization of the Middle East was well under way. France had conquered Algeria in 1830, and Britain, Aden nine years later. Tunisia was occupied in 1881, the Sudan in 1889, and Libya and Morocco in 1912. In 1915, the Sykes-Picot Agreement divided the territories of the moribund Ottoman empire between France and England, in anticipation of victory in the First World War.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Nobody expected religion to be a challenge or to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People turned to philosophy for that kind of enlightenment. In the Roman empire of late antiquity, people worshipped the gods to ask for help during a crisis, to secure a divine blessing for the state and to experience a healing sense of continuity with the past. Religion was a matter of cult and ritual rather than ideas; it was based on emotion, not on ideology or consciously adopted theory. This is not an unfamiliar attitude today: many of the people who attend religious services in our own society are not interested in theology, want nothing too exotic and dislike the idea of change. They find that the established rituals provide them with a link with tradition and give them a sense of security. They do not expect brilliant ideas from the sermon and are disturbed by changes in the liturgy. In rather the same way, many of the pagans of late antiquity loved to worship the ancestral gods, as generations had done before them. The old rituals gave them a sense of identity, celebrated local traditions and seemed an assurance that things would continue as they were. Civilization seemed a fragile achievement and should not be threatened by wantonly disregarding the patronal gods, who would ensure its survival. They would feel obscurely threatened if a new cult set out to abolish the faith of their fathers. Christianity, therefore, had the worst of both worlds. It lacked the venerable antiquity of Judaism and had none of the attractive rituals of paganism, which everybody could see and appreciate. It was also a potential threat, since Christians insisted that theirs was the only God and that all the other deities were delusions. Christianity seemed an irrational and eccentric movement to the Roman biographer Gaius Suetonius (70–160), a superstitio nova et prava, which was “depraved” precisely because it was “new.”31

• From A History of God (1993)

  Some saw Western secularism as the answer, but what was positive and invigorating in Europe could only seem alien and foreign in the Islamic world, since it had not developed naturally from their own tradition in its own time. In the West, “God” was seen as the voice of alienation; in the Muslim world it was the colonial process. Cut off from the roots of their culture, people felt disoriented and lost. Some Muslim reformers tried to hasten the cause of progress by forcibly relegating Islam to a minor role. The results were not at all as they had expected. In the new nation-state of Turkey, which had emerged after the defeat of the Ottoman empire in 1917, Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), later known as Kemal Atatürk, tried to transform his country into a Western nation: he disestablished Islam, making religion a purely private affair. Sufi orders were abolished and went underground; the madrasahs were closed and the state training of the ulema ceased. This secularizing policy was symbolized by the banning of the fez, which reduced the visibility of the religious classes and was also a psychological attempt to force the people into a Western uniform: “to put on the hat” instead of the fez came to mean “to Europeanize.” Reza Khan, Shah of Iran from 1925 to 1941, admired Atatürk and attempted a similar policy: the veil was banned; mullahs were forced to shave and wear the kepi instead of the traditional turban; the traditional celebrations in honor of the Shii Imam and martyr Husayn were forbidden. Freud had wisely seen that any enforced repression of religion could only be destructive. Like sexuality, religion is a human need that affects life at every level. If suppressed, the results are likely to be as explosive and destructive as any severe sexual repression. 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.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Despite the first of the assertions that Yahweh is indeed the God of Abraham, this is clearly a very different kind of deity from the one who had sat and shared a meal with Abraham as his friend. He inspires terror and insists upon distance. When Moses asks his name and credentials, Yahweh replies with a pun which, as we shall see, would exercise monotheists for centuries. Instead of revealing his name directly, he answers: “I Am Who I Am (Ehyeh asher ehyeh).”19 What did he mean? He certainly did not mean, as later philosophers would assert, that he was self-subsistent Being. Hebrew did not have such a metaphysical dimension at this stage, and it would be nearly 2000 years before it acquired one. God seems to have meant something rather more direct. Ehyeh asher ehyeh is a Hebrew idiom to express a deliberate vagueness. When the Bible uses a phrase like “they went where they went,” it means: “I haven’t the faintest idea where they went.” So when Moses asks who he is, God replies in effect: “Never you mind who I am!” or “Mind your own business!” There was to be no discussion of God’s nature and certainly no attempt to manipulate him as pagans sometimes did when they recited the names of their gods. Yahweh is the Unconditioned One: I shall be that which I shall be. He will be exactly as he chooses and will make no guarantees. He simply promised that he would participate in the history of his people. The myth of the Exodus would prove decisive: it was able to engender hope for the future, even in impossible circumstances. There was a price to be paid for this new sense of empowerment. The old Sky Gods had been experienced as too remote from human concerns; the younger deities like Baal, Marduk and the Mother Goddesses had come close to mankind, but Yahweh had opened the gulf between man and the divine world once again. This is graphically clear in the story of Mount Sinai. When they arrived at the mountain, the people were told to purify their garments and keep their distance. Moses had to warn the Israelites: “Take care not to go up the mountain or touch the foot of it. Whoever touches the mountain will be put to death.” The people stood back from the mountain and Yahweh descended in fire and cloud: Now at daybreak on the third day there were peals of thunder on the mountain and lightning flashes, a dense cloud, and a loud trumpet blast, and inside the camp all the people trembled. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God and they stood at the bottom of the mountain. The mountain of Sinai was entirely wrapped in smoke, because Yahweh had descended on it in the form of fire. Like smoke from a furnace, the smoke went up and the whole mountain shook violently.20

• From Martin Luther (2016)

  Rumours of attempts on Luther’s life also persisted; it was reported, for example, that a doctor of medicine who could make himself invisible ‘by magical arts’ had been ordered to kill him.’ All this coincided with a major change in Luther’s thought, and in the character of his religiosity. Up to this point, he had been deeply influenced by the Theologia deutsch; in the months leading up to the Leipzig Debate, Luther vigorously defended the mystical text against Eck, who insisted that the Theologia deutsch and other works by authors such as Johannes Tauler did not have the authority of the Church Fathers and should not be cited in debate. Luther accused Eck of denigrating these texts simply because they were written in German rather than Latin, and felt that their devotional style was the best guide for any Christian. While the book shared with Luther and Augustinianism a negative attitude towards human works, however, it also taught that through dedicated devotional piety, the individual can bring their will into conformity with God. This focus on the perfectibility of human nature was increasingly at odds with Luther’s emphasis on the lack of free will, but he continued to praise the book, even when his own religious practice began to diverge from it as he spent less time in contemplation.° Prayer, however, would remain hugely important to Luther. From a short work he wrote in 1535, we know that he prayed either kneeling or standing up, with his hands folded, and looking towards heaven with his eyes open. As he described it, prayer is a process: its purpose is to ‘warm the heart’. Luther advised the believer to contemplate each line of the ‘Our Father’ and elaborate it in his prayer, before going through the Ten Commandments, each of which should be consid- ered ‘as a book of doctrine, a song book, a confessional manual and a prayer book’. ‘If you have time left over’, he suggested adding a creed. His advice clearly contains traces of the methodical system of the hours, although he also insisted that ‘a good prayer should not be long and should not be drawn out, but should be frequent and fiery’? As Luther now moved away from the kind of spirituality he had explored with Staupitz, his relationship with his former patron and confessor also began to change. Although throughout his life he 148 MARTIN LUTHER would consistently credit Staupitz with having been his sole teacher and having ‘begun the matter’, there are indications in his letters that his attitude towards him was much more ambivalent.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  The disadvantaged man knows that in any conflict he must deal not only with the particular individual involved but also with the entire group, then or later. Even recourse to the arbitration of law tends to be avoided because of the fear that the interpretations of law will be biased on the side of the dominant group. The result is the dodging of all encounters. The effect is nothing short of disaster in the organism; for, studies show, fear actually causes chemical changes in the body, affecting the blood stream and the muscular reactions, preparing the body either for fight or for flight. If flight is resorted to, it merely serves as an incentive to one’s opponent to track down and overpower. Furthermore, not to fight back at the moment of descending violence is to be a coward, and to be deeply and profoundly humiliated in one’s own estimation and in that of one’s friends and family. If he is a man, he stands in the presence of his woman as not a man. While it may be true that many have not had such experiences, yet each stands in candidacy for such an experience. It is clear, then, that this fear, which served originally as a safety device, a kind of protective mechanism for the weak, finally becomes death for the self. The power that saves turns executioner. Within the walls of separateness death keeps watch. There are some who defer this death by yielding all claim to personal significance beyond the little world in which they live. In the absence of all hope ambition dies, and the very self is weakened, corroded. There remains only the elemental will to live and to accept life on the terms that are available. There is a profound measure of resourcefulness in all life, a resourcefulness that is guaranteed by the underlying aliveness of life itself. The crucial question, then, is this: Is there any help to be found in the religion of Jesus that can be of value here? It is utterly beside the point to examine here what the religion of Jesus suggests to those who would be helpful to the disinherited. That is ever in the nature of special pleading. No man wants to be the object of his fellow’s pity. Obviously, if the strong put forth a great redemptive effort to change the social, political, and economic arrangements in which they seem to find their basic security, the whole picture would be altered. But this is apart from my thesis. Again the crucial question: Is there any help to be found for the disinherited in the religion of Jesus? Did Jesus deal with this kind of fear? If so, how did he do it? It is not merely, What did he say? even though his words are the important clues available to us. An analysis of the teaching of Jesus reveals that there is much that deals with the problems created by fear.

• From Jesus and the Disinherited (1949)

  Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. The core of the analysis of Jesus is that man is a child of God, the God of life that sustains all of nature and guarantees all the intricacies of the life-process itself. Jesus suggests that it is quite unreasonable to assume that God, whose creative activity is expressed even in such details as the hairs of a man’s head, would exclude from his concern the life, the vital spirit, of the man himself. This idea—that God is mindful of the individual—is of tremendous import in dealing with fear as a disease. In this world the socially disadvantaged man is constantly given a negative answer to the most important personal questions upon which mental health depends: “Who am I? What am I?” The first question has to do with a basic self-estimate, a profound sense of belonging, of counting. If a man feels that he does not belong in the way in which it is perfectly normal for other people to belong, then he develops a deep sense of insecurity. When this happens to a person, it provides the basic material for what the psychologist calls an inferiority complex. It is quite possible for a man to have no sense of personal inferiority as such, but at the same time to be dogged by a sense of social inferiority. The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again. When I was a youngster, this was drilled into me by my grandmother. The idea was given to her by a certain slave minister who, on occasion, held secret religious meetings with his fellow slaves. How everything in me quivered with the pulsing tremor of raw energy when, in her recital, she would come to the triumphant climax of the minister: “You—you are not niggers. You—you are not slaves. You are God’s children.” This established for them the ground of personal dignity, so that a profound sense of personal worth could absorb the fear reaction. This alone is not enough, but without it, nothing else is of value. The first task is to get the self immunized against the most radical results of the threat of violence. When this is accomplished, relaxation takes the place of the churning fear. The individual now feels that he counts, that he belongs. He senses the confirmation of his roots, and even death becomes a little thing.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The great Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which raged through many of the Protestant and Catholic countries of Europe and even made a brief appearance in the American colonies, showed that a cult of scientific rationalism cannot always hold darker forces at bay. Mysticism and mythology had taught men and women to deal with the world of the unconscious. It may not be accidental that at a time when religious faith was beginning to abandon this type of spirituality, the subconscious ran amok. The Witch Craze has been described as a collective fantasy, shared by men, women, and their inquisitors throughout Christendom. People believed that they had sexual intercourse with demons, and flew through the air at night to take part in satanic rituals and perverse orgies. Witches were thought to worship the Devil instead of God in a parody of the Mass—a reversal that could represent a widespread unconscious rebellion against traditional faith. God was beginning to seem so remote, alien, and demanding that for some he was becoming demonic: subconscious fears and desires were projected upon the imaginary figure of Satan, depicted as a monstrous version of humanity. 28 Thousands of men and women convicted of witchcraft were either hanged or burned at the stake before the Craze burned itself out. The new scientific rationalism, which took no cognizance of these deeper levels of the mind, was powerless to control this hysterical outburst. A massive, fearful, and destructive un-reason has also been part of the modern experience. These were frightening times for the people of the West on both sides of the Atlantic. The Reformation had been a fearful rupture, dividing Europe into viciously hostile camps. Protestants and Catholics had persecuted one another in England; there had been a civil war in France between Protestants and Catholics (1562–63), and a nationwide massacre of Protestants in 1572. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) had devastated Europe, drawing in one nation after another, a power struggle with a strong religious dimension which killed any hope of a reunited Europe. There was political unrest also. In 1642, England was convulsed by a civil war that resulted in the execution of King Charles I (1649) and the establishment of a republic under the Puritan Parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, its powers were curtailed by Parliament. More democratic institutions were painfully and bloodily emerging in the West. Even more catastrophic was the French Revolution of 1789, which was succeeded by a reign of terror and a military dictatorship, before order was restored under Napoleon. The French Revolution’s legacy to the modern world was Janus-faced: it promoted the benevolent Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but it also left a memory of malignant state terrorism, which has been equally influential.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The Suez Canal had given Egypt a wholly new strategic importance, and the European powers could not allow its total ruin. To safeguard their interests, Britain and France imposed financial controls on the khedive, controls which threatened to become political. Muhammad Ali had been correct in his fear that the Canal would jeopardize Egyptian independence. European ministers were appointed to the Egyptian government to supervise its financial dealings, and when Ismail dismissed them in April 1879, the chief powers of Europe—Britain, France, Germany, and Austria—united against him, and put pressure on the sultan to dismiss the khedive. Ismail was succeeded by his son Tewfiq (1852–92), a well-meaning young man, but it was obvious that he was a mere puppet of the powers. Hence he was unpopular with both the people and the army. When the Egyptian officer Ahmad bey Urubi (1840–1911) staged a revolution in 1881, demanding that Egyptians be appointed to more senior posts in the army and government, and managed to gain administrative control of the country, Britain stepped in and established a military occupation. Ismail had dreamed of making Egypt part of Europe; he managed only to make it a virtual European colony. Muhammad Ali had been cruel and utterly ruthless; his successors were naive, greedy, and shortsighted. But, in fairness, they were pitting themselves against insuperable odds. First, the type of civilization they were attempting to emulate was something entirely new. It was not surprising that these men, with their very limited experience of Europe, were slow to grasp that a few military and technological reforms would not suffice to make them a “modern” nation. The whole of society would have to be reorganized, an independent industrial economy set on a sure footing, and the traditional conservative spirit replaced by a new mentality. Failure would be expensive, because Europe was by this time too powerful. The powers could force Egypt to finance the building of the Suez Canal and yet deny it ownership of a single share. The so-called “Eastern Crisis” (1875–78) had already shown that one of the great powers of Europe (Russia) could penetrate to the heart of Ottoman territory and be checked only by a threat from other European countries, not by the Turks themselves. Even the great Ottoman empire, the last stronghold of Muslim power, no longer controlled its own provinces. This became painfully apparent in 1881 when France occupied Tunis, and in 1882 when Britain occupied Egypt. Europe was invading the Islamic world and beginning to dismantle the empire. Further, even without the disastrous mistakes of the Egyptian rulers, these weaker Islamic countries could not become “modern” in the same way as the Europeans or the Americans, because the modernizing process in these non-Western lands was fundamentally different.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  The function of myth had been to give such action meaning and ground it spiritually. The Shabbetai Zevi affair had shown how disastrous it could be to apply stories and images that belonged to the unseen world of the psyche to the realm of politics. Since the shock of that fiasco, the old prohibition against treating the messianic mythos as though it were logos, capable of pragmatic application, had acquired in the Jewish imagination the force of a taboo. Any human attempt to achieve redemption or “hasten the end” by taking practical steps to realize the Kingdom in the Holy Land, was abhorrent. Jews were even forbidden to recite too many prayers for the return to Zion. To take any kind of initiative amounted to a rebellion against God, who alone could bring Redemption; anyone who took such action was going over to the “Other Side,” the demonic world. Jews must remain politically passive. This was a condition of the existential state of Exile. 39 In rather the same way as Shii Muslims, Jews had outlawed political activism, knowing all too well from Jewish history how potentially lethal it could be to incarnate myth in history. To this day, Zionism and the Jewish state which the movement would create have been more divisive in the Jewish world than modernity itself. A response to Zionism and the State of Israel, for or against, would become the motive power of every form of Jewish fundamentalism. 40 It is largely through Zionism that secular modernity has entered Jewish life and changed it forever. This is because the first Zionists were brilliantly successful in turning the Land of Israel, one of the holiest symbols of Judaism, into a rational, mundane, practical reality. Instead of contemplating it mystically or halakhically, the Zionists settled the Land physically, strategically, and militarily. For the vast majority of the Orthodox, in these early years, this was to trample blasphemously upon a sacred reality. It was a deliberate act of profanation that defied centuries of religious tradition. For the secular Zionists were quite blatant about their rejection of religion. Their movement was indeed a rebellion against Judaism. Many of them were atheists, socialists, Marxists. Very few of them observed the commandments of the Torah. Some of them positively hated religion, which they thought had failed the Jewish people by encouraging them to sit back passively and wait for the Messiah. Instead of helping them to struggle against persecution and oppression, religion had inspired Jews to retreat from the world in strange mystical exercises or the study of arcane texts. The spectacle of Jews weeping and clinging to the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the last relic of the ancient Temple, filled many Zionists with dismay. This apparently craven dependence upon the supernatural was the obverse of everything that they were trying to achieve.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  His visit coincided with the Indian Mutiny against British rule (1857), which left a lasting bitterness in the subcontinent. Afghani traveled in Arabia, Turkey, Russia, and Europe, and became acutely anxious about the ubiquity and power of the West, which, he was convinced, was about to crush the Islamic world. When he arrived in Cairo in 1871, he was a man with a mission. He was determined to teach the Muslim world to unite under the banner of Islam and to use religion to counter the threat of Western imperialism. Afghani was passionate, eloquent, wild, and quick-tempered. He sometimes made a bad impression, but had undoubted charisma. In Cairo, he quickly gathered together a circle of disciples and encouraged them to spread his pan-Islamic ideas. There was much discussion about the form that modern Egypt should take at this time. Syrian journalists had promoted the idea of a secular state, and Tahtawi had believed that Egyptians should cultivate a Western- style nationalism. Afghani would have none of this. If religion was weak, in his view, Muslim society was bound to disintegrate. It was only by reforming Islam and remaining true to their own unique cultural and religious traditions that the Muslim countries would become strong again and build their own version of scientific modernity. He was convinced that unless the Muslims took strong action, the Islamic community (ummah) would soon cease to exist. Time was short. The European imperialists were becoming stronger every day, and in a very short space of time the Islamic world would be overrun by Western culture. Afghani’s religious vision was, therefore, fueled by the fear of annihilation that we have found to be a common response to the difficulties of modernity. He believed that it was not necessary to take on a European lifestyle in order to be modern. Muslims could do it their way. If they merely copied the British and French, superimposing Western values on their own traditions, they would lose themselves. They would simply be bad reproductions, neither one thing nor the other, and thus compound their weakness. 55 They needed modern science and would have to learn it from Europe; however, this was in itself proof, he argued, “of our inferiority and decadence. We civilize ourselves by imitating the Europeans.” 56 Afghani had put his finger on a major difficulty. Where Western modernity had succeeded in large part by pursuing innovation and originality, Muslims could only modernize their society by imitation. The modernizing program had an inherent and inescapable flaw. Afghani had, therefore, perceived a real problem, but his solution, which sounded attractive, was not feasible because it expected too much of religion. He was correct in his prediction that a loss of cultural identity would result in weakness, malaise, and anomie. He was also right to argue that Islam must change in order to deal creatively with these radically new conditions.

• From A History of God (1993)

  Wisdom literature acquired a polemic edge in Alexandria in about 50 BCE. In The Wisdom of Solomon, a Jew of Alexandria, where there was an important Jewish community, warned Jews to resist the seductive Hellenic culture around them and to remain true to their own traditions: it is the fear of Yahweh, not Greek philosophy, which constitutes true wisdom. Writing in Greek, he also personified Wisdom (Sophia) and argued that it could not be separated from the Jewish God: [Sophia] is the breath of the power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; hence nothing impure can find a way into her. She is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God’s active power, image of his goodness. 72 This passage would also be extremely important to Christians when they came to discuss the status of Jesus. The Jewish author, however, simply saw Sophia as an aspect of the unknowable God who has adapted himself to human understanding. She is God-as-he-has-revealed- himself-to-man, the human perception of God, mysteriously distinct from the full reality of God, which would always elude our understanding. The author of The Wisdom of Solomon was right to sense a tension between Greek thought and Jewish religion. We have seen that there is a crucial and, perhaps, an irreconcilable difference between the God of Aristotle, which is scarcely aware of the world it has created, and the God of the Bible, who is passionately involved in human affairs. The Greek God could be discovered by human reason, whereas the God of the Bible only made himself known by means of revelation. A chasm separated Yahweh from the world, but Greeks believed that the gift of reason made human beings kin to God; they could, therefore, reach him by their own efforts. Yet whenever monotheists fell in love with Greek philosophy, they inevitably wanted to try to adapt its God to their own. This will be one of the major themes of our story. One of the first people to make this attempt was the eminent Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (ca. 30 BCE–45 CE). Philo was a Platonist and had a distinguished reputation as a rationalist philosopher in his own right. He wrote in beautiful Greek and does not seem to have spoken Hebrew, yet he was also a devout Jew and an observer of the mitzvot. He could see no incompatibility between his God and the God of the Greeks. It must be said, however, that Philo’s God seems very different from Yahweh. For one thing, Philo seemed embarrassed by the historical books of the Bible, which he tried to turn into elaborate allegories: Aristotle, it will be recalled, had considered history unphilosophical.

• From A History of God (1993)

  This had not happened in the other God-religions. The Koran, for example, makes it clear that Satan will be forgiven on the Last Day. Some of the Sufis claimed that he had fallen from grace because he had loved God more than any of the other angels. God had commanded him to bow down before Adam on the day of creation, but Satan had refused because he believed that such obeisance should be offered to God alone. In the West, however, Satan became a figure of ungovernable evil. He was increasingly represented as a vast animal with a priapic sexual appetite and huge genitals. As Norman Cohn has suggested in his book Europe’s Inner Demons, this portrait of Satan was not only a projection of buried fear and anxiety. The witch craze also represented an unconscious but compulsive revolt against a repressive religion and an apparently inexorable God. In their torture chambers, Inquisitors and “witches” together created a fantasy which was an inversion of Christianity. The Black Mass became a horrifying but perversely satisfying ceremony that worshipped the Devil instead of a God who seemed harsh and too frightening to deal with. 16 Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a firm believer in witchcraft and saw the Christian life as a battle against Satan. The Reformation can be seen as an attempt to address this anxiety even though most of the Reformers did not promote any new conception of God. It is, of course, simplistic to call the immense cycle of religious change that took place in Europe during the sixteenth century “the Reformation.” The term suggests a more deliberate and unified movement than actually occurred. The various Reformers—Catholic as well as Protestant— were all trying to articulate a new religious awareness that was strongly felt but had not been conceptualized or consciously thought out. We do not know exactly why “the Reformation” happened: today scholars warn us against the old textbook accounts. The changes were not wholly due to the corruption of the Church, as is often supposed, nor to a decline in religious fervor. Indeed, there seems to have been a religious enthusiasm in Europe which led people to criticize abuses which they had previously taken for granted. The actual ideas of the Reformers all sprang from medieval, Catholic theologies. The rise of nationalism and of the cities in Germany and Switzerland also played a part, as did the new piety and theological awareness of the laity during the sixteenth century.